MAKING LEMONADE

Intro

As you can probably tell, most of this website is devoted to a band that no longer exists. On April 13th, 2024, Goalie Fight will play its last show as a unit at a metal forge in rural New Jersey. Beers will be spilled and tears will be shed. The central organizing force in my life will cease to be.

I will still have this domain name, though.

With the massive layoffs at Pitchfork in January and at Bandcamp last October, a lot of people have been wringing their hands about the state of music journalism and music criticism. The same pattern has been happening in publishing, news, games, film, television, basically all other creative industries. Venture capitalists purchase creative organizations, flay them, skin them, tan their hides, and sew them into a leather coat. This is not an attempt to fix that.

What Will This Be

I have a lot of music. I love going to my local record stores and picking up a bunch of used CDs for $2 or $3 a pop. I don’t ever look up the artists beforehand, I just pick up ones that I think look neat. It’s the only kind of gambling that I like (with a much better rate of return than roulette or slots). But because I’ve been doing that for a few years, my collection has overrun its shelves. It’s currently disorganized and uncatalogued, so as I sort through my collection I’m going to have to listen to everything again.

I’m going to use this site as a place to put my thoughts about the music I own. I’m not going to talk about new music unless I buy it. One weakness of the current model of album reviews is that the reviewer can’t spend too much time with the record to unlock all of its secrets if they want their review to be read while hype is at its highest. This way, I’ll be able write about records I’ve already taken my time with, in some cases for years and years.

If you want to pitch me, just leave a copy of your CD in a record store in North Jersey and hope I find it.

New reviews will come whenever I have free time and something to say.

Double Binary

The newspaper critics had their letter grades and their star ratings. The blogs had their decimalized scores. What I’ve been kicking around recently is a lot less granular, but a bit more complex: a Double Binary system.

On the right hand, is this a good record?

Are the players skilled? Are the lyrics evocative? Does the mix support the song? Are the edits and tuning subtle and non-intrusive? Do the cover art or liner notes enhance the music? Are conventions either established, well reinforced, or played with in interesting ways? Does this record make me feel the emotions that the artist wants me to feel while listening to their music?

On the left hand, did I like this record?

I like a lot of “bad music”, and I also like a lot of “failed music”. There’s a great deal of beauty in an ambition that reaches beyond the skills of the ambitious.

I hope that one of my reviews helps you think about the records you like in a different way, or inspires you to check out something new.