UnNews:Local Group Ready To Bring Back Ska

This article is part of UnNews, your source for up-to-the-picosecond misinformation.

2 March 2012

The velvet art painting the group plans to use as the cover of its debut cassette, soon to be available at the farmers market.

RADIUMDALE, Idaho -- Local band Tin Pest has announced to the Radiumdale community that it's time to bring back ska, and that if no-one else will do it, they will.

"Man, what happened to ska?" Tin Pest frontman Jim Kowalski, 26, rhetorically asked the sidewalk in front of his garage practice space. "I loved ska when I was growing up. And if nobody else is going to bring back the ska, I will." Helping him will be his sister, Trudy Kowalski, who plays the bass, and her on-again, off-again boyfriend Trever Throckmartin, a trombone player.

Ska, a fast-paced 1950s Jamaican music style that picked up punk rock influences in the "two-tone" revival of the 1970s and enjoyed brief mainstream popularity again in the 1990s, is deader than dirt right now. An UnNews poll of locals fueling their cars at the Radiumdale Go-Go Gas found that 34% had never heard of ska, 20% were uninterested or not fond of the ska sound, and that 46% didn't like having a goddamn microphone shoved in my face while I'm minding my own business, buddy.

When shown this information, the band members, who keep tripping the circuit breaker once they get the drum machine working, were nevertheless optimistic.

"I just don't want to end up playing big band music my entire life," said Throckmartin. "I need this to work out."

He, like the other members of Tin Pest, grew up with the sound of ska in his childhood. However, actually writing new material is proving tough. Reasons cited included fast-paced bass fingering, the amount of lung power required to play the trombone that energetically, the difficulty of writing lyrics "that have to be sung at auctioneer speed" and the fact that the drum machine tends to smoke after running for more than five minutes.

However, recording of the band's debut album, Tin Pest in a Tea Cup, is almost finished. Track listings include "Pickle from Space," "Not What I Was Looking At," "Fractal King," and "Blue Baby Beige."