Graham and Punchy are also tweeting. So if you’re into the mundane, here are your coordinates: Graham & Punchy.

In other non-virtual news, we’ll be coming back to Europe and the UK this spring (here are some pics of one of our more recent trips there). All the dates are on our MySpace. Looks like that tour will be followed by another swing through the U.S.A. before the summer. The details of that are still being worked out.

Most importantly, we’re still toiling away at our new record, but it’s almost done and we’re excited about it. If everything goes according to plan, provided there is a plan, it should be available somewhere around September of this year.

Anywho.. a lot has happend since our last post. We finished up our glorious summer of non-stop touring, came home to relax, the world all went to hell, and we’ve started working on our new record! Fantastic!

It’s great to be home and indoors in the winter. Especially after the last year we just had. We ended up spending a week here at our friend’s converted barn to record most of our record. It was cosy, and very productive. The work continues at our respective houses, as we spend hours sifting through the mass of material we gathered.

The only thing getting us out of the house these days (other than Punchy chopping wood, and Brian touring his solo record) is the idea of setting out and tracking down the summer. So, on Sunday December 7th, we all get on a plane and head for Australia and New Zealand. We’ll be playing 6 shows in 6 days, and spending almost as much time flying there and back. I hope to see a koala bear, a kangaroo, and go swimming in the ocean. Unfortunately, there aren’t any days off on this tour, so I’ll probably have to postpone my trip to the Steve Irwin Zoo (it was Steve Irwin Day on November 15th just in case you were wondering).

Updates to follow………hopefully!

Speaking of festivals, the Meredith Music Festival near Meredith in Victoria, Australia, announced their lineup today and we’re a part of it. It seems, however, that the Dickhead Policy (scroll all the way to the bottom) has yet to be released. We eagerly await it’s unveiling.

More Australian and New Zealand dates will be unveiled soon as well, so stay tuned.

Five more shows left on this tour: Reading, Leeds, Push Club @ Astoria 2, Club NME at Reading and an in-store at Rough Trade East this Saturday, August 23 at 4 pm. Yeasayer, who seemed to have followed us at every festival this summer are on at 1:30 pm so come early.

Here they are getting a Holy Fuck lesson from Graham before we opened the mainstage at Lollapalooza a couple of weeks ago:

I guess we’ll see on Saturday how much they learned…

The first show in question was an afternoon slot at the Camp Bisco festival in upstate New York. It was not the most auspicious of debuts in that it completely sucked. I did, however, get to see Slick Rick play and visit the Professional Wrestling Hall of Fame the morning after the gig.

Since then we’ve played over 160 shows, at least a dozen live sessions and about 20 studio dates. We’ve taken about 40 flights, a few trains, buses, boats and countless vans while touring in Canada, the U.S.A, Mexico, England, Scotland, Northern Ireland, Ireland, Spain, France, Belgium, Switzerland, Norway, Sweden, Poland, Czech Republic, Denmark, Holland, Germany and Greece. Good times.

Today we’re at XL Recordings in London testing out their brand-spanking new recording studio. We’ll be here for the next four days working on some hot new jams which may or may not appear on our next record. Snooper’s Paradise came through again yesterday and we picked up a new drum machine that should get a good workout in the studio. While in Brighton we also played the Loop Festival. Or it played us, I’m not sure.

Before I go butter my strings, let me introduce you to our newest furry friend, who we met at the Lowlands Festival in Holland: Randy the Setlist Squirrel…

Cowboy Cat might want to watch his back.

Driving from Stuggart to Hasselt, Belgium today the abundance of wind turbines in Germany is hard not to notice. Really makes me wonder where all the wind turbines are in Canada. There sure is enough wind - and this past week more than enough hot air - and the technology is no longer too costly to consider. Although it’s not so affordable that both candidates for the U.S. presidency can be excused from missing a crucial vote on tax credits for alternative energy producers and investors like they did a couple of weeks ago.

(Geez Louise, all this European hospitality seems to be giving me a North American hate-on, eh. Watch out Mexico, you’re next.)

Pukkelpop is on today’s agenda. In what could be diplomatically referred to as an adventurous decision in festival programming we follow Drive-by Truckers who are preceded by Henry Rollins doing spoken word .

I’m excited about the show because I washed my “uniform” in the hotel bathroom sink last night. This is the first tour where I’ve tried the rock uniform - meaning I wear the same clothes on stage every night so that only one shirt and one pair of pants get drenched in sweat. While this allows me to travel light, it also allows me to kill most houseplants with my stench after about three shows. So get ready, Belgium - I’m starting fresh and, much like the tiresome windbag on our flight from Toronto to London last week who wouldn’t stop complaining about the smell of the dirty diaper belonging to the infant in the row behind her, my arse will smell like roses.

The last time we were in Norway - less than a month ago in Bergen - I stayed in my hotel room for two hours carving a piece of bone so I could repair my broken bass (second of that tour). Again, pretty standard Scandinavian fare.

We’re playing Oya later on today, or tomorrow depending on how you look at these things. My Bloody Valentine are playing as well and they may very well top Radiohead who we saw at Lollapalooza last week. Could be tough though, as Radiohead’s amazing light show is run off battery power! Dig it.

Anyway, wish us luck… We haven’t been vaccinated for Obamamania, hopefully I’ll be around to post an update later on.

I was with 10 year-old Cole from the get-go, but then he was less than enthusiastic about my favourite band in the world and I read on to discover that he like KISS and Canadian football, so it seems our differences are actually quite profound.

The response to our record was pretty good, but 12 year-old Anna wasn’t at all impressed. We’ll see how it all shakes down come September 29, Anna… We will seeeee.

Only three festivals left! Lounge on the Farm today, Oxygen tomorrow, and T in the Park on Sunday. That means only six more flights til we return home, for a grand total of 16 flights on this tour. 16!!! That leaves a pretty dismal carbon footprint, I know. We’re working on it…

Cowboy Cat, for his part, couldn’t care less, he just wants to continue riding our coattails around the globe. Here he is enjoying some Polish vodka in Bergen, Norway…