by SHANE SINNOTT

It’s impossible to read anything close to a representative amount of music blogs—all you can do is watch Hype Machine (hypem.com) or Elbows (elbo.ws) to get a sense of what they are posting, MP3-wise. And what they are posting, more often than not, are the upcoming records being promoted most heavily by the better promoters. Most of them offer nothing in the way of interesting writing, and one would be hard pressed to say they serve any useful non-promotion-related purpose.

I was pleased, then, to discover This Is Not Pitchfork (thisisnotpitchfork.com), a blog started last December that is one person’s attempt to review her entire music collection amassed over the past three decades and change.

I know, writing about music and putting “Pitchfork” in your name is a good way to get hits to your Web site, but this seems serious. Blogger Michele Catanalo’s story follows a familiar arc—“A long time ago, I wanted to be a music critic. I wanted to write for Creem or Rolling Stone,” she writes. Of course, she tried it and didn’t like it. “I didn’t want to be a critic. I wanted to write about music.” So she’s now attempting to “relive” her music collection rather than review it. The entries are short and anecdotal, usually chosen using suggestions that readers send in. A typical one, for Some Girls by the Rolling Stones, begins, “May, 1978. I was sitting outside the Mini Cinema in Uniondale, NY, probably waiting for the afternoon showing of Rocky Horror. We had a little portable radio with us, tuned to the local rock station and they were about to play the new Rolling Stones song...“ You get this idea.

As for something to download, there’s an rare Beastie Boys track floating around, from a seven-inch included with some copies of the reissued Check Your Head, called “Lee Majors Come Again,” which can get at tinyurl.com/cux4kt, along with an Animal Collective mash-up.