I haven’t paid attention to any records in the past two weeks other than David Comes To Life by the ten-years-old-this-month Fucked Up and JEFF The Brotherhood‘s We Are The Champions. OK, so only two records in two weeks is very much on the slow side of things and it’s not because there weren’t other good records that came out. It’s just that I care about these more than those and I really couldn’t be happier that these two bands, touring together now coincidentally, are really exploding in the States. For the first time in a long time I’m not reacting to mainstream press coverage of bands I’ve liked for a long time with “Oh, now you’re paying attention” but, rather, “Glad to see this getting further out there.”

Honestly, David Comes To Life is the type of thing the music press loves to cover. It gives them a chance to say things like “epic” and “rock opera” and “concept album”, along with having a justifiable reason to place the word “fuck” into a headline, and not be writing about an Emerson, Lake & Palmer reissue or interviewing Pete Townsend. So, even though the album is dutifully incredible there was no chance it was going to be ignored.

The attention JEFF The Brotherhood has gotten lately is something to be celebrated.  These two guys, Jake and Jamin Orall, have put out records by themselves via their label Infinity Cat, and others (including Athens’ Ham-1 [<–warning: that’s a MySpace link]) for years, toured relentlessly and never strayed from the guitar-n-drums setup that works so well for them. I first wrote about them a little over 2 years ago. Due to limited space I couldn’t really expand on how great they were as a live band and, obviously, I’m not really doing that here. So, look at this, why don’t ya?:

We Are The Champions comes out next week and NPR is streaming the whole thing until then so go listen to it.

Also, even though this has been posted everywhere I figured it wouldn’t hurt to give this to you to stream also. Enjoy!

MP3: Fucked Up-Queen Of Hearts (download it via that tiny little arrow on the right side of the streaming box)

(If you’ve got $12 or so to spare you could do a lot worse things with it than grabbing a copy of the Fucked Up bootleg Coke Sucks, Drink Pepsi , recorded at Atlanta’s EARL in January 2009, that ‘ol Unca Hank at Chunklet put out this spring.)