Preamble (Contains At Least One Made-Up Word)

You could make an excellent argument that every bit of ink spilled over a piece of music detracts from it, infecting an abstract realm with declaration and reduction, clawing at the emotional agency of the reader and; ultimately, cheapening the whole enterprise by reducing it to a mere exercise instead of an exploration. At it's worst, music writing yields a string of reference points and descriptions that fail to evoke anything other than a queasy knowledge of either how badly the writer needs you to approve of their record collection or how lukewarm their future thesis proposal needs to be.

"It's like Wire with swirling guitars."

"It references Bowie's ambition (circa his more conceptual period), but with the dub-inflected rhythms of Fugazi."

"...the East Coast four-piece, fronted by a singer with the soul of Muddy Waters, the lungs of a Gazelle, the body of a man, and the heart of a hero."

The core of this project is passion and intelligence. I'm not here to flatter your pretensions with esoteric jive ripped off from people you'd never want to meet in real life. Conversely, I'm not here to string together bro-isms like I'm composing an ad for a body spray that impregnates your skin with both Red Bull and the scent of date rape. I'm really not even interested in stabbing at hipness by shoveling competently mediocre bands into the hype cycle, secure in the knowledge that they'll either live up to everyone’s expectations or be sluffed off like a fleet of skinny-tie-wearing dead skin cells within a few months.

My purpose here is exploration and expression. I’m going to write about music as something you live with as opposed to music as a lifestyle accessory. I’m out to corner every inexplicable force that moves me. I want to help document and perpetuate the sort of moments with art where you and the piece are like mounted butterflies laid face-to-face, able to bask in a bone deep knowledge of each other like some shared inertia. I want to pass on what I’ve gotten from the things I love.

Everything here is offered for promotional purposes. If you like it, buy it. With the exception of stuff that's out of print, I own everything that I post here and think you should as well. To that end, grab everything and keep it around. It took me 3 years before I realized that I loved "Emergency and I" by The Dismemberment Plan and bought it. It took me almost as long with "We Are The Romans" by Botch. Requests for deletion will be followed up on immediately. If a link disappears in the night like a South American dissident, I'll take the hint.

If you've made it this far, I figure you're probably in. I'll try to update a few times each week. Sometimes I will lag. Sometimes I may update every day. Some month I may write nothing other than a 9 part generational manifesto connecting "Wonder Showzen," Orthrelm, and the aesthetics of PTSD. This project is about scratching itches, not creating "content." Content, not that a lot of it really contains much, can be found by the yard elsewhere. Writing can be found here.