10 Listens is a new-ish music review website co-founded by Jeff Laughlin (you can read his non-music blogs here and here, or listen to his band Beards here), an old friend from my Greensboro days.  The premise: provide the world with culturally-situated, opinion-based reviews of new albums by listening to an album ten times in a variety of settings.

As a reader both enamored and repulsed by the heavy-hitters in the music review blogosphere (the pitchforks of the world), I decided to check-in and see what 10 Listens had to offer.  I found that I liked their approach toward criticism, their awareness of the music blog as a genre, and the honesty and closeness that each reviewer felt toward a particular album after ten careful listens.

So when I saw the site come through my twitter feed with a call for more writers, well, applying for the position seemed like a smart thing to do.  Plus, it seemed like a good way to get back into writing about music and checking out some new bands and new albums that would otherwise fly under my radar.  During my few years in Greensboro, NC I had a radio show at WUAG and one of the highlights of the job was writing quick-and-dirty new music reviews to tape to the back of the albums in the new rotation cabinet.  Some of my favorite albums were discovered in that new music box.

My first review for 10 Listens looks at Surprises’ debut album All Dressed Up And Nowhere To Die, the solo output of Brooks Paschal, a former Greensboro, NC resident and former member of the band Sullivan.

You can read the the full review here, and take a peak at my “first listen” response here.  Should you be interested in checking out Surprises, you can sample songs and even purchase the album with a pay-what-you-want method here.  Enjoy.