JackTarAshore

What do they conceivably have to do with Shoegaze, other than perhaps being a vague influence on certain acts?

with the names of Newsom and Radiohead. I suppose if it gets a few indie kids to go and investigate a book about music that pre-dated the 1960s and didn't feature amplified guitars and drum kits, it can't be a bad thing.

Why are you reviewing this now if its release date is almost two months away?

Still, good to hear about it. Nadler's one of the better American pseudo-folk performers currently about, although she has tended to hide her voice under a blanket of reverb.

Bring back Robespierre and send them to the guillotine!

of crooning public schoolboys supposedly cite Bonnie 'Prince' Billy as an influence. Talk about different leagues - Oldham sings and writes with restraint and subtlety, whereas this Fink character is just a cloying pop puppy dog.

I find The Owl Service an annoying prospect. Totally divorced from contemporary folk revivalist acts (who usually go under their own names and play it straight), they seem to be aiming for the 'weird'/'wyrd' market by offering reheated pastiches of 60s material with kitchen-sink accompaniments.

Certain American groups seem to carry off this style more successfully (see: Espers), maybe because they are not making such direct claim to a heritage.

Joe has a pretty reasonable point about the majority of contemporary popular music: metronome-like beats/percussion are usually unsubtly high in the mix.

the beard count was probably over the legal limit.

While I'm sure Mike's general intention is to make things accessible and avoid the hipsterism infecting certain other sites, I think the sentence I cited above reads like a back-handed provocation aimed at DiS's younger indie-kid readership.

I mean, it's not a crime not to have heard of The Melvins.

I'd guess somewhere north of 5.9 billion people have never heard a Melvins record.

But if you want to go further with the Pitchfork-isms, try 'has anyone out there really never heard a [artist who only releases in editions of 1000 or less] record?'

Or - and this would have been my choice, actually - 'As I remember remarking to a colleague in the mid-90s, everything The Melvins have done since Lysol is a mere footnote to the earlier work'.