Welcome to xoxobra!

I'll start by getting this out of the way. It's pronounced "zo - zo - bruh"; zozobra as in "old man gloom", or that mythical creature that is burned in a festival every year in Santa Fe, New Mexico. According to the event website:

"Zozobra is a hideous but harmless fifty-foot bogeyman marionette. He is a toothless, empty-headed facade. He has no guts and doesn't have a leg to stand on. He is full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. He never wins. He moans and groans, rolls his eyes and twists his head. His mouth gapes and chomps. His arms flail about in frustration. Every year we do him in. We string him up and burn him down in ablaze of fireworks. At last, he is gone, taking with him all our troubles for another whole year."

Um...neat! Perhaps the name is more familiar to some of us as that band that's signed to HydraHead Records. But nah, this blog isn't affiliated with any of that nor is there any reason why it's named what it is other than the fact that I liked the word and decided to use it and gave it a cute alternative spelling.

That being said: welcome to xoxobra! I've had the idea for this blog in mind for a while, and after over a year of fleshing out the concept in my head, designing the look, and just general procrastination, I present it to you. So what is xoxobra? The simple answer is that it's a music blog, and for the most part that would be an accurate way to put it. I originally wanted to create it so that I could write about underground, esoteric music and my opinions on music related topics, and have them in a place where I could pretend that people cared what I thought. As time goes on, though, I imagine it becoming much more than that. My ambitions for what I want this blog to be range from doable to impossible, and it was those ambitions that led to this project being delayed for so long, until I finally decided that if I didn't start it soon in some fashion then I probably never would. So here we are. Only time will tell if it ever becomes what I want it to become, but we shall see.

The main thing I should make clear is that I AM NOT a music journalist. I don't claim to be a skilled writer with formal training and the experience to offer an authoritative voice on the subject. There are enough of those out there and many of them are a lot better at describing and giving you an objective opinion on a piece of music than I am. I'm just a guy who likes music and likes writing an opinion about it, which isn't exactly the same thing. The music featured on this blog is music that I have sought out and (probably) paid for, so naturally, it's music that I'm interested in and not music that I feel obligated to feature. This is not a place for professional reviews of new releases written by dudes who can describe guitar sounds accurately without looking them up on the internet first, and I ain't one of those dudes.

So now that the introduction is out of the way, I'll make way for actual content!....soon. Thanks for reading. I hope you'll occasionally continue to do so in the future.