Pitchfork

Feature - October 17, 2008

Last month I started this column by talking about the first time I heard Fleet Foxes, how a listen to "Sun Giant" at the start of this year was so immediately gripping, and how the thing that most jumped out at me was the quality of the band's v ...

Feature - September 5, 2008

I used to be able to remember the first time I heard something I really liked. Like that afternoon when a friend put on a 12" with Oval's "Runtime Engine", Marcus Popp's remix of the Microstoria catalog, and in an instant I realized that music as comput ...

Feature - August 1, 2008

When I talked to Animal Collective a few hours before their set at this year's Pitchfork Music Festival, I knew that I wanted to ask them about the Grateful Dead. Ever since A.C. had been one of the bands to name-check the Dead in an issue of Arthur ...

Feature - June 6, 2008

I. Idol I watched "American Idol" for the first time this spring. My understanding is that this was the worst season in the show's history by far, and yet I found myself engaged, almost to the point of obsession. It was easy for me to ignor ...

Feature - May 9, 2008

I spent a couple of hours driving around and running errands the other day, and I stumbled upon some sort of "80s Block" on the radio. It can be interesting to revisit songs from my youth at times like this, confronting them alone, rand ...

Feature - April 11, 2008

At some point in the 1980s I became mildly obsessed with a book called Beowulf to Beatles: Approaches to Poetry . It was used as a textbook in my older brother's high school English class and he must have kept his copy, because I rem ...

Feature - March 7, 2008

... something new. The guitars were lo-fi-- harsh, scratchy, frequency range sheared off to a bloody nub-- but the bass was pure money, rich ...

Feature - February 8, 2008

This only happened about 10 years ago, but it may as well have been the Stone Age: I was hanging out in a friend's apartment and he had a few friends staying with him who were passing through town. We were drinking beer. One of them ...

Feature - January 11, 2008

... but lately I've been getting the itch to do so with more frequency. And I have to admit that, in part, it's because I want to understand ...

Feature - November 16, 2007

In 1999, Kevin Shields sat for an interview with the British magazine The Wire . It was an Invisible Jukebox feature, wherein they play a musician a series of tracks without saying what they're hearing, and he or she has to guess what it is and ...

Feature - October 19, 2007

In his review of Bruce Springsteen's new album Magic , Pitchfork's Stephen M. Deusner said that the Boss has supplanted Brian Wilson as the indie ideal. He was generalizing, sure-- the devotion is found only in certain branches of indie rock-- b ...

Feature - September 21, 2007

"We set controls for the heart of the sun," goes what may be my favorite song from this year, "One of the ways that we show our age." The song is "All My Friends", by LCD Soundsystem, found on their album The Sound of Silver . On the All My Fr ...

Feature - August 24, 2007

In 1986, the infamously terrible erotic psychodrama 9½ Weeks , starring Kim Basinger and Mickey Rourke, debuted in theaters. I saw it then with my girlfriend at the time, who was also my first-ever girlfriend, which was quite an experienc ...

Feature - July 13, 2007

You forget sometimes how much songs are connected with the things surrounding you every day: This is what I hear when I'm walking to the bus, and while I'm waiting I'm usually looking at that tree across the street; every time I've heard that ...

Feature - June 8, 2007

In 1968 jazz pianist Bill Evans released an album called Alone . It's one in a long line of solo records by pianists with a similar title (Monk's Alone in San Francisco , Red Garland's Red Alone ), but for Evans, the word had a little ...

Feature - May 4, 2007

I used to occasionally DJ at experimental music events in Richmond, Virginia. I'm friendly with a collective of musicians and organizers working under the name 804Noise , and sometimes I'd spin for 30 minutes or an hour to open shows ...

Feature - March 29, 2007

A few weeks ago I saw Jandek in my town of Richmond, Virginia. He played the Firehouse Theatre, a little black box venue housed in an historic firehouse that can hold a little more than 100 people. It was the 20th show for the legendari ...

