Our friends over at Citypages have posted a slideshow of photos taken by Steve Cohen at last Thursday’s show featuring The English Beat, Fishbone, and Outlaw Nation at The Cabooze in Minneapolis, MN.  A packed house cheered on the bands with sweaty fervor, a real highlight coming at the English Beat’s “Mirror In The Bathroom” encore with Angelo Moore from Fishbone on sax.

You can check out the photos from the concert HERE.

In honor of their upcoming album release on Paper + Plastick, here is a video of We Are The Union performing their song “I Am Like John Cusack” at The Central in Nottingham, UK.  Let’s hope they decide to tour to MN this year!

Popular ska-punk group Streetlight Manifesto have posted their cover of “Hell” by the Squirrel Nut Zippers to be downloaded for FREE.  The song is one of many covers the band plans to release for their album series 99 Songs Of Revolution.  The first album in the series will be released on March 16, 2010 on Victory Records and will feature the band covering artists like Paul Simon, NOFX, Bad Religion, The Postal Service and many more.

In my personal opinion, it’s hard to find a better horn-driven song than “Hell.”  It has been one of my favorite songs since the mid-90’s, so it’s only natural that this band, with its many horns, is able to knock it out of the park.  You can download the song HERE.

Good news, everyone!  We are less than a month away from a brand new Pama International album!  The legendary dub group have announced that their newest record Pama Outernational will hit stores in April 2010.  The album has already received some critical acclaim:

“Pama Intl continue their inexorable rise” 4 Stars
- Mojo

“12 hook-filled tracks, vintage rocksteady spiked with soul… An album of substance”
- Q Magazine

“acknowledges the glory days of Studio 1 but sounds fresh and relevant today”
- Record Collector

“I’d simply say, it’s brilliant.” Album of the Month
- Scootering magazine

I’m listening to the album right now and I have to say that the sounds are rich and diverse, with soul-infused dub that make the songs sound like instant classics!  The band issued a press release to highlight Pama Outernational:

King Tubby & Lee Perry’s dub stylings meet the southern soul sounds of 1960’s Stax, all the time remaining distinctly Pama Intl. The classic sounds of yesteryear, with a social commentary firmly cemented in the 21st century.

The resulting soundclash is fronted by long time musical cohorts Sean Flowerdew and Finny (who cut their teeth together in UK ska-upstarts The Loafers, before joining 2 Tone supergroup Special Beat) and The Specials/Fun Boy 3 singer and guitarist Lynval Golding. They’re backed by a wonderfully diverse array of musical talent, including members from Acid Jazz label stars Lord Large, Kasabian, Bentley Rhythm Ace, Pop Will Eat Itself and Lynval’s fellow Special, Sir Horace Panter. Co-producing the album with Flowerdew is John Collins (producer of The Specials iconic ‘Ghost Town’).

2009 was yet another huge year for Pama Intl, with not one but two support tours with The Specials, countless festival appearances including Glastonbury and overwhelming response to ‘Outernational’. 2010 looks set to exceed all expectations.

Check out the album art and track listing after the jump.

Read the rest of this entry »

Michigan’s own Babylon Party Machine is set to release a brand new mashup EP entitled TRICKS on April 1st, 2010.  Here’s what founder/creator Matt Wixson had to say:

This ain’t no April Fools joke! This is “Tricks”! Seven fresh new mashups coming your way! Some of the artists you can expect to hear include Green Day, the Toasters, Big D and the Kids Table, the Slackers, Rihanna, Sonic Boom Six, Miley Cyrus, Hepcat, Chumbawamba, and more! You can get this release for free from Open Hand Records on April 1st. And if you haven’t downloaded the previous two mashup collections, head over to the Open Hand Records site and get yourself “Rididm & Flow” and “Mash Up Bashment” immediately!

You can check out one of the tracks from this EP over at Musical Occupation.

Attention all Aquabats fans in the Twin Cities metro area!  The Saturday, March 13th Triple Rock show is NOT CANCELED!

The Aquabats are touring with Yo Gabba Gabba Live!, a concert series based on the popular children’s TV show.  Yo Gabba Gabba Live! now has two showtimes for Saturday, March 13th at the Target Center in Minneapolis due to overwhelming demand; one at 3pm and one at 6pm.  The Aquabats also have a show scheduled that evening at 6pm over at the Triple Rock Social Club in Minneapolis.  Confusion ran rampant amongst the throng of Aquabats fans as to whether the Triple Rock show was in jeopardy of being cancelled or postponed, but do not fear: All 3 Aquabats performances are still on as scheduled!

If you would like to win tickets for the show at the Triple Rock, email mnskanews@gmail.com and put “The Aquabats” in the subject line.  I will be selecting a random winner on Thursday, March 11th.  Best of luck and I’ll see you at the show!

Our friends over at AbsolutePunk have posted a brand new song from Michigan punk-ska band We Are The Union.  The song “One Million Motors” will be on their upcoming album on Paper + Plastick Great Leaps Forward which drops on March 30th.

You can stream the song HERE.

This week’s guest hosts the longest running ska radio program in the country and writes a blog with one of the funniest names.  Join Courtney as he talks to JJ Loy, host of Ska’s The Limit on 88.1 KDHX in St. Louis, MO and creator of Ska Blah Blah.  The guys discuss their tastes in music, how MU330 is like a gateway drug, and what was like to recreate a classic Slackers album with a bunch of live bootlegs.

Ska’s The Limit airs every Saturday night from 7pm-9pm at KDHX.org or you can stream last week’s episode HERE.

Check out JJ’s blog Ska Blah Blah HERE.

Listen to JJ Loy Presents: Redlight Redid at Musical Occupation.

This show is brought to you in part by MNSKA.com, Minnesota’s Ska Community and the Fancy Pants Gangsters podcast network.  Become a fan of the show on Facebook, follow Courtney on Twitter, or email him at FOSS@fancypantsgangsters.com.

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You can download this episode HERE or subscribe to the show on iTunes.

Our friends over at ThePunkSite.com had the chance to interview Vinnie Fiorello, the head of Paper + Plastick Records and drummer for Less Than Jake.  He discussed some of his plans for the “paper” side of Paper + Plastick:

I’ve been looking for it and I think that what you’ll see start to happen is over the next few months I have a lot of records that will be coming and then after that, I’ll be concentrating on a lot of print. I’ve been shifting through a lot of young comic book artists, I’ve been shifting through a lot of photo journalists who do photo books. So to be honest with you, I’ve just been kind of looking at other authors to do books from them. I think that probably around Christmas time you’ll see the paper side of the label pick up.

At least two of those books will be written by Vinnie himself.

I have a book, an autobiographical book called Perfect Teeth that I’m about a hundred pages into. And then I have a tour story book called Fifty States that I’m almost completed with. Fifty States will probably be printed in a very Cometbus way, if you know that zine, it’ll be printed sort of like that. Everything will be hand written, everything will be very organic. It’ll be printed black and white. It’ll be tour stories. A nod to old punk rock: everything cut and pasted, everything halftone. It’s gonna be cool. You’ll see that probably around middle of the summer. And Perfect Teeth, I don’t know, it’s a work in progress. Hopefully it’ll see the light of day sometime next year.

It’s [Fifty States] basically every lyric I’ve ever written for Less Than Jake with stories about those lyrics; with pictures and just generally a very extravagant sort of look at the writing process of the lyrics and where they came from. Stories about the lyrics and about being on tour, it’s the companion piece to a bunch of Less Than Jake records.

In Less Than Jake news, Vinnie describes the band’s plans now that they have regained control of their own recordings:

August we’ll be doing a six DVD set of us playing all of our six records live. Then Christmas time will be the re-release of Hello Rockview and the re-release of Losing Streak. And then probably the late spring of 2011 will be Borders and Boundaries and then the late summer/early fall we’ll probably bring Anthem and In With The Out Crowd.

You can read the entire interview HERE.

Veteran 2 Tone ska revival act The English Beat have been chugging along on their U.S. Spring Skaward Tour with Fishbone and Outlaw Nation.  Last Thursday, the band played at The Cabooze in Minneapolis, MN and MNSKA contributor Patrick Larson was there to shoot this video of their cover of “I’ll Take You There.”