Category Archives: Music/Popular Culture

For your #ArtSunday listening pleasure: the 3rd Millennium Sound

This week I set up a new Facebook group with Rick Flierl (of Dotsun Moon) to replace one that had sort of taken a left turn on us. The goal: sharing and discussing a particular strand of emerging music styles. 3rd Millennium Sound revolves around specific genres like Electro-Pop, Darkwave, Industrial, contemporary Trip-Hop, Shoegaze/Dreampop, BritPop and more. This description isn’t intended to

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Dotsun Moon finds an answer on vox: Saturday Video Roundup

Dotsun Moon’s new singer, Maria Sebastian, is simply wonderful. Here’s proof. In my top CDs of 2016 list last week, I propped Rich Flierl and Dotsun Moon, a band doing some serious soul-searching after losing its very talented lead singer. Rich dropped some new tunes on me the other day, and they suggest that in Maria Sebastian he has found

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Remembering 2016: the year when everyone died

No, famous people won’t stop dying on January 1. But we lost too many bright lights this year and we hope that 2017 will be better. Here’s a list of noteworthy people who died in 2016. For the past several months a lot of us have been saying we can’t wait for this damned year to be over. 2016 gave us

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The darkest song ever sung: "Coventry Carol" (Saturday Video Roundup)

Remembering the blackest moment of the entire nativity cycle is an odd way to celebrate. For a couple weeks now I have been assembling my “Dark Christmas Melancholy” playlist, a process I described in a post a few days ago. While I have listened to (and sung) a lot of holiday music through the years, my little project introduced me to a

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A dark holiday playlist – and one man's melancholy war with childhood

There is beauty in the darkness. This is all I have ever known. Beauty doesn’t work the same for me as it does for most people. I first started realizing this in Mr. Booth’s (excuse me, Dr. Booth’s) English V class at Ledford High School in 1978 and 1979. I remember two moments distinctly. First, we read “The Eve of St.

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Love is not a victory march: Saturday Video Roundup

My favorite versions of the greatest pop song ever written – goodbye, Leonard 2016 took Leonard Cohen, one of popular music’s true iconic geniuses, from us this week. I have said before that I think “Hallelujah” is perhaps the greatest popular song in history, and as evidence I would simply note that it has been covered countless times by an

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