As usual I am a litte late on this, I suppose. Mark Kozelek, mastermind of thee one and only sadcore band, the Red House Painters has a new band called Sun Kil Moon and their album Ghosts of the Great Highway which is due for release Nov. 4th on Jetset in the US is already circulating in cyberspace. According to this review it is a return to form after the slightly disappointing Old Ramon.

Mark apparently gets obsessed with boxers dying in the ring on the new album. The song Duk Koo Kim is about this Korean lightweight champion who died after a fierce fight with Ray Mancini in 1982. It was already released with a live and a studio version on a sold-out 10'' by Vinyl Films a while ago. If you are really desperate to listen to this heart-breaking song in the vein of the early RHP you can subscribe to the Yahoo! Group mistress and search the archive for "ftp server" and read the first couple of result posts. Afterwards you should of course buy the 10'' as soon as it becomes available again...

P.S. There is a longish interview with Mark Kozelek plus review of the new album over at Splendidzine with three songs from the new album in audio stream: Gentle Moon, Pancho Villa and Salvador Sanchez.

is a river close to St. Petersburg and the name of a band of school friends from New Hampshire who relocated to Austin, TX. Sean was the first to bring them to my attention but somehow I didn't connect immediately to their brand of opulent melodramatic sadcore alt-country somewhere in between the Palace Brothers, Mark Eitzel and Sparklehorse. When I listened to the four songs from their second album Don't Fall in Love with Everyone You See which can be streamed here at Euroranch the singer sounded in places like a fusion of Bright Eyes' Conor Oberst and Daniel Johnston to me. Will Sheff, the singer, lets himself go completely and switches into a pretty irritating almost shrieking falsetto in Kansas City. And then I was in for a coincidental surprise on the last track Happy Hearts. It is a duet with Daniel Johnston himself. Is there anything more moving in the world than the mentally disordered Daniel Johnston singing in his children's voice

Later I found out that Okkervil River had played in the Dreikönigskeller in Frankfurt last Sunday. Oh God what a loser am I? In any case there is a new album out called Down the River of Golden Dreams which can also be partly streamed at the Euroranch link above and which didn't click with me yet but last year's record is definitely on top of my wishlist now.

I'll end this post with a small anecdote of their concert in Vienna last night. Again it is from Euroranch (German translated by me):