Another day. Another Euro. Bibi Club are a Canadian Pop Duo operating in French to a large degree though not exclusively. Latest album Amaro has a fractured intensity that lit up my Mercredi..
Apparently they explore the Liminal Spaces between the here and beyond. It's a response to the passing if lived ones. Letting the days go by. Another recommendation from Starbuck, Darren Jones Meilleure Ami pour It Starts With a Birthstone. Merci Beaucoup Starbuck. Encroyable.
Lauren Auder's Whole World as Vigil is exactly the kind of album that the chattering classes like to chatter about. Precious and drab and probably shortly off to the South of France to recline by a pool. It's the kind of record that seems mostly intent to irritate and enrage the likes of me . Did she really just rhyme BREXIT with taxes. I'm not stopping to fact check. . This is the kind of thing which seems designed to get under the skin of Blog writers like me who are looking for something that reminds them of Pavement to set their Tuesday off on the right foot . Oh it's insufferbale. Bring back Nik Kershaw !.
Life's Too Good is an album I associate with a difficult time in my life. Life always has dangerous aspects to it and we're foolish if we think that danger will ever completely dematerialize or vanish from the horizon. That's the joy.. That's what makes life the great adventure. John Peel fastened onto Birthday and this strange and uncompromising and wondrous album appeared a few months down the line. I didn't really appreciate it at the time. I find it reckless, jittery and altogether wonderful now/ like the best records you feel a new colour has been invented. Willy Wonka has arrived with an entirely new taste !
You carry the people who depart before you for the rest of your days. The ones who leave too soon. You do what you can to bear them with you. To carry their joy with you. To live each day with their flames inside you. It's not always easy but you owe them that. As well as those who are also going forward without them.
A very good friend of mine, the music friend of my lifetime, told a story about this album. About how he was going through a religious phase at school and had been listening to God from this album one day when he was at boarding school and had jumped at a key point and he'd wondered whether it was a religiously inspired moment. And then I imagine he then took a toke of his spliff. The stuff that probably went on to kill him. I miss him. Still.
I think about Matt when I listen to this record. But I also think about Lennon. I didn't really know who John Lennon was until he died. I thought Paul McCartney was The Beatles because he'd been the ever present one while I was growing up in the Seventies. 'Someone's knocking at the door on the Mull Of Kintyre on mists rolling in from the sea...' I was a late developer. Musically. And in other ways.
But Plastic Lennon / Yoko Ono Band helps you to catch up and takes your breath away in quick succession. You're shocked then charmed. You smile. Then feel ike crying. At his rage . And pain. And sense of love. And drive to go on. It's an astonishing record . You get the sense that if he was in the same room as you are in now that he would be hard work frankly. But that you'd be sorry when he left the room. Don't be like the folks on the hill. Whoever they are. Turn over the record instead...
I never particulary warmed to Wild Beats. They struck me as nutered and emaciated Sparks or Associates for a more prosaic age.
'Your hands are shaking and your arms are shaking..'
Another day in January in the North if England. Notoriously a difficult month to negotiate but I'm in a warm, cosy flat and it's a Saturday. A sheet grey sky.
Shaking Hand hail from Manchester. The city of rain. They rifle through the alternative guitar song book; Sonic Youth, Pavement, Slint, Women. To no little effect. Manchester. So much to answer for.
* Thanks as ever to Starbuck for the nudge. Thanks Darren Jones. The best friend a blog ever had.
Picture yourself on a beach in Brazil. It isn't hard to do. Bruno Berle's mellow and jazzy Sem Fronteiras is helping me to do that as I make my way towards ten. It's a record that exists in its own space and carries you with it..
It's 2026. And every other record it seems is an imaginary soundtrack. We seem to be being asked to go and live in some kund of permanent fantasy existence. It's certainly inviting. Well if you can't beat them you might as well join them, So here's today's serving and its another fine record.. Peaches and cream. With breakfast. What are your doctor's orders?
Adrian Younge is an Emmy award winning self taught musician whose work apparently 'defies the digital tide.' If this means his current offering Younge recall Golden Age of Soul classics like Trouble Man and Hot Buttered Soul then I'll have a serving of that !
Records which remind you of times when you were unhappy sound richer with the years as you distance yourself from the person you were when you first heard them. I bought Beth Ordon's Trailer Park on CD when it came out and I was terribly unhappy.
