We now have three more sound clips up on the Demo page. Be sure to check out the sounds of Wicked Sun!

Yeah, I know. If it’s new, it can’t have been improved. But, it’s so improved, it might as well be new!

The Wicked Sun web site has undergone a complete refit, with an eye towards a little cleaner design. The new site makes it easier to find things, and is a little easier to update. The new design also properly supports the audio file player — when the link turns orange (or blue, depending on your browser), the song will play without opening a new window!

wickedsunrocks.com screen shot -- as it should be!

For those interested, if you’re viewing the site with Firefox (or any browser using a codebase common to Firefox), you’re not seeing the site as designed. If you’re using any other browser (Safari, IE, Opera, etc.), it looks like it’s supposed to. Click the thumbnail to the left to see what the site is really supposed to look like.

The biggest difference is that Firefox refuses to render the correct colors for the headers. No clue why, but it’s annoying.

I’m also still working on a few tweaks here and there. Hopefully, we’ll have more demo tracks up next week, and more photos as well.

The first of the demo audio has been posted. They’re just real short clips (it’s all the law allows us to post, I’m afraid) of the songs, but they do give a sense of what we sound like. It’s a real shame we can’t post the entire song, ’cause these things rock! You can find links to the streaming files on the Demo page or the Song List page.

We had our recording session last week, and for the most part, things went really quite well. Ray promises to have the first rough mixes for us to listen to at tomorrow’s rehearsal. Here are a few pictures from the first session I snagged with my iPhone (these are from the “test” session, not the actual recording session).

Our studio date for recording the demo is set! A week from today, we’ll record the five songs we’ve selected for the demo. To that end, we had a really great rehearsal yesterday, so we’re all pretty psyched about the recording. Look for the samples here on the site in a couple of weeks.

We’re also finalizing plans for our photo shoot with area photographer Stan Freedman. Stan’s an awesome photographer who can really think out-of-the-box. We’ve given him a couple of ideas to chew on, and I can’t wait to see what he comes up with for us.

Another really cool thing happened in practice yesterday — we put together a song from start to finish in less than 15 minutes with no reference! It was basically: “Hey this would be a cool song to do.” “Wanna rough it?” “Damn, we got it!” That’s a good sign that the band has really, really gelled.

All I can say is, “WOOHOO!”