Original Unpublished Pirate Material

You may have noticed a new outlet popping up in this blog's right rail. I've been writing a few lists for Made Man, from bands to baseball. Perhaps this will get you back in the mood for the latter's current reemergence.

Oh, and here's the bio that lives on my author page there:

Colin St. John is a fifth- or sixth-generation Coloradan, depending on who you ask. He now resides in Brooklyn where he roots for the Denver Broncos, listens to the Grateful Dead without irony, drinks entirely too much beer and contributes to Pitchfork, Stereogum, Time Out New York and his 2003-style blog.

Thursday, January 09, 2014

Top 15 Albums of 2013

1. Queens of the Stone Age - ...Like Clockwork

2. Vampire Weekend - Modern Vampires of the City

3. Kanye West - Yeezus

4. Deerhunter - Monomania

5. My Bloody Valentine - m b v

6. Kurt Vile - Wakin on a Pretty Daze

7. Phosphorescent - Muchacho

8. Majical Cloudz - Impersonator

9. Jon Hopkins - Immunity

10. Daft Punk - Random Access Memories

11. Arcade Fire - Reflektor

12. Fuck Buttons - Slow Focus

13. Mikal Cronin - MCII

14. The National - Trouble Will Find Me

15. Frightened Rabbit - Pedestrian Verse

Stay tuned for my Pazz & Jop contributions and, if you're interested, check out my previous picks:

Tuesday, November 12, 2013

Pitchfork

Oh, hello.

I've written a couple of reviews for Pitchfork. Check them out below and look for more.

Lee Ranaldo and the Dust, Last Night on Earth

Pelican, Forever Becoming

Wednesday, September 04, 2013

Flyer

Ayo:

I'm the Director of Content for a new app called Flyer, based in New York City. We are launching soon and it's why I have not been too, ahem, active here.

But, forgive me and sign up for our limited release yonder: http://flyerapp.com/

Monday, January 28, 2013

2012: A Landmark Year for Gay Music

My Pazz & Jop comment that The Voice published was taken from a larger submission. Here it is, below, in full:

Alex Ross, in his New Yorker piece from November about the progressive strides that the gay rights movement has made, surmises, "Today, gay people of a certain age may feel as though they had stepped out of a lavender time machine."

Yet amid brief discussions of straight artists like Lady Gaga and Carly Rae Jepson, Ross—a music critic, it should be noted—failed to identify 2012 as a landmark year for gay musicians. (He did, however, enter into the race for quote of the year, writing, "At certain moments, straight people can seem gayer than the gays.")

These were Frank Ocean's twelve months. His Fallon performance, the second movement of "Pyramids," making bandannas almost as cool as the Boss once did: the list goes on and on. And, oh yeah, he declared his one-time love for another man on the advent of his debut album, ahem, coming out.

Channel Orange is a record that critics laud despite having a difficult time pigeonholing. In late December, I went to my local record store in Denver and was shocked to find the album in the rap section. It's probably an R&B effort, yes, and all of the bluster about Ocean's reinvention of the genre isn't all that over the top. From Pitchfork to People, it's the rare release the connects with a wide swath of the populace. On "Bad Religion," Ocean sings, "Unrequited love, to me, is just a one man cause / Cyanide in my Styrofoam cup / I can never make him love me / It's a bad religion to be in love with someone who could never love you"—lines that spurned humans of any stripe can connect with.

Grizzly Bear is doing a bang-up job of making itself a supergroup as an afterthought, Daniel Rossen and Ed Droste fronting, and other members being Chris Bear and Chris Taylor. The quartet keeps busy elsewhere before coming back together, only to record some of the finest pop music in the world. Droste, a homosexual, is one of our best vocalists, with an ability to convey frailty yet confidence, the crux of the Brooklyn group's shy-power dialectic. As sure of a bet as any in the music world, Grizzly Bear's record from this year, Shields, came through in spades with an unmatched clarity of production.

Watching Perfume Genius's video for "Dark Parts" made me think of my gay father and the struggles he's encountered over tumultuous decades. Mike Hadreas walks lovingly with his real-life mother though a forest as his lyrics ring out: "But he'll never break you, baby." There's much implication that the tough guys—the men's men—still don't get it. I don't know Hadreas's father and I don't know his life. But, I do know that his ruminative debut Put Yr Back N2 It can be absolutely devastating.

On "Take Me Home," Hadreas laments, "Take me home, tend to me, baby lay me down easy, for I have grown weary on my own." It's painful stuff and might not be directly correlated with being a homosexual. Still, there's an edge, there. We are lucky enough, as Ross's history indicates, to live in a time where we can assert that an individual's sexuality "doesn't really matter." And while it distracts us from what really counts—the music, in this case—it does so in an ever-dwindling amount. It is getting better, Dan Savage but, of course, we aren't there. Yet, we can distill some smiles from the bloodshed. Would any of these records have been as good as they are without struggle?

Pazz & Jop 2012

The Village Voice published its yearly wrap of the best music of 2012 a couple of weeks ago. Here is my list of favorite albums and singles.

I have, again, proudly chosen a few songs that nobody else did. (And even one album: Karriem Riggins's Alone/Together.)

Here are the tracks that apparently nobody else in the universe dug like I did:

Lambchop, "Mr. Met":

Perfume Genius, "Dark Parts":

Japandroids, "Younger Us":

Four Tet, "Locked":

And wouldn't you know it? The Voice also saw it fit to publish a comment I penned. Here it is:

Channel Orange is a record that critics laud despite having a difficult time pigeonholing. In late December, I went to my local record store in Denver and was shocked to find the album in the rap section. It's probably an r&b effort, yes, and all of the bluster about Ocean's reinvention of the genre isn't all that over the top. From Pitchfork to People, it's the rare release the connects with a wide swath of the populace.