First Quarter Music Report

Lov­ing this album. Feel like J. Mas­cis’ voice has always cap­tured that spir­it of not real­ly try­ing, which was the apoth­e­o­sis of all things good in the ’90s. Along those lines, I’m catch­ing up with Wild Flag, too. ’90s nos­tal­gia real­ly has trans­formed into some­thing else entire­ly, has­n’t it?

Real­ly like the new Moun­tain Goats, too. You can lis­ten to that one here. What’s become of me?

An aside: I blame “Port­landia” and Com­e­dy Death Ray for my new­found appre­ci­a­tion of Aimee Mann. Helen was way ahead of me on this one. The lat­ter show is also respon­si­ble for my renewed appre­ci­a­tion of Ted Leo, even though the “Bru­tal­ist Bricks” was qui­et­ly one of my favorite records last year.

Kurt Vile and Cold Cave are ear­ly win­ners, too.

Feel like this is as good a time as any to men­tion that the ex.fm Chrome exten­sion final­ly has me lis­ten­ing to music tum­blrs. Maybe that whole “blog j” thing Gerd Leon­hard men­tioned ages ago was­n’t as sil­ly as I thought.

Posted on by J T. Ramsay 0

Sad Social Media Commentary on the Fishtown Library

I par­tic­i­pat­ed in the Save the Library protest back in Novem­ber 2008. When I recent­ly vis­it­ed, I checked into Foursquare. If I check in again, I’ll be may­or of the joint. At a time when peo­ple are check­ing into Wawa, you’d think at least a hand­ful of folks would still be will­ing to pop in for a book or two. Does it real­ly make more sense to pay for every book you read?

C’mon, denizens of Fish­town! Vis­it your local library. Check out a book! It’s free and it will make you smarter. And you can hit Kraft­work imme­di­ate­ly after­ward to reward yourself.

Posted on by J T. Ramsay 0