Best Review I've Read in Weeks

Something Awful reviews The Black Kids. Honestly, this is the best review I've read in weeks. I especially like the comment about disco down toward the bottom.

Best Onion Article Ever: "Pitchfork Gives Music 6.8: Review Calls Ancient Art Form 'Tired'"

Of course music journalism has its own unique, um, style, which is pretty much the same game of intellectual one-up-manship played by people like, oh, say, Science Fiction fans, or a room full of second-year comparative literature grad students. In fact, put those two groups together and I guarantee that you will find at least one person who imagines themself as the next Lester Bangs (though we all know how that turned out).

Pitchfork Media is the current platform for all those aspiring Mallermes of the musical milieu. But I'll let The Onion take it from here. My favorite bit is the last paragraph:

Still, most analysts agreed that the impact of Pitchfork's scathing review of music will be dampened by the 2.4 rating it received from Pitchfork staff writer Dave Maher just moments after the initial critique was published online. Maher termed Schreiber's assessment of music "overwrought, masturbatory posturing intended to make insecure hipsters feel as if they're part of some imagined elite beau monde."

MIT Study: How to Describe Timbre

One of the biggest challenges I face when writing about music is how to describe it. Recently the boyfriend and I were having a discussion about what it meant when music, particularly electronic music, was described as "dark." Well, it turns out that some folks at MIT are interested in this problem of describing timbre as well, and have put together a really neat survey to see find out how people translate what they hear into descriptive terms. Check it out and see how you would describe the sounds you hear.