In 1996. Recovering from an unhappy break up and lacking direction. A year on the dole in a cool flat in Hove. The tennant before me was how should we call it a 'call girl' Her clients used to call me late at night and were somewhat surprised to hear my voice.
And all the time I played Trailer Park. It's an incredibly rich and resonant record. Deeply rooted and pained. About the nature of relationships, how we come together and drift apart in our youth seeking permanent connection. How the permanent connection we find can often be illusory but that shouldn't stop us searching..
I like music which takes risks. Baby Rose's third album Yearnalism will do me for today. It's cimematic and soulful and aches. Reminds me of Nina Simone one moment, and having a broken heart the next, It's a beautiful, sensual record that reaches for the stars as all good records should .and makes you feel you're wishing on one.
' How I wish I was young again...'
I live in a flat with an allbum crammed with hundreds of albums. It's an effort to keep things tidy sometimes but I'm not ready yet to let my records go.They're a part of me after all.. I was delighted to get them back when I shifted them up from the attic in my parents house in Canterbury on my move into my own flat in 2011. I could listen to everything on my television set but I'm strangely reluctant to do so.
I've been working from my flat for a couple of years now and if I have my own way I'll never go to work again. I have no desire to work in an office again or make my way through the streets with the morning traffic, attend meetings or generally deal with the slings and arrows of outrageous boredom, irritation and grief that office life seems to generate. At least as far as my experience of 2008-2023 suggests.
So I'll be listening to plenty of records on a daily basis it seems and might as well catalogue them here. Play the record and record the memory it triggers. Kicking off like a decent breakfast as every day should with some Orange Juice. Playing Rip It Up send me spinning through time back to Twickenham Station in Autumn 1982. I'd just started Sixth Form College and bought a copy of Smash Hits with Edwyn Collins on the cover to read in the waiting room for my train back to Richmond. Our family home was down a long white tunnel connected to Richmond Station.
I've never owned this record but saw it in the window of RPM a couple of days ago and it's playing on my record player now. Edwyn has retired from music after a drawn out Farewell Tour last year. My sister a long time OJ devotee since those days went to see him in London. Apparently it was emotional.
Rip It Up is an elegaic, subtle and poetic album which came out on Polydor Records and performed poorly and received mixed reviews when it was released. Pearls before swine. It swings and swoons. Chugs like The Velvet Underground relocated to the Scottish Highlands then swings its hips like Chic. This is a versatile and bewitching record which shrugs its shoulders at ts absence of commercial recognition. 44 years later
The original Juice that had spearheaded Postcard Records, Glaswegian Indie Pioneers before Indie really existed had disbanded Leaving Collins and David Mclymont the bassist to draft in Malcolm Ross from labelmates Josef K and Zeke Manyika a Zimbabwean drummer who gave the band another joyous dimension and line of attack..
Rip It Up, the single of course was the band's only genuine hit. Competition was fierce back in those days. Orange Juice feel like big winners forty years or more on. This record is a picnic in the heather..
There can be an almost Mythic quality to a great American Alternative Album. Dreaming which start in the bedroon and friends parties and dank clubs listening to obscure 4AD and Post Punk records and opens up on the grids and highways, underground clubs and the open road.
Pittsburgh trio feeble little horse ride into town brandishing third album bitknot and its a quite marvellous record . Not a million miles from Chicagos' Horsegirl, versed in My Bloody Valentine but with fuel and dreams of its own
Liz Lawrence has got the look and the modern sound. The new solemnity. On current album, Vespers she sounds like Phoebe, Aldous and erm Liz Lawrence. There's plenty of atmosphere and ennui. It's a damned good album that's accompanied me through a Stormy Wednesday.
Unhalfbricking is a record that's grained. With wisdom and joy beyond the years of its players. With a sense of history that most of us never quite accumulate.
The variety and quality of great albums I'm coming upon this year is gathering momentum. Rostam Batmanglij's American Stories is an elliptical record with plenty of the sparkle which its author contributed to Vampire Weekend before his departure and plenty to say to the confused, embattled age we all live in.
It's a warm and mysterious record that cherry picks from the Great American Songbook and draws from the World that America is currently plundering and in some quarters attempting to shut itself away from though of coursee it can't . Records like this may not provide all the answers but they direct you towards the light and a life spent on golden mountain pathways .
