Metronomic Underground: About

Welcome to Metronomic Underground! This website is written by Patti Vacek (she/her), a musician and an avid music fan. It began in 2007 with a focus on the live concerts I attended. I also intermittently review albums, songs, and music-related books and films. On rare occasion, I write essays.

I currently live in Berlin, Germany. When I started writing, I was a student living in St. Louis, Missouri. I have also spent some time in Austin, Texas, and a few other places in the USA and Germany. It should also be no surprise that my tastes have grown over the years, but some genres and bands I like are:

Shoegaze and dream pop: Cocteau Twins, Beach House, Slowdive, Kitchens of Distinction, Pale Blue Eyes, Lightning Bug, Dummy
Post- and experimental rock: Stereolab, Godspeed You! Black Emperor, Electrelane, Mogwai, Einstürzende Neubauten, A Sunny Day in Glasgow
Kosmische Musik and "Krautrock": Harmonia, Neu!, Can, Agitation Free, Ash Ra Tempel
Post-punk and new wave: The Cure, The Chameleons, Bauhaus, Siouxsie & the Banshees, The Smiths

Of course plenty of artists don't fit neatly into these or other labels. Some more recent favorites are Nala Sinephro, Cremant Ding Dong, Chappell Roan, The Last Dinner Party, International Music, Nation of Language, and Die Heiterkeit.

Most of my reviews feature a score in the form of a letter grade, which is provided to offer a rough assessment of my interpretation of the relative quality of a given recording, performance, etc. These should not be taken too seriously. The key is that C means average, decent, respectable, mildly entertaining, not bad but not my thing, whatever. B means good or above average, and A means transcendent, excellent, exceeding any expectations. A+ means that I cannot conceive of how something could be better. (I don't give that score often.) D is for disappointing or disinterested, and F is for failure. I don't give many D or F scores because I try to avoid bad music. You will probably see more high scores than low simply because I prefer to write about things I like. To counteract that, I try to grade even my favorite bands quite strictly. That means that a C is not bad and should not be viewed as a negative score!

Here are some of my favorite posts: