Music ... It Rocks

[Music] Technology is not my strongest point, but when rumors about our new Website started floating around the office I was the first to suggest we adhere to a strict routine of daily blogging. How hard can it be, I said. We write for a living! We have email and MySpace accounts and friends with iTunes! Then the server started acting up and I quickly lost my patience with and faith in the Internet. I focused all my energies on City Weekly's print edition, entertaining the grand illusion that all of our readers, like my quarter-life crisis/end of Generation X-era friends, prefer to flip through the paper over cups of fair-trade espresso, hoping that the green java will somehow balance out the gratuitous use of nature's blank slate.

Things were great until last Sunday when MTV aired the VMAS, its annual awards show. After watching Britney Spears' catatonic striptease, it once again became painfully clear just how important it is for music lovers/critics over 20 to champion the underdogs--the artists who actually play their instruments, eat Ramen and soy cheese, tour in a beat-up van, wear clothes (sometimes the same clothes for months on end), live in a beat-up van, write innovativ lyrics, and yes, even play the glockenspiel, for as much as I hate that precious instrument its role in contemporary indie rock is much more welcome than the ubiquitous drum machines, back-up dancers and faux-hawks that rule the airwaves. On that note, I invite CW readers to get involved by checking our website for exclusive show reviews (including a forthcoming Domster take on Arcade Fire's random Thanksgiving Point performance Sept. 26), CD reviews and random music news. And when we slack off because the server is slower than Miss Teen South Carolina, give us hell.

In the meantime, here's a taste of more off-the-radar activity by one of my recent favorites, Austin's White Denim :




(Jamie Gadette)