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Dizzy Spells (album)
''Dizzy Spells'' is an album by Dutch post-punk band The Ex. It is the band's 11th studio album and 18th overall, and was produced by Steve Albini who had also produced its predecessor. ''Dizzy Spells'' was also The Ex's final studio album to feature bass guitarist Luc who would end up leaving the band after being a member for 20 years. Content ''Pitchforks Spencer Owen characterized the music as "art punk" writing that their " gular guitars, ..oddly clattering beats, and ..six-minute songs ..seem to borrow more from Wire and the Talking Heads than the Ramones and the Stooges." Comparisons to Wire were also made by Todd Kristel of ''Allmusic'', who wrote that the album "should appeal to fans of this Dutch band's previous work, as well as newcomers who enjoy Fugazi, Gang of Four, or some of the projects by this album's producer, Steve Albini." Douglas Wolk called the album a "twin to 1998's '' Starters Alternators''" and highlighted "guitarists Terrie and Andy's dueling shred ...
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The Ex (band)
The Ex are an underground band from the Netherlands that formed in 1979 at the height of the original punk explosion. Initially known as an anarcho-punk band, they have since released over 20 full-length albums exploring a wide variety of genres, blending punk rock with free jazz and folk music from all over the world. Biography The Ex's music has undergone significant evolution over the years from their beginnings as a punk band. Founded by singer Jos Kley (better known as G.W. Sok), guitarist Terrie Hessels, drummer Geurt and bassist René, the band debuted with a song titled "Stupid Americans" on the ''Utreg-Punx'' vinyl 7" compilation released by Rock Against records in Rotterdam. The release of their first 7" ''All Corpses Smell the Same'' followed shortly after that, in 1980. Through the decades their music has gradually developed into its current form of highly intricate, experimental punk/post-punk/ no wave-inspired work. Expanding beyond punk rock, The Ex have incor ...
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The Stooges
The Stooges, originally billed as the Psychedelic Stooges, also known as Iggy and the Stooges, was an American rock band formed in Ann Arbor, Michigan, in 1967 by singer Iggy Pop, guitarist Ron Asheton, drummer Scott Asheton, and bassist Dave Alexander. Initially playing a raw, primitive style of rock and roll, the band sold few records in their original incarnation and gained a reputation for their confrontational performances, which often involved acts of self-mutilation by Iggy Pop. After releasing two albums – ''The Stooges'' (1969) and ''Fun House'' (1970) – the group disbanded briefly, and reformed with an altered lineup (with Ron Asheton replacing Dave Alexander on bass and James Williamson taking up guitar) to release a third album, ''Raw Power'' (1973), before breaking up again in 1974. The band reunited in 2003 with Ron Asheton moving back to guitar and Mike Watt on bass, and the addition of saxophonist Steve Mackay, who had played briefly with the 1973–1974 ...
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Metacritic
Metacritic is a website that review aggregator, aggregates reviews of films, TV shows, music albums, video games and formerly, books. For each product, the scores from each review are averaged (a weighted arithmetic mean, weighted average). Metacritic was created by Jason Dietz, Marc Doyle, and Julie Doyle Roberts in 1999. The site provides an excerpt from each review and hyperlinks to its source. A color of green, yellow or red summarizes the critics' recommendations. It is regarded as the foremost online review aggregation site for the video game industry. Metacritic's scoring converts each review into a percentage, either mathematically from the mark given, or what the site decides subjectively from a qualitative review. Before being averaged, the scores are weighted according to a critic's popularity, stature, and volume of reviews. The website won two Webby Awards for excellence as an aggregation website. Criticism of the site has focused on the assessment system, the ass ...
