the nerdster tumblr

every instrument in every one of their songs sounds like a sytrus preset with very minimal tweaking, the singer is boring, and their beats fall into the “generic trance music” category so hard it’s not even remotely funny

no idea why sirens of the sea is still in my library, I guess I just refuse to delete things

are all so terrible at april fools

stop immediately telling people after every other word you write APRIL FOOLS don’t break character if they’re dumb enough to fall for your shit let them

i’m so unhappy and now it’s april fools day and the only people who have pulled off a good joke thus far is mthrfnkr, which is terrible because i hate everything they post (they love to talk about how great odd future’s crew is and the xx and the weeknd and UGH)???

my life is terrible it’s 2:30 am and i hate myself

I think the worst part about trying to listen to lots of new music is that not every band only has a single album that can take up around fifty minutes of my time and give me a good first impression. For a lot of bands, I need to sift through a discography or a good myriad of songs to find shit I like and shit I don’t like, and it’s easy to get turned off by the songs I dislike and consider a band a waste of my time. Bands like Weezer or They Might Be Giants are two simple ones to name; while I like both of these bands for some of the music they’ve put out, I can not and will not enjoy their entire discography. I tried this with TMBG when I first started collecting music, and I came to realize that I hate half of the shit they’ve put out over the years. It can be nigh impossible for me to really get into new bands without a hardcore recommendation from people I trust or respect. I get a lot of my recent shit from Anthony Fantano of The Needle Drop on youtube and his youtube videos, and my buddy Matt. Both of them have great taste and a wide variety of musicians that they really appreciate and listen to, and it’s easy for me to take recommendations from them because I feel like I understand where they’re coming from when they explain their reasons for liking and disliking shit.

Matt’s also one of my closest friends, and he’s a really great guy. I just get so sick of digging through hundreds of albums, and I always feel like the albums I end up downloading without some level of recommendation end up sucking way harder than they should. I hope I have these two for some time to come, because I don’t think I’d be listening to new music at all if it weren’t for them!

andrew jackson jihad is actually a hell of a lot better than i thought they would be

way to ruin all of my skepticism for music guys thanks

I’ve never really thought about it consciously, but what’s really the most appropriate song length? I think I’ve found that it depends super heavily on genre and style. What influences your music and drives it is really what should define your song length. This isn’t to say that musicians should be going out of their way to write down a definitive number for the time stamp on their respective songs, but it’s really,reallyimportant that you understand what’s acceptable for your genre.

If you’re in a band that’s drawing heavy influences from mewithoutyou and La Dispute’s spoken word, then more power to you for giving us a lengthy epithet on the nature of man’s inhumanity to man or how your girlfriend broke up with you. If you’re in a rockin’ punk band that’s off the fucking hook and has the most angst riddled lyrics since Blink 182’s earlier albums (no that joke is just tasteless) the invention of punk, then you can wreck that 0:52 second track. If you’re passion pit, or islands, or death cab for cutie, or just about any band ever designed for popular consumption,please don’t make your songs longer than around 4 minutes.

I’ve had swimming in the floods by passion pit marked down as a 4 star song in my library since I fucking got their 2011 2009 LP Manners, and I could never for the life of me understand why. The emotional build up the song gives was always right on cue, I was in love with the singing voice, I was in love with all the synth and how the instruments came together, and I just could not piece out why the song was hard for me to get into. It took a very long time for me to realize that the emotional buildup just came too late, a little farther into the song than I’d like, and came across as melodramatic. It’s a 4 minute and 47 second long song. As it stands now, I love the song and couldn’t imagine it any other way, but a lot of songs in indie pop really could use some trimming down — and you’re a lot less likely to make a super fantastic hook as a pop band that keeps people coming back for more if your songs drag on like the coals in an extremely smoky fire. We get it. You’re really trying to make us notice you and pay attention, but the longer you burn, the worse our cough gets, and the more the smoke smell gets into our hair. After a while, we’re just going to put a huge distance between us and you, until the wind blows the smoke back in our direction to remind us exactly why we took a few steps away just a few moments prior.

If you really want to write super catchy pop music, I don’t think it’s beneficial to make your songs too long. What constantly brings people back to pop music is catchy hooks that don’t feel trite or overdone the millionth time they come back to listen. Shorter pop hooks as opposed to lengthier ones always feel more catchy, and make me want to come back and listen a thousand times for that one hook that’s drawing me back. I don’t necessarily want to go back and put swimming in the floods on repeat the way I’d put a bag raiders song on. Watch the length of your music, and try to trim the fat when it seems excessive.

biggest pet peeve: people saying qué instead of cue

If there is anything I hate more than most hipsters, it is anti-hipsters. People who run around saying that anyone trying to put a definitive label on music is wrong, because music is just music, and it makes music to our ears so literally that it’s impossible for us to go deeper and understand anything about its roots or what category of sound it should fall into. I have always hated this argument, because it makes me feel like there’s a huge amount of anti-intellectualism that falls into music; I know lots of artists are not the brightest in the bunch, and you do not need to be a genius to be a musician, but I still don’t like the idea that trying to classify music is a bad thing. Classifying music is important so we can see where they are coming from, what direction they are trying to go in, and how we expect their music to evolve in the future.

