Every once in a great while, a thing comes along which is more or less some things you’ve already been using diligently for that same while, and suddenly you’re experiencing those things in a new form and wondering how this new composite thing couldn’t have existed before. For example, ask your grandparents about when they started going to drive-in movies or using sporks. It knocked their socks right off their garters (also: socks with elastic bands). Anyway, this is one of those great whiles, and it’s perfectly in step with the internet age. Behold, the new, simple, and extraordinarily useful
MBV Music blog. Unveiled officially on Monday and developed by occasional lord of the internet
Ryan Catbird, the site collects entries from five spectacular music blogs into one clean, ad-less space. Those blogs are
the Catbirdseat,
Chromewaves,
Fluxblog,
Largehearted Boy, and
Said the Gramophone. Heavy hitters one and all. As Ryan
continues:
And hopefully, it’ll also be contributions from you. Intelligent, engaging music conversation is frighteningly rare out there, and I find that strange, considering all of the sharp-minded music lovers I know. I hope MBV will be a place you can come to engage in interesting music-centric conversation, free of the usual knuckle-dragging comment trolls (who I will execute with wild abandon).
For starters, MBV led me directly to a couple of Meursault songs posted by Said the Gramophone contributor Sean Michaels. The band is from Edinburgh, and their name is taken (supposedly) from Camus’s
L’Étranger. Sean’s review of this song, which sounds like a folk-singing robot, begins, “BREAKING NEWS: CYBERMAN 3000-D HAS BEEN SPOTTED. HIGH-POWERED TELESCOPES PICKED UP MOVEMENT IN THE BLACKENED WRECKAGE OF THE FOREST.” I don’t want to ruin it for you, but everyone wins. —
Erik Bryan, Dec. 3, 2008