Celebrate with A Sundae Drive at Their CD Release, Tonight

Dammit, dammit, dammit. Alright, y’all, here’s the sad truth: I had fully and completely planned on reviewing The Senseless & The Sound, the long-awaited full-length by awesome H-town shoegazers {A Sundae Drive}…and yet, it didn’t happen. sigh.

When I should’ve been writing the review last night, yours truly was instead driving down a darkened country road outside of San Antonio, winding our way towards after spending an insanely long time stuck in dead-stopped freeway traffic past Seguin on I-10. Before last night, I’d never even heard of St. Hedwig, Texas; now, I’ve actually been there (and no, there’s not a lot to recommend it, at least not in the dark).

So instead of listening once again to the album and making notes, I was navigating by smartphone and trying to reassure the munchkins that no, they weren’t going to be devoured by bears lurking in the darkness off either side of the road. And by the time we got to our final destination, all I could do was collapse.

All of which sucks, because having listened to it several times through over the past week, The Senseless & The Sound is an excellent, excellent album, one I was looking forward to writing up. (And yes, it will get an actual review, don’t worry; just not this weekend.) It takes the band’s shoegazer-y, dreampop-y sound and makes it somehow somber, almost elegaic, like the album’s some kind of wake for the dead, and that shift towards seriousness makes it all the better.

It’s made worse by the fact that, yes, tonight, Saturday, November 22nd, is the official CD release for the aforementioned new album, happening up at Rudyard’s this evening. The ASD crew will be rocking the hell out with a widely-varied cast of other excellent people, including cool, weird-ass surf-rock-noise Galveston dudes {The Escatones}, fellow Houstonians Playing For No One, and comedian Brian Zeolla.

Sadly, great College Station ’90s-indie-rock throwbacks The Ex-Optimists had to bail on this evening’s show because guitarist Kelly Minnis has strep. Dang…

Even still, though, this is a damn fine evening of bands to celebrate a damn fine release. If you’re in town (unlike me), you should go, seriously.