For today, you can call Douglas Martin, Ishmael. Within the first minute of Black Up, Ishmael Butler conjures an incredibly loaded image. “I cried with Mooch at Papi’s wake / Snuck an extra slice of cake / When the pigs came ‘round to make they case / I looked them dead up in they face […]

Douglas Martin prefers sourdough bread above all. In my Pitchfork review of his cover of GG Allin’s “Don’t Talk to Me,” I referred to Ty Segall as “the heir apparent to the garage-punk throne.” Others have called him “the next Jay Reatard”. Due for a crossover. A major crossover. A Kurt Cobain-like crossover? C’mon. But […]

Douglas Martin keeps ’em laced in the illa snakes. Psychedelic Horseshit’s name is instantly recognizable among the lo-fi horde, but for all the wrong reasons. Psychedelic Horseshit jokingly created the rather abhorrent term “shitgaze,” one used to describe scuzzy-as-fuck-but-otherwise-great bands like Times New Viking and Eat Skull. Psychedelic Horseshit is far more famous for this […]

Douglas Martin is still waiting for Women and Wolf Parade to return, but Woods’ are helping palliate his sorrows. Nobody would have faulted Woods for taking a break. The Brooklyn band– whose Jeremy Earl runs frighteningly consistent indie label Woodsist, whose Jarvis Taveniere runs Rear House Studios, whose Kevin Norby plays in a number of […]

Douglas Martin’s favorite monster is Mumm-Ra. Unless you live around the corner from me in Seattle– where highs have been in the upper-50’s all week and I saw a girl justifiably wearing a hooded parka yesterday– summer is right around the corner. Which means baseball day games, watermelon wheat beer (trust me, it’s delicious), and […]

Why yes, that was Douglas Martin at the Slut Walk ’11. Like most all-woman rock bands, the Atlanta quartet has had to withstand some incredibly sexist shit being pelted at them since their inception a little over four years ago. They’ve been derided as shit-stirrers instead of actual musicians, while their a-alike male counterparts are […]

Douglas Martin has never even been to Arabia. The production services of Mark Ronson usually only attract two types of artists: arrivistes attempting to break into the alternative mainstream, and established artists looking for a little indie cred. This is an approach that has worked extremely well for Ronson, as he gets to enjoy the […]

Douglas Martin will accept an all-expenses paid trip to lovely Bloomington. I assure you that Bloomington, Indiana is a nice place. The city is home to the Secretly Canadian Music Group (which includes Secretly and equally-unfuckwithable labels JagJaguwar and Dead Oceans), the campus of Indiana University has an unexpected and refreshing lack of broken chairs, […]

Douglas Martin prefers Simon Belmont to Simon Le Bon. A small list of things that I have either done or have had done to me during the five times I’ve caught a live set from Thee Oh Sees: 1. Stopped a renegade monitor from flying into Mike Shoun’s drum kit. 2. Saved two girls from […]

If you need Douglas Martin, he’ll be flossin’ in Austin. Chad VanGaalen could feasibly be referred to as indie rock’s foremost genre shapeshifter– a distinction that would be pretty cool if he weren’t as frustratingly uneven and easily  capable of hopscotching between styles of music. For every genuinely terrific number the songwriter/producer/multi-instrumentalist/visual artist has written […]