2008 Woodie Awards
Hundred Year Storm Rocks Orlando
Nicole Shaffer
Issue date: 9/4/06 Section: Arts & Entertainment
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It's Saturday night, and another struggling rock band plays the stage at Orlando's BackBooth to a small crowd of stool sitters and beer drinkers, most with their backs turned, facing the bar. On stage: three TV screens spaced neatly between four band mates broadcasts video images that rotate subjects with each song played; fireworks, old ships sailing, one-engine airplanes from the 40's. Not exactly the mosh-pitting, lighter flicking crowd. But regardless, the Austin-based quartet Hundred Year Storm performs with intensity like many other acts before them, trying to make a name for themselves in a globe-sized pool of aspiring rock groups.
With enough grassroots marketing on web-community sites like MySpace and PureVolume, anyone with a microphone and a beat-box can call themselves a musician. Though the Internet can transform an unknown act into the most "friended" group within a week, it's still just a springboard to get noticed by a major label willing to take their music to the next level. But even label contracts can't promise a new band iconoclastic fame. In today's over-saturated music market, bands need more than clever titles and contracts. They need fans. Real fans that will see their shows and buy their albums.
In a world controlled by emailing, Sidekicking, TiVo watching, and other technological time consumers, bands today must work even harder to catch the public's quickly disappearing attention span. It doesn't take a mathematician to count the number of new It bands that disappeared after their debut album. Enter: Hundred Year Strom who've just released their first national album Hello from the Children of Planet Earth. Newly signed to Costa Mesa's Floodgate Records, Planet Earth is now stocked on the shelves of every Best Buy and Tower Records across the country.
HYS formed in 2003 as an instrumental group, Now Bill, Brandon, Dave, and Shane take the stage at BackBooth, one of their many album promoting tour stops. HYS opens with new track Golden Record, a song laced with a JKF speech on the space race, and continues with 6 other tsongs off Planet Earth.
With enough grassroots marketing on web-community sites like MySpace and PureVolume, anyone with a microphone and a beat-box can call themselves a musician. Though the Internet can transform an unknown act into the most "friended" group within a week, it's still just a springboard to get noticed by a major label willing to take their music to the next level. But even label contracts can't promise a new band iconoclastic fame. In today's over-saturated music market, bands need more than clever titles and contracts. They need fans. Real fans that will see their shows and buy their albums.
In a world controlled by emailing, Sidekicking, TiVo watching, and other technological time consumers, bands today must work even harder to catch the public's quickly disappearing attention span. It doesn't take a mathematician to count the number of new It bands that disappeared after their debut album. Enter: Hundred Year Strom who've just released their first national album Hello from the Children of Planet Earth. Newly signed to Costa Mesa's Floodgate Records, Planet Earth is now stocked on the shelves of every Best Buy and Tower Records across the country.
HYS formed in 2003 as an instrumental group, Now Bill, Brandon, Dave, and Shane take the stage at BackBooth, one of their many album promoting tour stops. HYS opens with new track Golden Record, a song laced with a JKF speech on the space race, and continues with 6 other tsongs off Planet Earth.
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