THE RETURN

Yes, it's true!

After a year of not really doing anything with The Inarguable, I've decided I should probably bring it back. A few people have asked me to write for their publications (by the way, thank you!), and, while flattering, I didn't feel the same kind of motivation as when I just wrote for myself. I figured abandoning music review stuff would help me concentrate on getting my life on track. You know, moving out of my parents' basement, recording more of my own music, finding a steady job/getting into grad school. Welp, aside from putting out a few new Footpaths releases and going on a mini-tour with a certain spooky death metal band, 2014 has proven itself to be kind of fruitless, and I figured, "Well, Jon, you seem to be in the same place you were at this time a year ago. Why not bring your hobby back to pass the time?"

And I am!

THE STIPULATIONS:

Updates will not be regular (not like they were, anyway). The biggest mistake I made was taking on too many things at once, which really killed my motivation and enthusiasm. This isn't a chore, it's a hobby! I mean, I'm just blogging!

I'm just going to do this by myself. Yes, at any given point I had an ever-changing staff of underlings beneath me, and managing them wasn't the greatest thing ever. The leak of the latest Gris album, which was at the hand of one of my former staff who has yet to reveal himself (meaning, as bossman, I had to take the blame), was really the last nail in the coffin. If there is going to be a mistake as severe and stupid as that, I'd rather know it was my fault as opposed to covering for someone who knowingly did not follow the rules and carelessly discredited me. I've already made my apologies to the label and its representation, but that will always be a black mark on my reliability. No more.

I'm just going to review what I want. Quite a few websites seem to thrive on page views and ego thrusting based on reviewing the big and popular thing. Yeah, it's nice to see a published review in which you agree with the reviewer, but does it really matter? Eh. If I feel the need to say anything publicly and in long-form, it will be here. Yes, even negative reviews, on which I didn't really concentrate in the slightest during my first run here. Recommendations are welcome, but requests will likely be ignored (unless you're really convincing).

It's not about me. I see a lot of music websites using their reviews to justify their music tastes and elevate themselves to some higher plane of "objective music taste elitism," and that's not cool. Music reviews are about the music and the writer's experience with it, not an explanation as to why the writer is an elite being who is the be-all-end-all objective opinion overlord. It's all subjective, but it's also fun to write about stuff. It's a hobby, not masturbation, after all. Most of the population doesn't even care about black metal, anyway.

So there it is. I probably sound like a huge douche, but hey...I'm doing something again!

-Jon