"When I close my eyes you know I see sunrise, everyday." - MantaRay.

Here's some hot news.

It looks like the MantaRay banner has been retired (sad, but in our opinion ultimately necessary due to confusion with the popular Spanish act Manta Ray) and that mainman Erik Evol and drummer extraordinaire Mitch Joy have a new combo called The Get Quick. We sort of stumbled over the info on the RedEye site just now while we were poking around. The Get Quick issue their debut on Rainbow Quartz in August (we've found two dates during that month the record supposedly streets, so you'll just have to keep an eye out all month). The record is called How The Story Goes and it is produced by some guy related to the Lilys. Of course we're dying to hear it. We'll have to put in a request to Junkmedia HQ for them to keep an eye out for it for us.

MantaRay (or perhaps the band had already changed its name), as previously reported here, had recently included former Kam Fong drummer Mike Boran on rhythm guitar, according to our sources. No word whether Boran is with The Get Quick, but we are going to put out some feelers. The retail one-sheet at RedEye states the band is a quartet but only names three principals: Evol, Joy and a bass player named Jamie McMahon. No mention of the identity of the fourth member.

The beginnings of a Get Quick web site are here. Rainbow Quartz announced the signing here, but that, of course, wouldn't have meant anything to us if we hadn't seen the picture at the RedEye page. RedEye has a :30 MP3 sample of a song called "Live Without It," a hint of what to expect from The Get Quick. Very interesting, more atmospheric and light than the Cream-influenced power-pop of MantaRay. The one-sheet mentions a summer/fall North American tour, so there's hope that we'll see Evol and Joy, et al., outside their usual 100-mile radius around Philadelphia. More bulletins as events warrant.

For a taste of classic MantaRay, here's "Jugular."

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Elsewhere: We took in a set by the rock act The Texas Governor Friday night with H-Dawg from Accounts Receivable. The set was dramatically more together and sounded much better than the show we took in earlier this summer at P.A.'s Lounge. And we're not just saying that because the band sported awesomely weak bunny suits made from white toxic waste suits with red hearts spray painted on around a stencil. We have to admit we weren't sold on the band after the PAL performance, and had to dig through H-Dawg's set of the band's records to really get on board.

But Friday evening the band was really alight, despite house sound that migrated from too weak and muddy at the open of the set to too loud and cacaphonous at the close of the set. There was a period at the midpoint where the sound was crystal, and you could hear more than the drums and lead guitar. Lead Governor Dave Goolkasian's guitar hasn't been loud enough either time we've seen them. But sound issues aside, the performance was really electric. The band had tightened up substantially over the last six weeks or so, perhaps because of some steady live playing. We're still eager to see the bass player and keyboard player do something that inspires, but on the whole we think this is a band worth following closely.

Steve Albini says goodbye to Silkworm's Michael Dahlquist in the Chicago Reader. Thanks to The 'Nac for the link.

Cooler links to this pretty farcical snafu regarding the use of a bar code as album art that was not the actual bar code for the album, but for a Jack Johnson record. Multiple oopses ensue. Someone at Reuters obviously reads Coolfer, as this story went online several hours after the Coolfer blurb.

That is all.