Remove
Month: August 2016

Interview: Bayside

Bayside
Craig Ismaili

Bayside have steadily become one of the preeminent forces in alternative music by simply being themselves throughout their entire career. The band has a unique sense of self which displays itself every time they release new music. The band’s seventh full-length record, Vacancy, just dropped last week, and to celebrate, they hit the road with some incredible bands supporting them: The Menzingers and Sorority Noise. I’ll have more on that tour a little later this week, but for now, enjoy my conversation with Anthony Raneri and Nick Ghanbarian about managing fan expectations, what they feel their responsibility is as a band with a platform, and how you continue to write the most honest music of your career seven albums deep.

Read More “Bayside”

Review: Sianvar – Stay Lost

Sianvar - Stay Lost
Zac Djamoos

Knowing the members of Sianvar, the quality of their work should never have been up for debate. Featuring members of Dance Gavin Dance, A Lot Like Birds, Hail the Sun, and Stolas, the lineup is a veritable who’s-who of modern progressive rock. It was never a secret that Sianvar was made up of talented members, but I don’t know if anyone expected the group’s debut full-length to sound as good as it does. Stay Lost almost makes the members’ previous outings look like warm ups.

Read More “Sianvar – Stay Lost”

Remove

Blonde Bombshell

Jason Tate

A great takedown of the insufferable Bob Lefsetz from Nick Heer at Pixel Envy:

The gist of Lefsetz’s piece is that the exclusive-to-Apple Music release of “Blonde” is, somehow, the canary in the coal mine of the music industry. That its exclusivity is, somehow, a symptom of a music industry that doesn’t know how to build a fanbase and is, instead, spitting in the face of everyone from committed fans to casual listeners.

But, for some reason, Lefsetz is only angered now by the release of Frank Ocean’s record on Apple’s platforms.

Mylan’s EpiPen Price Gouging

Science
Jason Tate

Matt Novak, writing for Gizmodo:

EpiPen, the life-saving allergy product, is now a $1 billion a year business for Mylan, a drug company that’s currently enduring a wave of bad publicity over the extraordinary surge in EpiPen pricing. In 2007, an EpiPen cost about $57. Today that price has skyrocketed to over $600 — all for about $1 worth of injectable medicine.

EpiPen is an emergency medication that’s stabbed into a person experiencing anaphylactic shock, a life-threatening allergic reaction that can be triggered by anything from bee stings to food. I’ve never used an EpiPen, but as someone with a peanut allergy who once made his own trip to the ER after a particularly unfortunate restaurant experience (“these Chinese beans sure are crunchy…”) I can tell you that anaphylactic shock is really no fun.

This is such bullshit.

Remove

The Public Option

Vox
Jason Tate

Jacob S. Hacker, writing for Vox:

Since the early 2000s, I had been calling for letting the public sector compete with private insurers to sign up people younger than 65: not “Medicare for all,” a dream of the left for decades, but “Medicare for more,” a public insurance plan for working-age people that could compete with private insurers and use its bargaining power to push back against drugmakers, medical device manufacturers, hospital systems, and other health care providers.

I’ve long been a proponet of the public option and this article does a great job of laying out the argument why.

Remove
Remove