Category: Doing

  • One last word on Vampire Weekend.

    I think the thing that’s most aggra­vat­ing about Vam­pire Week­end’s crit­i­cal epicy­cle is that there’s this absolute need to be ‘right’ about the album, and that it’s not sim­ply enough to write it off as clever pop that a lis­ten­er can take or leave. The com­ments on that blog post com­plete­ly suck the fun out…

  • File under personal goals, achieved.

    Looks like my first and only for­ay into the SXSW wilder­ness may be a suc­cess. From the way things sound right now, I should be sit­ting down to talk with my child­hood heroes R.E.M. in Austin. This is great because I’m pret­ty sure it’s the first inter­view I’ll con­duct where I’m gen­uine­ly enthused about talk­ing…

  • A word about Dave Sitek productions.

    I lis­tened to most of the Foals forth­com­ing album, Anti­dotes, yes­ter­day. As much as I love the sound that TVOTR achieved with Return to Cook­ie Moun­tain, it does­n’t work for every­one. Even if you love Cel­e­bra­tion as much as I do, you have to admit that it all starts to sound samey after a brief while.…

  • That was glib and unnecessary.

    Sor­ry about that. Alfred’s right after all. It’s just hard to coun­te­nance a plea for niche music when most peo­ple only care about music-relat­ed celebri­ty on a day-to-day basis, and you’re on the hook for sev­er­al hun­dred thou­sand pageviews every day. The indie music hype bub­ble [and the traf­fic it gen­er­ates] seems insignif­i­cant in com­par­i­son,…

  • This is an industry in decline.

    The Gram­mys are a strange show. The pro­duc­tion is out­stand­ing [at least until 9 p.m.] and then, like an M. Night movie, they throw in a point­less plot twist to wreck the mood. Do Gram­mys vot­ers not even know what Zeit­geist means? Maybe more appro­pri­ate­ly: do they know they help cre­ate it?