The All-New STYLUS.

I also didn't realize how young [Todd Burns] the chief is !

I also have writer's block. I'm having trouble getting a moment to knock my Richard X thoughts into any sort of coherant form, but with any luck it should be more or less sorted by this afternoon.

The very thought of Dave Q writing for Stylus fills me with joy.

Cozen, I would love that (plus anythign else you want to do).

Tom, it's not back-handed at all (I don't know what you look like!).

Dave Q's had one article published with us, ahs another in the works (ie; waiting for me to edit and format it), and a review coming soon.

Dom, write me more stuff, you're brilliant.

Swygart, same for you.

Matt DC, I await your Richard X review with baited breath and sweaty palms.

DR C, I'm ready any time you are.

Credit for the new look is mainly due to Kenan, Todd, and the man from Moveable Type whom we love with all our hearts (and who's been sat up till all hours with Todd reloading stuff into new matrices and tables and stuff for the last week).

It's looking fucking splendid, and will be even better when I email Todd a picture of me looking windswept on Dartmoor.

Sorry Nick, something WILL come your way soon. I have had v.little time.

Burns/Nick: Tell Gavin to write as much as possible!

it rhymed. cut me a break.

I am using IE 5 and the album reviews on the left do not have enough space between artist, title, etc. I will IM Todd about when I get back from work.

Nice job, Todd.

matthew weiner posts here as naiveteenidol.

It was partly me, yes, though I'm not going to take too much credit since I didn't do all that I said I would. I picked the colors, designed the logo and header and picked the fonts, laid out the individual pages, and wrote some of the code. I had nothing to do with the front page, but whoever did did an excellent job, apart from some stylesheet problems that are easily fixed (i.e. -- the text spacing and padding is all screwy).

It does look much better. Yay Todd!

I didn't realize Pitchfork had the patent on HTML.

the new design is amazing and the writing is just getting better and better-- every feature is slam dunk it seems. it makes me wish i hadn't lost the small shred of writing spark i used to have. i wish i could contribute more than i have been this summer.

todd (along with nick and keenan, natch) is the hardest working man on the internet, and it's finally paying off big time. bravo.

Well, all sorts of websites and publications cover all sorts of music and get lots of hits/readers, it just happens that the ones that are more critic-driven and wordcount-heavy are indie or indie-leaning generalist types. And I have a strong hunch that whatever desire exists out there to read critical analysis of non-indie music, no matter how small, is probably pretty underserved.

As I've said before I suspect no music is more regularly and casually critically maligned than "women's music" of the non-indie/non-R&B variety.

yeah, i think you said this w/r/t female singer-songwriters before, which rings v true - the reason i never really read much music crit when growing up is because it was mostly very snarky/dismissive of the artists i listened to as a teenager (tori amos, fiona apple, ani difranco et al). oddly enough apple became a lot more accepted (circa extraordinary machine) once she started hanging out w/indie-auteur faves like paul thomas anderson, developed that whole me-vs-the-record-label narrative which wasn't even true etc etc.

tori amos's weirdo electronic albums at the end of the 90s are still two of the most critically underappreciated ones i own - been revisiting them a lot this week and the scale, ambition and execution are still extraordinary, yet pretty much no one cares about them any more.

As I've said before I suspect no music is more regularly and casually critically maligned than "women's music" of the non-indie/non-R&B

I don't read enough crit these days to say for sure, but my impression is that this isn't true of women's country music...assuming that by "women's music" you mean music made by women. If you're talking about music made for women then I don't know what this means so I can't say.

Hey, I really miss this website - it was kind of like "Pitchfork, but good"

Is there any hint that they might come back up?
Or is there another website out there like it?

Nope. The archives remain, and lots of us have found homes elsewhere. Thanks for the kind words.

so are there other sites like it?
I dunno, I liked the features like "Playing God", "On Second Look", etc. - kinda showed you guys thinking about music the same way obsessives like myself do.

http://www.thesinglesjukebox.com/

Playing God was fucking awesome, and I definitely have a number of playlists that adopted some of those tracklists.

Thequietus is the best thing since Stylus.

^^^mad trolling

TQ has good interviews but their taste is so boring that I really can't read anything else.

