Reclassification

Jun 4

Hymie’s Records recently moved down the street. It sounds like they’re happy to be rid of their old landlord, but I still miss that weird, aquamarine building that they used to occupy. And now, much to my dismay, that building has been painted over. If you look closely, there’s still some greenish-blue paint left around the trim of the door. Hymie’s now occupies the space right next to the Blue Moon Cafe, which puts it even closer to my home. Their new building, however, is not of an interesting hue like the old Hymie’s.

I feel bad for the umpire who made the bad call at first base in Wednesday night’s Detroit victory. Jim Joyce* made a mistake. Moreover, he has shown a huge amount of contrition, and immediately admitted that he made huge mistake. For the love of God, do not introduce instant replay into the game of baseball because of this one mistake…it’s a slow enough game as it is.

I love to hate the jargon populating music criticim these days. For example, how many reviews do I have to read that describe something as “lo-fi,” only to find out they mean that the guitarist uses a tube amp and the record was captured on tape and then transferred to a digital file? How are we judging fidelity, here? How much tape hiss does it take to be cool these days? On a similar note, several records reviewed these days seem to be best described as having “angular guitars.” Alternately, the guitars may be “reverb-drenched.” Hell, even the Entertainment Weekly blog is jumping on that bandwagon, referring to Mark Linkous’ music as “lo-fi psych-folk.” Honestly, that description tells me absolutely nothing about the way this music sounds; these reviews often fail to contextualize a given “sound” because every band has a unique compound noun microgenre of their own. And because this stuff drives me nuts, I really enjoyed this Glo-Fi chart in the NYT. Mostly, I enjoyed that it elicited the following comment from one reader: “not sure i agree that teengirl fantasy is glo-fi. pretty dreamy dub to me.” Dream-dub indie-trance electro-core. With reverb-drenched guitars, naturally.

*Can we start referring to this guy as JAMES JOYCE? That would be awesome to me. James Joyce ruins perfect game for Detroit Tigers pitcher.