Short reviews can be funny. The hands-down best one ever was by J.D. Considine in Musician magazine back in 1982 for his review of GTR’s self-titled debut. It read “SHT.” Pure gold. Pitchfork’s review today of Black Kids’ Partie Traumatic is not so clever. It’s a picture of an LOLdog with “Sorry” pasted on it […]

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Not too many surprises here from Blur’s notoriously quasi-reformed louche, though Martin Amis seems like he would have been a shoe-in for the list with London Fields, what with its influence on Blur’s career-defining album, Parklife. I suppose that was more Damon Albarn’s Bag. Anyway, James’ tastes mimic his English-ness and his former penchant for […]

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Well, this is unsurprising. Even on a good day with cheap gas, making a profit on tour for an upstart band is next to impossible. And, now that gas is over four dollars a gallon in some states, going out on tour has practically become cost prohibitive at the grassroots level. CNN has a story […]

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Gawker’s Hamilton Nolan correctly calls for a moratorium on the term “indie”, especially when applied to musicians who willfully seek out any possible cross-market corporate tie-in in order to sustain so-called “independence.” Or as Nolan succinctly states: …to sell a single freaking song in today’s environment, musicians must rush around bootlicking every monster corporation of […]

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I’m a little slow getting around to this, but I just re-read it and laughed the whole way through: Meathead over at Buddyhead rips Rolling Stone and Coldplay’s Chris Martin a new one. Easy targets, I realize, but they were both asking for it. For RS to call Chris Martin a rock god is more […]

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Once you reach a certain level of fame your dignity becomes harder and harder to hold on to. And that goes double for when you’re dead. I’m pretty sure Kurt Cobain would hemorrhage at the thought of Converse making a signature shoe in his honor. Well, actually, publicly he would have made a big stink […]

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The always-well-spoken Tom Ewing of Freaky Trigger has a new addition to his Poptimist column in Pitchfork that ponders the psychology behind choosing one’s favorite album. I’ve always answered the same album since I was about seventeen: The Cure’s Pornography. I haven’t even questioned that answer in years (despite The Cure’s self-sabotaging relevance in my […]

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