5/5/17: After reducing my 'Unrated' category from 1,500 to 959 albums in my collection still to hear, I have been distracted from a volley of metal vinyl reissues, I am pretty much caught up with the ratings of my music.

4/14/17: If one has any kind of inkling of a CD/digital collection, this time of existence has to be dizzying in its offerings. For one, there are thousands of truly quality basement-price discs just floating around online to be had like a virgin at prom night. Jazz and classical albums, especially, frequently of the finest conductor's reputes often lie around unlistened and unloved for pennies. This is a grand time to update digital files. For another, those big box sets are now affordable and almost any album one could desire can be had via discogs or amazon on a new 180g vinyl pressing. Tax time means the paying of bills for those of us resolutely planted in the middle-class bracket, but for a small smatter of these random discs and fresh Iron Maiden/Rush/Pink Floyd LP's. Like a handful of honey outside the beehive, I await a volley of small packages arriving post haste. These feelings are sweet, as are occasions like polishing off one's wishlist--It's a 0, save Kendrick!--and shifting to spend more time listening and hanging out with one's daughter.

I always knew I would delve deep and hard into my digital/CD library and finish off all the catalog albums I missed in every genre over the years, and these last excursions into early/modern classical music, ska, and grunge feel very fulfilling and final, but as Renton says, "Let's face it. There's final hits and final hits." Spoken like a true junkie.

4/1/17 I just like anything that's thoughtful, original, expressive of voice--FUCK! I will take anyone's voice, so long as they have one of their own. It all comes down to voice, no matter the medium, just have one, then say something about US and I'm so fucking down with any of you, just, you know, don't come around here with that recidivist bullshit or I've seen it before and I will regard this offal with derision and contempt. The way I see it--everybody gets into heaven, which coincidentally happens to be best represented on this earth in my fucking digital music file collecion, so long as they can toss in one great song or more. That is all it takes for me to canonize you, for all my mischief. Just make something good--a play, a tune, a speech, a poem, I just love it when we are not fucking killing each other or straining away at the contempt behind neighborly stares/social malaising away our tenuous but real mansions of brotherly love and mutual acceptance. Any who find 3 minutes of joy in this world are pardoned, none the rest will ever find but contempt outside these glances that make us eternal. It is fun to wax philosophical about the thoughts behind art and things, when one is drunk and there is spring vacation to pad the absence of work with ennui and frayed dissolution in all their human glories. OK, I'll stop drinking now....

11/23/16 I sold off a large chunk of my CD's--still keeping most till death--at Amoeba in LA. It's pure ecstasy getting lost for a handful of hours in the world's biggest record store and a day I will not soon forget.

My wife just hooked me up with an OOP MFSL Megadeth-Countdown to Extinction LP for our anniversary. I also just dug up a slew of DG Beethoven box sets for $5. June may just keep doing that to me, if it please--may you feel the same this summer \m/ 6/20/16

Emptiness lends deference to perception: 4/20/16.

2/12/16: Been screening some old Mobile-Fidelity remastered LP's lately, having gained interest from the superlative pressings done by the newest iteration of their label on the Miles Davis Classic Quintet platters and...I've been impressed, despite my low-brow general take on such audiophile re-over-issues traditionally. I will say that Jethro Tull's "Aqualung", Solti conducting Holst's "Planets" and Yes' "Close to the Edge" just regale in close listenings, wielding mixes that sound so transparent, so vibrantly full of nothing but the actual instruments themselves, that I just gave away my old pressings. Still, I will defer the title of 'Most Improved Recording' to my Mo-Fi Miles Davis "Someday My Prince Will Come" whose high-hat isolated in the right speaker makes sweet manna-trickle with the walking bass inna left and Miles' trumpet over them both in glorious stereo. Ahhh, sweets to the sweet!

