In the last decade, no organ of music criticism has wielded as much influence as Pitchfork. It is the only publication, online or print, that can have a decisive effect on a musician or band’s career.... [W]hatever attracts people to Pitchfork, it isn’t the writing. Even writers who admire the site’s reviews almost always feel obliged to describe the prose as “uneven,” and that’s charitable. Pitchfork has a very specific scoring system that grades albums on a scale from 0.0 to 10.0, and that accounts for some of the site’s appeal, but it can’t just be the scores.... How has Pitchfork succeeded where so many other websites and magazines have not? And why is that success depressing? A lengthy history and review of
Pitchfork [Media], from an inexpensive online alternative to a music zine, to "indie" music kingmaker, and thoughts on pop music (criticism).
[more inside]
posted by filthy light thief
on Jan 24, 2012 -
109 comments
Screaming Females are a 3-person self described "rock/rock/rock" band from New Jersey featuring Jarrett Dougherty on drums, King Mike Abbate on bass, and Marissa Paternoster on guitar and vocals. They're not incredibly famous and they're probably not on the cusp of a string of number 1 hits, but they put on a
mean show and they've got a
new album in a couple of months if rock/rock/rock should happen to be your thing.
[more inside]
posted by sandswipe
on Jan 17, 2012 -
33 comments
Swissted New York graphic designer
Mike Joyce takes vintage flyers from punk, hardcore and indie rock shows and redesigns them "into international typographic style posters. Each poster is sized to the standard swiss kiosk dimensions of 35.5 inches wide by 50 inches high and set in berthold akzidenz grotesk medium, all lowercase. Every single one of these shows actually happened."
posted by BitterOldPunk
on Jan 11, 2012 -
36 comments
It Nova Scotian Rich Aucoin's video for "It" directed by Noah Pink. SLYT worth clicking on. You may recognize a few scenes.
posted by Ironmouth
on Jan 7, 2012 -
16 comments
Amazon has recently declared that tomorrow is
Price Check day. If you go into a brick and mortar retail store with Amazon’s new
Price Check App on your smart phone, and scan a barcode with the location settings active, and then report back to Amazon on the price of that product, Amazon will deduct $5 from your online purchase of that product. Amazon claims it’s trying to keep prices low for consumers, but others attribute the move to
a less innocuous agenda.
[more inside]
posted by Toekneesan
on Dec 9, 2011 -
143 comments
A couple has an intimate conversation in a restaurant, unaware that their every word is being closely monitored. This is
Table 7, a short film from indie filmmaker
Marko Slavnic.
posted by jbickers
on Dec 1, 2011 -
37 comments
cactus (aka Jonatan Söderström) is a prolific independent videogame developer. His games are known for playing against genre expectations and their surreal storytelling qualities (as in David Lynch surreal). His latest effort (a collaboration with
his brother and
FUCKING WEREWOLF ASSO) is called
KEYBOARD DRUMSET FUCKING WEREWOLF. It's about an eskimo that that turns into a werewolf and the events that follow. Sound weird? It is. Available in pc and mac flavours.
posted by pancreas
on Nov 5, 2011 -
22 comments
Modest Mouse play a 25 minute set in September 2001 in front of Criminal Records in Atlanta. The songs they play are Paper Thin Walls, Third Planet, Trailer Trash, Lives, Diggin' Holes (later released as an Ugly Casanova track) and I Came as a Rat.
posted by Kattullus
on Aug 31, 2011 -
14 comments
Pompeya is a band that is hard to describe, especially if you go by their videos and sound. For example, if you started with
Power (Simple Symmetry & Lipelis Remix), you might think it's an act from the the late eighties, complete with break dancing and dated fashions. If you first came across
the Barbarella Chisinau Teaser, you might imagine that they're something from the early 1990s, or a new band goofing with vintage video. And then they drop
Power II, which could be some kids playing neo-disco akin to the US band
VHS or Beta (
wiki). But wait! Check out
Cheenese (NSFW moment of nudity 2:58 to 3:05), and you think they might be professional musicians with a sharp-looking video. In fact, Pompeya is a mix of various things:
they're four young Russian guys who play indie-disco. [more details after the break]
[more inside]
posted by filthy light thief
on Jul 17, 2011 -
22 comments
Overlooked '90s Indie Pop:
The Cat's Miaow, whose single sentence wiki describes them as... "an indie pop band formed in Melbourne, Australia, in 1992." And
Madison Electric, a band from Ann Arbor that played one show in a church basement before going their separate ways.
