Friday, September 25, 2026
Best Ever Albums - 2,000 - 1,001 - 1,318 James Blake - Overgrown
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.
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
Nights # 8 Bob Seger & The Silver Bullet
I wonder sometimes whether you have to experience the Mid West to truly appreciate Bob Seger,
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
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....
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
500 Greatest Albums of the 2000's # 51 Yeah Yeah Yeahs - Fever To Tell
Flagrant expression, sexuality, display, abandon and release.
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
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.
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
F
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
A hop and a step and we're off. Walking on the street. 'The wild night is calling....' All life is here.
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
Songs About People # 1,434 The Pontypool Front Row
Charlie Faulkner, Bobby Windsor and Graham Pryce from the Golden Age of Rugby.
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
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.
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.
Sunday, September 20, 2026
Songs About People # 1,433 Isaac Asimov
From the Bunnymen's stunning new album and magical return to form. There's a story there I suspect.
Coveted # 3 Chico Buarqe - Construcao
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.
It Starts With a Birthstone - 200 Albums for 2026 # 109 Inland Years
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
500 Greatest Albums of the 2000's # 55 Broadcast - The Noise Made By People
'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
Nights # 3 R.E.M.
R.E.M. sent me off on one of the great journeys of discovery of my lifetime. One of which I have still to arrive at my ultimate destination.
Coveted # 2 The Vapors - New Clear Days
This is still coveted becase it was an album I almost bought when it came out. I was 14 and just starting to get interested in music seriously. On the funfair ride and process of accumulation I've been on for almost fifty years since.
It's a fairly generic New Wave record really with an album cover very, very much of its time. An image of a man making the after news weather forecast. It barely registered chart wise. The competition was unfeasibly strong back in those days. The song everyone knows and The Vapors shot at immortality Turning Japanese, famously a song which seemed to extol the wonders of onanism was quite rightly a Top Ten Hit and hung around the Top 40 for weeks.
The rest of the album is solid if unremarkable. Less to my taste than The Only Ones, Magazine, The Passions, Gang Of Four or any others who carved out a space for themselves at the same time and wielded a sharper scalpel. It's sub Jam and Sub Costello without being a patch on either . But if I ever see a reasonably priced copy. I'll probably buy it.
Song(s) of the Day # 4,516 The Homesick
The Homesick are a Dutch Avant Pop group who have moved from Sub Pop to Vienna's Siluh Records in recent years They play on the influence of bands like Yellow Magic Orchestra and have a broadly Eighties sound.
But as someone who grew up in that decade and has mixed opinions about any number of its defining characteristics. None of them seem particularly garish or overstated on latest album What's Up With All These Shangri Las which is a thoroughly bright and creative record.
It's artistic without being lofty. Incredibly melodic and restless. This is a record that puts the 'art' in heart and I thoughly endorse it.
Saturday, September 19, 2026
Songs About People # 1,432 John Calvin
Taster for tomorrow's Song(s) of the Day. The first track from the excellent new record from The Homesick.
500 Greatest Albums of the 2000's # 56 Scott Walker - The Drift
There's something about Scott Walker's later work which is slightly terrifying and possibly I imagine divisive among couples.
Coveted # 1 Harold Budd - Pavillion of Dreams
I'm in a 'space' at the moment which allows me to consume culture, music, film and culture in general. This allows me to listen to a lot of music and fall under its spell. My natural urge is to covet it. the act of owning it, but that's not always necessary. Instead I'll document my appreciation here.
An album released in 1978 and intended for the ages Budd is an avnt-garde west coast figure. This is his second album and was part of a cycle of works begun in 1972and produced by Brian Eno. It has a cast of distinguished musicians and feels like an ascension to a sacred place frankly
It Starts With a Birthstone - 200 Albums for 2026 # 110 Charlie Ivan Band
A band from a town called Alice. Alice Springs, Australia. A mythical place. And here's a mythical record from there .Of Nothing from the Charlie Ivan Band. No lack of dread, mystery, pathos and and the sense of tumbleweed making its way down Main Street while the locals make their way to and from their local.A good record can plumb the same emotional depths as a great novel and Of Nothing is a good exmaple of these processes detonating and falling back into space. A stunning and quietly stunned record.
* Thanks as so often to Darren Jones for directing me here. That's classy Darren.
Song(s) of the Day # 4,515 beebadooobee
Pylon. A coooler than coolArt Rock band from Athens Georgia and the early Eighties . A cooler than cool, (I imagine), novel from icon of the American South William Faulkner. The third album by Filipino born singer songwriter Beatrice Laus, better known as beabodoobee.
It's a record that imeddiatiately impresses with its cultural heft tugging me back to the Nineties most obviously. She's an arist who has cited the Sundays, Mazzy Star, Veruca Salt and Elliott Smiths as influences and that's the place this occupies and it's very comfortable in that space.
It's a great record but its nostalgic drag is inescapable like so many of the records I'm listening to in 2026. 'Disconnected from reality,,,,,, like a pylon on an open road.' There are worse places to be.
Friday, September 18, 2026
It Starts With a Birthstone - 200 Albums for 2026 # 111 Twilark - Never Learned The Tide
Twilark's Never Learned the Tide is not going to cheer you up.It raise the flag of surrender halfway up the flagpole and then runs out of energy. It's a whole heap of modping and self pity. But hey we've all had some of these moments. It's a cry in the dark a healthy blow into a handkerchief and amd you really shouldn't bother with it but I've just done so for you.
Song(s) of the Day # 4,514 Beck
'I've been through the desert on a horse with no name. It feels good to be out of the rain.'
It's a Friday morning in Canterbury and I'm listening to Beck's new album Ride, Lonesome. We're all on lonesome roads. Whether we acknowledge it or not. But Beck has always been a better soundtrack for those roadsthan most. Ride, Lonesome is him doing what he does betst of all. Ballads to comfort and highlight the beauty of existence as we make our way down the highway.
This is classic songwriting and ennui. There's none of Morrissey's self pity and inchoate rage. Far from it. This strikes me as more enlightened and worldly. Plenty of consolation and comfort. Ride, Lonesome is twelve songs of comfort and consolation as we make our way down or up another slope towards Christmas !
500 Greatest Albums of the 2000's # 57 The XX - The XX
The XX were one of those bands that I heard and felt music was leaving me as I could not connect with them as I did to the music that meant most to me. With The XX it was not really that they were austere. Joy Division and Young Marble Giants were austere. But this felt rather clinical and claculated and positioned for a market and I felt uncomfortable because I didn't wish to be their target consumer. A genuine Post Modern 'Post Punk' sense of discomfort.
Thursday, September 17, 2026
500 Greatest Albums of the 2000's # 58 Queens of the Stone Age - Rated R
Rated R came out in 2000. I bought it on CD. Of course I did. I was still in thrall to The NME even though it was in a pitiful state. I didn't really like Rated R . I didn't really understand where it was coming from , Heaviness was never something that particularly appealed to me.
But this doesn't sound particularly like a Heavy record so much as a crafty one. A gamechanger. The kind of record you want to hear when you're fifteen.
It Starts With a Birthstone - 200 Albums for 2026 # 112 William Matheny - Material Witness
'I've been talking to stray dogs. And empty stools.'
Material Witness is a proper gem of the old school from William Matheny out of West Virginia. It's an album that speaks loud and clear about the story of life. The way we navigate the bends in the road as best we can,`
It's deteminedly glass half full and well adjusted. Full of good lines and good tunes. Worldly wisdom. Homely charm. Good Night Jim Bob. Good night Erin.
Song(s) of the Day # 4,513 Crying, Laughing
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.
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