| Douglas Martin’s Dirty Shoes: The Mantles Play the Memory Game | November 6, 2014 |
Douglas Martin loves board games. The Mantles may have been borne out of the same dive bar garage-rock boom that swept the San Francisco Bay area before high rents and tech yuppies forced most of them out, but they’ve always had this sweetness about them that belies their peers. I’m not sure if it’s Michael […]
| The Corrections: Interpol “Antics” | October 8, 2014 |
Fellow sartorialist Douglas Martin looks back at Interpol's second album (with no tie clip)
| Douglas Martin’s Dirty Shoes: King Tuff Puts a Spell On You | September 30, 2014 |
Douglas Martin is back from the dead like Tobey Maguire from Brothers. People who don’t listen to lo-fi music frequently talk about how the genre is merely an aesthetic crutch, how using slender means to record your music (as well as the tape hiss and distortion that often comes with it) is a way to […]
Douglas Martin has two pairs of Red October’s on layaway Nobody likes being wrong about something. It was announced in January that Thee Oh Sees, a first-ballot Dirty Shoes Hall of Fame group if there ever was one, would be taking, in their words, “a very long break.” Upon hearing that news and to my […]
| The Last Yeezus Piece: Douglas Martin | June 21, 2013 |
Like Eazy E, Douglas Martin has the last werdz. On 2011’s Watch the Throne — that year’s favorite hip-hop album of many a white person who only listens to (at most) three hip-hop albums in any given 365 — Kanye West co-starred with Jay-Z in an expensively produced piece about being self-made black men in […]
| Douglas Martin’s Dirty Shoes: In Defense of Dee Dee Dum | December 10, 2012 |
Douglas Martin ghostwrote Dee Dee King’s “Funky Man” It’s appropriate that Dee Dee Dum, head Dum Dum Girl and aesthetic inspiration for introverted, gothy kids the world over, named her 2012 EP End of Daze. There’s the obvious narrative of Kristen Gundred’s mother passing away and the feeling of living in a storm cloud while […]
| Douglas Martin’s Dirty Shoes: The Graceful Aging of Sic Alps | September 20, 2012 |
Douglas Martin is to garage rock what water is to rave-ups. Start with the name. Sic Alps. “Sic” could mean “ill” as in “cool.” But it can also just be improper spelling. Maybe that makes more sense considering they take 60s garage-rock and guitar-pop songs and intentionally disfigure them. Their instruments sounding like poorly functioning […]
Douglas Martin is back with scuffed Chucks. Now that we’ve reached the Age of Iceage, it appears Americans have uncovered a side of Northeast Europe most have been unaware of. After the Danish teens released my second-favorite record of 2011, we’ve experienced a wave of loud guitars and heavily accented English. With bands like Vår, […]
