The All-New STYLUS.

No ghosts?

only the ghost of future present

"taking the sounds of club culture and R&B and reconfiguring them as ghosts drowning into a black hole."

surely it's VAMPIRES that are drowning OUT OF a black hole? maybe my stereo channels are reversed?

that's Lupe Fiasco

yep, it's awesome. Best lines: Paul Wall bit, and lighting matches bit

xposts

No, it's like in the Daft Punk "Digital Love" review. You are emerging from slumber in a dream-land where the music is inside-out, a negative image of the dance track you're itching for it to become, and you have to recall your dream and will it into life and watch it explode into color.

xxpost

Stewart Voegtlin left doomed forever (the old southern lord board) in a huff because people liked mastodon there. People still laugh about him over there and on the rolling metal thread here too after is godawful village voice piece.

Nick, I don't know if this is a bug but on the singles list, section 40-21 there isn't a link to the top 20, only to go back to 60-41. I had to guess and type the url directly.

The Stylus piece has so many instances of offTM, unnecessary bitterness as to be insane.

He did give Nilsson an extra 11 years of life though. I wonder if he made any more records in that time?

...same with albums list.

What happened to the Hold Steady's Stories from the City, Stories from the Sea album?? You guys had second thoughts? I thought the votes were tallied and finalized...

90% of these "reviews" are just awful. but i guess that doesn't make it any different than music criticism in general. john's are ok.

I hope you didn't feel like you had to add that at the end just because you know me.

hah, i only scanned the mike powell essay so far, but in general i like his approach and he has pretty similar taste to me in a lot of stuff so. i mean there's never a sense that he's some jaded guy sick of the hype machine, he just seems happier to ignore the crtical climate's silliness and just hunt for great sounds

Stewart Voegtlin seems like a deeply fucked up person imo

what on earth?

he's a murderer imo

collaborates w/bin laden iirc

Riiiiiiiiiiiiiight.

zapruder film enhancement captures Stewart Voegtlin passing envelope full of cash to the umbrella man. more champagne!

Voegtlin piece pretty good imo.

his metal article in the voice was *terrible*, jeanne fury's response piece was otm

^^^this

I wonder, if 'Stylus' continues after this brief revival - what would they call it? Because I doubt Todd Burns would let them use Stylus. Will it Stytwo? Stylu? Laser?

Pencil

Haha, what the fuck is Voegtlin's problem?

dude it's not his fault if you wrote about the worst music of 2008 -_-

Mostly thanks to dope-smoking, Patagonia-wearing Republicans, Mastodon’s still recording records and making money from ‘em.

I just think this particular line needed to be called out again. Dude is fucking horrible.

its okay if u 4get that all those words refer to bands bourrousian even

man, i love powell's essay. i'm not sure why i find him so agreeable and readable when 99% of music criticism pisses me off.

anyway yeah SV sounds a little o_O

agreeable is a good word, dude is obv not an ilxor tbh

maybe that's part of it, he never comes off like a dick, even when he doesn't like stuff

but also he has this really quietly personal way of writing abt stuff in general

this is by no means the first time ive repped for this here, but this is i think my favourite piece of writing ever

http://www.stylusmagazine.com/articles/weekly_article/basic-research-lovely-music-ltd-and-the-universe-in-general.htm

its the only one i've saved as a doc on my laptop in case stylus goes down eventually anyway

voegtler on baroness ws hand-wringing of the worst kind and jeanne fury set him straight; haven't read his stylus thing but will do now

stick around to the finish and read about how he pwns harry connick jr and gets in a whitney houston zing (on the wrong end of the decade)

Mostly thanks to dope-smoking, Patagonia-wearing Republicans, Mastodon’s still recording records and making money from ‘em.

haha this arsehole is still butthurt about Mastodon all those years. This guy is the worst "writer" in the world. Anyone who employs him must be desperate.

*after

ok "Ante Up" in top 20 all is forgiven

― The Reverend, Friday, January 8, 2010 3:34 AM (5 hours ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

xp after reading the blurb, I take that back

― The Reverend, Friday, January 8, 2010 3:38 AM (5 hours ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

pretty much every dan weiss blurb in this list was painful

he mentions mastodon 5 times, lol

I wish the SL archives could be accessed.

What was his issue with Mastodon? From how tight he is holding onto this grudge I can only imagine they banged his girlfriend and his grandma.

hipsters like them

never bothered to listen to mastadon rly but <3 it when critics have chips on their shoulders

He thinks hipsters like them so gets all troo metal elitist about it.
In "troo metal" cretin circles it's very hip to hate Mastodon, Isis, Sunno))), Pelican, Wittr,Boris,Torche or indeed any band that "outsiders" like.

But it's funny that this guy has been peddling this shit on message boards since at least leviathan came out yet some people are stupid enough to pay him for it.

mastodon do suck tho

RONG

Maybe the sentence seems a little excessive and awkwardly constructed in hindsight, but I'm still a little confused as to why people are harping on this one sentence I wrote. I know I’m coming across like a sock (and furthermore, I know I don’t contribute enough to the discussion; I don't really have the time), but all I was trying to do was convey what I think Burial does sonically, which is that he often clips R&B vocals and makes them sound spectral. That ghostliness doesn’t characterize the emotional effect enough—-to me it sounds more like drowning, but into some sort of vast emptiness. The visualization of the sound itself is what I was trying to express. Because in the end I’m trying to explain why the music produces a certain kind of emotional response, which I take it from some of the reactions here I failed to do.

Burial’s music tends to have a wearied, bottomed-out sound that happens to affect me in a certain way. My comment about R&B was only meant to indicate that the music just doesn’t hit that synapse quite the way Burial’s does. But that wasn’t meant to be a negative interpretation of R&B or its pervasiveness; if anything, I was trying to express how R&B’s ubiquity is a testament to the consistently high quality of the music. With the amount of space we were given, however (more than usual, yes, but still not enough in some ways), I was trying to pack in as much information as possible.

The people that write for Stylus, like many of the people on this board (and many people on this board wrote there), feel very strongly about the music they love. It’s understandable to me why people may go a little over-the-top when trying to express why music is so meaningful to them. Understandably, those tendencies occasionally need to be put in check—-but overall, I really didn’t think any of it was any worse than many other decade-end features.

(Someone upthread said that they feel like a lot of music writers can be really condescending--some of the time I agree. I wasn't trying to be smug or condescending in the blurb or in this response; ribbing and insults can be helpful in tamping someone's weaker habits in writing.)

hey, why stop with mastodon when there are these choice lines!

A band named Isis releases a record called, SGN>05, which is binary code for, “Years from now you’ll be loved by kids who own all the complete seasons of Scrubs on DVD and consider phone sex an ‘edgy activity.’”

Britney Spears marries the first guy she gave a handjob, viz. Jason Allen Alexander, tuggin’ 2004 on off. Marriage annulled 48 hours later.

Bjork, whom I’d like to give a handjob, puts out a record of beat-boxing

Mariah Carey wins a bunch of Grammys in ’06 but doesn’t mention the Coca-Cola flavored dildo in any of her ramblin’ man acceptance speeches.

Chan Marshall isn’t so Joy Division anymore. Instead she’s playing with Dave Grohl and Eddie Vedder and making songs that only serve to anger her Republican fan-base.

Stephen Malkmus continues to look “too UVA” and make records no one but class-conscious enthusiasts could make out to.