Patrick Jenkinson

It seemed like such a routine day when I first heard the screaming. I woke up just like any other morning, showered, brushed my teeth, got in my car, and stopped for coffee and a bagel on the way to the lab. I walked over to my station at the far end of the 50ft x 100ft room where all the audio people were set up. I was the first one in that day, so the normally buzzing bank of computers along the wall had that almost startling quiet morning people so love. It is an amazing thing to think about: that if I had shown up fifteen minutes later my life would still be normal. Oh well, dwelling on past failures never accomplished anything. That's not why I'm doing this. I walked down to my station and booted up my computer. That's when I remembered my problem from the day before. You see, I work identifying and classifying audio samples. The thing that makes my job unique, and why I was paid far more than your average Mechanical Turk drone, is that I had to do my analysis entirely...

The first thing one notices on their initial play-through of Arcade Fire's "Everything Now" is the disco. This effect is very deliberate. While throughout the album one finds traces and elements, sometimes even structural supports, that would have been at home on any of Prelude's releases, the first two tracks, "Everything Now" and "Signs of Life" bathe in the square multicolored lights. Rather than allowing the "20 minute line for a men's room with open urinals*" vibe to exist solely in the form of 70s string counterpoints to hook melodies of the 21 st century, the kind of thing a Pitchfork writer can think himself clever for being able to point out, the band choose to follow the noble path of El Kabong before them and smash you on the head with the influence. Their has always been a certain similarity with the way many modern acts relate to disco and the way the medieval mind viewed the heritage of antiquity (why do you think Hercu...

Do I suggest a remedy? I do. I suggest several remedies. I suggest that we throw out all critics who use vague and general terms. Not merely those who use vague terms because they are too ignorant to have a meaning; but the critics who use vague terms to conceal their meaning, and all critics who use terms so vaguely that the reader can think he agrees with them or assents to their statements when he doesn't. The first credential we should demand of a critic is his ideograph of the good; of what he considers valid writing, and indeed of all his general terms. Then we know where he is. He cannot simply stay in London writing of French pictures that his readers have not seen. He must begin by stating that such and such particular works seem to him 'good', 'best', 'indifferent', 'valid, 'non-valid'. -Ezra Pound, "How to Read". Scope At the moment, my music writing is limited to the kin of rock and roll, i.e. the genres that derived and sp...