Hello

It's a more than a little amusing to think about how many people continue to write to me saying that they check my old website every day hoping for new content, despite a lengthy and crude goodbye message residing on the front page since May. As much as punkrocks ungracefully faded away throughout the last two years, I feel like I may have gotten the last laugh. In the four months since we shut down, I've done a fair amount of writing for Alternative Press, which is fulfilling from the standpoint that they pay me, but one can only attain so much levity from a one-page puff piece on Ernie Ball guitar strings.

I avoided starting a blog for a long time due to a lack of focus; no one wants another livejournal that just happens to be hosted on blogspot, and I feel no obligation to start another website dedicated specifically to music... or more accurately, a website dedicated to a very small and mainly-popular-on-the-internet niche. I still listen to plenty of music, but have found it exhausting to not only keep abreast of what's new, but figure out some way to run a zine that differentiates itself from the other 300 that copied our site to begin with (just kidding, sort of). If you want music news, read coolfer, stereogum, pitchfork, pastepunk, blabbermouth, mammoth press, the org or the brand new idolator... or one of those other ones.

This is the last post with so many sentences having the subject of yours truly. In the future, I'll try to occasionally just write about things that bother me. That generally doesn't extend past unfortunate spelling mistakes these days, but we'll see what happens.

If I may conclude with just a moment of opinion... Everyone is talking about the new Saosin record, including some people whose taste I greatly respect. I think it's an overproduced mess with no good songs. It'll probably go triple platinum. As for music that I enjoy - the new Decemberists record is rather good. They toned down the pretentiousness a little (which could be good or bad depending on how much you care what other people think about your musical tastes) to write a record that is genuinely entertaining from beginning to end.