Sometimes its in the name. Shouldn't a band called Spooky Tooth from the late Sixties and rolling into the Seventies be worth listening to. This has a yearning. imperious flow and drag to it that makes you yearn for the times. There's something slightly messianic about the whole record which is gripping frankly. Spooky Tooth were from Carlisle which is also greatly commendable and they put out albums on Island and were produced by Jimmy Miller which are also badges of quality. This is incredibly soulful and engaging.
Alex Winter and Geese seem to be connecting with a lot of people right now. Further evidence if needed on Late To Set. He walks down the less trodden road.
Slayyter's Wor$t Girl In America it would seem reasonable to conclude is not a record that is aimed at the likes of me. I am not its natural constituency.It's not in mine. I can't remember the last time I was on a dancefloor. I am heading North from my base at 60. Nevertheless. I've listened to it a fair bit over the last few days. I quite like it, It's got sass.
This will do me for today ! Bring It On is reminiscent of a certain perspective and way of going about life. It was the end of the Nineties and Brit Pop had curdled. Lock Stock & Two Smoking Barrels had come out. Hot on the heels of The Big Lebowski.
Bring it On came out in April 1998 on the still cool Hut Label. It won the Mercury Music Prize beating Mezzanine and Urban Hymns, (a sign of very strong days) and Gomez toured the UK with Embrace who were like Oasis meets The Verve for those who needed more of the same.
I was very, very partial and played it on loop. I'm playing it on loop again today. I had it on CD but don't on vinyl. I might need to amend that. The draw of the album is I'd say sheer enjoyability. It's not a record which takes itself seriously on any level. It says something about friendship and love of music. That's enough.
i Iike a record with a liminal space dimmension and an intriguing sobriquet. So Windy & Carl Meet Optigan Conservatory delivers on several fronts. A leading light apparently in the Michigan Space Rock scene of the nineties they've prevailed and moved on to calmer, if slightly eerier waters. This is one I find I keep coming back to....
Rufus Wainwright makes me feel like I'm waking up in New York. It's the sweep. The romance. The ambition. And extravagance. Want One gives you the sense that you're heading down Broadway for a lunchrime date, It's the stuff of dreams
Sitting on a big oak tree. Yellow and green. At the age of nineteen. We've all been there. And perhaps aren't anymore. But that doesn't seem to matter or impact on the basic emotion. The feeling of being alive. It's certainly a long time in the other place. Lethe. The river of forgetfulness.
In the meantime there are worse places I might direct you than to Slow Pulp's Melodie. It's the stuff of uncertain Independent American dreaming.That will do for today. And tomorrow I imagine.
There are a series of titles with the Jazz and Soul late and greats entitled 'At The Montreux Jazz Festival' ; Ella Fitzgerald, Dizzy Gillespie. Nina Simone, David Bowie . Take your pick. Tonight I'm listening to Bill Evans. The drummer is a bit too fiddly and wired too close to the recording mic for my comfort and this becomes an irritant but otherwise everything is just precisely in place. Bill Evans knows...
'Long drive to Reno. Blasting too hard to tell. This is the worst year of my life but so far it's gone pretty well.'
Des Moines, Iowa. An album called Shark River. A guy who calls himself Wormy. As good a way to work my way from lessons two to three on a January morning halfway through the month.
This is all American endeavor. Phosphorence comes to mind but there's less heat rising off the headphones, more confusion in the wire. Wormy doesn't seem to have so much under his bely . This is a great place to start.
Not what I listened to 25 years back and not really what I listen to now. I can appreciate the artistry and admire the innovation but frankly the listening experience leaves me cold.
'Double, double toil and trouble. Fire burn and cauldron bubble.'
Roomer's Staircase Made of Rope. A trio based in Berlin weaving the kind of sound that Melody Maker writers would have frothed over in the early Nineties. Slowcore meets Shoegaze and ignites the night, Ronja Schosser, Ludwig Wandinger and Luka Aron launch a startling and haunting second album that thickens and gathers with every moment like Sleeping Beauty's enchanted kingdom. Memory and melody.
There's something comfortingly familiar about the record but something that's startlingly brave too. It reminded me of Hugo Largo which is always a good thing. They're touring Europe in October. Make a date with the night.
