What’s So Dramatic About 21st Century TV?

I’m not one of those people who thinks The Sopranos wrecked television, though I kind of get where they’re coming from. Tom Carson:  “I may be alone in this, but I could make a good argument that The Sopranos RUINED TV. The medium was a lot more original when it wasn’t ‘art.’ And I’d rather…

150 Best Albums of 2004

The fifth year of the 21st Century, in case you forgot, is the year that started with an areola belonging to Janet Jackson being exposed to 150 million or so football-watching couch potatoes in January and everybody blaming her for it when maybe they should have blamed Justin Timberlake instead or even better just ignored…

Things I Said on April 12

2005: “Which publications allow critics to review albums from leaked downloads?”,” Tim Ellison wondered on ilx. “I mentioned on the Of Montreal thread that the Pitchfork review (which is up today) of their new album neglects to mention anything about the songs on the bonus EP that comes with the album.” But I don’t see…

150 Best Albums of 2002

MY CRANKY COMMENTS THEN: If the Pazz & Jop album list is indeed topped by Wilco, Springsteen, and Beck¹, which I assume it will be, then 2002 will probably be first year ever that the top three albums will all have been reviewed negatively in the Voice itself (by Christian Hoard, Keith Harris, and James…

150 Best Albums of 2001

“CRANKY COMMENTS!! (PROBABLY COMPLETE WITH TYPOS AND EVERYTHING!!!)” I wrote but didn’t publish beyond a blurb or two back then, some of which I no longer recollect what the heck I was talking about, and all of which I’m glad I managed to excavate from my hard drive since I couldn’t figure out what else…

8 Indie 45s From the ’00s

Written in retrospective hindsight, as explained in more detail here. Cococoma “6 ¼ – 125”/”Take My Time” (2006) Recorded December 2005 in their hometown Chicago, so my release-year guess can’t be too far off. Either way, this speedy, muffled nugget is the sort of revisionist garage punk that genre addicts pretend rocks harder than it does…

Metal and Hard Rock Reviews, 2006-’08

Well, at least the rough drafts (notes? I Love Music posts?) seem to originate from the mid ’00s, as do almost all the releases themselves. Rhapsody apparently didn’t technically publish the blurbs until quite a few years later, and I can no longer precisely remember why. Air Conditioning, Dead Rails  These noise hipsters from Allentown,…

Country reviews, 2006-’11

Gary Allan, Set You Free Gary Allan has long been one of country’s most velvet-voiced beautiful losers. But on Set Me Free he lets the crazy out, howling psychobilly graveyard threats in “Bones,” interrupting a recovery meeting church organ to blame mental ghosts in “It Ain’t The Whiskey,” vegetating in his hotel room while college…

150 Best Albums of 2003

There is no logical reason why this list should seem more presumptuous, self-indulgent and downright ridiculous to me than all the earlier years I’ve catalogued. Just the opposite, really — Given the sheer number of albums released (probably somewhere between 2000’s 35,516 and 2007’s 79,695 according to Billboard), the number that critics in general had…

Collage Licks, 2004

18 years later, Department of Eagles is still easily the dullest of these three records (I checked, last week), though 18:51 of Mr. Dibbs’s “Porntablist” is quite the unbearable endurance test. (In immortal words of my friend Michael Hall when he was in Wild Seeds, “I’m Sorry, I Can’t Rock You All Night Long.”) As…