Feature - March 2, 2007

History tells me the doo-wop hit "I Only Have Eyes for You" by the Flamingos was released in 1959, but I don't believe it. Not that I could tell you when it's from, exactly. It's a very slippery song and its place in the chronology ...

Feature - January 26, 2007

In July of this year Da Capo will publish Marooned: The Next Generation of Desert Island Discs , the sequel to the 1970s critic's classic Stranded . The earlier volume was edited by Greil Marcus and posed the eternal music obsessi ...

Feature - December 1, 2006

Writers who open up about how a piece of music works for them might talk about feelings, memories, a tug at the heartstrings engendered by a clever turn of phrase, a song that reminds them of when they were young. But sometimes tracks d ...

Feature - October 27, 2006

Twenty years ago the term "attention span" came up only once in a while. It wasn't generally seen as something that grew and shrank with the administration of psychotropic drugs. The way we experienced the world, the amount of stimulati ...

Feature - September 29, 2006

"An anchor lets you see the river move." That's a line from Silver Jews' "How to Rent a Room" and it's one of my favorite lyrics in all of music. There's a 5,000-word essay inside that short phrase. It suggests, among other things, that ...

Feature - August 25, 2006

I learned about "real" music in Pinball Pete's, a dingy arcade in a basement in East Lansing, Michigan. Pete's was somehow able to get a feed from WRIF, the album-oriented rock station from Detroit, despite the fact that it was 90 miles aw ...

Feature - July 7, 2006

I've never been hypnotized but I'm probably suggestible. Something happens to me when I'm spoken to in a particular tone of voice. It's difficult to explain, and when I've mentioned it to people through the years they give me a funny look. But ...

Feature - June 1, 2006

There's a good trailer for the Beastie Boys concert film Awesome: I Fucking Shot That! floating around. The voiceover is by one of the profession's most recognizable-- it even starts with his specialty, "In a world where..." The Beastie Boys ...

Feature - May 5, 2006

I. The Problem In listening, thinking, and writing about music over the past eight years, I've never been able to figure out precisely what role repetition plays in the sounds I enjoy. Occasionally, I'm tempted to dismiss ...

Feature - April 7, 2006

There is something fascinating about that point where singing turns into screaming. Maybe it's because I myself am generally quiet. What it takes to get me worked up is something like a car coming at me at 40 mph, an incident which releases my inne ...

Feature - March 3, 2006

... in relation to the loudspeakers," and then, later, "a high frequency sound is used that the listener becomes aware of only upon its ...

Feature - February 3, 2006

A couple of months ago ABC aired a Barbara Walters special called "Heaven: Where Is It? How Do We Get There?" I caught the first hour or so (no, I don't have cable, thanks for asking) and the lens on Barbara was frosted as ever as she interviewed ...

Feature - January 6, 2006

I started listening to and buying music seriously about a year before CDs first hit the market. By the time they arrived my interest in records was in full swing and discussions about sound quality were all over the music press. My brother was into hi ...

Feature - November 11, 2005

As fall turned to winter in 1989 the Cold War was ending and I didn't even know it. I knew about the Berlin Wall coming down in November, sure, but I don't remember it registering that the Soviet Union as we knew it was rapidly disappearing. Despi ...

Feature - October 14, 2005

For about a year I worked in social services as an instructor for developmentally disabled adults. It was one of those things that just sort of happened; you're new in town and you run into a guy who works at the agency and he says they're hiring. ...

Feature - September 9, 2005

For 75 years the guitar has craved electricity. Tom Scholz and Brian May believed that the instrument on juice could do anything. "No Synthesizers Used. No Computers Used." said the inside sleeve of Don't Look Back , while the 70s Queen alb ...

Feature - August 5, 2005

In 1996, the Flaming Lips came to Slim's in San Francisco on the Clouds Taste Metallic tour. It was I think the loudest show I've been to, but what stays with me most is the opening. The stage was dark as the piano refrain from "The Abandoned ...

