The Other Music newsletter

Once upon a time—in fact five years ago, when I lived in New York—I used to read through the Other Music newsletter with reverence, clicking all the links, listening to all the sound clips. I discovered some interesting records because of it: Max Tundra's first release, Sack and Blumm. Then, the way these things do, something changed. Was it something in me, or in the shop itself? OM's graphics got snazzier, but there were competition giveaways and promo stuff to wade through before you got to the reviews. The blurbs the staff wrote began to verge on the self-parodic; not only pretentious, but full of the overblown assumptions of the snobbiest kind of consumer journalism.

( Continue reading... )