St. More

"Indie" "bands" tend to end up on "sound-tracks" for "indie" "films", but if St. Mawr got into the pictures they would probably end up backing up something a lot more interesting than Nick and Norah's Infinite Playlist. Movies suck. Your friends rule. Your friends should be in movies because movies should be about them. I'm more upset about my friend/bandmate having mono than I am about never actually seeing Nick and Norah. I'd rather watch my friend tune his guitar than watch Michael Cera in an uncomfortable sex scene.

So, real shit: St. Mawr is a great band with guys I've good enough friends with to have strangely unflattering photos of them.

Josh Meer plays guitar and sings on most of the songs we've put up here. He's been writing songs as long as I've known him, which goes back to some really excellent pop-punk demos in freshman year. I was in a sort of "youth crew" (oriented more toward blunts and beer than baseball bats and beatdowns) called Wiener Section in the first half of high school, and Josh Meer was a tight enough homie to run with the fourteen of us. I think we also went to Hebrew school together at Temple Emanu-El. By the time we saw Star Wars Episode III together, he was already a matured and disciplined songwriter/musician/producer, and that shows in these spring 2008 demos.

Andrew Hine plays drums and sings on one track, the blackout rager that is "Turning Into Nothing". I could go on and on about all the cutty things this man has done, how deep he mobs, etc. etc., but it should suffice for today to say that he's a classmate of Josh (Drew College Prep, SF, 2008).

This recording, Sweaty Palms, also enlists Jim Garrison, a music teacher who enjoyed working with the band so much that he joined them after their tenure at Drew to keep playing music with them. You can hear him hear playing bass, sax, accordion and probably a few other things I haven't even noticed yet. I haven't had the pleasure of meeting him, but someone told me that he and I were at the same Shellac show a couple weeks ago, which I consider a good sign.

It's nice how this band covers so much ground in just the four or five songs we've put up here and still manages to maintain its own energy, despite the influence of hanging out with the same crowd of punkers and taggers and assorted high school d-bags that surrounded the rest of us. This is a band that's worth following and more than worth listening to.

TL;DR version: St. Mawr rules and I'd rather listen to them than get fingered by Michael Cera.

Recollection - St. Mawr

Turning Into Nothing - St. Mawr