There’s this guy here in my hometown of South Bend, Indiana who’s not FROM Portland but who used to live there, apparently. From what I understand, he lived there from the time when he was 25 to when he was 35, moving back home, here, after that stint, and having lived here before that stint. … Read more“This Dude Here from Portland”
Score: 3/10 Louder than Sound describes Wilderness of Mirrors as “the perfect soundtrack for the end of the world,” which is ironic, seeing as Alex Maas seems to take every opportunity possible to get all lovey-dovey with the kind of nauseating lack of self-consciousness only a Southern good-ol’-boy could probably muster. They claim that the … Read more“DD Review: The Black Angels – Wilderness of Mirrors.”
*The “Where Have You Been?” series handles individual songs and diagrams their history, from their inspiration, to the writing, to their eventual contexts and implications it’s had in our culture, with an emphasis on the geography of all these things, or the “where,” in other words. Corbin Reiff’s Chris Cornell biography Total F*cking Godhead paints … Read more“‘Where Have You Been?’: Audioslave – ‘Like a Stone’”
There’s a lot of ways you can slice this thing, as you might have guessed. That is, I complain kind of a lot about the wane in quality of music after 2010, the year the world apparently saw fit to kill off indie rock like some hairy ogre scratching itself. But when you factor in … Read more“A Non-Detailed, Probably Way-Late, Autopsy of the ‘Music Snob’ Zeitgeist”
Oh, how simply do you want me to put it? There was just more substance on rock albums back in the ’90s, back when it was a lifestyle, when your singer went on a strict regimen of The Clash and A Tribe Called Quest and your guitarist went on one of U2 and Tom Tom … Read more“Dolby’s Rupees: Third Eye Blind – ‘Burning Man’”
“Isis,” track three on Joyner Lucas’ 2020 album ADHD, has over 300 million streams on Spotify. The song is an absolute monsoon of rhythm and supernatural flowing, capped off gloriously by what’s easily the best Logic verse I’ve ever heard, one in which he mentions “HD vision,” hence establishing a killer double entendre of the … Read more“Unsurprisingly, the Logical Fallacies Abound in Joyner Lucas Criticism”
Being around people who are obstinately traditional and “by-the-book” can sometimes offer a strange sort of appeal. What I’m talking about here, in particular, is certain members of management where I work, who are very hierarchical, and whose music walks this almost stupefyingly absurd line of “normal.” One thing that this staunch adherence to genuine … Read more“Positioning Suicidal Discourse as the Last Stand of Lyrical Ingenuousness”