Hello and welcome to that thing that’ll “change the way you read Stylus forever”. Why? Well, the essential problem with music criticism is the fact that you have trust, implicitly, the writer that you’re reading to be able to accurately describe the music that they’re critiquing. At that point, you have to go out, take a chance and purchase the music that they’re talking about and hope that the music translates to what you’ve read.

Not anymore. It’s become standard practice for a number of music writers to present the music that they’re writing about on what are being called mp3 blogs. Featured in both the New York Times (here, kind of) and on NPR (here and here), we at Stylus figured it was about time to enter the game ourselves.

So, in the coming weeks we’ll be featuring five tracks each Monday morning for your aural enjoyment in two different formats: writer curators and feature tie-ins. The former will be exactly as it sounds: a writer from the site will take control of the blog for a week and post the songs that they feel may have passed you by the first time they were talked about on the site, songs that they’re planning on talking about in the future or songs that they were turned on to themselves by reading the site. The latter, as you’ll see in our opening post, is a tie-in to an upcoming, current or past feature that we’ve run on the site that would benefit from a few samples to whet your appetite more towards hearing the full releases.

In each case, though, the aim is the same: to talk about the music that we love and to turn you onto it further. And, if we aren’t enough for you, we recommend hitting up some of our links on the left-hand side. Enjoy!