* Thanks again as ever to Darren Jones, best friend of this blog. You've come up trumps here Starbuck and no mistake!!!
I've never listened to a James Blake album before. I went into this largely blind . I was very taken . It reminded me of Antony & The Johnsons in some respects, It was unworldly and disorienting, Ultimately comforting.
Listening to a record like Anita, Anita O Days debut album can teach you a lot . A lot about the world and the way it was. A lot about the world and the way it is. It was an album that was released in March 1956 and listening to it makes you wasnt to go back there right now as if everything that has happened since has somehow been an awful abberation.
This is well into O'Days career but is a new road for her as she's just signed for the newly established Verve Record label and finds her heading out on her own properly. Anita was recorded over three sessions in 1955 and places itself exquisitely between Jazz and Pop. It's full of standards but sounds like you're hearing them for the first time frankly. The settings are pure gold
Beautiful things happen every day. If you have your eyes and ears open. Today The Bird Calls album Take Leave. Resonant melodic Indie Folk with good tunes and wonderful lyrics. Out of New York City. That will more than do me on a Friday afternoon.
An album that sets off as if you're heading in to My Sweet Lord then proceeds with a song called Mohammed and another called Nietzsche. This was the Dandy Warhols album I interacted with and I played my CD version of it a lot over the years. It feels like a CD to me rather than a record and I don't really feel the need to own it on vinyl.
It's a fine album with any number of fine songs and almost breathless ambition. It's a Rock & Roll record but it clearly harks back as is so often the case in our Janus facing culture. -Thirty Tales From Urban Bohemia was released over 26 years ago. The Strokes Is This It came out the following year. And in music terms you caould make a good case that we've been looking back pretty much ever since....
Team Dresch a Punk Queercore band from Olympia, Washington are back after a thirty year hiatus with Furthermore a robust streamlined album that sounds a bit like Fleetwood Mac morphing into Sleater Kinney.
There's plenty of choreographed mob chanting where it gets to the point that arms need to be punched skywards and the moshpit for the fifty somethings kicks into gear.
This is a punchy powerfully played record with the component instruments dropping like small explosions in an out of the mix, There is Comanche intent and reisilience to the bands stance. They've somewhat softened their line of attack over the attack but stayed consistent to their values.
* Disclaimer. The first track is nondescript. Please persevere. The record improves incrementally.
There's a copy of (Turn On ) The Music Machine by LA Band The Music Machine in Canterbury Rock at the other send of town and I think I'm going to go and buy it. It's the kind of record that cries out to be owned . Just the kind of thing I like; inspired misdirection. Teenage angst .' Social life's a dud. My name is really mud' in the name of the one song that people know. But theres; more than that. It's inspired Garage Flower Power.. So of it;s time. December 1966 heading into '67.
Each song goes in a different direction . Like the glorious times that gave it birth. It reminds me of the scene in The Graduate where Benjamin takes Elaine out for their first date and they end up at a Drive In where there's clearly A Riot Going On. It has a crazed cover of Taxman. It's by turns, ecstatic, trippy, completely disposable but charming.
Brooklyn Trans Rage. Iconoclastic confrontational and not a little knowing but highly listenable, disposable and ready for the spotlight in the queue heading back to Lou, Andy, The Dolls. And from there of course back to Oscar.
'Some people should be shot....; is intoned at a certain point. Adrian Borland is namechecked in standard Hipster fashion. Grease it seems is no longer the word. It's spirited and short and sweet in the extreme . Seven songs and twenty minutes. Blink or Blank and you miss it. But it's got Pitchfork's attention and deserves yours
I've always been slightly partial to My Morning Jacket without ever finding the album that hit my soft spot so I'm giving this a spin before I turn in. But I'm not initially entirely sold. They strike me as the kind of band Cameron Crowe would like which never completely does it for me. They don't ever quite make it up the slope and rub shoulders with the Allman's and The Band which strikes me as their aspiration. On this play Golden is the one which slip into top gear a turns into the fast lane and at this point the record notches into something special. Yup. Time to turn in.
Indie Folk Stalwarts Mountain Goats are nothing if not a set of safe hooves. Active since 1991 they've moved from their base in Calermont, California and are now based in North Carolina. Days is their twenty fourth album.
