When Nitro Records approached me with the offer of being sent a free copy of Dont Look Down's latest album, The Fear In Love , in return for a review it seemed a fair deal. To be honest I'd not heard anything by them, despite the fact that they are very proud that they sold over 5,000 copies of their Five EP and subsequently were signed to Nitro for their efforts.

After a couple of week of waiting the envelope turned up, the catch being it contained only an empty CD case. After toying with the idea that maybe the enhancement on the CD was that it rendered it invisible I contacted the go-between company known as the Hype Council who are charging Nitro large sums of money to handle the online promotion for an album that will probably not be released outside of the US for at least another couple of months (if at all)).

I wasn't expecting them to be overjoyed with the news that they had managed to intenationally ship an empty CD case but I was slightly surprised when their response was:

Hi Vicki, that's so strange. Did the envelope look tampered with when you received the package?
Erin

Maybe the mail service in the US do things differently, but in the UK if they want to steal your post they take the whole thing and then store what it transpires they don't want in their house for months on end until someone finally notices that all their post for the last 6 months as not turned up and a police raid ensues.

Having shared this example of apparent cultural diversity between English speaking countries I didn't recieve a response for a couple of days, during which time I got bored so decided to contact the band to see if they had anything interesting to say; initally I tried using the publically available contact details for the band. However Ryan Ogren (Vocals/Guitar) and Matt Emburgia's (Guitar/Vocals) email accounts were too full to accept any emails, whilst Jesse Rendell (Bass/Vocals) and Tom Parker (Drums) didn't appear to be prolific correspondants from the word on their message board.

So I resorted to using Ryan's instant messenger:

Session Start (AIM - gaveupdroppedout:ryandld): Fri Nov 05 20:17:05 2004
gaveupdroppedout: Hi, Ryan from Dont Look Down I presume? I was asked to help promote your new album
ryandld: thanks so much
gaveupdroppedout: No problem, the only catch would be that Nitro & co appear to be not so great about providing the means to promote it.
ryandld: thats rad, thanks for getting it, spread the word over there for us!
gaveupdroppedout: Although they did manage to post an empty CD case to the UK and are now trying to convince me the spotman stole the CD and inlay but left the case
ryandld: right on.

At this point I should probably have given up, but since Dont Look Down are touring Japan this month supporting Rufio and Last Year's Hero, but are above Pulley, I thought Ryan might have sometihng insightful to say:

gaveupdroppedout: looking forward to the Japanese tour?
ryandld: yah, its gonna rule
gaveupdroppedout: out of curiousity, have you got a favourite song onthe new album to perform live yet?
ryandld: umm, track 3, trust is a word
gaveupdroppedout: Right... any plans on coming to Europe soonish?
ryandld: i hope so

I gave up and watched Kung Fu films for the rest of the evening.

The last email I had from Nitro and their minions indicated that they were going to send me a copy of the CD to review in the near future, I'm not sure I care anymore.