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Tom Hull (critic)
Tom Hull is an American music critic, web designer, and former software developer. Hull began writing criticism for ''The Village Voice'' in the mid 1970s under the mentorship of its music editor Robert Christgau, but left the field to pursue a career in software design and engineering during the 1980s and 1990s, which earned him the majority of his life's income. In the 2000s, he returned to music reviewing and wrote a jazz column for ''The Village Voice'' in the manner of Christgau's "Consumer Guide", alongside contributions to ''Seattle Weekly'', ''The New Rolling Stone Album Guide'', NPR Music, and the webzine ''Static Multimedia''. Hull's jazz-focused database and blog ''Tom Hull – on the Web'' hosts his reviews and information on albums he has surveyed, as well as writings on books, politics, and movies. It shares a functional, low-graphic design with Christgau's website, which Hull also created and maintains as its webmaster. Career In the mid 1970s, Hull accepted a jo ...
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Alternative Press (magazine)
''Alternative Press'' is an American entertainment magazine primarily focused on music and culture, now based in Los Angeles, CA. It generally provides readers with band interviews, photos, and relevant news. It was founded in 1985 by Mike Shea in Cleveland, OH. The company is now looked after by MDDN. Beginnings The first issue of ''Alternative Press'' was distributed at concerts in Cleveland, Ohio beginning in June 1985 by ''APs founder, Mike Shea to advocate bands playing underground music. The name for the magazine, ''Alternative Press'', was not a reference to the alternative rock genre, but referred to the fanzine being an alternative to the local press. Shea began working on his first issue in his mother's house in Aurora, Ohio. Shea and a friend, Jimmy Kosicki, targeted the Cleveland neighborhood of Coventry. Financial problems plagued ''AP'' in its early years and by the end of 1986, publication had ceased due to its financial problems, not resuming until the spring ...
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PopMatters
''PopMatters'' is an international online magazine of cultural criticism that covers aspects of popular culture. ''PopMatters'' publishes reviews, interviews, and essays on cultural products and expressions in areas such as music, television, films, books, video games, comics, sports, theater, visual arts, travel, and the Internet. History ''PopMatters'' was founded by Sarah Zupko, who had previously established the cultural studies academic resource site PopCultures. ''PopMatters'' launched in late 1999 as a sister site providing original essays, reviews and criticism of various media products. Over time, the site went from a weekly publication schedule to a five-day-a-week magazine format, expanding into regular reviews, features, and columns. In the fall of 2005, monthly readership exceeded one million. From 2006 onward, ''PopMatters'' produced several syndicated newspaper columns for McClatchy-Tribune News Service. By 2009 there were four different pop culture related col ...
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Pitchfork Media
''Pitchfork'' (formerly ''Pitchfork Media'') is an American online music publication (currently owned by Condé Nast) that was launched in 1995 by writer Ryan Schreiber as an independent music blog. Schreiber started Pitchfork while working at a record store in suburban Minneapolis, and the website earned a reputation for its extensive coverage of indie rock music. It has since expanded and covers all kinds of music, including pop. Pitchfork was sold to Condé Nast in 2015, although Schreiber remained its editor-in-chief until he left the website in 2019. Initially based in Minneapolis, Pitchfork later moved to Chicago, and then Greenpoint, Brooklyn. Its offices are currently located in One World Trade Center alongside other Condé Nast publications. The site is best known for its daily output of music reviews but also regularly reviews reissues and box sets. Since 2016, it has published retrospective reviews of classics, and other albums that it had not previously reviewed ...
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Benelux
The Benelux Union ( nl, Benelux Unie; french: Union Benelux; lb, Benelux-Unioun), also known as simply Benelux, is a politico-economic union and formal international intergovernmental cooperation of three neighboring states in western Europe: Belgium, the Netherlands, and Luxembourg. The name is a portmanteau formed from joining the first few letters of each country's name and was first used to name the customs agreement that initiated the union (signed in 1944). It is now used more generally to refer to the geographic, economic, and cultural grouping of the three countries. The Benelux is an economically dynamic and densely populated region, with 5.6% of the European population (29.55 million residents) and 7.9% of the joint EU GDP (€36,000/resident) on no more than 1.7% of the whole surface of the EU. Currently 37% of the total number of EU frontier workers work in the Benelux and surrounding areas. 35,000 Belgian citizens work in Luxembourg, while 37,000 Belgian citizens c ...
