Tuesday, January 31, 2006

Music to blog by

Music bloggers do us all a great service - they go to all the gigs we can't and listen to all the new bands, helping us pre-sort out the wheat from the chaff with a minimum of music journalist badditude. And in most cases, they're not getting anything out of it - no money, no "reputation", just the knowledge that they are harnessing their obsessive enthusiasm about music for the power of good.

As you'd expect, the Manchester area's home to several excellent music bloggers. Phil Thompson created Bloodshot Dawn out of a desire to spread the word about good music overlooked by most DJs. Artists featured lately in BD's album reviews, gig reviews and concert news include Sufjan Stevens, Belle and Sebastian and the Arctic Monkeys.

Formerly known as the Ledge on the Edge, The Indie Crediential is written by Rick (The Ledge) and Mindy (justHipper), a Salford couple who go to 40-50 gigs a year, plus the odd festival. That's a lot of live music. The most recent is a review of the Secret Machines gig last week. Rick writes: The site is due a redesign as soon as I've finished reading my Eric Meyer books, and the content will be beefed up with extra cd reviews and commentary as well as regular mp3s. Cool.

Others don't blog exclusively about music, but feature it prominently in their blog posts. Girl on a Train posts lists of songs she listened to that day. Crinklybee is doing a series of posts about his old 45s, and 3 degrees of noise often posts about bands. Check them out.

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