Pitchfork recently spat out their “50 Best Ambient Records of All Time” list, essentially a holistic (and deserved) tribute to Terry Riley, Brian Eno, Oneotrix Point Never, and Tim Hecker. I assume it’s also a native advert for Spotify. For example, omissions include Ash Ra Tempel’s landmark ambient work “Inventions for Electric Guitar,” while the sole […]
Billboard recently posted a list attempting to name the 100 “greatest ever” music books. Billboard’s list includes High Fidelity, as well as a few other novels. Is High Fidelity – listed as high as #9 – a better rock novel than Delillo’s Great Jones Street, Harlan Ellison’s Spider Kiss, or Paul Ford’s Gary Benchley, Rock Star? Tom Perrotta’s Wishbones? Maybe not worse than some or […]
David + David’s album Boomtown turned 30 this summer. They’re making the follow-up now. I was 15 when I bought Boomtown on vinyl in the weeks following its July 7, 1986 release. My family had just informed me that, by November, we would be moving 50 miles away from the only home I’d known. By that summer, Boomtown had already been […]
Like most auteurs, director Ben Wheatley can’t be pigeonholed. Calling him a horror director is like saying Werner Herzog makes biopics. Same would go for science fiction, which classifies Wheatley about as easily as it does David Cronenberg. Cronenberg may be Wheatley’s best antecedent; a director talented beyond genre whose work touches genre and reinvents it sometimes (The Fly) yet never […]
Truth is only sometimes stranger than fiction, but truth is almost always more horrifying, unless you’re lobotomized, or attend too many raves. One element separating fictional horror and horrifying nonfiction is guiltless entertainment; you can enjoy Stephen King or Jo Nesbo, or even Gone Girl, but you can’t necessarily say you enjoyed Truman Capote‘s In Cold Blood (although don’t underestimate Capote’s […]
With physical album sales tanking and streaming royalties frozen by corporate war, you can bet your BitTorrent that major label artists are scrambling to release visual albums. Whether these visual albums will be exclusives for web-based companies remains to be seen: major labels are already circling their contractual wagons, and no less than Spotify has […]
