The Mae Shi’s Hillyh is pret­ty much exact­ly what I want to be lis­ten­ing to at 5:38 am on a Mon­day morn­ing before head­ing in to the office.

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 of music crit­i­cism. This isn’t to say that get­ting the details right isn’t impor­tant — it is — but why make the exer­cise such a total dickwave?

It’s stuff like this that gave me the thought today that, as much as the indus­try’s hurt­ing itself, music crit­i­cis­m’s fin­ish­ing the job.

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 with an artist and not sim­ply inter­view­ing some­one because I’m play­ing some sort of hype cycle whack-a-mole in the hopes of get­ting pub­lished and paid.

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.

Nat­u­ral­ly, this is one of those records I’ll pun­ish myself for not lik­ing more, only to real­ize that no one liked it much in the first place.

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, which is depress­ing in at least two ways.