The Eighth Annual Criterion Month Draft

It’s that time of year again! Well, sort of. This year we’re pushing our annual Criterion Month back a month due to summer travel plans, which will perhaps give us time to buy some of the blu rays on sale at Barnes & Noble’s July Criterion Sale? Who knows, but one thing we do know is that we’ve stuck to the same format of picking our movies to review each year. We each take turns selecting our films over the course of a podcast and then struggle to describe what these movies are about. But that’s ok! We haven’t seen them yet, but luckily a sense of discovery will prevail during the ensuing month as we find out why these films are deserving of being in the Collection. Continue reading

Colin’s Favorite Albums of 2024 (So Far), Pt. 2

Now let’s take a look at some of the more recent albums that transitioned us from Winter to Spring to Summer. As you may notice, a lot of these albums are a bit more high profile or ones I had already been anticipating, but well, those are just the albums you end up listening to the week (or month) of their release. Hopefully, there will be a few more low-key albums out there from this first half of the year that I’m able to catch up with as the year progress. And who knows, maybe I’ll end up writing about them at year’s end.

For the first three albums, I don’t need to go too in-depth with them, since I already praised them on episodes of The Pick. But they’re albums so nice, they’re worth talking about twice. Continue reading

Colin’s Favorite Albums of 2024 (So Far), Pt. 1

For the first part of this year, writing about music got away from me.

I’m not exactly sure why, but the easiest answer is probably just the general decline in us writing consistent reviews of anything on this blog. Additionally, my general mood about online music writing also hasn’t been helped by the announcement that Pitchfork, the one critical voice that was always dependable, was being folded into GQ, not to mention the other online pop culture sites that have been gutted the past few years.

But really, the more optimistic reason for why I haven’t been posting music reviews on here is that there’s been a fairly overwhelming amount of good music to listen to this year. So much so that every time I’ve found a new favorite album of the moment, a new one gets released the next week. And even when there hasn’t always been a new album out there to mesmerize me, there have also been plenty of high-profile pop albums this year that despite their varying quality, at the very least felt like necessary listening. Perhaps this doesn’t all excuse my laziness, but either way, there have been a lot of albums worth diving into, and it’s made it hard to know where to start. Well, let’s start here. Continue reading