RIP: .BELVILLE

Damn. Jonny broke the bereaved broadcast to us that .belville, bummerishly, is now a broken band. Boo. From a post in the group’s MySpace blog, singer/guitarist Jay hands out thanks to all the members past and present, plus the folks who helped them get onto the stage (with an extra-big kudos for Rudyard’s Mike Simms). Ugooglelizing the band itself, he posits:

The sad news is that .belville as you know it is now dead. We never got to record even a third of the songs we had, which is now by in the hundreds. We just never had the money. The recordings were subject to this effect as well. We never got to nail down vocals, never got to do the songs we dreamt of doing, and alot of them are seriously bad ass. Some people really like Vie olin, not realizing that its not even closed to being finished, or that its an old song to begin with. The vision here was alot more than what it turned out to be. And for that i apologize to the waiting people, the people that had faith that we would somehow pull it off.

Jay and Jessica (bassist) have decided to change direction, and have been writing pieces with guitar and cello, perhaps carrying on with the .belville name, perhaps not. And in a sense, the slow crumble of a band that we we’re stoked on is not such a bad thing. As is the way in Houston, from one band there are now four, including The Mustn’ts, Audio in the Pregap and drummer Eric Costill’s solo stuff. Long division - crack and divide: it’s the way our scene goes – fresh ideas with clean hair. While we’re bleh on their parting ways, we’re glad their all still doing their own thing. Itchy.

WHUT? .BELVILLE ON THAMES ON CATCHING UP

RIGHT! UK HERE! SKYLINE MASSIVE reporting direct from Kingston on Thames. You may be wondering, what’s the p’s and q’s with the dread proper act we haven’t made mention of lately, them’s mainly going by the name of .belville, and we was mad slappin on their thick ride Vie Olin. Recall they’ve had about as many drummers as of late as Foot and Mouth outbreaks in Surry. Well, step right out of that exclusion zone and into the glorious light of her majesty’s knowledge. Proper signed, sealed and delivered was their correspondence to us with the don'cha know it.

BEANS ON TOAST is their status, proper delicious on the kiddie menu style as they build up to their first outing since Lilly Allen got her visa yanked by the Yanks (September 14th). Total rewrite, new jams, hotting and trotting rubbish-free will be the score. We curry mad favors with their curry flavors and have also learned that Jonathan .belville himself has signed up with the drummer from her majesty’s now tower-haunting cool kids The Oots. Post haste on the cut and paste to hear some in-progress recordings via their SkyNews MySpace page here: www.myspace.com/audiointhepregap. We don't knows what they called. We think Audio in the Pregap, but maybes thats just what the train reminds you to mind. Also, just like Chelsea beat United in the season opener, you too can score one with the fans by joining up as they keyboardist. Peace to Diana and a deuce with spades to Staines. We out.

NOT STOKED: .BELVILLE CANCELS SATURDAY

Well phoey. Totally non-kaleidoscopic riff droppers .belville have had some changes on the drum riser as of late, and, according to a bulletin they posted yesterday, weren’t going to be able to bring the top rockuledge that you deserve to their Notsuoh set on Saturday. So, reluctantly we presume, they have decided to pull out of their appearance at the venerable old Madame of Main’s 12 anniversary party this weekend. Which is a bummer because, though we still haven’t managed to catch these kids on stage, we’ve got a live recording rocking our little SkyPod that tells us it would be aces. Keep it clicked here for updates on when they’ll channel The Funland Band in the future.

Even with .bellville off the bill, the not-all-together-heavily-promoted Notsuoh 12th anniversary weekend still boasts two nights of solid lineups, including a Friday night that could essentially be subtitled "The Skyline Network Rants About Outer Space in a Podcast Lineup" MAKE THY PLANS:

Friday – Co-Pilot, Storms Threaten to Destroy, A Revolution of Kings, Margot

Saturday – Ringo Death Starr, The Riff Tiffs, The Lost Keys, Cowboy Dynamite, Free Radicals, Scattered Pages, Blare ‘n' Aaron, Slo Gun, ST 37, Arthur Yoria, Space City Gamelan, El Gato Negrito, The Defenstration Unit, Babel Fish.

Now, we have no idea what the set-times are for either night, but we hope to nail it down during the week and get back to you with something a bit more definitive soon.

ADD TO PLAYLIST: .belville - Vie Olin

You know that tendency to put labels on things? To give bright and arbitrary edges that separate this from that and the other? That’s probably why we are such big fans of the Skeleton Coast, a stretch of Namibia where the desert meets the Atlantic. Who is to say, in this empty, foggy, inaccessible and utterly demising part of awful earth where the beach ends and the desert begins? Who and why will draw lines in this sand and say ‘Sorry – no deck-chairs in the desert’? How granular a separation between two things can be made when the separation may not be important at all, for if shipwrecked there, you are going to die in the sand.

Maybe that’s why we’re so keen on .belville. They’ve got a dot at the beginning of their name like they’re a file type extension, like you could plug them into a computer and tell immediately if they were a PowerPoint or a Word document or a movie file. But listening to Vie Olin, we can’t tell if the moisture and the salt staining our collective collars is the sweat of running through the desert towards the coast or the last few drops of seawater evaporating away as we hurl ourselves from the ocean towards death inland.

MP3: .belville – Vie Olin

Catch .belville (who we will now give a hard time for having, by their own admission, three albums of material that they have yet to record – GET ON IT) at 1:40 on the Numbers outside stage at Saturday’s Westheimer Block Party.