It's one of the great joys of having a large record collection. I constantly find myself listening to wondrous albums that I've never picked from the shelf and given a spin. This evening Fresh Fruit In Foreign Places, the album Kid Creole & The Coconuts released in 1981 before they broke globally gleefully and particularly in the UK with the release of Tropical Gangsters the following year,
Fresh Fruit In Foreign Places is a fabulous record. A fresh terrain. A place where integration rhymes with misegenation. You get the sense that The Jets are meeting the Sharks in pitched battle any moment. Half Broadway Musical, half extended conga down Manhattan, Miami, New Orleans, Havana or the exotic desi\tnation of your choosing.
It's concept and musical travelogue so naturally I pick up the Oddyssey as another possible narrative reference point. Helen of Troy is mentioned in the opening song.It's tight and just right. It got to # 40 in the Swedish Album Charts. Elsewhere it got critical garlands but the Kid and his Coconutsdidn't hit the cash tills until Tropical Gangsters,
It's July. But frankly it's hotter than July. I've just taught three online classes in a flat where it sometimes felt like I was teaching in an actual tin can and headed into Newcastle to make the most of the day. Dropped in to Reflex and this took my fancy. Green Hills the debut album from Falmouth's The Heavenly Bodes. Now I'm back at my desk listening to it on my headphones and I'm gripped.
Apparently emerging from South Cornwall's Grassroots Psych scene. This is instantly recorgisable to anyone with a certain record collection; Sonics, Cramps 13th Floor Elevators, Yardbirds, Troggs, Allah Las. Add your own suspects. An utterly thrilling ride.
I Built You a Tower, the eleventh studio from Seattle's Death Cab For Cutie is a sweet and tender record. By contrast with the Modest Mouse alum which confused and repelled me rather, a few days ago I'm finding this amenable and skipping back to the start. It's like an inviting eiderdown you return to rather than doing something more profitable with your day.
Of course you're always resigned to records at this distance into a band's journey being consumed to some degree by grief and resignation and that's the case here. In this case reconnecting with Emo . Bands like to rediscover their origins and speculate on the nature of their first acts of departure. This is neatly done. The abiding impression of the record is warmth.
Managing a brand. From 2004. Patti settles into the stride and leads her gang across the prairie.
The modern celebrity success story generally seems almost pre-ordained. A birthright. Take Sombr. This week seems very New York on It Starts with a Birthstone for some random reason. I had a conversation about going to New York yesterday with one of my Record Store counter friends who' s turning fifty and expressed his reluctance of going to New York in the current politcal climate even though he's never been and really wanted to . But he's got values. . Putting money in the pocket of a craven oligarch warmonger. I can sympathise but given a cashfall I'd go like a shot. Isn't the mayer supposed to be an actual communist?
So to Sombr. That's a New York success story for you. sombr, actially. Styilised in lower case. But is he a Nepo Baby? More than likely. Educated at La Guardia High School. Debut album I Barely Knew Her, released in 2025 but already repackaged this ,and globally punching above its weight with chart positions in top tens everywhere. sombre has already moved to LA and is plotting with his team the next move for global dominance.
Listening to I Barely Knew Her I was reminded of Disco divas of my youth; Patrick Hernandez, Andy Gibb, Lief Garrett. This is not where sombr and his team are packaging him of course. Indie cred is everything these days and sombr has already posted his takes on Radiohead's Fake Plastic Trees and Mazzy Star's Fade Into You. Indie greats from the Nineties. Ancient History ! Further away from us than Pretty Vacant was from Blue Suede Shoes.Lest we forget.
I Barely Knew Her ultimately doesn't walk the walk. The rhymes are bland. It feels programmed.I'm not sure it has staying power. Ultimately like so much about the world. About money. Hey what changes. 'If I was a rich man.' 'It's a rich man's world' Tomorrow, the new Madonna record possibly. Take another bite of the Apple !
Speculative Fiction. Wipe that Smirk off your face Punk. Wondrous West Coast Dread Art Punk. X, Crime and Wipers, and Gun Club come to mind. This is a blistering entre to my evening. Breathless, claustrophobic and clutching for the divine.
There are records that you like in your youth but don't fully come to appreciate for decades. This album is one such album for me. When I was in my twenties I think I liked it for the association between taking trains from Teddington into London with my honey. The criss cross of railway tracks on the album cover. Clapham Junction, Vauxhall and London Bridge. A litany of stations that I've long since left behind me. Sadly my honey headed off too.
