I feel like I've been wasting my time hating on all this other stuff my entire life up until now, never really knowing what truly despising music meant. I honestly didn't know what to say, so I asked a few of my music writer colleagues to weigh-in.

“It's like the Olympics,” said David Thorpe, the man who inflicted this video upon me, “There are new world records for how bad shit can get every year.”

“Whoa. I feel like crying just because I have no other way of coping with this,” Noisey's own Sasha Hecht said....more

“Leave Her Alone” is the standout here — perhaps the most instantly likable local song in recent memory — with a vengeful minimalism that feels sunny but sinister, like a drained Hollywood pool creeping with overgrown moss. “Horoscope” builds from their typical pose of shambling, accidental musicality (“Oh, was I just playing that guitar solo? Whatever”) into something scorchingly spooky....more

Earlier this week in a New York Times profile about Paul Ryan, blue-eyed, empty-hearted, has-to-lose Vice Presidential candidate, they wrote about his paradoxical affinity for lefty rockers Rage Against the Machine, a revelation which, in this idiotic political landscape, probably counts as reportorial due diligence....more

Lady Gaga was “departing her hotel in Bucharest, Romania,” begins the description of this video, apparently written by Gaga’s lawyer, or else someone not too clear on how “meanings” of “words” work, when “suddenly a fan attacks her.” [emphasis mine]. There was less physical harm implied in this interaction than in that (fake) bitchy letter she got from Ke$ha the other day....more

One Direction took time out of their busy schedule of teenagering around the world, psychically manipulating panties into knots with their barely-mustachioed warbling to record a cover of the beloved Brit-pop classic. How did they fare? Well, it certainly exists, that much we can say. No one denying that fact as far as I can tell. Couple of guys sang a song here, little bit of guitar, waves crashing on the beach, and then we watched it. They can never take any of that away from us, no sir....more

You’ll hear plenty of DJs dropping dubstep into their sets around the city (more still complaining about the ones who do), but not quite as many producing it themselves of late. Which is why “Promise Me,” the standout among a series of singles released this year by the Boston-area production duo and DJ team Butlertron is such a welcome change of pace. Mostly because it’s not awful — no easy feat these days.

The track, produced by Mike Short of Stoneham and Mike Bell of Melrose, isn’t quite so simple to classify, however. While it throbs and surges with peaks and valleys of bass static, it veers off into chippy synth runs that sound pulled from a frantically side-scrolling 8-bit adventure game before exploding with ascending house chords. The package is rounded off with a sultry but minimal vocal track that places it squarely on the popular side of the line drawn between snooty chin-strokers and those aiming for the throb of packed dance floor....more

With all of the very serious attention paid to very serious cocktails in the past few years by very serious bartenders, it can be easy to forget that drinking is meant to be fun. Kirsten Amann hasn’t forgotten. Her new book, “The Screaming Orgasm, 69 X-Rated Cocktails,” is a trip through an array of sexy tipples. You may not see them ordered regularly in Boston’s craft cocktail bars, but their names, and easily-drinkable recipes, make them well-suited to romance....more

Timing is everything when it comes to enjoying a bar, for both good and bad. For example, you might choose an ideal, dry summer evening with a breeze coming off the water to sit at the cozy and cute Alley Bar at Rowes Wharf (not to be confused with the gay dive bar of the same name). But then again, it might also be out of key ingredients in its two  signature cocktails, in this case cranberry shrub and muddled cilantro. The fact that it even has either in its repertoire is an encouraging sign, however, because this bar, literally in an alley adjacent to the Boston Harbor Hotel at Rowes Wharf, could very easily have been a touristy joke. It's mostly not....more

Today's punk and hardcore landscape is glaringly different than it once was, Nanna says, particularly now that the Warped Tour has presented kids with such a glut of bands from which to choose. He and co-vocalist/guitarist Chris Broach performed an acoustic set at the Chicago date of the festival earlier this summer, where Braid drummer Damon Atkinson is a production manager of the tour. "My God, there are so many bands, honestly 90 percent I had never heard of," Nanna says. "I catch glimpses of their stages, and kids are going nuts. It's awesome, but it's weird. At one point you're envious that these kids have access to all of this music, what they think is awesome — what I think of it doesn't matter — but all this music they like."....more

3OH!3, Boulder, Colorado’s most demographically palatable, maybe-kidding, hit-making, electro duo, aka LMFAO beta, have released a new video from their upcoming 4th (that can’t be right can it?) record Omens. The video for the song “You’re Gonna Love This,” which isn’t necessarily the most accurate title ever, finds the boys ‘living it up’ in Vegas and one-upping each other with a series of escalating show-off moves like that were, like the group themselves, and Vegas for that matter, so surprisingly popular a couple of years ago. One of the signature shots involves tossing casino chips into people’s drinks, which, and I haven’t tried it in a while myself, isn’t the best way to get the attention of a young lady at the bar. Maybe my #SWAG was on low that day?....more