The band got together again in these past few days, the first time we’ve done so under our current line-up. And to prove we’re not lying rotters, we have a nice shiny band pic for you. TO HAVE.

In very related news, the recording of our new album and the re-recording of Big Cardboard Robot are well under way. Expect new/rehashed material… sometime. We’re not fixing any dates. We don’t like dates. Take that how you will.

Attention, rabid fanbase! Zed Narley has a new member. Her name is Skippy Wasslow, and her position is vocalist, along with Cthulhu (and myself, Zimmy, on occasion), which should be enough for the initiate to figure out who we’re talking about.

So let’s give a big hand for Skippy. Yaaaaaaaaaaaaaay!

Here is our cover version of “Chinese Democracy” by Axl Rose, erm, Guns ‘N Roses. Which we made before the album came out. In about half an hour.

Enjoy: swedish_democracy

The album is now available for free download.

But don’t do it.

Smauel labelled the songs with improper capitalization. Instead, download the songs from our PureVolume page, to which I’m currently uploading properly capitalized MP3s. Unless, of course, you don’t care at all. You should, though. Also, there appears to be some compatibility problems with the MP3s and Windows Media Player 11; the album art doesn’t show up and neither does the list of composers. The composers we can’t really fix, but if you’re a WMP 11 user and you want that album art, copy the image from the previous blog post and paste it into the album art box.

You may notice as well that we’ve renovated the site. It’s still under construction, so watch for updates. And if you’re an Internet Explorer user, you may notice that it looks terrible. Don’t worry, we are working on that, although you really should be using Firefox. 😀 In the meantime, we updated our “About” page on the blog, so go read that.

Enjoy the musicks.

–Zimmy

EDIT: Never mind, you are gonna have to download them from the main site… a couple of songs are too big to fit on PureVolume. Oh well, just edit the ID tags or somethin’. 😛

EDIT #2: Yeah, edit the ID tags. The titles for some of the songs get clipped in WMP apparently…

EDIT #3: Hey, has anyone heard the new Metallica and AC/DC singles?

Well, it’s done. We’ve finished Big Cardboard Robot. It’ll be available for download on the main site and PureVolume this Tuesday. Physical copies are on the radar screen, but won’t be available in the near future as far as we can tell. (And BTW, you people who downloaded “The System is Down” and “Back to the Abacus” from PureVolume will want to re-download anyway; significant changes have been made to both.)

What can I say? It’s been a lot of fun and a lot of… not fun. One track in particular was absolutely 100% (well, at least 98%) not fun. But we’re proud of this album, and while it may not be a great album, we all agree that it’s a decent album.

The recording process for this album has to be one of the most random, disjointed ones in history, and we have many entertaining and memorable stories concerning it (like recording “The System” outside Mar Smauel’s chicken coop, or Nevik improvising a bridge by saying, “Let’s try some bar chords,” or Cthulhu and me trying to figure out how Smauel wanted his lyrics sung). There’s too much to recount in one blog post. So, um, I guess I’ll stop trying and just shut up now.

Until Tuesday, here’s the album art for you to salivate over:

Thanks to all our friends, families, and groupies for their continual support. Especially the groupies. 😀 jk, jk…

By popular request, we are making these band pics public. They’re ezackly the same, but the second one has been fiddled with.

Here’s the normal one:

And here’s the one that I’ve fiddled with:

–Zimmy

Hey guys. Hey guys guys guys.

So we haven’t posted any updates or anything in, like, a while, so I thought I’d better do that. The album is almost finished; we’ve finished several other songs besides the ones available on the PureVolume page, and we’ve got all the music finished for several others (I just need to record the vocals sometime when nobody else is in the house). As well, it’s looking like we won’t be able to release the whole album through PureVolume, since the maximum file size for the site is 8 MB and it’s looking like one or two of the songs are going to be bigger than that (yeah, they’re REALLY long). But never fear, Mar Smauel will come up with some clever computery thing that lets you download the whole thing directly from the band’s main site.

It’s probably also worth noting that Nevik’s done more work on the songs lately; I remixed “Abacus” so there’s his acoustic guitar in the bridge (very symbolic) and he wrote most of the music for another song which we did without Smauel knowing, heh heh heh. Anyhow, the album should be released sometime this month, mostly likely towards the end of it. The whole thing will be available for free download from the main site as I mentioned, and then the physical CD (with album art and lyrics ‘n sturff) will probably cost around $5 or $10, just to cover the cost of production.

–Zimmy

This here’s the last single from Big Cardboard Robot: Back to the Abacus. That link redirects, once again, to our PureVolume page, where you can download the song and/or listen to a highly compressed version of it.

Yesterday was a historic day for the band. It was the first time, since the band’s formation, that every member of Zed Narley were in the same room together, recording and jamming. Well, OK, maybe “jamming” is the wrong word; more like “playing or attempting to play songs by other artists such as Black Sabbath and Van Halen”. 😛 Cthulhu was back in town for that one day, so obviously we took the chance to get him down to the studio to record a couple of songs. We also took some group pics which will probably go in the liner notes for BCR, and our alleged groupie (we just have the one, plus a bunch of antigroupies) drew some fan art, which may also go in the afore-mentioned liner notes.

So basically at this point the album’s over half done. All the lyrics are written, and just over half the songs are very near completion. And the next — and last — single from this album will be released soon. Just as soon as I get the vocals down.

In the meantime, Happy Canada Day!

–Zimmy

We’ve press-ganged, er, hired a new member. His name is Cthulhu, he was part of the original jamming session that spawned the band, and he’s gonna sing, because I’ve discovered that I really can’t sing most of our songs.

So everybody give a big hand to Cthulhu.

–Zimmy