In blog years, I’ve been away for long enough to put out a reunion album.  If only I had more to show for it.
Not that I haven’t been “being productive.”  The opposite, actually.  It’s just that said productivity hasn’t manifested itself publicly.  Yet.  Along with taking trips out of town for various reasons (the Pitchfork [...]

Wordpress pinged me and told me that someone didn’t like a Pitchfork review I’d written, and had also linked to my blog in doing so.  Which is all fair game, of course.  You write for Pitchfork, you answer to a pretty big audience.  But there are two unique things here that made me want to [...]

Tom Ewing on “a couple of regrettable tendencies in Pitchforkwatching,” or “conspiracy theories from people who think they’ve ‘cracked the code’”:
1. The ever-creeping-upwards margin of what seems to constitute a “bad Pitchfork score”. Bloggers are twisting their knickers over a 7.6??? (Ed. note: This link is from me, not Tom)
2. The use of figures to [...]

If you read the whole thing, you’ll see that Newton Minow’s notorious “vast wasteland” speech—delivered right after he’d been tapped by JFK to lead the FCC—at least had its heart in the right place.   Its official title is “Television and the Public Interest,” and Minow used it to lobby a still-formative medium to incorporate more [...]

My brilliant friends are preparing their year-end lists, which I’ll post here to showcase my good taste in friends (last year’s).  After that, I’ll post some longer thoughts (last year’s) and even-longer mixes.  For now, a bit of my stuff for that other place.  My take on Royksopp’s Junior, which I love, is at the [...]

Zach Baron, interviewing P4KTV employee Greg Finch on a new performance space/collaboration laboratory in Brooklyn:
And does Dame come to the shows?
Oh, absolutely. The last show that we did on Tuesday (with London Souls and the Cool Kids), after the show was over, he told everyone to stay and he MC’d like a freestyle-off, with Curren$y, [...]

I’m not a law student, but nonetheless, it’s nice to see that an Indy resident actually read and understood what I was trying to do in this review. I only got 3 emails from people honestly aghast that I’d report others saying anything negative about my hometown, but they still sorta hurt, y’know?  Sorry [...]

Simon Reynolds in the Guardian:
“See, I have this hunch. I reckon that if you were to draw up a top 2,000 albums of every pop decade and compare them, the noughties would win: it would beat the 1990s decisively, the 1980s handsomely, and it would thrash the 1970s and 1960s. But I also reckon that [...]

My last Grampall Jookabox Pitchfork review, of Ropechain, led to an interesting rebuttal from the label.  Not sure if AK’s got another Bill Veeck-esque gimmick in the hopper this time around, but my take on the new one, Dead Zone Boys, is up today.  The record is a big improvement on Ropechain, though the B-movie [...]

What if Nine Inch Nails-inspired modern rock dialed in on Trent Reznor’s simmering synth-pop fixation, instead of begetting aggro mid-90s stuff like Filter and Stabbing Westward? What if Secret Machines bought vintage Korgs and hired Doug Martsch to sing? What if the M83 guy were less French and more alt-bro? These (and others!) are the [...]