Django Django’s Clicky Clacky Jingle Jangle

Dave Maclean, Django Django’s drummer/producer, has one of the better curated Twitter accounts out there. He often posts YouTube links to albums he’s listening to that day, and they’re usually ones that most people would only find digging around in the “used” crates at record stores. Just in the last few weeks, he’s linked his followers […]

The Cult of Coxon

Like many legendary guitarists, Blur’s Graham Coxon is mainly filed under “quiet, brooding genius” (see also: George Harrison, John Squire, Bernard Butler). Of course, for everyone who sees him as an unqualified guitar prodigy, right up there with Jonny Greenwood, there are those who point to Damon Albarn as the true brains behind Blur. Coxon’s […]

A Long Review of Sufjan Stevens’ Show; the Thesis of Which Being, Ditch The Backing Band!

“Thank you. So, we watched Bring It On 2 on the bus last week,” Sufjan Stevens says, speaking for the first time eleven songs deep into the setlist. It’s an attempt to jerk the audience back to reality after being enmeshed in Stevens’ emotional turmoil for 40 minutes. The transition is an awkward one, and […]

My First Negative Review

Speedy Ortiz is the definition of an indie-rock band. When you think of the most stereotypical indie-rock band—frontman with wiry but melodic guitar lines, another guitar that does the flashy stuff, basic bass lines, drums that break and come in at all the right times, and just enough feedback to be edgy and not power-pop […]

Yr Typical Oasis Thinkpiece

An Oasis reunion might be in the works, and I’m excited. Full fucking disclaimer: I hated Oasis until two months ago. This is the perfect example of the drawbacks to approaching pop music through historical context: I heard “Wonderwall” a few times, fell in love with Blur, read voraciously about the Britpop feud, and then […]

Young Fathers’ White Men Are Black Men Too: Not subtle, but not simple

The 2014 winners of the Barclaycard Mercury Prize, Young Fathers, sent British music journalists into a tailspin – labelmate Kate Tempest had been the favorite, Young Fathers were stony-faced and unwilling to talk, and in addition, nobody knew what to call their music. Is it hip hop? the journalists asked. There’s definitely elements of it. […]

Blurred Into The Present Day

Blur is back (with a new single, a new album, and a live date in London) and everyone is happy. There aren’t even any negative comments on the NME article about their return, which is a miraculous display of unity in itself. This is unusual for what essentially amounts to a reunion: there’s usually some […]

Pete Doherty: A Study in Three Parts

Pete Doherty was never a poet of this century. It’s far easier to imagine him as a dashing Lord Byron-type, swaggering across Europe, than it is to fit him, fedora intact, in the present day. His lyrics were never of the modern mold: he uses intense symbolism but grounds his abstractness in precise adjectives, using […]

Why Jamie T’s Carry On the Grudge Is My Favorite Album of 2014

The second single pulled from Jamie T’s new album, Carry on the Grudge, was the rollicking and relentlessly upbeat “Zombie.” It’s almost unbearably catchy – four minutes of glossy, low-key punk – but it’s not representative of the rest of the album, an album that took five years and hundreds of drafts of songs to come […]

Still, I’d rather be famous than righteous or holy, any day.

Hi, my name’s Miriam. I’m a (very) amateur music journalist, UChicago student, vinyl/stereo geek, and also many other things that aren’t especially relevant to the purpose of this blog (which is music writing). I wrote some album reviews for my high school paper, got hooked on writing about bands that were generally of no interest […]