I only contributed to Stylus three times, but Todd Burns was one of the best editors I ever dealt with--one of the few who didn't, in the parlance of Sweet Smell of Success, expect you to jump through burning hoops like a trained poodle.

wait - is like every ILMer a former writer for this website?

Nearly.

I don't contribute to this site very much, but I only ended up here because Stylus folded. I loved that site, and posted to it a lot. Some of the most intelligent, and impassioned, engagements with reviews/writing I have found. Of course, a whole lot of horseshit, grandstanding, and just plain mean-spiritedness/petty trolling as well, but OVERALL a very admirable effort to let the masses in on the experience. This site is probably the closest to it, from a feel perspective (and all the alumni of course).

frogbs: there was a lot of stylus/freakytrigger/ilx crossover; a lot of the same people now right for singles jukebox

No trolling here! I dig Thequietus interviews, op eds and occasional reviews. Frankly I should use it more to check out what they're touting as they clearly come from the same post-punk roots as I do.

i wasn't a "writer" per se... but, when Stylus closed, i was the first regular commenter they thanked in one of their goodbye pieces ^____^

The Quietus is awesome btw

Uggh, I got mentioned in that Stylus goodbye as well. Both OK with that and totally embarrassed at the same time. Some real unfortunate posts by me in some of those pieces, but those were rougher times. Still sorry about some of them though.

likewise for me, i'm sure. but then it's not like i don't make unfortunate posts on ilx nowadays, so who cares

man, I didn't you two were commenters.

"zarklephaser" - i've said this before!

same as my Last.fm username the last 6 years or however long

http://www.last.fm/user/zarklephaser

Well, it pains me to admit it, but we’ve had plenty of favorite commenters on the site. Zarklephaser, Grand Banks, Florenz6, meatbreak, raskolnikov, et al.: we salute you!

WTF I WAS CALLED OUT AS A FAVORITE STYLUS COMMENTER??!?!!!

(totally unexpected, thanks to whomever suggested that!)

― stephen, Monday, October 29, 2007 10:49 AM (3 years ago)

Hahaha, that was all Todd's doing, singling you and the others out. I don't think anything has had as much sustained, impassioned, profane and repeated discussion in our virtual office over the years as the comments boxes. God bless our readers. And hello, Zarklephaser.

― Scik Mouthy, Monday, October 29, 2007 10:51 AM (3 years ago)

Ah, Alfred, one of my regretable moments was on a piece of yours. Sorry about that, I actually liked almost everything you wrote, but for some reason your Boredoms piece, and the subsequent comments, caught me on the wrong day.

This news is heartbreaking. :(

― three handclaps, Friday, October 26, 2007 9:50 PM

nuts that it's almost been four years since it closed . . .

i kind of wish Stylus had polls.

― Wrinklepaws

hahaha

Uggh, I got mentioned in that Stylus goodbye as well. Both OK with that and totally embarrassed at the same time.

Hey at least you got mentioned!

writing for this magazine was the second half of my adolescence and the reason i've gotten any work anywhere so yeah <3. the ideal writers' mag: polyvocal, always up for stuff, and unsustainable.

Yeah, I am happy I got mentioned, I am imagining that I got noticed mostly for being a good poster, but sure wish I could take back some of my comments. Great site though, thoroughly miss it.

ha, i just found a stylus 'stycast' podcast on an old drive - an interview that todd did with me for stylus in 2005!

The Stycasts were great. There was a very amusing one about 60s/70s stars trying to transition to the 80s.

lmao @ inconceivably atrocious, bully is a stone cold classic imo

Stylus Magazine said the song was "undoubtley" Fatboy Slim's "finest moment to date", noting "the ten-minute house anthem “Song for Shelter”, whose redemptive power was so awesome that it almost saved Larry Clark’s inconceivably atrocious film Bully simply by gracing the last scene."[1]

what's up with the Stylus website lately? their album reviews don't seem to be accessible anymore (and even the Archives link yields a 404 error) although their features and movie reviews are still online...

awww so glad you care

The site's slowly crumbling. I've been transferring reviews to my blog.

I've done the same thing with my reviews.

i still occasionally start typing in stylusmagazine into the search bar, from muscle memory, whenever i'm wandering the internet looking for something new

cuz we still rule