I typically don’t do research on musicians before I write about them. I dislike those reviews that are stuck on that kick about like the singer has all these kids, and does all this stuff behind the scenes, or whatever. But come on, Gary Clark Jr is just TOO GOOD of a story to resist […]
Score: 7.5/10 . I have to be careful what I ask for, I guess. I once made the knock on The JMC’s album Automatic that it was a little too “automatic”: like as in all songs got put through the same leather-cool sneering culture cooker, and then produced through the same leaf blower-sound apparatus. So […]
Score: 2.0/10 . Nothing is ever as simple as it seems. Ok, check that. Real Estate are every bit as simple as they seem. But most things are not, and in my opinion we have the city of New York to blame for this, with its inexorable hype machine surrounding seemingly every newly released album. […]
Score: 9/10 . There’s a lot that goes on behind making an album. Believe it or not, I’m not talking about how many kids the singer has, or relationship with the label. I’m talking about just the very minor miracle of somebody making it so many more times around the sun all the while carrying […]
Score: 8.5/10 . I don’t know anything about The Stooges. That’s the attitude I have. That’s the attitude you have to have watching a thing like this, otherwise you won’t learn anything, whereas if you think you already know everything, you won’t learn anything anyway. Related to this, Jim Jarmusch of Cleveland suburb who also […]
Score: 7.5/10 . I review some tracks on this site (Menace Beach’s enchantingly apocalyptic, and enchantingly Britpop “Maybe We’ll Drown” being one) but I primarily review albums, which involves as we know sitting in one space and concentrating on the same thing for 40 minute chunks of time. Now, I have no problem with this—it’s […]
* “Nine-minute rock songs don’t rock” Pitchfork review of Shellac – Terraform. [1] Score: 6/10 . The curse of reviewing this album from Soundcloud is that I knew exactly how long the songs were, before they ended. Or was it a blessing? So we’ll call The Long Dark Road primarily a LIVE band. Hmm… well, […]
Score: 7.5/10 . It’s a sad fact, but it’s really just hard to make a great E.D.M. ALBUM, per se. Sure, some seem to have succeeded in amassing a considerable genus of songs, placed within slots, on an LP format — whether it be Aphex Twin, Autechre, Hercules and Love Affair, Sepalcure or the likes, […]
Score: 6.5/10 . Hate. Hate is what is undeniable on this earth. I see, I hear it all the time. It’s this random Wilco roadie calling out Ryan Adams as the most full-of-himself individual imaginable, it’s me, the guy writing this view, doing things probably 10 times more hateful, every day. And then I’ll go […]
Score: 7.5/10 . Related to my last post about the difference between rock criticism in the ‘90s and that today, I thought about making this review like viewed through the eyes of The Real World decade — would the music stack up to the snobbery of when things were still cutting edge, or would it […]