I’ve never been a Sirius Satellite Radio subscriber, but I think I’m going to take the leap.  I visited my parents in grand Cincinnati this weekend for the holidays and my mother and I also took the winding four hour drive through Tennessee, as they have a vacation cabin just outside of Knoxville.  Along the [...]

You could probably start a blog that exclusively posted Jay-Z mash-ups and get fifteen thousand hits a day.  Jay-Z and Weezer on Monday.  Jay-Z and Pavement on Tuesday.  Jay-Z and The Verve on Wednesday.  And so on.  We’ve posted at least four Jay-Z remixes ourselves this year.  Number five is a doozy, however.  This genius [...]

Confluence.  Concordance.  Synchronicity.  Happenstance.  A broad feeling that the universe has a plan, that everything (to quote the great poet Lauryn Hill) is everything.  You know how I roll: in general I think all of that stuff is junk, a remnant of our human predeliction to ascribe consequence to subsequence.  I’m of the opinion that [...]

(Editor’s note:  I know that it is Wednesday.  For all intents and purposes, however, it is the BEST SATURDAY OF THE YEAR.  Thanksgiving Eve is, essentially, the greatest Eve that we have.  Nobody works tomorrow.  Everyone you know is home.  Nobody has to do anything until noon at the earliest on Thursday.  New Year’s Eve [...]

No disrespect to the month of December, but I’m getting super excited for January. You, me, and the creepy dude down the street are in for an ass-load of solid indie rock releases the first month of 2010, and Citay’s forthcoming Dream Get Together is the latest addition to my “albums to look forward to [...]

Publicist one-sheets are a devilish beast. On one hand, I think using them is something slightly akin to cheating. On the other hand, there are often contextual factors they identify which do – and really should – affect the manner in which a critic listens to and thinks about a record. And then there are [...]

I have a really good feeling about the upcoming Boy Genius album, Staggering. Even though it doesn’t come out until early 2010, the record is already getting its second nod on the Citizen Dick pages. (Check out what we said about “Old New England,” the other release from Staggering to garner attention from us, here.) [...]

Today’s Radio Dick will digress into semi-rant this weekend, not particularly because the tracklist I’ve got below is bad, but more because I’m knee deep in New Moon nonsense.  Considering the soundtrack issue is relevant and thought-provoking, I wanted to follow up on my already disdainful, yet mildly successful take on my initial fears and [...]

(Editor’s note: Two straight weeks of entropic wandering on Lazy Saturday, principally because of the following:  I’m tired.  I’m stressed out.  I’m busy.  I’ve got a grant burning, a paper cooking, IEP progress reports to write, hogs to feed, a harem to tend to, capital gains taxes to calculate, and so forth.  I don’t have [...]

God damn you Vampire Weekend.  Why do you make it so hard for me to defend my positive feelings towards your material?  Why do you constantly feel the need to remind me that I didn’t go to Princeton (or Cornell or Dartmouth or Bryn Mawr)?  Why do you have to rub your madras shirts and [...]

My buddy Vin and I arrived at the show just in time to see Whiskey Daredevils, a local band with a lot of buzz. They started off their set by saying “Thanks for coming out on Wednesday night, we know you could be at home watching Modern Family.” That’s true, it’s a good show, which [...]

Let me be clear – I love me some covers. But what I really love are covers that are better than the original.
Such is the case, in my marginally humble opinion, with Coconut and the Duke’s recently released take on Vampire Weekend’s “Walcott.” The duo, which usually perform a delightful blend of original lazy-folk, have [...]

What exactly does it mean to say a particular musician is indie? Any reasonably comprehensive definition of that word is going to be necessarily complex, but if you let me get parsimonious on your asses for a second, I’ll say the indie tag employs a combination of (a) financial integrity and (b) a songcrafting/recording/producing style [...]

Before I dive into my impressions on Tuesday’s killer Medeski, Martin & Wood show, I thought it might be appropriate to talk about the spirit embodied by the band.  It goes without saying that the show was amazing. (They’re one of the four or five tightest live acts in the world, irrespective of genre; you [...]

We aren’t even three dozen deep into this singles club series and already we’ve found our first repeat performers. Kora Records’ Stricken City, a London-based art/indie dance pop outfit, follow up their mid-September appearance in the series with another tune, “Small Things.” The second single to be released off the band’s just dropped debut album, [...]

The Mess Hall’s new album, For The Birds was sent to me a bit ago, and since I’ve been a huge fan of their work for several years, I was really stoked to finally get my hands on it. I first heard about them when they were opening for Kings of Leon and The Strokes. Since [...]

The first three tracks of Parade provide the perfect introduction to Afternoon Naps, a rust belt pop band that has been bringing sunshine pop to their gloomy post-industrial climes since 2006. “Plum City Fight Song,” the band’s homage to their hometown, begins the album with a healthy dose of guitarist Tom Dechristofaro’s Moz-lite vocals, while [...]

Rolling into shows in full pre-game mode has its benefits, particularly when artists exceed lofty expectations and melt faces.  Full disclosure, I’m not a big live review blogger, and toss the blue-ribbon to my colleagues Brian, Justin, and James in this arena.  I’m much to erratic cognitively during live performances and my mind can just [...]

I’ve been doing this kind of cultural criticism writing on and off now for more years that I care to count. Since my junior year in high school, about half my life ago, rarely has a period of more than several months or a year gone by between times when I was writing something in [...]

Does video art sap the life right out of musical lyricism, stifling imagination? I begin today’s Radio Dick with my simplistic and probably naive assertion that one ought to still read words and not dive too heavily into visual culture.  My thoughts have been weighing pretty heavily on this idea lately; my 9th grade class [...]