Mitch Therieau

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Articles

In Big Star’s “Radio City,” the Old Spells Don’t Work

Dec 27, 2024 | newyorker.com | Mitch Therieau

If they had left it there, Big Star would perhaps go down in rock history as a piece of trivia, a band whose consuming misfortune somehow yielded a single, impossibly beautiful record.
A Business Doing Pleasure With You: On Becca Rothfeld's "All Things Are Too Small" — Cleveland Review of Books

Dec 10, 2024 | clereviewofbooks.com | Mitch Therieau

There are nefarious forces at work in the sphere of taste. Dislike and possibly judgment itself have been outlawed. Phalanxes of stans stand ready to dox critics and unbelievers. Haters are held at post-point until they recite, and believe, that article of anti-critical faith: “Shhh.
Does the AAUP Know What It Means?

Sep 16, 2024 | chronicle.com | Jacob N. Shapiro |Sean Norton |Mitch Therieau |Len Gutkin

The AAUP’s recent reversal of its longstanding opposition — formalized in 2006 — to academic boycotts has occasioned a great deal of debate, including dueling opinion essays in our pages by Cary Nelson and Joan W. Scott. But the practical consequences of the change in policy remain to be seen. Should we anticipate an explosion of academic-boycott activity in the coming year? What, exactly, does the AAUP’s new policy permit?
Can Criticism Still Be a Career?

Sep 11, 2024 | chronicle.com | Mitch Therieau |Ph.D. candidate

The climax of What Nails It, the music critic Greil Marcus’s new book, is a letdown. As Marcus recounts it, on his last day of high school, he went to the movie theater to see The Pirates of Blood River, which promised thrills but turned out to be a piece of forgettable dreck. “The Park Theatre in Menlo Park was jammed with students,” Marcus writes,most of them graduating and a lot of them drunk.
Fucked Up: Another Day

Aug 12, 2024 | pitchfork.com | Mitch Therieau

Fucked Up makes music under the sign of more. Within its prolific output, the Toronto band has made hardcore both denser—piling on tightly orchestrated guitar overdubs—and more distended, stretching out their ideas over baroque, hour-plus albums and a sprawling EP series based on the Chinese zodiac. In recent years, though, the band has been experimenting with less.
In Defense Of That Whole Weird ’90s Rock Marble-Mouthed Thing

May 29, 2024 | defector.com | Mitch Therieau

I am, I suppose, a latter-day Millennial, which means that my peers grew up calling themselves “'90s kids,” even though we were only alive for half of the actual '90s, years which largely passed for us in an indiscriminate blur of sensory impressions: the taste of pesto, the smell of CK One, the sound of Rob Thomas’s voice.
Imitation of War

Feb 16, 2024 | newsbreak.com | Mitch Therieau

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Itasca: Imitation of War

Feb 16, 2024 | pitchfork.com | Mitch Therieau

Some people play the guitar like they want to caress it; some play like they want to destroy it. Kayla Cohen, who has been recording under the moniker Itasca for around a decade, handles the guitar like she is feeling her way through a lucid dream, cutting through the fog with bright, exploratory lines. Imitation of War, her first release in more than four years, makes the searching motion of her playing its motivating principle.
Dan Sinykin’s history of corporate fiction

Feb 6, 2024 | bookforum.com | Mitch Therieau

Dan Sinykin’s history of corporate fiction Big Fiction: How Conglomeration Changed the Publishing Industry and American Literature BY DAN SINYKIN. NEW YORK: COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS. 328 PAGES. $30. Purchase this book: Bookshop • Amazon WHAT IS AN AUTHOR? A conduit for the divine or a poor schlub combining and recombining stale units of meaning? Both answers share the assumption that a literary work is the product of one consciousness.
The Mountain Goats: Jenny From Thebes

Nov 1, 2023 | pitchfork.com | Mitch Therieau

Few working artists have accumulated a richer body of lore than the Mountain Goats. Across a vast catalog spanning more than 30 years, John Darnielle has developed a mythology with enough recurring characters and references to fill its own Wiki and support a number of dedicated blogs and podcasts. The Sophoclean title of new album Jenny From Thebes announces it as a continuation of the myth cycle.