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Sonic Youth
Sonic Youth was an American rock band based in New York City, formed in 1981. Founding members Thurston Moore (guitar, vocals), Kim Gordon (bass, vocals, guitar) and Lee Ranaldo (guitar, vocals) remained together for the entire history of the band, while Steve Shelley (drums) followed a series of short-term drummers in 1985, rounding out the core line-up. Jim O'Rourke (bass, keyboards, guitar) was also a member of the band from 1999 to 2005, and Mark Ibold (guitar, bass) was a member from 2006 to 2011. Sonic Youth emerged from the experimental no wave art and music scene in New York before evolving into a more conventional rock band and becoming a prominent member of the American noise rock scene. Sonic Youth have been praised for having "redefined what rock guitar could do" using a wide variety of unorthodox guitar tunings while preparing guitars with objects like drum sticks and screwdrivers to alter the instruments' timbre. The band was a pivotal influence on the alternat ...
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LA Weekly
''LA Weekly'' is a free weekly alternative newspaper in Los Angeles, California. It was founded in 1978 by Jay Levin, who served as president and editor until 1991. Voice Media Group sold the paper in late 2017 to Semanal Media LLC, whose parent company is listed as Street Media. The current Editor-in-Chief and Creative Director is Darrick Rainey. It covers Los Angeles music, arts, film, theater, culture, concerts, and events. In 1979 they established the LA Weekly Theater Awards which awards small theatre productions (99 seats or less) in Los Angeles. Starting in 2006, ''LA Weekly'' has hosted the LA Weekly Detour Music Festival every October. The entire block surrounding Los Angeles City Hall is closed off to accommodate the festival's three stages. Some of its best known writers were Pulitzer Prize-winning food writer Jonathan Gold, who left in early 2012, and Nikki Finke, who blogged about the film industry through the ''Weekly'' website and published a print column in the ...
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Gordian Knot
The Gordian Knot is an Ancient Greek legend of Phrygian Gordium associated with Alexander the Great who is said to have cut the knot in 333 BC. It is often used as a metaphor for an intractable problem (untying an impossibly tangled knot) solved easily by finding an approach to the problem that renders the perceived constraints of the problem moot ("cutting the Gordian knot"): Legend The Phrygians were without a king, but an oracle at Telmissus (the ancient capital of Lycia) decreed that the next man to enter the city driving an ox-cart should become their king. A peasant farmer named Gordias drove into town on an ox-cart and was immediately declared king. Out of gratitude, his son Midas dedicated the ox-cart to the Phrygian god Sabazios (whom the Greeks identified with Zeus) and tied it to a post with an intricate knot of cornel bark (''Cornus mas''). The knot was later described by Roman historian Quintus Curtius Rufus as comprising "several knots all so tightly ent ...
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Douglas Wolk
Douglas Wolk (born 1970) is a Portland, Oregon-based author and critic. He has written about comics and popular music for publications including ''The New York Times'', ''Rolling Stone'', ''The Washington Post'', ''The Nation'', ''The New Republic'', Salon.com, Pitchfork Media, ''Vanity Fair'', and '' The Believer''. Wolk was the managing editor of ''CMJ New Music Monthly'' from 1993 to 1997, and hosted a radio show on WFMU from 1999 to 2001. He has four published books. The most recent, ''All of the Marvels'', tours the Marvel comics universe via his project of reading all 27,000 Marvel superhero comics. In support of that project, in January 2019 he launched a members-only reading group, wherein participants collectively read and discuss a single issue of a Marvel comic book every day. He frequently appears discussing comics on the YouTube channel of Portland comic book store, Books with Pictures. Biography Early life Wolk grew up in East Lansing, Michigan. Marriage and ...
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