My latest YouTube mix began as an attempt (ill-fated) to make a sound collage of my recently posted Top 50 Favourite Songs list, but quickly mutated into something much narrower, in sound if not in scope. Which is to say I managed to get in four songs from my Top 50, plus two from a previous Top 100 list. The flip side of the coin … Continue reading Caught in the Act of Listening
Roughly a year ago I came across a Spotify playlist with every Christgau A+ album (1,693 songs, 104 hours and 41 minutes long), and one night, listening to it on shuffle play the idea struck me: wouldn’t it be cool to create an “A+” mix? Then, as is often the case, my ambitions went kind of crazy on the thing—neo-Shakespearean recitations? why not—and, well, here … Continue reading A+ (Christgau)
By Scott Woods Jason Gross is the founder and editor of Perfect Sound Forever, the longest-running internet music publication, with its monthly schedule dating back to 1993 (roughly three years before I even knew what a “web” was). Gross has written for numerous publications over the years (Spin, the Village Voice, Blurt, et al.), produced critically acclaimed CD reissues by Delta 5, Kleenex, and Essential Logic (via … Continue reading Interview with Jason Gross (Perfect Sound Forever)
Back in the pre-blog incarnation of rockcritics.com, we used to post Jason Gross’s “The Year in Music Journalism” surveys, a sort of good-bad-ugly of all things rock writing-related. So I’m pleased to see that Jason is still doing his thing, with the 2021 edition of the survey hosted at Rock & Roll Globe. I interviewed Jason recently about this feature—19 years in the running—which will … Continue reading Best Music Journalism/2021 edition (Jason Gross/R&R Globe)
Frank, from his 2021 ballot: I joked that I was doing the Uproxx [critics’ poll] as a conceptual art piece, i.e., I knew my ballot wasn’t going to make an impact. But I was actually doing it to combat my alienation and to engage with some of my critic friends via email. Then when Chuck tipped me off to the P&J Rip-Off thing I jumped … Continue reading Frank Kogan’s 2021 ballot
…singles Deliberately set out to hear (stream) more new music in 2021 than I have since whenever it was I used to write about the stuff, and that was a good thing. And I previewed a great deal of it in as unfiltered a fashion as is still possible—with zero prior knowledge of song, artist, sometimes even genre. One unintended not so great consequence was … Continue reading My year in
The Boston Phoenix (1973-2013), once home to many great music critics, is now available online, full issues intact, and it includes a search engine. (Navigation, as with 99% of archival stuff you find on the web, is a little less than intuitive, but hey.) Continue reading Boston Phoenix archives
To kick off our year in this/that/and whatever posts, Howard Druckman posts his favourite songs of the past 12 months. (Pictured above: Snotty Nose Rez Kids.) It’s actually 14 songs, because for Mustafa and Donovan Woods, it was impossible to choose the best out of two songs. So for each of them, it’s two-songs-per instead of one. Needless to say, the pandemic figures heavily in … Continue reading Top 12 Songs of 2021 (Howard Druckman)
I discovered how many songs I love, and how hard it is to narrow it down to just 50. Looking through themed discs I had created over the years for a series of music-sharing meetups with a couple of friends, I came up with an initial list of about 250. Trimming to 50 seemed impossible at first. The first cut got me to around 100 … Continue reading Top 50 Favourite Songs: Paul Woods
My friend Isabel Cole explained to me that in horoscope-speak your “moon” is the secret Spotify playlist that you’d make to soundtrack your inner life. She also reminded me that astrology is fake, which is why it’s good—it’s like an improvisational prompt with arbitrary parameters to ensure it’s not just an act of confirmation bias. Something seems like it doesn’t fit, but then you make … Continue reading Top 50 Favourite Songs: David Cooper Moore
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