1. Broken English Records has signed Iowa pop-punkers HISTORY ON REPEAT. The band recorded a brand new EP titled So Long, Future Boy, with label honcho John Naclerio (which means it sounds phenomenal), and two of the four songs from that release are currently streaming on the band’s MySpace page.

2. I took two books with me on vacation last week: Brian Peterson’s incomparable 90s hardcore book “Burning Fight” and “Traffic: Why We Drive The Way We Do,” by Tom Vanderbilt. I highly recommend both, especially the former given the audience of this website. The best part about books like “Burning Fight” that go into great detail on bands of a certain era is that the book is a gap filler for music collections. I came into hardcore in the mid-to-late 90s and mostly missed out on the heydays of labels like Ebullition and Bloodlink. I’ve done much work in the years since to build my music collection, but a book like this is always helpful in getting to the next level of completeness. “Burning Fight” is out now via Revelation Records Publishing. I plan to do a feature about the book and Peterson in the near future, so stay tuned.

3. I kind of hinted at this with a tweet, but I spent a lot of time selecting particular pieces of ‘headphone music’ on my cruise last week. By far, the most incredible musical moment was listening to HOWL’s amazing new full-length Full of Hell while sitting out on my cabin’s balcony, at sea in near total-darkness. You’ve got the ship moving at a certain speed, with the ocean having a unique rhythm of its own, and then layered on top of that is HOWL’s insane riffing and technical lumbering. I need more of that unconnected, uninterrupted downtime in my life…

4. This Is Hardcore fest sold out in 36 hours… not bad, not bad. I just like looking at this digital flyer. I know the planned KID DYNAMITE and INK & DAGGER appearances got a lot of the attention, but no love for HANDS TIED? We’ve got like 9 weeks to the fest – what bands break up before then?