Sprout is underrated as an essential GBV component. Moonflower Plastic is such a great record. (Also, nice avatar! I love Jim O'Rourke. Bad Timing is one of my favorite albums of the 90s.)

Yeah, totally. There was a ton of excitement about GBV that grew just by word of mouth in my high school, and that's something that would never happen in such an organic way today. Of course, the flip side is that now I can instantly discover music from all around the world without having to first read about it in…

Yeah, I love that shift in style at the end of the record - the album has a weird but really appealing feel, like a normal album with a killer EP tacked on the end.

I saw them at a show in Kentucky where the venue actually shut down after 4 encores and Pollard refused to leave the stage - they turned the lights on and shut the power off and he sat on the edge of the stage with an acoustic guitar shouting "I'M NOT GONNA STOP PLAYING SONGS!" It was awesome.

That's definitely true, but you can only get away with that economy if you're releasing a nonstop torrent of exceptional songs - a lesser band would probably want to make a song as amazing as, say, Game of Pricks or Your Name is Wild last for 6 minutes, because your average songwriter would know that they'd never…

I'd be pretty stoked to listen to it for the first time - it's an incredible album, probably my favorite of theirs. It has a ridiculous number of all-time greats on it. There was some controversy at the time because it's a bit more hi-fi than prior records, but fuck that: Pollard is firing on all cylinders here, just…

Agreed. And as a bonus, the Breeders cover of that song is killer.

I was a teenager in Dayton in the mid-90s, and it made GBV all the more exciting that they came from seemingly out of nowhere in a boring-ass midwestern town. They were… well, let's just say an erratic live band at the time (I went to a show in Dayton in '94 during which Pollard got so drunk he was incapable of…

Bomb in the Beehive. Mag Earwhig! is a massively underrated record. Plus that incarnation of the band absolutely ripped live. So good. I'd also put Game of Pricks up there as among the very best of GBV's songs.

Yep, it's the Dunning–Kruger effect in full force

Agreed. I don't trust Zack Snyder to deal with 9/11, even subtextually. I think big popcorn movies can do that sort of thing well (I rewatched Spielberg's War of the Worlds recently, which I thought did an excellent job of directly evoking 9/11 in a worthwhile way) but not Snyder, whose idea of "serious" extends no…

… except they didn't. That decision didn't come from anyone at The Dissolve, but rather from higher-ups at Pitchfork Media. (Rabin himself obliquely referred to this in a post somewhere, don't remember where.)

That website is awesome! I am probably going to lose a lot of time browsing there.

For many well-known songs, you can Google search or find the song on wikipedia to see what samples were used (see eg here). There are lots of hip-hop heads who live to ferret out samples. This isn't to take away from this guy's skills - putting together a beat takes a lot more than just knowing what samples were used…

This is cool - dude is clearly talented and these videos are fun to watch if you're into music production, although I was amused by how he glossed over the most difficult parts ("yeah, uh, I chopped up the loops and added EQ and transient shaper and pitched it up 2.33 steps" [!])

I don't see it as that different from people who, say, obsess over guitar tone. And people can get an lot of mileage out of the same sample - see eg the astonishing amount of music made with the amen break.

The first Red House Painters album came out in 1992. I'm unconvinced that music from the early 90s is in "get off my lawn" territory.

Agreed - an amazing movie and truly astonishing. If this were fiction it would be hard to believe.

Afflicted is really good - it's a shame that it didn't get more of an audience when it came out. It's a whole lot better than the "found-footage" label would imply, with genuinely likable characters and a fun plot that's essentially a more overtly horrific twist on Chronicle.

I felt similarly when I first saw it - you're definitely right that it's all surface and no depth - but I liked it much more on a second viewing, since I was able to recalibrate my expectations. Plus that soundtrack, so fucking good… you could throw that soundtrack over Grown Ups 2 and make it a halfway decent movie.