How to Write About Music: Excerpts from the 33 1/3 Series, Magazines, Books and Blogs with Advice from Industry-leading Writers by Marc Woodworth (Editor), Ally Jane Grossan (Editor) Now let me stop you before you way anything. I know what you’re thinking: a music website reviewing a book about how to write about music? Preposterous, right? What are you as the reader supposed to take from a book like this? Well, just listen for a second… As someone who spends...
Cowboy Bebop The Complete Series Welcome to our series of anime shows which we will be covering for the next few weeks. Whatever your opinion of the genre, the fact remains that anime (or Japanimation in general) is a fantastic medium for storytelling. In many ways the genre has been ahead of western television because it seems like anime series have always understood that you can tell a more complex story over the course of many episodes. On the...
A deeper look at the grooves pressed into the California Heart LP by Great Apes. It is often said that the mastering process required to present music on vinyl (instead of CD or mp3) is part of what really changes the overall experience of the format (above and beyond the obvious physical contact made between stylus and vinyl), but that still doesn’t exactly explain the difference a listener will discover between a digital copy of Great Apes’ newest album, California...
RASL by Jeff Smith Jeff Smith has made a permanent fan out of me against all odds. I’ve only read his book Bone, but what an epic tale that was. And Bone is far from being a perfect story, but that’s just the kind of impact the book can have on people. Smith creates worlds full of interesting and complex characters and the man knows how to move the plot along. Also, I read Bone in the original black-and-white format...
A deeper look at the grooves pressed into the First Ditch Effort LP by NOFX. While the last few years may not have looked like the busiest for NOFX on the surface (yes, as every fan knows, four years lapsed between Self-Entitled and First Ditch Effort – the longest gap between new full-length albums in the band’s 33-year history together to date), to say that the band’s members sat fallow would be completely untrue. In fact, it could be...
The Washington Connection and Third World Fascism: The Political Economy of Human Rights: Volume I by Noam Chomsky and Edward S. Herman For being such a controversial writer, Chomsky’s writings have been surprisingly easy to obtain. After all, this isn’t soviet Russia we’re living in. That’s why one of the most surprising aspects of the Washington Connection is the very beginning where the authors detail exactly how this book was suppressed by its parent company due to its “unpatriotic” content....
A deeper look at the grooves pressed into the In The Garden LP by Holy Sons. Even at first sight, those who are familiar with Holy Sons – the solo pet project of Grails drummer Emil Amos – will know that In The Garden is an important release for the artist. Why? Well, they’ll know it must be of particular importance; In The Garden is Holy Sons’ fourth album for Partisan, but it is the thirteenth to bear the project’s...
Mike Watt Ball-Hog or Tugboat? The juggernaut that is Mike Watt hasn’t always been the unstoppable force we know him as now. The death of his best friend and Minutemen comrade D. Boon made him a broken man, pondering what was next for him. On the documentary We Jam Econo, Watt chokes up when he thinks about D. Boon’s death. “That was a tough day for Watt,” he says. Mike Watt has certainly come a long way since his debut...
Breaking Bad The Final Season Hello readers, and welcome to the first ever edition of TV Party Tonight! Here at Ground Control, we’re known mostly for our impeccable music coverage, but as of late, we’ve ventured into impeccable literary coverage and now impeccable movie and TV coverage. We’re turning into the AV club, I suppose, except with a less-manageable website. Anyway, it’s not certain what route we will be taking with this column (whether we will be focusing more...
Bracket The Last Page It seems like Bracket’s career will always be as unappreciated and bittersweet as those characters they sing about in their songs. Or maybe they’ve been singing about themselves all along. Whatever the case, there’s a certain sad sweetness to their songs that’s undeniable. That and a tendency to contain some of the greatest melodies and harmonies ever recorded in punk rock. One would think that’s a recipe for success, but instead has turned out to be...