This is an interesting twist! Today I received a Facebook event invite for a show at Dublin Underground in Albany, NY on Monday, October 26th. Bands performing are Alta Mira, The Receiver and The High Dials. What what? THE HIGH DIALS? Like, purveyors of chiming, NUGGETS-era psych-pop? Never thought I’d see the day!

UPDATE:
Show failure last night. Apparently the High Dials were spooked off by the fact that Dublin Underground would not let the bands use the (giant / more-than-adequate / house) PA for the show. Someone mumbled something about the club not wanting to hire a sound engineer for the night as the excuse for not being allowed to use the house PA. Alta Mira and The Receiver soldiered on with the former’s practice PA set up curiously next to the club’s PA; sounding excellent in that compact, crisp-sounding room.

I can appreciate that Monday isn’t the most obvious day to have a full staff, but perhaps making the club barely functional could help smooth any “new-business bumps in the road” that they might be facing. It didn’t help that some clearly advertised beer specials were suddenly not specially priced any longer, nor the absolutely inappropriate insane light show that was constantly spraying green and red lasers around the room. Perhaps there’s more to the story, but kind of a bummer from this perspective, indeed.

Original post, for posterity:
I must admit that I haven’t kept my ears with The High Dials in the past few years, but A New Devotion and War of the Wakening Phantoms contain some excellent, excellent songs that creep into my brain here and there. From the latter, “Strandhill Sands” kind of just wrecks me in a good way.

Strandhill Sands – The High Dials

(Photo by Flickr user tomcochrane, used under a CC share/attribute license)