My links are in a dreadful state – I was meaning to update them this weekend but I haven’t. Thankfully the oldest rule of the weblog still applies – keep an eye on your referrals and the links they will come. I Feel Love is a music blog written by someone I don’t think I know, and I enjoyed it a lot – thoughtful, perceptive, nicely laid out, good taste, says nice things about Freaky Trigger, etc etc. (Yes it’s a backscratching world online but honestly check the site out).
Auspicious Fish is written by ILM/Stylus guy Nick Southall, who I do know (online at least). He has a confusing thing going on where he describes the FT relaunch as a “defeated slide into adulthood” but then a paragraph on castigates Hornby and young fogey Tom Cox for still banging on about music when their fire’s gone out. Few are less of a Hornby fan than I but you can’t have it both ways, Nick! Anyway it’s a fair cop though my ginger toehold on ‘adulthood’ feels more like a hard-earned victory than any kind of defeat.
Nick also fingers me with the attempted murder of the music review – again a confession is easily extracted though the fucker seems stronger than ever before, two 150-word reviews springing Hydra-like from 300-word corpses wherever you look. NYLPM is filled to the gills with reviews of course, but my philosophy is broadly that if you’re going to be all consumer guide and tell someone to buy an album, then just tell them to buy the album, don’t waste even ten words on it.* The thing is that you should only be in a position to do that if you know them and they know you – my favourite and most reliable reviews are asides from friends. How do you get the reader into that happy position? That is the ongoing question.
*unless you’re getting paid, in which case waste as many as you can get away with.