For the last seven Halloween weekends, the university town of Gainesville has been overtaken by punk rockers for what is possibly the best punk festival ever, known simply as Fest. Last week, Fest 8 (which included 330+ bands, most of which will probably never tour the UK) was no exception.

Right now, thousands of people are recovering from one killer weekend.

Just imagine Freshers’ Week, but replace all the Abercrombie and Fitch preppy doucheness with punk rockers who only have one thing in mind: they’re there to party and have the best time ever. Heck, no wonder Less Than Jake named their latest record after the place.

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The second song on 'Ghost Stories', 'Turnstiles', is probably the best Lawrence Arms song. I say that because we’ve played it a zillion times and it’s still one of the most electrifying points in the set for me every time it comes up. This record marks Chris stepping out and taking on lots of lead vocal duties and sort of setting the groundwork for the band we’d eventually become.

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This record is raw. That’s the only word for it. The music was recorded in one day in one continuous take, then, that same day, I sang everything and Chris did backups. There were no guitar overdubs. We ran out of money so the record was never mixed. This is a rough mix of a record and as such, it’s got a uh… unique production value which bummed me out at the time, but as I listen back to it, I kind of think it’s appropriate for a new band who had no fans and who had never even played a show. It’s a punk record. Plain and simple.

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I get a lot of emails from PRs every day. Every hour. NONE has ever grabbed my attention like this - it contained the below video, from a band called 'Milking The Goat Machine'. They are a grind band. They wear goat masks. They play a type of music called goatgrind.

That song is called 'Surf Goataragua'. I don't know what to do with myself right now, other than watch it OVER AND OVER AND OVER.

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So, Belgium, eh? Or, more specifically: Ghent, eh? Home to... Soulwax. Go on, we dare you to name something/anything else from that little Belgian municipality to have achieved notoriety (although, if you said Caspar de Crayer, painter [1582-1669] then congratulations, you can use Wikipedia correctly).

Lucky, then, that Rise And Fall - those moody dudes staring you out up there - are here to redress the balance. And when we say 'redress the balance', we mean 'slap the living christ out of the balance, throw down some radical pit moves and then scream until the balance shits itself in abject, nauseating terror'. Such is life as a truly brutal hardcore band.

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OK, so tour blog number two, and to add insult to injury, I typed one up yesterday only to have it wiped by fucking Hotmail as it sent... so it was a jaunty little thing about how great the UK shows were and how badly we ate for the entire time we were running up and down the country... permit me to paraphrase. Last show in Portsmouth: great! Bowel function after two weeks of chips and pizza: terrible.

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