That said, I just got an old album from 2006 by Kristian Matsson of Tallest Man on Earth when he was with the indie rock band “Montezumas”, and the genre label was “General Mainstream Rock”. What the fuck? That is not a genre or label, and whoever is in charge of this metadata damn well knows it isn’t one. Why not call it indie rock, because its got the indie rock sound and was produced independently? Sometimes when everything is pointing to a really obvious genre or definition, everyone goes out of their way to explain what they think it sounds like, and I can half understand why people get so upset when a Queen’s greatest hits album lands in my library with the AOR Classic Rock tag, or when Holy Ghost! shows up with the Alternative tag. I get that there is a lot of misinformation and general “incohesiveness”, so to speak, when people go around trying to label every song, artist, and album that falls upon their ears. I get that there is a reason for anti-hipsters, because a lot of the time they are going way too fucking far and need to be told to shut up. If we are labeling artists for their sound appropriately, and they actually fall into the category or genre we are using, why call us out for using terms to describe their sound and influence?

That said, I understand that calling anti-hipsters “anti-intellecutalists” may be pretentious, because hipsters are also not necessarily the brightest in the bunch. Attacking people for trying to look deeper into music, though, seems to come off as such. Is there anyone out there who hates genres and labels? If yeah, what makes you hate them so much?

i have chiptune

oh my god this guy on the page just said “I have been called [a wop] many times…it builds character and a thicker skin. It also teaches you that we are all different and to not sweat the small stuff”

Yeah, I think I’ll try this out. I’ll walk up to black guys I see on the street and call them the n word, and when they get mad and call me a bigoted asshole, I’ll exclaim, “No, you don’t understand! It builds character!”

Jesus christ.

amazon kindle’s page on facebook just posted a whole thing in spanish and like the top comment is essentially WHY ISN’T THIS IN ENGLISH??? GOSH THIS ISN’T RACIST I JUST DON’T LIKE SPANISH. KEEP IT TO MY LANGUAGE

16 likes, and counting

there will be blood from white people on facebook tonight

Stop talking about lana del rey. She sucks. I know everyone thinks her live shit is terrible but you’re missing the whole “all her other music is terrible too” thing

because that is a thing

my entire library had the most fucked up ratings ever.

I don’t know how it started but I sort of just clicked 5 stars every time I liked a song a lot, and every time I disliked a song it got 4 stars. I’m redoing all of my ratings to fix that now… out of like 2500 rated songs. So tedious.

Over the past few months, there’s been a new Brothertiger release, a new Islands album, and a new Sleigh Bells album. I also finally picked up that sick K.Flay EP, Eyes Shut (don’t even need to listen, know it rocks). Why does no one keep me up to date on these album releases!?

Unfortunately, this Sleigh Bells album is way mediocre in comparison to Treats, but I suppose everyone else can be the judge of how good it is. Too poppy in comparison to their old taste for me. The Brothertiger release, on the other hand, is pretty excellent, and exactly what you’d expect out of him. Islands I’ve yet to listen to personally but that’ll come later (I just linked a random single from the album) — and K.Flay is K.Flay, of course. If you don’t know her or her work, just check her out on da yootubez, or check out one of her earlier works from her self-titled EP, wherein she wrecks the mic. Her rap skills are phenomenal. Also I don’t know who her cinematographer is, but damn if he/she isn’t amazing too.

Also I should mention that, according to Pitchfork, we’ve got a new Beach House album on the way. For uh, anyone who’s excited about that.

Sick way to start off the weekend. Anyone got any other cool releases I should know about?

thisgingersnapsback:

we-lie-we-love:

Ok, so here is my theory. There’s black people, and niggers. Black people, are just black people, niggers are the annoying ones. Same with Hispanics and beaners/wetbacks, Asians and chinks, etc. Its not racist, I’m not singling out a whole race, just people of that race that are particularly frustrating or annoying. I feel the same about white people and uh, whatever racial slur for white people there is, besides cracka cause I’m too white to say that.

guys, can you please delete this off your respective blogs?

I am entirely okay with shaming assholes who don’t know a thing about racism, but I’m really not okay with shaming children who don’t know any better and make a single racist post. She already deleted it and apologized, and I haven’t really seen any posts attempting to educate her on the subject. I already see so many posts directed at racists on tumblr attempting to educate them and teach them why they are absolutely horrible people, but we can’t put that aside for a second to try and help a 14 year old be less terrible in the future? She didn’t make a video trying to tell us what the fuck. She’s even said a couple of times she was formerly suicidal, and even if she’s actually a SUPER DUPER RACIST U GUISE I would not be okay with driving any child back to suicidal tendencies just because we’re so anti-racist.

seriously, I’d love to force people to take responsibility for their actions, but kids gonna be kids. Let’s not give more attention to this, because all it does is increase the likelihood that your followers are gonna get pissed and comment. Please remove these.