Category

Music

• Live, Music

  upstate, last weekend

  09.28.08 | Permalink | Comment?

  Loud-ass rock and roll.
  Amy Phillips’s Pitchfork piece is spot-on, I’d say, and covers a lot of the festival’s highlights. (Also, believe the hype: Low has written the creepiest song ever about Santa Claus.)
  Also worth mentioning: the genius of Maria Bamford; the surprisingly hilarious stage banter of A Silver Mt. Zion; the competitive intensity of air [...]

• Live, Music, NYC, Review

  live: becky stark, harper simon, human highway; cake shop, 09.15.08

  09.16.08 | Permalink | Comment?

  So hey, Cake Shop. Tropical wallpaper stretching for a dozen feet as you approach the stage, hanging red garlands and tiny white lights dangling amidst soundproofing foam. It’s become one of my favorite places to see shows in New York — actually, given that I once saw Daphne Brooks read from her book on Jeff [...]

• Live, Music, NYC, Review, Uncategorized

  live: pigeons, air bombay, pretty & nice; pianos; 09.05.08

  09.15.08 | Permalink | Comment?

  Pianos on a Friday night is a strange place to be. The bar portion, which one has to traverse in order to get to the venue in the back, was on this particular night full of well-dressed, well-off types making loud conversation. The actual performance space, which had added a bar since the last time [...]

• Music

  this is some really, really good iver.

  09.15.08 | Permalink | Comment?

  Currently listening to a quartet of live Bon Iver songs, recorded for Myspace’s “Transmissions” series. Gorgeous and sparsely arranged and mostly heartbreaking. And, hey, downloadable here. Fine late-night music, I’d say.

• Me, Music, Review

  death, taxes, and me.

  09.12.08 | Permalink | 2 Comments

  In the new issue of Death+Taxes (the one with CSS on the cover), I have a pair of reviews, along with a piece on Oxford Collapse. Two more reviews (of Adem and Bound Stems) are now up on their site, where another two should be joining them one of these days.
  The Oxford Collapse piece will [...]

• Film, Links, Music

  I have not posted links in a while. I will now remedy that.

  09.12.08 | Permalink | Comment?

  One: Kevin Smith on movie posters.
  Two: Ezra Caraeff on Jenny Lewis and the existential horror of watermarked promotional CDs.
  Three: At Pitchfork, Will Sheff on (among other topics) Still Flyin’. I heartily approve.

• Me, Music

  “jurado snores like a lion”

  09.10.08 | Permalink | Comment?

  I wrote about Damien Jurado for the Portland Mercury.
  “It’s midnight, and I give up, tired of lying for you,” Damien Jurado sings over neatly strummed chords. That’s how we’re eased into “Gillian Was a Horse,” the opener on Caught in the Trees, Jurado’s eighth album.
  For what it’s worth.

• Live, Music

  recommended music writing: 09.08.08

  09.08.08 | Permalink | 2 Comments

  Molly Templeton witnesses Les Savy Fav in Portland.
  Someone gives Harrington a fork and he combs all available hair (on his own body) with it. At one point, he yelps, “What’s the difference between me and a pit bull?” The crowd responds, “Lipstick!” Harrington says, “I have human intelligence!”
  Amazing.

• Coffee, Live, Music, NYC, Review, brooklyn

  live: the dutchess and the duke, james jackson toth; union hall, 09.01.08

  09.02.08 | Permalink | Comment?

  Union Hall is around four blocks from Gorilla Coffee in Park Slope, and on nights when my supply of coffee is low and I find myself bound for the venue in question, I’ll generally make a stop beforehand for a freshly ground pack. And so on nights when I find myself standing in Union Hall’s [...]

• Music, criticism

  praise / burial

  08.29.08 | Permalink | Comment?

  Paper Thin Walls has called it a day. Something of a retrospective is now up.
  I’ll miss it. Not only because I did a fair amount of writing for it, but because it cultivated a style of honed-in music writing that I daresay doesn’t exist anywhere else.
  Plus, this was pretty damn funny.

• Live, Me, Music

  The Ex / Gétatchèw Mèkurya / EMP revisited

  08.26.08 | Permalink | Comment?

  Last week, I headed up to Lincoln Center for what turned out to be a pretty astonishing WFMU-sponsored bill. There’s a good writeup on 17 Dots that I pretty much agree with. Said writeup doesn’t go into the pretty stunning set played by The Ex and Gétatchèw Mèkurya. Essentially, it was nine musicians completely in [...]

• Music, NJ

  my home state does me proud

  08.25.08 | Permalink | Comment?

  Now playing: The Gaslight Anthem’s The ‘59 Sound. This is excellent so far — knowing nostalgia in the lyrics and unrelenting rock on the musical side. Last year’s Sink or Swim sounded a bit like New Jersey’s answer to Lucero; this one shows them having found their own (’59?) sound and, hey, Springsteen nod right [...]

• Music, Politics

  links for friday: diy edition

  08.15.08 | Permalink | Comment?

  One: In which the Paper Thin Walls editorial staff records a Deerhoof song. The publicist responses are somewhat amazing.
  Two: In which Spencer Ackerman discusses Rancid, and analyzes why bands don’t typically cover songs from their members’ previous bands. (I’d like to hold up Lucero as a counter-example of this, as I saw them do a [...]

• Music

  notes on “notes on collaboration”

  08.14.08 | Permalink | Comment?

  Late last year, I reviewed the song “Saro” from Sam Amidon’s All Is Well. Said album, released in 2008 on Bedroom Community, is — in my opinion — one of the year’s best. Both it and Amidon’s appearances elsewhere this year have inspired a fair share of additional posts in recent months.
  Amidon is currently sharing [...]

• Me, Music

  freud might have a field day; on the other hand, he might be swept up by the overlap of pras and yo la tengo

  08.12.08 | Permalink | Comment?

  I’m not sure what it says about my subconscious mind that the last genuinely vivid dream I had involved a discussion of the legal issues surrounding the new Girl Talk album. A friend and I were sitting at a bar — I’m pretty sure it was the Pencil Factory — and we talked copyright law [...]

the scowl