Feature - July 8, 2005

Thurston Moore's coffee table book Mix Tape: The Art of Cassette Culture has sent music geeks born before 1980 into their closets to dig out The Shoebox. You remember The Shoebox, right? It's the one you stuck behind the car seat the last couple t ...

Feature - June 10, 2005

I've heard that MP3 players have shrunk attention spans and now standard-length pop songs now seem to go on too long. When you're carrying thousands of records in your backpack and can instantly access any song in your collection, waiting patientl ...

Feature - May 6, 2005

When we first catch the performance it's already underway, been going on for who knows how long. Something seems wrong. The lens is too close to the subject and half the screen is black; all we can see is texture-- a dark jaw with some stubble and ...

Feature - April 8, 2005

You knew reading about the Minnesota school murders that the shooter's taste in music would come up (he liked metal, hated rap), although this kid's family life was so plainly horrifying the pop culture bogeyman only made a brief appearance. The p ...

Feature - March 11, 2005

In recorded music, the term "album" comes from the pre-LP collection of 78s, in which several slabs of shellac would be collected together in a bound book. I'm holding such an object in my hands right now, a strange pink and green thing called J ...

Feature - February 11, 2005

Summer 2004, Glacier Park, Montana: Nine miles with backpack through the Belly River Valley, we find our campsite next to Elizabeth Lake and pitch our tents. After a meal and a few sips of wine, we're exhausted and we fall asleep before it gets da ...

Feature - June 5, 2003

So I come home from work to find I've received a parcel in the mail, which is always a happy event. Better yet, this particular parcel is what I consider to be the best possible size: 12 ¼" x 12 ¼" x 2", which means that it more than lik ...

Feature - February 26, 2003

In 1999 I caved in and subscribed to The Wire . I'd been buying issues on the newsstand regularly for a while and decided to save a few bucks. The cover price at that point was $6.50, and an annual subscription was $60. Not cheap, but a savings non ...

Feature - January 10, 2003

I received few 4.0 grades in my years at college, so the ones I did earn are memorable. My first "A" came in a physics class I took to fulfill some sort of natural science requirement. It was Physics 201, and the title of the course was clever: "The S ...

Feature - December 5, 2002

It's all cold down along the beach. The wind is whipping down the boardwalk. Yes, E-streeters, it's Christmastime, the most wonderful, magical time of the year, and I'm sure everyone reading this has visions of exquisitely packaged import-only rarities da ...

Feature - October 16, 2002

Eno. Ambient. Rarely has a genre, indeed an entire musical idea , been so completely owned by a single individual. Merzbow and noise, maybe. You have to wonder if, even fifty years from now, every drifting, quiet instrumental record will still ...

Feature - August 18, 2002

1977. My best friend was a kid named Justin who lived down the street. Justin's mom worked as a nurse, and his dad was a drummer in a bar band. This wasn't something my friend's dad did in his spare time. His one and only job, as far as I ever kn ...

Feature - July 8, 2002

I'm getting married in three months. By that time, my relationship with Julie will have lasted eight years, just a touch longer than the average marriage. There are a million things running through my head, thoughts on life, love, death, permanence, l ...

Feature - May 30, 2002

The Wilco song "Poor Places" provides the title for the band's most recent and much-hyped record: when the track swells with noise, somewhere in the din we hear a woman's voice coldly intoning "yankee, hotel, foxtrot." As is now widely known, the ...

Feature - April 30, 2002

In 1999, my girlfriend Julie and I decided to settle back East after spending five years in Seattle and San Francisco. We flew out to North Carolina together and signed a lease on a house-- though, she moved a few months before I did because I'd h ...

Feature - April 8, 2002

... represented tuning into the cosmic vibration on a tighter frequency. At some point, space transformed from an intense and mind-blowing ...