When we were tracking the last record, my brother stopped by the studio (AKA my brother-in-law’s house) with a friend. All of a sudden that Kelis song started playing and everyone got really confused until the friend took his phone out and answered it. It was pretty awesome.

Anyways, that’s not the milkshake I’m talking about.

I’m talking about real, honest-to-fucking god milkshakes. Because I just had one and it was amazing.

I only mention this because I’m lactose intolerant and I haven’t had a milkshake in about seven years. But today at the store, Meg found some lactose free ice cream (which is something of a misnomer, since there is lactose, but they also put the same enzyme that’s in Lactaid to offset it), which, when combined with some vanilla Silk, created a creamy delight. Well, it was a little soupy to be honest, but I’ve been out of the game for a while, so whatever.

For a moment as I was drinking I started questioning my atheism. Truly there must be a god in a world full of milkshakes that I can drink, right? Then I realized that it was science, and not god, that gave me the ability to have what I thought was lost to me forever. That obviously reinforced my atheism, since if there was a god (which there isn’t), he obviously doesn’t give a shit that I’ve gone for years without a fucking milkshake.

The moral of the story? Science triumphs over religion once more! I mean, milkshakes rule!

As of this year I’ve spent half of my fucking life doing this, so let me offer you some advice: when you’re making flyers for your shows, don’t put your name at the top way bigger than everyone else’s unless you’re actually headlining. And then even if you’re headlining, don’t put your name really big. It’s especially grievous when you put your name really big — maybe in your “logo,” maybe not — and then underneath that, much smaller and in a different font, you put “With:” and then list the other bands. All I’m saying is that a little humility goes a long fucking way, you know? And while I’m thinking about it, stop taking your band so fucking seriously.

Unrelatedly: Toffuti Cuties? They’re fucking awesome.

I started cleaning up the links tonight. I went through all the bands and labels to start and I think I weeded out all of the dead ones. I also added a bunch of new bands and a few labels. For what it’s worth, my goal is to link to as few Myspace sites as possible, but that’s another post altogether.

I also made a page for MP3s, or, as the case may be, AACs. Todd uploaded our entire demo, and while it sort of sucks, you’re more than welcome to hit the music page off on the sidebar and check it out. I’ll be posting a track from our full length there in the next few days as well. We’re also talking about posting some of the awful-sounding jams we do to warm up during practice. Sometimes these get used in songs, most of the time we forget they ever happened. We’ll keep you posted.

Also, I’m going to try to disable comments on any page that isn’t the front one. The way the theme we’re using is set up a little weird, in that it uses the post template for everything instead of just, you know, posts. I guess that’s a small price to pay to have someone else do all of the work for you, but it’s still kind of irritating.

More to come.

Keyboards went way faster than we thought, so Todd’s down there doing vocals. Here’s Todd screaming his lungs out:

We’re doing keyboards as I’m typing this. Here’s a picture of Nader getting ready to rock:

Here’s a picture of Brendan’s amp, which is what the rock is coming out of:

You’ll have to trust me when I say that the microphone is in focus in that picture.

So after finally getting this fucking thing up and running after talking about doing it for almost two years and then editing the first post, I’m doing a proper news update since I haven’t posted anything on the old non-site in two months.

Really, the only thing we’ve been working on is the new record. Tomorrow we’re doing keyboards, everything else but the vocals is pretty much done. We’ve had some setbacks here and there, but by and large everything has been going pretty smoothly. I’m pretty fucking excited about how everything has turned out so far, and I can’t wait until it’s done so we can play it for people.

I’ll try to remember to bring my camera tomorrow so I can post some pictures, but we may be too busy playing Guitar Hero to bother. More to come, but for now? Bed.

Did I say “proper news update?” I guess I meant “bullshit one.”

Welcome to www.vanfuckingcleef.com, homepage supreme of our band, Angel Eyes. Alright, so it’s a fucking blog. Are you happy? Anyways, every domain name related to the phrase “Angel Eyes” was spoken for (and often by porn-related sites), as was every variation of “Van Cleef” in .com, .net and .org, often by fuckface domain squatters. So to work around it, we cleverly (and quite boldly, I might add!) inserted the word “fucking” in between “Van” and “Cleef,” and here we are.

Anyways, going forward this is where we’ll be posting news, show info and whatever else might be on our minds at the moment. Hopefully we’ll get to share some awesome stuff with you, and likewise we hope that you’ll alert us to awesome stuff that you’re into, because we really like awesome stuff. Communication is a key component of our band, and to date we’ve been pretty fucking lackluster about using the internet to its fullest potential in facilitating said communication. This site, long in coming, will hopefully rectify that.

Right now it’s pretty barebones around here, but we’ll be fleshing it out and shuffling things around in the upcoming weeks. Right now all we have is a handful of ancient links, cut-and-pasted from our last proper site. They’re a few years old at this point, so a lot of them will probably be dead. We’ll be weeding through them and adding new ones over the next few days. Beyond updating and reorganizing our links, we’ll also be posting our entire demo (which isn’t very good) and some shit from our last cd. Going forward, we might be posting some shitty recordings of us jamming out at practice as well, and maybe even some rough shit from the record we’re currently working on. I’m hoping that we’ll be keeping this place updated frequently, so feel free to stop back often or subscribe to our feed.

Hit us up on the contact page with any thoughts, questions, or if you just want to say “hi.” Take care.