Now I'm in awe of the poetic reach and understatement of the record. The echoes of Joyce, Beckett and Behan. Wonder at Cathall Coughlan range and vision. The understatement and rage, clothed in almost MOR trappings. Like the Radio Times; I never knew there was so much in it.
It's Friday morning and like little Jack Thorner I'm sat in the corner. Alright, hold your horses. I'm not eating my curds and whey. I cant buy these at Sainbury's at Newcastle Central Station where I live. But I've certainly put in my thumb and pulled out a plum this morning for you. What a good boy am I.
Dirt Buyer's Dirt Buyer III. ticks requisite grunge related boxes of Great American introspection and undolence for those who can't get out of bed and aren't even sure if they're planning to do so. It's a mellow record for duvet days. It strays sometimes to feeling overly sorry for itself but hey, that's all part of the Rock & Roll quilt.
Part of the gradual transformation of select parts of the world into a Wes Anderson film. This is a nice album but it's not really there to challenge your perceptions quite as much as confirm you in terms of your own taste. Reader, of course I liked it !
A hertfelt ode to Love. Lovebirds the self released debut from London sextet Birds Flying Backwards is very much a product of these strange nostalgic times. The band themselves are moustachioed, bearded or flaxen haired look as if they yearn to return to 1972 and pack a picnic basket, pop it into the back of the beetle and head out to the open fields. It's a remarkably unchallenging record. But strangely comforting in that I quite like being taken back in time to when I was seven !
Denver, Colrado's Dear Pioneers exist in the most righteous and uncompromising American Punk renegade traditions and take no prisoners in latest album Wagon Burner . Banded to the ideals of identity and reistance. this accepts no compromise and climbs unapogoletically onto the barricades. Lacking in subtlelty occasionally but not in vigour.
Erm. Pretty much what it says on the tin.
Failure is not endemic or inevitable. Don't believe the hype. Listening to Failure may be a good move. Some records and artists sometimes sound as of they were designed in test tubes rather than being genuinely creative poetically birthed exercises to me. There's something of this going on here for me. I'm not complaining, I realise my own ideas of musical perfection and majesty are not shared by everyone.
Take Failure. Los Angeles Failure in case you want the failure pinned down to a specific region. First of all that's a great Rock & Roll name if ever there was one. Where did you get the idea that Rock & Roll was about success. Do you really fancy a peek at Elon Musk's record collection?
Failure have been round the block a few times. They were originally active between 1990 and 1997 and reactivated in 2014. Up to now they've released seven albums and any number of EPS.
Latest record Location Lost feels strangely weightless. I was minded of a hot air balloon kicking clear of its moorings and heading towards the heavens Their sound is dense but strangely crystallised and poised. A list of points of influence and interest on their Wikipedia page was instructive and covers a lot of ground; Bowie, Pixies, Sonic Youth, Radiohead, Kate Bush . Doesn't really sound like failure to me. Cool record !.
When King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizzard were relatively young. Their fifth album and came out in 2013 the year I kicked off with It Starts With a Birthstone. It's errr. A Psycheldelic Australian Krautrock album which like almost evrything else I've heard down the years makes me wonder whther I've neglected the band. This feels like a pellmell dash through the bazaars of Istanbul.with the hounds of hell snapping at your heels.
The Shins make me think of Riga where I lived and worked for four years between 2004 and 2008 and tried to drink the city dry. Well god loves a trier. The Shins were something of a revelation. It was great to realise that not all of the great songs had been written or that emotions were not quite used up just yet.
As I get older I suspect I get softer and I hope my heart opens, and not just in Spring. After a lifetime of watching musicals with my dear mother, they will always work for me. Always make me think of her and happy afternoons or evenings spent together. So to Gigi, which I've watched with mum on several occasions. In several decades.
Stars of the sort that they don't make any more. Don't call me a nostalgist. Name me modern equivalents that compare with Caron, Jordan and Chevalier. A front line that could have captured the European Cup before it was renamed whatever it's called now. Beaten De Stefano, Puskas, Gento and Didi . Not just that, but outplayed them. Outnumbered or not.
Gigi has a beating, real heart. The Parisians. Our memories. Ennui. Jealousy. Inseecurity. The way that older people think of the young. The constant search for love and repose and most of all holding back the hands of time when we know that's simply not on life's table and never has been. Turn the record over. Refuge is always here.
