You guys are killing me. I enthusiastically concede to the evolution of language, and as a person who works with and loves words, I actually delight in that evolution. That said, there are a few basically arbitrary rules that are hardwired into my brain and consequently just look wrong to my eye, among them "alright" and "literally." I wasn't condemning this anonymous source for employing the word in such a manner, nor was I condemning dictionaries for updating the word's definition to include its evolving meaning. I just can't bring myself personally to adopt that meaning.
You gotta talk to the dictionary people about that one. I personally only use the word to convey the traditional meaning, but I'm not the arbiter of what is and isn't acceptable.
In fairness that was part of a quote attributed to "a source" but that said I've heard lots of people who write for a living misuse "literally." It's so widely misused that dictionaries are just changing the definition to include that misuse. http://www.cnn.com/2013/08/15/living/literally-definition/
My honorable mentions are:
Wild Beasts - Present Tense
The Men - Tomorrow's Hits
Young Widows - Easy Pain
Nothing - Guilty Of Everything
Tony Molina - Dissed And Dismissed
The Horrors - Luminous
Mark McGuire - Along The Way
Totally agree but it's ingrained. That and "OK" rather than "okay" and a bunch of other things that look weird to anyone who wasn't clubbed to submission with an AP Stylebook for years.
I do love that one actually but it probably goes overlooked because it doesn't hold up as well next to the Hüsker Dü records that preceded it or the Sugar records that followed it. But it is a great record, I agree.
Also, I'd say Vampire are definitely not groundbreaking (I'm hoping now that I didn't call them "groundbreaking" when I wrote about them), and in fact they're sort of just a variation on the whole OSDM revival of the past few years, but they're just reviving a SLIGHTLY different era or set of influences than most of the OSDM revival bands -- instead of like Obituary/Autopsy/Incantation/Entombed, they're doing like a Venom/Celtic Frost/Sarcofago/Bathory thing -- not that those are unique influences or anything, but Vampire are just going for (and nailing) a super era-authentic sound, which is interesting to me because those bands in that era kind of operated without any genre boundaries. But yeah, I didn't mean to imply they were doing anything new, totally the opposite!
Yeah, truthfully you just have to accept that you're not gonna get great sound in a parking lot off the expressway (in most cases with another band soundchecking a few hundred feet away during the performance you're watching). That said, I think considering that setting, the sound was really good on the whole, but it's obviously not built with acoustics in mind. FWIW the stuff at Ram's Head sounded fantastic.
10 Best Songs is back next week, and a new Counting Down will run the week after that! And both will run regularly on that rotation (unless more frequently) going forward.
GAH. Fixed this, thanks for the heads up.
I gave the east coast time because we always do east coast times because we're based in NYC. But yeah, if you actually live in California and you wait till 3PM, tickets will probably be gone.
I think it's pretty great, woulda been my choice, although IMO the best album released this week is Agalloch's The Serpent & The Sphere, which we also already did a PE on.
That's possibly/probably true, but KISS, the Stones, and the Misfits actively license their brands willingly. It was just an anecdotal observation anyway; in reality there's probably more random One Direction merch than that produced by the rest of the music industry combined.
Yeah not sure if you can Wayback Machine to the time I wrote that post, but that graphic was not there at that time. Oh well. Consider the new album confirmed!
It's not available in any region at the moment. They took it down, to be replaced tomorrow by a new version (though it'll almost definitely be the same version with minor if any alterations -- my guess is they didn't have the press rollout ready for today, and maybe never intended for the video to be released today in the first place).
I forgot this Black Monolith record came out in April. Pretty significant fuck-up on my part. I would have pushed hard for it to be on this list, and somewhere in the top half of the list, too.
http://www.stereogum.com/1675286/stream-black-monolith-passenger-stereogum-premiere/mp3s/album-stream/
Thanks for the kind words, Ben! I'd definitely recommend reading Doug's piece (as well as my semi-rebuttal to his piece here). I think trying to consume EVERYTHING will burn you out real fast, but building an effective filter takes a while. I definitely get bored at points sifting through new records, but I also know pretty quickly if something is right for me. And when I hear something that's right for me, all the disillusionment is (temporarily, at least) swept aside. That's part of the fun of searching, right?