posted by puny human
on May 21, 2011 -
26 comments
Terraria is a recently announced game that is currently in closed alpha. It is similar in play style to the Internet favorite
Minecraft (
previously, and
previously-er, and
previously-er), except it operates in a 2D, sidescrolling world. Players harvest resources to craft items and structures to defend themselves against enemies. A teaser trailer is available
here, and a more extensive gameplay trailer is available
here. The developers are currently uploading "let's play" videos on to their youtube account:
part one here, and
part two here.
[more inside]
posted by codacorolla
on Apr 23, 2011 -
46 comments
Color Me Obsessed is a new documentary about legendary Minneapolis rock band
The Replacements. It features over 140 interviews with rockers, journalists and fans (including Colin Meloy, Craig Finn, Tommy Ramone and Robert Christgau) but not one note of the Mats music. Director Gorman Bechard has been documenting the making of the film on his
blog and screening it in
select cities.
posted by Lovecraft In Brooklyn
on Apr 16, 2011 -
63 comments
Covering Tohoku The Foreign Correspondent's Club of Japan (
FCCJ) has posted a special edition of its
No. 1 Shimbun covering the Tohoku Earthquake:
FCCJ members, many of them freelancers, were the first on the scene after the quake and have led coverage since. Weeks after the global media pack left, they're still here. There's articles by veteran Japan reporters such as
Charles Pomeroy who recently retired to Otsuchi after covering Japan for 50 years, to newer stringers such as
Gavin Blair who worked as a "fixer" for foreign prima-donna journos dashing in and out of the disaster zone. There is a photo by photographer
Rob Gilhooly who recently made
a heartbreaking trip into the exclusion zone near the plants. Although not included in No 1 Shimbun, freelancer
Yas Idei provides a Japanese perspective (in English) about the multiple disasters.
Idei's piece about Rokkashomura is pretty enlightening, frightening, and depressing.
posted by KokuRyu
on Apr 12, 2011 -
23 comments
The incredibly influential and loved music show
120 Minutes returns, with Matt Pinfield returning as host. The MTV2 premiere happens later this year, while the web version
120 Seconds debuts today.
[more inside]
posted by naju
on Mar 18, 2011 -
63 comments
Biome Terrain Mod is a modification for Minecraft that allows tweaking the world generation parameters for the regions in the game. The Minecraft Forums are running
a contest to find cool generation settings. Some of the results are quite striking....
[more inside]
posted by JHarris
on Dec 17, 2010 -
94 comments
It’s maybe a
little early yet for year’s end retrospectives, but who cares:
we’ve got 157 songs, 10.5 hours, 1.12 GB of “some of the best and most notable music from 2010... covering indie, pop, rock, punk, folk, rap, R&B, soul, dance, country, modern classical, ambient and electronic music, and in many cases, hard-to-classify genre hybrids.” —Curated by FluxBlog’s own Matthew Perpetua.
posted by kipmanley
on Dec 3, 2010 -
30 comments
Out of the blue, Sufjan Stevens, most famous for his epic indie symphony
Illinois (which can be streamed from this link), released an "EP" called
All Delighted People. It's 60 minutes long, you can play it all online for free, and the title track is a deliriously gorgeous 12-minute epic. He's also announced an upcoming new album, scheduled for release this October, called
The Age of Adz. You can stream its first single,
I Walked.
[more inside]
posted by Rory Marinich
on Aug 30, 2010 -
52 comments
