It Starts With a Birthstone...
'To boldly go where no blog has gone before....
Tuesday, September 29, 2026
Coveted # 10 Anne Briggs - The Time Has Come
It Starts With a Birthstone - 200 Albums for 2026 # 101 Crying Laughing - Smoking
I can't particularly write about Jazz but I do appreciate it. Crying, Laughing have and album called Starting and frankly, it's Smoking. Different ways of getting to the same place
500 Greatest Albums of the 2000's # 46 LCD Soundsystem - LCD Soundsystem
This has an incredibly high 'Hip' quotient. That's to be respected but I have my ceilimg when it comes to LCD Soundsytem. Probably largely generationally and geographically we don't coincide. Still. It's alright I s'ppose.
Song(s) of the Day # 4,525 Julia Jacklin
Julia Jacklin's fourth album The Gem has a poised quality and I'd suggest benefits most of all from active engagement. and repeated listens to release its harvest . This makes for an increasingly compelling and rewarding experience. It has a rhythm. A coherent flow. Like a river you're drawn downstream with and eventually overcome by and find yourself succumbing to its undertow.
I've got this on repeat. As we head from September and brace ourselves for Autumn. Sometimes a record tudns up just when you need it. Jacklin is definitely an artist who shares certain impulses and instincts with Aldous Harding. Found poetry. It's an album that's as rich as a well judged, poetic novel . Something I wanted to understand better so I'll return to it in the hope that I begin to do so better.
Monday, September 28, 2026
Coveted # 9 SpookyTooth - Spooky Two
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 an imperious flow and drag to it that makes you yearn for the times. There's something slightly messianic about the whole record which is frankly.
Spooky Tooth were from Carlisle which is also greatly commendable and also put out albums on Island and were produced by Jimmy Miller which are also badges of note. This is incredibly soulful and engaging.
500 Greatest Albums of the 2000's # 47 Lambchop - Is a Woman
It Starts With a Birthstone - 200 Albums for 2026 # 102 Alex Winter
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.
Song(s) of the Day # 4,524 Song of the Day - Slayyter
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.
Sunday, September 27, 2026
Coveted # 8 Gomez - Bring It On
It Starts With a Birthstone - 200 Albums for 2026 # 103 Windy & Carl
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....
500 Greatest Albums of the 2000's # 48 Rufus Wainwright - Want One
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
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Song(s) of the Day # 4,523 Slow Pulp
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.
Saturday, September 26, 2026
Coveted # 7 Bill Evans Trio - At The Montreux Jazz Festival
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...
It Starts With a Birthstone - 200 Albums for 2026 # 104 Wormy - Shark River
'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.
500 Greatest Albums of the 2000's # 49 Daft Punk - Discovery
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.
Song(s) of the Day # 4,522 Roomer
'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!!!
Friday, September 25, 2026
Best Ever Albums - 2,000 - 1,001 - 1,318 James Blake - Overgrown
Coveted # 6 Anita O'Day - Anita
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
It Starts With a Birthstone - 200 Albums for 2026 # 105 The Bird Calls
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.
500 Greatest Albums of the 2000's # 50 Dandy Warhols -Thirty Tales From Urban Bohemia
Song(s) of the Day # 4,521 Team Dresch
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.
Thursday, September 24, 2026
Coveted # 6 The Music Machine - (Turn On ) The Music Machine
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.
Song(s) of the Day # 4,520 Lex Walton
'We are all of us in the gutter. But some of us are looking at the stars...' So it goes. No generation is ever truly different Lex Walton it seems was saying get me out of here before he was ever born. Certainly if latest album ULTIMATE LOVE FOREVER is anything to go by. It's ragged punky attitude from the word go. Seemingly with Daniel Ek for one in his sights and heading the charge to the barricades.
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
Wednesday, September 23, 2026
500 Greatest Albums of the 2000's # 52 My Morning Jacket - It Still Moves
It Starts With a Birthstone - 200 Albums for 2026 # 106 Mountain Goats - Days
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.
Coveted # 5 The Langley School Music Project - Innocence & Despair
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 album Innocence & Despair give 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.
Song(s) of the Day # 4,519 National Park
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.
Tuesday, September 22, 2026
Songs About People # 1,435 Andrew Borland
From the frantic new album from Lex Walton which I'll review shortly. For the late, mourned Sound vocalist
It Starts With a Birthstone - 200 Albums for 2026 # 107 Neil Young & The Chrome Hearts - Second Song
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 .
500 Greatest Albums of the 2000's # 53 Blur - Think Tank
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.
Coveted # 5 Songs: Ohia - Magnolia Electric Co.
'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.
Nights # 5 Van Morrison
Song(s) of the Day # 4,518 Echo & The Bunnymen
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 !
Monday, September 21, 2026
Coveted # 4 Fela Kuti - Zombie
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.
It Starts With a Birthstone - 200 Albums for 2026 # 108 The Cowboys - The Bottom Of A Rotten Flower
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 !
Nights # 4 The Moody Blues
Song(s) of the Day # 4,517 Radiator Hospital
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.
























