Music library

After many years away, I’m back in the used-CD market, and it feels like home. This isn’t the Cars compilation I had on my wishlist—despite the title, this one is more than I needed—but I could hardly balk at two and a half hours of prime power pop for eight bucks, even if I’ve always been baffled by its product category: it collects the hits for the casual fans and B-sides and unreleased stuff for… See more →

More than a few moments in Marina Herlop’s Dja Dja tempt me to call it the best Björk album since Vespertine, but Herlop packs far too compelling a range of ideas into this record to just leave it at that. Among other things from my somewhat limited frame of reference for this sort of thing, I hear bits of the choir in Kenji Kawai’s Ghost in the Shell score, the abstract vocal experiments of Mike… See more →

In these early days of a post-BrooklynVegan world, who knows how long it would have taken for me to catch wind of Temptation to Exist, today’s surprise release from your best friend and mine, Andrew W.K., but thankfully my buddy Smo informed me via text early this afternoon, and I was spinning said release forthwith. Ever since Andrew cancelled all tour dates and deleted his website and social media almost immediately after releasing his last… See more →

Look, I’m not a conspiracy-minded guy, but a carefully coordinated effort by the international punk intelligentsia to keep me in the dark is the only explanation I see for why it took 37 years for this incredible album to find its way to me. Nomeansno has been on my radar since the early ’90s, when they appeared on Alternative Tentacles’ Virus 100 compilation, and their committed a cappella cover of Dead Kennedys’ “Forward to Death”… See more →

I like to think I’ve shaped my FOMO into a generally healthy force for good over the years, at least as regards my commitment to the arts, but it really let me down on this occasion, when it took me more than two months to accidentally discover this new album from an old favorite. Still, I’ll cut myself some slack on this one, as it was easy to lose track of Jesse Sykes in the … See more →