It works from a familiar foundation . They sing songs about the everyman. Are prone to concepts. Appreciate the funny and difficult ironies of life. Days is like a pair of shoes that you're not sure about when you first put them on in the store but which almost immediately themselves yourself to your contours and you realise that you were made for each other.
The essential characteristic of Days is its sagacity. It's Springsteen without the raised fist. It makes Life feel like a fairly nice idea.They vary the velocity and angle of their gentle approach. There's comfort and love and then Days is done, Life is sweet.
This is a series about coveting objects. But I think that urge and also the act of listening to music at all can go deeper. Depending on your choice it can be an urge of recovery, wanting to go back and recapture and reexperience the past and the way that you felt then and have felt every since. An almost primal urge.
The Langley School Music Project albumInnocence & Despairgive me that sense and drive more than any record I know. I don't own it and I'm not sure I need to but I find myself listening to it regularly and I find whenever I do. it triggers off a whole set of invaluable and incredibly resonant memories within me. I was growing up at the time these recordings were made so perhaps my reaction is understandable made and I share it with many,
Innocence & Despair is a set of recordings instigated and conducted by a Canadian music teacher Hans Fenger with students from four different Elementary Schools in the Langley Schools District on British Columbia Canada in the mid Seventies . The children are singing in a miked up school gym in Metro Vancouver covering songs by The Beach Boys, David Bowie, The Eagles and Paul McCartney and others. .
The resultsconsciously avoid the traditional associations of 'children's music' and focus on the elements of childhood that are dark, scary and spooky. Hence the title the album was given. There's a loneliness and longing in the recordings that frankly is quite extraordinary. There's a resonance here that I find quite incomparable. It captures an incredible painful longing. Hearing children singing of emotions they are experiencing and can't understand or will go on to experience and perhaps hearing these recordings will help them to come to tems with. But the fact that they're singing together gives them a sense of solidarity and strength.I hope so. It's a quite extraordinary document.
I was a late developer and certainly came late to The Velvet Underground. I was aware by fifteen that they were a cornerstone of where I was looking to go but mistakenly bought an oddly compiled compilation that gave me the impression that The Gift, I Heard Her Call My Name and Run, Run, Run were the esence of the band. The Velvets could be difficult but they're not always difficult.
I'm there now. They're probably the cornerstone for me now. The source of the river. So I'm more than ready for National Park's glorioua outside a selection of singles, EPs and previously unreleased tracks. National Park could only hail from Glasgow and they're an Indie supergroups of sorts. Players from The pastels , Telstar Ponies, Teenage Fanclub and other notables . They soud like erm the velvet Underground. And bands that sound like The Velvet Underground.It's a gentle, wild, fractured and intimate record. It's archival gold.
Neil Young has a new album out. Hold the front page. It's a gentle record. Not a million miles away from Harvest or After The Goldrush, but with a slightly croakier voice and a shakier hand, Shamelessly sentimental which was always a Neil tendency but the sense of another beautiful sunset and the promise of a beautiful sunrise tomorrow. There's a beautiful acceptance everywhere .
I stuck with Blur which I didn't with Oasis. The latter was a not a divorce. A conscious decision. They seemed to have said what they had to say although countless millions disgaree. But Blur still seemed to have plenty to say. Think Tank clearly has quality control issues. The band are comig apart and Albarn particularly is resetting his compass. A few tracks might be clipped but generally it's an amaible trip.
'The whole place is dark. Every lot of this side of town.'
A fabled album. The work of Tony Molina.The seventh and final album of Songs; Ohia. Tales of toil and strife with Steve Albini at the engineer's desk. Putting your shoulder to the plough and applying yourself to the task. There's something magnificent about this. It doesn't work in verse and choruses so much as cycles of sound and mythic grandeur and loneliness. But it feels incredibly consoling and comforting.
I just surprised myself. I listened to Echo & The Bunnymen's thirteenth album Apples For Isaac late on Sunday night and astonished myself. Forty five years after I'd first fallen for them as an uncouth teenager, miraculously they've found themselve agains. It's rare when this happens. But life is like that.
The Bunnymen mean so much to me. As they do to so many. They marked a map for me out of the teenage playground towards university and the world beyond it. Throughout those teenage years when anyone pointed a camera at me I instinctively turned my face to profile as the Bunnymen had on the sleeves of Crocodiles, Heaven Up Here and Porcupine because I wanted to project a romantic mystique. An idea of depth and mission.
