Well, Milkmachine is quite possibly the coolest band ever. They put on an incredible show last night. I met Russ during the summer of '99 on alt.music.ween. Somebody was looking for a bassist in Minnesota and I posted some wiseass thing about how he should just move to DC so I could play. Russ emailed me and said that he played keys and was in the area, so we jammed out a week later. Then he got his friend John to come play guitar and we became Dirtpatch. Dirtpatch rocked for about a year with a couple different drummers and eventually broke up. Russ and John pretty much each needed to have their own band (I always compared it to J. Mascis and Lou Barlow just beeing too strongly creative in different ways to be in Dinosaur Jr. together), so John started Cricket in Times Square and Russ went solo with Milkmachine, eventually getting Rob to play drums and now with Austin on guitar (Austin also played lead guitar in an early incarnation of Captain Paradox). So anyway, the show last night was really great. It was a CD release party and I've been listening to the CD all morning and it's so damn good. Russ rotated between his Wurlitzer organ to accordion and Austin alternated between bassline-like rhythms and watery leads, all to Rob's dynamic drumming. The guy who played viola on some of the tracks on the CD also showed up and played on one of the songs. I could see these guys building a serious and dedicated following if more people heard about them. I think I might make mp3s of their CD and rename them to something that is a big hot download but leave their name and URL in the ID3 tag and slap them in my kazaa shared folder.