Douglas Martin was a groomsman at Andy Samberg’s wedding. Where were you the first time you heard the word twee? Back in the glory days of AOL Instant Messenger, I was chatting up a friend when during our conversation, his older sister told him she wanted to listen to something with trumpets. After a few […]

Douglas Martin stays trippy. It’s a question that hasn’t been raised with any sort of deep thought, even in the garage-punk circles of Ye Olde Internet. Which of the million bands John Dwyer has been in is the greatest? It’s because everybody knows the answer: Thee Oh Sees would stand to win that vote by […]

Douglas Martin was made to realise. Fate didn’t choose me. I could have seen My Bloody Valentine’s first Seattle date in god-knows-however-many years. I could have flown to another city to see them. But the cosmos clipped my chances at every curve, until a few months ago when a friend excitedly texted me in all-caps […]

Like Eazy E, Douglas Martin has the last werdz. On 2011’s Watch the Throne — that year’s favorite hip-hop album of many a white person who only listens to (at most) three hip-hop albums in any given 365 — Kanye West co-starred with Jay-Z in an expensively produced piece about being self-made black men in […]

Let me give what you hint what Douglas Martin’s album of the year might be. “C’mon, Stimmung” may very well be the most art-punk song title a band has decided to use in a long time. Coming off a lengthy hiatus, No Age’s first single in three years uses a title either derived from a […]

Douglas Martin is a pioneer of modern National Basketball Association fashion. For this piece, I was considering a long-ass intro, detailing the dearth of Dirty Shoes this year. I could claim to have taken a mental health day — er, half-year, but that’s not the whole truth. I could claim that I was busy getting […]

Douglas Martin’s church ain’t got enough room for all the tombs. King Tuff was already dead and reborn before most people even heard of him. By the time he released his pretty widely-acclaimed self-titled record, Kyle Thomas had already been in a million bands, including the one he formed while the ink was still drying […]

Douglas Martin is a Tweener in the NBA swingman sense. After a life spent listening to people talking about how the generation coming up after them is going to ruin the world, I’ve found myself saying the exact same thing with startling frequency. What would any reasonable person think about Justin Bieber spitting at his […]

You got bigger while Douglas Martin was away. If any song from last year deserves the rare Dirty Shoes Late Pass, it’s one that can pack this much into its lean two minutes and forty-eight seconds. The first single from 2011’s outstanding self-titled record, Austin duo Deep Time conjures the spirit of early-80’s Glasgow post-punk […]

Douglas Martin is Archbishop of the beach. It takes a true gift to be highly skilled but still seem lazy, which was the big draw of Beach Fossils’ 2010 self-titled debut. Dustin Payseur studied the intricate arrangements of jazz and classical and crafted them into a leisurely rooftop party. While each guitar and bass line […]