The Useless Critic 2.0

Just released yesterday, Will Stratton's newest album "The Changing Wilderness" is the first cohesively excellent album for me from this year so far. It's pensive, somewhat melancholy, stripped down - but beautiful in a way that makes it hard to forget. Although Stratton describes himself as a "disciple of Nick Drake," I found that his seventh album called to mind the very best of Iron & Wine.  "The Changing Wilderness" may have had its debut in May, but it sounds like it might be better suited for the cooler air of autumn than the hopefulness of spring. Stratton is a singer-songwriter who, in the past, has thrived more off introspection than attempting to commune with the macro world outside himself. In "The Changing Wilderness," he set out to deviate from that pattern. No where in the stark 40 minutes the album lasts is this more apparent than "Infertile Air," which imagines the guilty conscious of an ICE agent.  But intro...

I've always wanted to go to Record Store Day, but never have. Erie really never had record stores and last year I just didn't do it. So this year, instead of doing chores and going to the store, I said to myself in a monologue my neighbors may have heard: "Britt, fuck it. We're going. Part of life is about the experiences we have anyway." So I bought a bus pass and I WENT.  This post is brought to you by Liv Tyler's midriff. According to the folks at Fuse , Jack White was the national ambassador for the day. Of course he was: Jack is a noted sound-quality snob!  Part of the appeal of Record Store Day are the new releases various artists come out with for it. Like MGMT, Garbage, Tegan and Sara, and David Bowie among others. I didn't see this- I just saw a lot of vinyl that would have been useless for me to buy because I have no turntable (shhhhhh). I saw this and I ended up staring at it entranced for several moments. Alex Chilton still hau...

40 years ago, as I'm sure you haven't heard a bajillion times by now, we (and by we, I mean Americans everywhere, I mean God bless us, I mean mankind obviously) put a man on the moon. men on the moon. a PLAQUE on the moon. some people don't believe it and think it was a conspiracy. I don't really care about these people. http://news.aol.com/moon-landing?icid=main|aimzones|dl1|link3|http%3A%2F%2Fnews.aol.com%2Fmoon-landing ^ interesting stuff! (amateur astronomy nerd) I was pretty bummed as a youngster to hear that we hadn't done anything along that magnitude since the 1970s. But, apparently, we're looking to point someone on Mars in the near future (or at least Russia is). now a lot of people think, with the economy as is and other matters pressing, that the space program should be put on the backburner. but judging by the technology that we derived from the moon race, I disagree. LET'S GO TO MARS! Space Mix "My Moon, My Man"- Feist: http://www.sen...