Watched the pilot episode of Big Love last night. Whatever one can hate about an HBO series, you certainly cannot accuse them of sacrificing authenticity to save a buck like the networks, who will film something like Law & Order half in NYC and half on obvious LA sets while they’ll only get about 65% […]

The Beatnik Filmstars have the poor luck to have been born around the time Guided By Voices experience a fruitful, early nineties adolescence. They’re mostly the result of songwriter Andrew Jarrett’s manic outpouring of material — a regular Beatnik Filmstars album includes around 20 songs, most hovering near the 2.5 minute mark, each different in […]

A few posts ago, with regards to success vs. artistic endeavor in music, I misquoted David Bowie’s infamous statement ‘it’s not who does it first, it’s who does it second.’ Sorry to get all High Fidelity and create a new list, but let’s get to those bands/artists who Do It First, too, but have the […]

There’s a fine line between homage and rip-off, too. I recently grabbed an mp3 of “According to Plan” by I Love You But I’ve Chosen Darkness from some blog (and I apologize for not remembering whom) and amid their swell job of transporting and reforming the semiotics of mid-eighties emo-pop, there arose a guitar figure, […]

Eveyone has a personal canon. How many times have you been told ‘yo, you don’t own that record?’ and then you waste $ on a CD that could be better used (after smashing it) as something sharp to stab the artist who created it? Yeah. When I’m feeling nice, I’d just say these records were […]

Prediction: Neko Case’s new album Fox Confessor Brings the Flood will no doubt spur reviewers to wax overpoetic about her influences being the likes of David Lynch or Calexico (her sometime backing band, along with the better Sadies) and alt-country this and alt-that and etc etc; they’ll miss the fact Fox Confessor nails that American […]

DISCLAIMER: The Oscars suck moldy cow-udder as a rule. Ok. Read on. Crash was the biggest batch of horseshit I’ve seen on screen in a long long time. First of all, does no one one recall the insipid Grand Canyon or the better, but flawed City of Hope both failing at the issues-ensemble-drama, a genre […]

I’m neither Japanophile or -phobe, so it’s by chance this week that I’ve been reading Haruki Murakami’s Kafka on the Shore and listening to Boris’s latest record, Pink. Which made me dig up their countrymen&women’s the Boredoms’ Seadrum/House of Sun, specifically the track Seadrum, a monstrous beast offering an outpouring of free piano, wordless singing, […]