On being yellow

Smiley Face

At long last, here’s the new web site. As you have probably noticed, it’s very yellow, which I absolutely abhor, but there’s a good reason behind that. More on that in a minute.

After entirely too much procrastination, I finally got around to relaunching using WordPress. I’ve been working with WordPress for years, so I didn’t have any excuse other than the time it took to convert the old flat HTML files (yikes!) to WordPress posts. (I never said it was a good reason.)

Since I have a tendency to make everything I do far more difficult than it needs to be, I’ve also gone back and added as many relevant pictures as I could find. There were a couple of edits here and there, but for the most part the text content is the same — that is, except for the article excerpts I added all over the place. The end result is that even with the old items, there’s now far more content to read and look at, and now that everything has comment functionality, you can even interact.

I get a much better admin interface on my end, which should translate into updates that are more timely and regular. There’s also an RSS feed for those of you who might want to check up on me more regularly (all three of you). All of this should have happened in about 2005.

One of the other reasons it took me so long — after I had made up my mind to switch, I mean — is that I built some things along the way. I wrote this WordPress theme myself, and it has some cool extra functionality built in. I’ve disabled it for now, but I should be rolling it out eventually. (When I’m good and bloody well ready, so stop asking.)

That stuff is also the reason it’s yellow. Sorry, was that anticlimactic?

My Brightest Diamond not so bright

My Brightest Diamond

I’ve thoroughly enjoyed the last few albums from My Brightest Diamond, but much to my surprise, last month’s show at (Le) Poisson Rouge left me lukewarm. (To be fair, I had spent the whole day at Santacon, which is pretty hard to top.)

With the strings already accounted for, who exactly is going to pick up the slack when you nix the distorted guitars or the drums? Because it sure isn’t the voice leading. This is not to say that we need faithful reproductions—an unexpected harmonic departure in the middle of “Inside A Boy” is angular, jarring, and by far most interesting interjection of the set, and when the strings swell up underneath and take over at the end, it’s absolutely sublime. I’m all for artistic growth and boldly traveling into new musical territory, but unfortunately these adaptations are a little too haphazard—or maybe just understaffed—and Worden’s magic has been lost in translation. Maybe it’s just that her strength is as a recording artist, with all the trappings and rhinestones and cheese sauces, and not as a barebones songwriter. More

You don’t have to take my word for it, though: the show was filmed in its entirety by a fan and has been posted online.

Furia stats for Pazz and Jop

Pazz and Jop

Glenn McDonald has once again done a remarkable statistical analysis of this year’s Village Voice Pazz and Jop poll. I have stats now, just like a baseball card!

But I’m a Manhattan omnivore!

Kieran Hebden and Steve Reid

I just learned that Brooklyn Vegan used a chunk of the Hebden/Reid review I wrote for PopMatters to preview the duo’s show at (Le) Poisson Rouge last month.

TV On The Radio in the newspaper over the internet

Bubblyfish

At PopMatters, a review of Blipfest 2008, the largest chiptune show of the year.

I’ve fiddled with the programming enough to know that this stuff doesn’t come easily. There’s a certain sameness to a lot of it on the surface—all lo-fi electronic music in 4/4 with house-derived “drum” sequences which rely on filtered white noise—but after taking in a couple of sets, the differences between the artists become more readily apparent. Bucket-headed spaz-dancer Sulumi’s restless melodies were a fantastic highlight, skipping across the room like so many chips of shale across a Mario 2-2 swimming level, but geek-chic Asian chick Bubblyfish had the most depth, with an enthralling opener which expertly transitioned from jovial Katamari plinks to ominous Metroid gloom over the course of ten minutes. More
Pazz and Jop 2008 Cover

In the Village Voice, Pazz and Jop 2008, the long-running annual music roundup in which I was invited to be a small blip myself.