Tom MacWright

tom@macwright.com

Recently

Joaquin Miller Park

I’m finally reading The Death and Life of American Cities by Jane Jacobs. I’m keeping pretty detailed notes, so when I post it to /books, there’ll be a pretty detailed take, but I can say for sure that I’m really enjoying it.

Prison strike

This is a solid season for music: lots of bands are releasing albums, and I’ve been finding a bunch of new albums I like.

Darwin Deez released 10 Songs that Happened When You Left Me With My Stupid Heart. His style has changed a lot over the years: the difference in vocal mix between this and his self-titled is huge. Double Down felt like it went too far in the pop direction, but this album adds back guitar and synth edges that put his music right back squarely in my interests.

I’m really enjoying Screaming Females - and have noticed that their leader, Marissa Paternoster, is using a hip strap for guitar — a good development, in my opinion, for an instrument with lots of ergonomic problems.

Zoe Keating’s music has been in my library for years, but I haven’t listened to it intently for far too long. Returning to a track like Optimist shows a sort of melodic side to it that I was missing in earlier listens, where I got the feeling that she was relying heavily on complexity and volume contrasts.

I have a preorder for this next Dodos album, and am really excited to see them in San Francisco in October (hit me up if you’re also going).

Bad Moves is keeping DC angular-happy-punk alive, and I’m very excited for their next album. Their music videos in the lead-up to release have also been great: the renaissance-people band includes Katie Park, a talented graphics editor/engineer/dataviz person, and Daod Tyler-Ameen, a writer/actor/editor/drummer.