About

I also have a fiction/poetry blog at http://boxcars.wordpress.com

I started this blog because most music review sites I find seem to suffer from the same problems: a false sense of objectivity, a focus on rating rather than experiencing and sharing, and a narrow audience. Music is incredibly subjective to both the individual and the point in time, a property which I think is ignored by the idea of a numerical rating or the review that tries to dictate what every listener will feel. Music is not simply “good” or “bad,” and a review that exists solely to justify that judgement loses its relevance as soon as you disagree with that, and tends to discourage listeners from even trying to find something to like about it.

I also wanted to write a personal blog. This is sort of a way to write one with some semblance of structure. That also means I can go off on personal tangents whenever I want while under the guise of writing about music.

I’m not under the impression that anyone other than my friends and acquaintances will read this, but I love music and I love to share it, and I hope that writing about it will be a good way to do that. Plus, I need an excuse to actually write and not just think about writing.

As far as my tastes are concerned (which will, of course, dictate what music I write about), I try not to tie myself to any one genre, I have trouble listing a top 3 let alone one. I hate when people just enumerate genres to show how “eclectic” their taste is, so I’m not going to do that either. I like a wide variety of music, but my taste isn’t particularly eclectic, at least to me. It’s just that the things I like about music aren’t particularly related to those elements that delineate genres. So, I would say, I tend towards music that feels like a genuine, passionate expression of the artist and away from music that sounds sterile or mechanical. I love atmosphere and texture, so I like wall-of-sound, heavy distortion, noisiness, drone, and minimalism (silence can be a powerful atmosphere). I love strong lyricism, in the literary sense but also in the strictly aesthetic sense (for example, good flow in rap or hardcore music).

These aren’t hard and fast rules, by any means. If something moves me emotionally, or if I find it catchy, I’m not going to pretend I don’t like it just because it goes against these criteria. Likewise, if it fits these criteria but does nothing for me, I won’t pretend I like it. They’re descriptive trends, not prescriptive rules, and they’re necessarily incomplete. I can’t even definitively say whether or not I’ll like one song a month from now, much less an entire category of music.