If you've picked up the new issue of
Maxim, you may have flipped past a review of the Black Crowes' forthcoming album
Warpaint. In the 75 or so words allotted to him writer David Peisner spends half his time talking about the Crowes' 1990 debut album before passing his final judgment, writing off the record as being "boozy, competent, and in slavish tribute to the Stones, the Allmans, and the Faces." The graphical representation of Peisner's review: Two and a half filled circles out of five. Which wouldn't be so bad except for one thing: Peisner never heard the album because the Black Crowes' label, Megaforce, didn't release advances of it to critics. Someone at the label got in touch with
Maxim, and the person there in charge of editing the mag's music coverage said that the writeup, stars and all, was actually an "educated-guess preview" and hey, wasn't it better than no coverage at all?
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Idolator
Not that I expect the lumbering newsmagazine Time to be cutting-edge or anything, but its oddly timed package "The Songs Of Summer 2008" sure does provide an argument in favor of the microcriticism service Blippr. The list, which is presented in the time-honored "listicle spread out over ten separate Web pages so as to maximize clicking" form, basically collects 10 songs that have nothing in common except for their having been played on commercial radio sometime this year. (Maybe even as early as February!) You'd think that a publication that fancied itself to be Web-savvy would have been all over some of these songs by now, but apparently Time's overlords need a few more day-late, dollar-short, annoyingly designed packages before they rethink their online culture strategy for the 48,627th time in the magazine's online existence. The mag's list of top songs after the jump.
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The New York Daily News' gossip column would like to remind you that Kurt Cobain, now 14 years passed, didn't like Axl Rose. While this information 