The first time I wrote about ATG here I included a sorta caveat but I'm not going to do that every time. (When I do a PE for At War With Reality, I'll include some of that for context.) That said, I don't think anyone who reads the Black Market needs to be convinced ATG are a great/not-cheesy band. If anything, time has separated them from the pack of Euro melodeath/mall metalcore. Listen to Slaughter Of The Soul alongside any of the albums it supposedly inspired -- it's just a rawer, harder-hitting, sharper, more iconic, and more timeless sound. I genuinely think Tompa is the best extreme metal vocalist ever, period, and I think he elevates the material immeasurably. (And that's not a knock on the material -- I think the material would hold up decades later if, say, Andres Friden were singing it, too -- I just think Tompa is a unique and transcendent performer and presence.) I mean, everyone who reads this column regularly (and CERTAINLY Doug, Aaron, and Wyatt) knows ATG are one of my all-time favorite bands, and Slaughter is my favorite metal album ever, so I don't really feel a need to be coy about it.
That said, I appreciate Aaron including that little disclaimer in the Insomnium blurb -- not because he needed to cover his or our collective ass, but because I think it's a pretty savvy way to present the music. He's saying, "Look a lot of people think melodeath is cheesy, and a lot of it is cheesy, but this is really good melodeath that is not so cheesy, so ignore your biases and listen to this, because I think you'll like it."
I'm not defending it, I just don't have the context to say one way or another what Dagon believed in 2006 (when he wrote that song) and what he believes now. 88MM was a power electronics project, the product of a genre that features "screeching waves of feedback, analogue synthesizers making sub-bass pulses or high frequency squealing sounds, and screamed, distorted, often hateful and offensive lyrics." Does that mean he wrote that stuff ironically or from a point of critical remove? Not at all. But I don't know what spirit he wrote it in. The fact that he's distanced himself significantly from that music/scene suggests maybe his viewpoints have evolved, maybe he's now embarrassed to have been associated with it back then (unlike Varg, who still spews hate speech in every possible forum). But I have no context for knowing that, either. I'm not saying he's not scum, just that I don't know for a fact that he's scum, and I don't think the anecdote that came to light this week proves anything either way.
The "evidence" is pretty flimsy -- a bunch of loose connections that have been floating around at least since I was running IO + a new anecdote that seems dubious at best. That said, I wouldn't be surprised to learn they were guilty of being stupid bigots at some point in their lives -- absolutely disappointed, but not surprised.
Yep, my bad. It was No Way Sis. God, the worst. Remember they did a cover of "I'd Like To Teach The World To Sing" or whatever that actually charted? The fact that there is a Noasis, too, though says ... something.
I wouldn't consider any Radiohead to be Britpop -- Pablo Honey predates Modern Life by months, and is largely influenced by American bands. The Bends was released during Britpop's apex but really had nothing to do with Britpop (aside from maybe "Fake Plastic Trees"). And OK Computer was pretty much the death knell for the whole thing.
I actually wrote about it last year, when we premiered the first track:
http://www.stereogum.com/1531111/cormorant-waking-sleep-stereogum-premiere/mp3s/
I think he technically holds the title of "junior staff writer" or something, as he has since graduated from intern to paid contributor. I can't vouch for the "drinking thru straws" thing. He's also a great guy! Welcome indeed!
@Michael_: Definitely not trolling you, didn't mean to offend you. I think your feeling is totally valid; it's just not the way these lists are assembled/produced by us. And it's not analytics that establish a blogger, but words, and you've published a lot of 'em. I say that with the sincerest respect. WITH THAT SAID I am jumping out of these comments now, because the work is piling up over here. Thanks for listening!
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