Smile Politely. Speak Directly. A Champaign-Urbana Culture Blog

What 13-year old boy — a middle child in an Jewish-American family of loud-mouthed dramatists — didn't at one point do something, anything, to try to alienate himself from the world?

For me, it was smoking copious amounts of tobacco and weed, and falling in love with the industrial rock scene. Once centered around the city of Chicago and the Denver-turned-Windy City record store/label — WaxTrax!! — that, for so long, dominated the genre, I got my fix by listening in to music that my parents just scratched their head at.

In 1994, I was given the Black Box - Wax Trax Records: The First 13 Years for Christmas, which looking back, was an odd juxtaposition.

Here I was — 15 years old — and angry for the most part, about nothing really.

My hair was long on top, shaved underneath, with NIИ scrawled into the back of my head with a hair clipper. All the while, Amy Grant's cheesy-but-somehow-awesomely-nostalgic Christmas album is playing in the background. Later that day, I pulled a milky tube in my closet, lit some incense and pushed play. What came out was nothing short of pure sonic bliss making fairly dirty love with machines, screaming men and years of pent up aggression.

The best of those tracks? A single from Revolting Cocks' 1985 album Big Sexy Land. To this day, it still remains, one of the finest songs to drive to that I have ever heard. The lyrics, filled with an urgency about a dystopian present where the idea of god and lawfulness have slipped through the cracks, still give me chills.

Guitarist/singer Rick Miller (he's the one with the skinny goatee) chatted with Smile Politely the other day about their music's pelvic component, Porter Wagoner, and why he doesn't like emo. For more goofy goodness, check out the interview after the jump.

How excited are you all for tonight’s debate? So much will be discussed and I, for one, am sitting on the edge of my seat. Debates are excellent because they allow us to see the candidates and hear what they are told by advisors they believe in so that we can decide on our own who we personally believe is best fitted to lead us. Personally though, I prefer someone else to tell me who to vote for. Political figures and newspaper editorial boards are alright sources for finding out who to vote for, but I prefer to be persuaded by people that have no true knowledge or expertise in the political arena – rock stars!

This year, there seems to be one clear presidential candidate choice if you’re into popular music. Barack Obama has support from every genre and every direction on the musical spectrum. Jay-Z is playing a couple shows in support of the Illinois Senator. Bruce Springsteen is doing the same. The Decemberists got tied up in Right-Wing punditry because of their support and this guy’s (pointing at self while typing) favorite New York band, The National, designed a t-shirt for the candidate of “change.” Don’t get the wrong idea, I’m not saying that Obama has it in the bag. I’m not saying that at all.

Olney, Ill., (pronounced ull-knee) is the undisputed home of albino squirrels. The chummy police officers sport chalky white rodent patches on their sleeves and wear clear jelly shoes. Without this hairy claim to fame, Olney could just be mistaken for a spot on a map. It was that seemingly insignificant spot that molded and formed New Ruins into the band, and the men, they are today.

New Ruins formed in 2004 with Caleb Means and Elzie Sexton both on acoustics. They created their first album, and The Sound They Make came out on Hidden Agenda Records (a subsidiary of Parasol Records) in April of 2007. In 2006, Means and Sexton played a show at Aroma Café in Champaign. There they met Roy Ewing, previously a drummer in Braid, and Paul Chastain of Velvet Crush who completed the package. This summer New Ruins worked on their second full-length album titled We Make Our Own Bad Luck.