1/17/16: Music is the greatest love, innit? I just watched the N.W.A. film with my wife and just get stuck thinking of those juicy moments with the posse working on tracks in the studio. I may never have the sense of tonal balance that it takes to make records, but I respect those who can so do all the more for it, just like Salieri in "Amadeus". All the politics, all the cultural mistrust, all the horrors that industry unleash upon the planet--it all fades into positivity and brother-love during the creative process. What wise beauty there is to unlock in the world when caught up in the rhythm and what bullshit there is apart from it in life! Aside from art and travel, epicurean concerns populate the only real reasons for living through these moronic days. I'm amazed the suicide rate is so low when looking out the windows, honestly. There's just not much worth living for...but for riffs and rhymes, that is. For me, that's enough, but my sense of progress feels flatly stifled, if I'm being truthful. I'd hoped to raise my child in a more tolerant and less emotional world than I am, being a son of capitalism and democracy. As Springsteen says in "The River":
Now those memories come back to haunt me/
haunt me like a curse/
Is a dream alive if it don't come true/
Or is it something worse..."

8/13/15: My daughter will turn four this week and that is a sweet age. Being '4' was playing Star Wars for a year straight for me--hope she likes it as much. She's listening to the "Nightmare Before Xmas" soundtrack right now, cuddled away in the next room with a My Little Pony blanket, already a music lover with definite preferences in both children's music and metal; I love watching her grow into music. Now if she'd just start liking Star Wars...
Speaking of child-level bliss, I just completed my wall of Zeppelin super deluxe box sets. Sometimes I just pet them and make sibilant noises of uncontrollably excreted joy. Oh yes!

4/7/15: It's always a pleasure to speak of music; talking of anything else, however, requires cash remission. Seriously, how many dull-ass convos do you endure every day just to get back to your girl or buddy and ask about that new Kendrick or Leviathan? As I get older, I want less work/traffic/O.P.S. (Other-People's-Shit) and more enjoying of vinyl spins, more chats about artists, more reading of poetry, more daughter-swinging in backyard, more grilling fish, more sex, more coffee, more riding bike--but less, less, less of the horseshit that populates my eyelids with the desperate need of an ADD-addled puppy. See, life is wonderful, but its percentages and ratios are off, gravity is too heavy, works starts too early, free time adds up to little. Let's start lobbying for 4-day workweeks, fewer hours at the office, fewer meetings, and start enjoying our hours instead of wishing them quickly away like time in prison. Music can take any of that slop and make it closer to joy, so blest we are to have it. Why speak of aught else?

10/31/14: Been listening to lots of classical piano and war metal lately, maybe that part of me is depressed, the part that reaches out seismically into the zeitgeist, into our shared collected consciousness, whiles the rest of me finds co-pious joy in my own personals and feels like listening to the "Princess & Frog" soundtrack or old Samantha Fox songs.

8/16/14: This summer was great: work, new audio/video hardware, vacation in the San Juan Islands, and lots of time with my blondes. What a stupendous year for music this has been, as well--almost every release you've been anticipating ends up satisfying. Behemoth, Mastodon, St. Vincent, Goatwhore, Prong, Overkill, Swans, Tom Petty all release top-tier albums and the re-releases have fully met the promise of my imagination, with exactly the kind of box-set love I'd dreamed for Zeppelin, Soundgarden, Death and Demilich unfurled on the world. Now there's a slew of must-have death metal albums coming out on vinyl at Relapse (Vader, Massacre, Nocturnus) and Hammerheart (Cobalt, Cryptopsy, Beherit and Leviathan) that nearly completes my wishlist. Praise God for black metal \M/

4/16/14: I strive to leave a small footprint on my friends. Dads don't have time for shit.

3/22/14: Just saw Gorguts and Carcass--excellent show!

3/20/14: Why do so many amazing boxed sets have to come out in mid-end-March, when I am as a rite of legend--broke out of wallet and formally wanton of funds? This year I'll see Behemoth, Carcass, Gorguts, Mastodon, 1349, and Noisem, so I can't really bitch..."can spring be far behind?"

