Static Multimedia has posted my April 2006 edition of Recycled Goods. They've come up with a new layout where the actual content is squeezed into small type in a tiny middle column, mostly by the 300-pixel Cingular ad in the right column. The effect is that once you get past the links and ads all you see is a ribbon of small black type against a huge white background, and the ribbon goes on and on, narrowing further in the Briefly Noted. Also annoying is that they left my name off, although I expect that at least will be fixed before long. This is one of those things that makes me wonder how good a vehicle Static is for my column.

I've worked with Static since 2003. Originally I was courted by Michael Tatum, music editor at the time. He had initially gotten in touch to help out on the Robert Christgau website. I saw it as an opportunity to do something I had long wanted to do: a reissues consumer guide. I first tuned into popular music in the early '60s, but didn't take it very seriously until around 1973-75 when I started writing rock crit. I stopped around 1980, but kept up with new stuff more or less well. The less well period was in the early '90s, the grunge and gangsta period, when I found it much more interesting to dig back into the older music I had missed. My command of jazz and pre-1960 country, blues, and r&b largely dates from the mid-'90s, when I scoured record guides and made a serious effort to listen to all of it. The column let me use what I had learned, plus push it some more. This month's column is the 30th in the series, covering 1254 albums. In addition to whatever Static has managed to preserve, the columns are available on my website. This month I've split up the two index files, one for artists, the other for compilations. A project that always seems to slip further into the future is to collate these reviews over at Terminal Zone.