They were the bravest of bands and they encouraged me to dream. I still play the records they made from '79 to '84 and they still make me feel the way they did then. And remarkably in 2026 Ian McCulloch and Will Sergeant, (for that is who the Bunnymen are now). with Apples For Isaac they've done it again. They've rediscovered the essentially Gothic and Romantic quality that first set them apart. The Baroque, twisted Catholocism which was so deeply inspirational to the likeminded. The Jacobian flair . They've somehow rediscovered their ambition and edge . To carve anthems of thoughtful and slightly anguished worth for the masses.
McCulloch is unfeasibly sharp here, lyrically and vocally. He's tapped back into the 'people rolling round on the carpet' dazed 'found poetry' of the early days and Sergeant rises to the task in a quite inspired manner though he doesn't feature on the whole album. As for me. I'm incredibly pleased to see The Bunnymen back on the podium. This is inspired stuff and as with the best of their back catalogue A Promise, The Cutter, it's light on the waves once more. Nothing will cahnge. Everything will change !
Possibly because you can't really have too much Fela. This is indescribably energetic and pretty much puts you on the streets of Lagos. It's militant, sinuous, conscious, frantic and simultaneously joyous and furious. I've also seen David Byrne who would know comment on how incredibly tight and disciplined.
The Cowboys The Bottom Of A Rotten Flower has all the jagged, misdirected romance of 1978. DEVO meet Buzzcocks and Sparks by the swings One song after another of the rollercoaster of life !
In 1976 Capital Radio hosted a countdown of all time favourite songs hosted by Roger Scott and Kenny Everett. It was dominated by somewhat schmaltzy Singer - Songwriter fixated fare and Nights In White Satin charted high and made me feel rather strange frankly. Hinting at emotions, passions and experience which I would never quite understand and wasn't sure really if I wanted to !. I confess, I don't like the song very much.
Radiator Hospital have built up a healthy audience for their ragged and disjointed Garage Rock sound over previous releases. Distorted Time sees them sticking to their guns with a sound that finds the missing chord between 13th Floor Elevators and modern operators like Black Lips, Spirit of the Beehive and The Lavender Flu.Distorted Time gathers momentum and rattles along the rails of destiny for 13 songs and 36 minutes like Dylan the stoned rabbit from The Magic Roundabout with merry effect.
I probably haven't got enough time to consume as much music as I'd like to and do it justice on here. But I'll do my damnedest. There are certain genres I can barely do justice to given how vast and unknowable they are and I'm only really beginning to dip my toes into to any degree. That goes for Jazz. For Folk and certainly for Brazilian Tropicalia.
Well you have to start somewhere so why not with Chico Buarqe's 1971 album Construcao. The most dramatic and intense record imaginable. The strings just dive out at you. Fans of Forever Changes and Oddessey and Oracle and The Left Banke take note. But given that this is in Portuguese it has another layer of melodrama and intrigue.And so much history
Written partially in Italy during a period of political exile.it's sleeve and presentation has been interpreted as a tribute to the plight of the working man during a period of intense suppression by a political dictatorship. If you don't speak Portuguese you can still appreciate the passion and colour. It's a beautiful record on any number of levels.
Inland Years latest album Nowadays lives up to its title in planting its flag firmly and squarly in the plot of vague and imprecise but gently likeable Indie American ahalfway between the giant plots of War About Drugs and The Byrds.. Occasionally you want to shake Ryan Daniels who is Inland Years head honcho in frustration but he stays close to his guiding principles and I can't say I'm compaining frankly
'What's the point in wating time with people that you'll never know.'
I've been waiting to find a place of calm in my day and I suspect it may have come. It's half past two on a Sunday afternoon in late September and I've finally arrived at my desk, put my heaphones on and I'm listening to an album from 2000 by Broadcast - The Noise Made By People.
it could really be pretty much any album by Broadcast I imagine. They're one of the important bands for our age I'd say. A band that understand many of the central preoccupation of our times. The Age of Anxiety. They've been labelled within the whole disticussion of Hauntology. A way of seeking answers to the problems of our time by wrapping ourselves up in the concerns of the past.as a means of heading into the future.They're quietly inspired frankly
