To describe I Hate New Music as it should be described - in a word, pointless; in another, execrable - could easily be spun as having missed the point. The book is tongue-in-cheek. It’s intended to ruffle feathers. It’s written by a lover of classic rock for other lovers of classic rock; those who would demur aren’t its target readership…

Full review here on Ink19.

I blogged my thoughts on why Crime and Punishment didn’t quite work as a novel.

My review of this ran on All About Jazz alongside Mark Murphy’s Once to Every Heart.

My review of this ran on All About Jazz alongside Marc Johnson’s Shades of Jade.

An almost wholesale return to the sound of Swell’s halcyon days in the mid-’90s. For fans of Swell who, like me, thought the band had slowly lost its way and become adrift on a sea of ProTools excess, South of the Rain and Snow will come as a refreshing return to form.

I found some of the essays to be a bit grasping (please, folks, Buffy is a guilty pleasure, not an academic pursuit) and fueled by a sense of unfocused outrage, but many of them were insightful, enlightening and raised serious challenges to the status quo. Worth reading for Andi Zeisler’s essays alone – she’s a brilliant writer with thoughtful contributions to many ongoing sociopolitical debates.

A good historical overview of second wave feminism—in fact, I feel more familiar with the three “waves” thanks to reading this. But at times Rosen can be a bit too forgiving of the problems that feminists faced within the movement itself (as opposed to the external sociopolitical oppression the movement was seeking to highlight and overturn), perhaps because she felt as though pointing out its flaws would undermine its appeal and achievements.

THE Mighty Walzer has been my first Howard Jacobson novel and won’t be my last. I so thoroughly enjoyed Walzer, in fact, that Jacobson’s more recent Kalooki Nights has already found its way onto my Amazon wishlist, and I hope to start making my way through the Vintage paperback reissues (but could the covers really be any more drab?) of his earlier novels.

In profiles and interviews Jacobson has often been compared to Philip Roth, and not unfairly. Both draw strongly on their religious roots and make the Jewish culture an integral part of their fiction; both use thinly disguised literary alter egos as their narrators; and both have hopelessly complicated relationships with the fairer sex. But Jacobson, while he calls to mind more Portnoy’s Complaint-era Roth rather than Plot Against America-era Roth, is a much funnier and lightheartedly self-deprecating writer than his American counterpart; and in comparing the similarities between their work, it begins to look as if their careers have gone in opposite directions. Jacobson started out with “serious” novels and then found his lively comic voice later, whereas Roth has moved the other way - to the point where he’s treading water in the same well-dredged pool of postwar American existence, particularly if Christopher Hitchens’ and a recent Philadelphia Inquirer review of his new Exit Ghost are anything to go by. I’d even go so far as to say that Jacobson’s observations - about himself, about religion, about most anything, really—tend to be sharper than Roth’s, packed into pithy, meticulously worded sentences that sizzle on the page.

To save myself from dancing far too close to a critical ledge, I’ll stop there. One Jacobson novel compared to half-recalled selections from Roth’s oeuvre isn’t enough to start weighing the two authors against one another with any fairness and accuracy. But for those who delighted in reading Portnoy’s Complaint, The Mighty Walzer ought to be next on your reading list, and with any luck, it’ll prompt you to start delving further into Jacobson’s back catalogue. He’s a writer who’s surely deserving of greater acclaim, even if it is just on the strength of Walzer alone.

My review of this graphic journalism work was posted here on Ink 19.

(Originally posted on Copper Press’ The Daily Copper.)

No man is an island, they say, but Jason Martin (who for all intents and purposes is Starflyer 59) has been following his own whims and impulses for the past thirteen years and ten albums - all on Tooth & Nail - regardless of the musical zeitgeist. For that reason, the band that started out with a thick shoegazer sound to suit its sci-fi name has drifted far to either side of its original course, yet always a hair’s breadth outside the scope of whatever tracking system the music industry uses to select its darlings.

Even with Martin’s fickle and versatile musical nature in mind, My Island is not the album many current Starflyer 59 fans would have easily seen coming. It’s clearly in the same lineage as 2005’s Talking Voice vs. Singing Voice, but it’s a darker, more bass-driven and straight-ahead rock ‘n’ roll effort than earlier dream pop albums like Leave Here a Stranger (2001), with occasional new wave keyboards replacing the lavish synths of Everybody Makes Mistakes (1999) and string arrangements of Talking Voice. You might even call My Island a melding of the two dominant phases of the band’s existence, uniting the softer pop of recent years with the weightier guitar sound of Gold (1995), Americana (1997), and the would-be Americana follow-up, I Am the Portuguese Blues (2004). As always, though, Martin’s strong, simple melodies are the backbone of the album, with everything else merely draped over it ornamentally.

“The Frontman” and “Division” are two different sides of this new-ish direction for Martin, one driving and almost sinister, the other slow and menacing. What they both have in common is that sinister/menacing element, which runs through the first half of the My Island. Only with the gritty guitar and metronomic drum thwack of “Mic the Mic” does the mood break, and it no longer feels as tough Martin is making ominous pronouncements from behind steepled fingers in a smoke-filled room. But even though these foremost tracks set a shadowy tone, a first impression that tends to obscure more reservedly upbeat songs like “It’s Alright Blondie” and the title track, they’re some the some of the most memorable on the disc. Of these “Nice Guy” is the instant standout, a song that walks the fine line between bass-heavy rock song and dark dance track, a bit like “Good Sons” from Talking Voice.

For all its strengths, My Island nevertheless has an overly clean, clinical production that has affected a number of self-produced Starflyer 59 releases since Gene Eugene’s death in 2000. To say that it detracts in any significant way from yet another excellent Starflyer 59 album would be reckless exaggeration. This is the sort of quality most bands would like to hit on just one disc in their entire history; Jason Martin has achieved it with nearly everything he’s put out under the Starflyer 59 name, no matter which personal whim he happens to be indulging at the moment.