Expain Does Guitar Playthrough. Old Coot Stewart-Panko Whines and Complains.

Most of the promotional methodologies of the digital age are platforms I don’t quite get and don’t think I’ll ever be able to hang with. In addition to the constant fishing for complements that are disguised as update/progress reports (“We’ve got two-and-a-half new songs written and we can’t wait for you guys to hear them!” or “Check out our guitar player recording 30 seconds of scratch tracks!”), there’s your barrage of usually useless information via Twitter and pointless Facebook status updates, which mean nothing unless your album is coming out today, you’re appealing for help because you flipped your van on the way to a show, or the Canadian border patrol denied you entry into the Great White North. Then, there are the absolutely pointless lyric and playthrough videos that do little more than hog up real estate on the interhole.
However, when a band I admittedly enjoy cracks off with one of the above, and I want to help them out by opening up my Thursday afternoon spot as a promotional intermediary, I guess I’m stuck between a rock and a lame place. Vancouver’s Expain is a band I’ve mentioned in this space previously, back around the time of the release of their full-length, Just the Tip. They play a quirky brand of thrash that employs as much humour as prodigal musicianship. As well, they know how to put together a decent cut-and-paste thrash collage. Six months or so down the line, they’re still pimping their self-released debut and in doing so, have created this latest playthrough video of guitarists Pat Peeve and Eric Morrison doing the unthinkable: playing their own songs the whole way through! Sure, there are a few elements that make this particular exposition a bit more interesting than your basic fret-watching; like the different faces Peeve pulls off (from falling asleep and deep concentration to mild amusement and the agony of dropping a three-pound deuce) and why it is that Morrison is wearing bondage wrist cuffs while playing guitar (doesn’t that shit get in the way?), but it’s still a playthrough video. Better you listen to the album, which is below.

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