There’s one thing missing on the Dabbers' MySpace profile: songs. The two-piece, consisting of Kill Me Tomorrow’s Zack Wentz on drums and vocals and Shelby Gubba on bass, don’t have any proper recordings of the band, just bootlegged copies from a few of their live shows. “We’ll put some songs up here soon. We promise,” reads one of the band’s blogs. “We’re old-school…trying to figure out how to turn wax cylinder recordings into MP3s.”

Even if the stripped-down two-piece had recordings of their distorted bass-and-tom-driven songs, they would take days to download.

“We are pretty no-tech,” writes Wentz in an email. “Especially me. I still use a land line. No cell phone. No voice mail. I’ve never ‘texted’ anyone. Perhaps we’ll record a track into my old answering machine, post my phone number online, and people can call if they want to hear a bit.”

The band has other reservations about the quality of songs they add to their profile.

“I’ve always found it to be pretty unnerving to throw out unfinished artistic projects for the internet world to have its way with,” responds Gubba in the same email. “Anyone can listen to a band’s whole set list through compressed MP3 recordings played through tiny laptop speakers, and that’s the first impression that you get. It’s cheating both the musician and the listener.

“I hear so often of people ‘researching’ bands on MySpace before even going to the show and sometimes choosing not to go based solely on the quality of what they hear online.”

At the end of January, the band posted a blog asking if anyone would be interested in recording the band properly. Two weeks later, Mitch Wilson (guitarist and vocalist for No Knife) responded, agreeing to record the Dabbers at North Park’s Archival Sound Recording Studio.

“Since so many of you have been asking (and some of you demanding and/or threatening), we are finally going to begin the audio capturing process later this month [February],” reported the Dabbers’ MySpace blog.

While both Dabbers were gracious and excited about getting the chance to record with Wilson, for Gubba, the whole point of the recordings is still to get people to come out for a live show. “I want it to be just enough to get peoples’ interest and get them off the computer long enough to see some live music. I’d rather have tinnitus from going to live shows than develop carpal tunnel watching YouTube clips of live shows.”