3/6/14: Today I finished ripping my CD's! Yes! Joy! Really I'm stoked! Now to get to the mellow enjoyment going...

1/5/14: I'm not going to fucking lie to you--I don't really listen to Steppenwolf that much anymore.

5/17/12: It's not really about the numbers for me, really. I just have this lifetime to experience all of the most amazing thoughts man has ever thought before the whole shit-house goes down! I've slowed down my consumption a lot lately because of the birth of my beautiful little blonde girl, too. May you all know such joy.

May fear drive your evry step, the onrushing wolf behind a leg at a pace, dear and complete, for then you will not forget the reality of man.

I'm just a literature teacher who likes to fancy himself a writer of poems. I know what I like (give me a megaphone, Jack White) and that's blondes, Yorkies, speed, metal, speed metal, real punk rock, real soul music, fine recordings of classical pieces, serious/entertaining film, deep and rewarding literature, lifting weights, and using my fave website--RYM:)

My reviews are often based off the thousands of albums I heard while maturing and 'unlearning' in college DJ-ing at the radio station, but recent critiques may be distorted by my audio equipment, which might offer different subtleties than your own does. I use a Denon X5200W 9.2-channel receiver to power 7 Klipsch surrounds, a homemade ghetto-bird 12-inch subwoofer backing an Andy Jones Edition Pioneer 8-inch sub, and 2 Polk Audio TSi300s up-front, powered by 2 Parasound HCA-1000A's running 400w/ch in monoblock mode; my turntable is a Pro-Ject Debut III Esprit with an Ortofon Blue cartridge running through a Pro-Ject sound box II; I use a Synology 2414play NAS server to stream my digital library; the secondary turntable is a cheapo Audio Technica USB running through a Monoprice DAC into Sennheiser HD558 headphones and a speaker setup consisting of Audioengine A2+s paired with a Polk Audio 10" sub; my TV is a 60" Sony SRX LCD; I also waste copious hours with my OPPO BDP-103D and XBOX One. And to quote Peanut Butter Wolf, "My vinyl weighs a ton." Take a look at my stuff and if you've got items on my wishlist, I'm down to trade.

Since I teach aesthetics, though I'd hate for you to take all of my reviews too rigidly, as many are just silly trifles for fun, and I have always enjoyed some ironic or obscene or authorially composed reviewage, in fact, hoping to contribute to that, if not some brief-paragraph length ditty review that may save/ensure a bloke a purchase, I do enjoy the composition of some things, certainly some technical flairs when not too gaudy, mostly the energy one gains from music. Or, I like any of it when it's good.

For me a high rating indicates my least subjective rating and accompanies a release that serves as one of the greatest examples of its style, or one that is extremely influential.

Most of the music to which I listen falls in the 3-4-star category. These are good listens with problems or inconsistencies that don't capsize the lollipop lillypad of fun-time-listen.

A 2-star album is a failure, but usually an admirable or enjoyable one. A great pair of singles turns into an overlong, dull album, or an LP really strives to impress, but unwittingly reveals the artists' limitations of voice, etc.

<-2-star albums don't qualify as competent music and spread their gross fester wide for obvious ridicule. Most country music belongs here, as other maligned genres of inexpressive, corporate-chart-friendly fluff, or holiday music, and only the most legendary of failures get christened with the mark of 0.5 Stars, may their homes be razed and their names stricken out. I guess I'll have to curtail my reviewing of pop-rap and country artists, as RYM's new policy denounces anyone who speaks violence against the artist. In the forgotten words of Jackson Browne, "But...I love you/ What else could I do?"

When it comes to film, I am much more critical and objective/formalistic. As Howard Hawks said, "A great film contains 2 amazing scenes and no bad ones." Or something like that. Except for Godzilla films.

Cuz fuckin' Godzilla.