My friends Oliver Wang and Sharon Mizota are conducting a survey of music critics who currently work in America. Please participate if you fit the description and can spare a few minutes to leave some completely anonymized data. Message from Wang / Mizota below:
Calling all pop music critics! Please take the Critical Minded Pop Music Critic Survey. This survey is open to pop music critics working in the U.S. or for U.S.-based outlets and seeks to understand the opportunities and obstacles you’ve encountered over the course of your career. The results will be included in a report by Critical Minded in early 2026, including recommendations for how critics of color and criticism in general can be better supported in the future. Critical Minded is a grantmaking and learning initiative fiscally sponsored by Allied Media. Please click here for more information and to take the survey.
Writer-photographer Pat Blashill is a very old mate. We've been friends since 1989, after working together on some stories in New York for Melody Maker - he did the artist portraits and I wrote up the interviews. One of them was Sun Ra, would you believe!
Before he moved to New York, Pat was involved in Austin's punk-and-after scene, documenting the mayhem in real-time with his camera. That pictorial trove fed into his first bookTexas Is The Reason. Now Blashill has written the definitive history on the Texas punk and postpunk scene. Someday All The Adults Will Die! For which I was glad to offer this ringing endorsement:
"Texas had America’s wildest, weirdest punk-and-after scene – a primal playpen of shock rock, instinctive Dada, psychedelic freakout, performance art, scream therapy and absurdist anti-politics. Austin native Pat Blashill was in the thick of it, photographing the messy madness as it unfolded. In Some Day All The Adults Will Die!, Blashill shepherds the ultra-vivid memories of his contemporaries and threads through his own hindsight insights, forming an essential document thick with the textures of a long-gone real-gone time. Hilarious and poignant, this is a story never before told – and an inspiration to future free-thinkers and trouble-makers."
Published by the University of Texas Press, Someday All the Adults Will Die! is available here.
Hasten to read - while the paywall is relaxed for 24 hours - this fascinating conversation between Kieran Press-Reynolds and Shawn Reynaldo (no relation) for the latter's substack First Floor. Kieran talks about being a Gen Z writer about music + memes + internet subcultures - or as Reynaldo puts it, "mapping the brainrot continuum".
There's also some glimpses into Press-Reynolds family life.
E.g.
"I
think I always wanted to be a writer. When I was six, I made my own newspaper.
But I also had that teenage rebellion thing where I thought that what my
parents did was the lamest thing ever. I’d come home from school and my dad
would be playing weird ambient alien sounds, and I’d think, 'I just want to go
play Minecraft. Turn this off.' Then my mom would come home and she
was exhausted every day from work. Both of my parents were like, 'This is the
worst job. Do not follow in our footsteps'."
I must say I don't remember ever saying it was "the worst job", being a critic - after all, it's got a lot of upsides.
But we did kind of hope he would choose a path that didn't lead to precarity.
And we really didn't expect him to go down that same path. As a teenager he showed no interest at all. I always thought Kieran would do something involving video. Or invent an app.
But he's joined us in the incredible shrinking field.
RIP Keith Dobson of World Domination Enterprises, possibly the most exciting live band I have ever seen still to this day, and creators of the immortal "Asbestos Lead Asbestos".
Lovely bloke and he had the gift of the gab so fun to interview.
Keith - who once went as Kif Kif le Batteur - had a long history with countercultural music going back to the ebb days of the actual counterculture - he drummed in the Gong-like festival band Here and Now.
Then Keith plunged into the whole DIY culture with the cassette label Fuck Off Records and his band The O12, when the credo was "bad music is soul music".
Then, using the same fell-into-its-own-weird-unique-tuning-stayed-there guitar as in O12, he formed World Domination Enterprises with himself snarling at the mic' and hacking at his axe, Digger pummeling the drums like a caveman, and Steve Jameson (who died six years ago) on dub rumbly bass.
Big up to Chris Scott of Monitor who turned me onto World Dom in the first place.
World Domination Enterprises were on the cover of Melody Maker at least once - David Stubbs did the honors.
Here's some of my own Melody Maker ravings about WDE
World Domination Enterprises featurette
summer 1986
live at The Underground, Croydon
Melody Maker, early 1987
with their pals MUTOID WASTE COMPANY 100 Club, London Melody Maker, November 21st 1987
Let's Play Domination Melody Maker, April 16th 1988
World Domination live at Hungarocarrot, Budapest summer 1988
The photo catches Keith's gold tooth nicely
Here's Stubbs remembering a jaunt to the Soviet Union with WDE
And a piece at the Quietus by Wyndham Wallace about Keith's whole story
Well, you learn something everyday and I didn't know that the O12 did the original version of "Asbestos Lead Asbestos" in 1984
"Actively passive, losing-itself-in-the-noise" - new column by Kieran Press-Reynolds steps out of his lane to explore the "dreamy malaise" of "hazy new-gen alt-rock": bar italia, untitled halo, deer park et al.
Slackerdelia part 3, only this time they don't even have the energy to capitalize their names...
Slackerdelia part 3?
Well obviously part 1 is Mercury Rev, Pavement etc.
But what would part 2 be?
Chillwave, glo-fi, hypnagogic pop, of course.
Not the sound of the groups he's writing about particularly, but some of K's evocations of them reminded me of my favorite guitar album of the past 15 years: Suburban Tours by Rangers.
Also the name of one of the bands, deer park, reminded me of the opening track "Deerfield Village".
I got into this record not long before we moved to LA and I think it somehow prepared me for suburban life in the land of perpetual summer. Drifting through, dazed by light, mood oddly suspended between anomie and bliss....
As I recall, the album is inspired by living in Texas and the newbuilt suburbs, which often have names inspired by the wilderness they've supplanted - hence track titles like "Bear Creek", "Deerfield Village," "Woodland Hills," "Glen Carin."
That integration of wilderness and built-up areas is very LA and something that continues to enchant and unsettle - just the other day heading off to an on-the-early-side dental appointment we saw a mangy looking coyote in someone's driveway. This in a neighbourhood completely built-up with suburban houses, no wilderness or even parks nearby.
An early attempt to connect hypnagogic pop and Southern California while freshly enchanted as a new arrival.
Then there's the Suburban Tours track "Out Past Curfew" - an allusion to the fact that some towns in America actually have legal curfews for teenagers. You're not allowed out after sundown.
Joe Knight has put out a bunch of excellent records since but here he tapped into something really magical-mystical - I bracket Suburban Tours with The Greatest Hit and Up On the Sun.
Supposedly he drew some sideways inspiration from this song by Rush - not musically but the mise en scene
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Another recent Rabbit Holed - K reports onSWAGGOTFEST, a 12-hour anarcho-pride parody of a music festival that transcended cringe and captured the sweetest, rawest aspects of the New York DIY scene
