Stuzza

I love the Men. Great gig at the Garage too. Infinitely better than the awful shacklewell arms one last year.

the review is written by Mark beaumont so can be dismissed immediately as rubbish.

but seeing them play it with Death In Vegas supporting was one of my all time best gigs. Good work.

and thanks for replying so comprehensively!! Yeah, so good spot that my Songkick reference wasn't internally consistent... I suppose with that, that's personlisation that I control (as in me adding my tracked artists myself - again for technophobe reasons I wouldn't use Pandora, etc etc to do it) and the right hand side bar "of you might also like" stuff would only ever trigger me to add a band I know already but have missed, it wouldn't make me think I must start tracking a band I don't know so I could see them. (Although I suppose at a push it might prompt me check them out some other way)

Anyways, I could go on and on so I'll leave it there for now...

Cheers

This is because

(a) I am old and am less understanding of technology than I used to be

(b) I am not on FB or Twitter or any other social networking sites for reasons of point (a), job and stubborness and if the site becomes too reliant on these without being standalone I will suffer. And maybe others will too.

(c) (most importantly) the point of DiS is to discover stuff I don't know about and might be outside my immediate sphere of knowledge. From DiS I have discovered loads of bands who I truly love, inc Parts and Labor, Iliketrains, Twilight Sad, Okkervil River, TTT, etc etc. I don't want to tell you I like Mogwai and get directed to EITS and TWDY content and all that because I know about them already.

I think the site is absolutely fantastic as it is and is my one-stop music resource (apart from Songkick). Esp considering the number of people who work on it. happy to help on testing etc.

...I really do remember when Play came out and it was genuinely different for him and in general. I remember the NME review saying it couldn't understand waht audience would be interested in it. Just because he practically re-wrote it for 18 (which does however have 2 great tracks in We Are All Made of Stars and Extreme Ways) and it became totally ubiqitious, doesn't mean at the time it came out it wasn't new and fresh and great.

And Everything is Wrong was great.

So there.

on what basis was that then? Quite apart from the fact that it was on a bonus disc or something, so presumably wasn't at the forefront of their minds.

which makes it totally a million times more brilliant.

I was there the year before in 1991, in the pit, and that was incredible. Without any rose tinted spectacles one of the best of my many Reading experiences (and let's not forget Mudhoney in the same main stage slot the year before that).

To be honest my abiding memory of the headline show was being quite far back and a kid with glasses asking if he could sit on my shoulders to see. I duly obliged and did one of my only good-gig turns. Can't really much of the set and agreed it didn't feel super special at the time but hindsight etc. I'll still get the DVD though.

he's totally right in the last answer to say that it is the same sound but with different instrumentation. Well perhaps the rest of the song is kinda different but when the chorus comes in it's so NOT a marked departure and so clearly is Editors, I am struggling to see slightly why everyone's making such a fuss.

is the greatest remix album of all time. And maybe one of the best records full stop.

only for it to be such a massive disappointment as Interpol. I have tried really hard to not let it, but Our Love... has negatively coloured my perception of the other two and some great Interpol gigs. So I probably won't put myself through this - IMAGINE if I didn't like this either? lordy what would there be for a boy to do?

It’s just not right to say people need to be told what to like – is it? That might be true for whomever us “true music fans” perceive as the general record-buying public but these aren’t the people Stuart is getting at is it?

In the “good old days” (for context I'm 36 so in the "old" camp) you’d be told stuff by NME and MM etc but also pick up stuff from all sorts of other places; checking out albums with good-looking covers in your chosen section of your local record shop, flyers at gigs, buying stuff on spec because it was on sale in your local library (like in my case coincidentally Labraford; I didn’t like it), checking out other people's t shirts etc etc.

Now, even without any other sources, the fact that there are loads more digital equivalents of the old paper music press “telling” us what to like must of itself mean there’s less chance of herd mentality - or at least a lot more, smaller herds. On top of that, however, we also have loads more tangential sources of discovery; blogs, message boards, recommendations on emusic, even the genius bloody bar on itunes. Whereas before you might be limited to the recommendations of the music press, which itself was limited to its copy space, now you can easily find out about and sample bands you are “told” to like, but - if we do like them – loads of other bands who are similar, in a way not previously possible. Like, just say, by reading the various DiS specials on shoegaze, math rock etc etc…

So I don’t get where he’s going on this one. For what it’s worth, I thought the state of the music industry in the internet age was better summed here on Saturday here http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2009/jul/11/cornershop-interview

they're a poor man's White Lies who in turn are a poor man's Editors who in turn are a poor man's Interpol, who in turn are a poor man's...