Keep it simple. 2. A sweeping, diverse and frequently lovely album from Canadian quintet Foxwarren. They feature Andy Shauf . Boundaries between genres and songs are freqyently blurred. It jumps around a bit occasionally but generally it's assured , playful and really quite appealing,
Oh dear. It's Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds. Could someone else listen to it for me please. I'm sorry I would make an effort normally. But I'm 60 today and generally I'm doing what I like,
I have a very good friend who truly seems to believe that the sun actually shines out of Bruce Springsteen's arse so my thinking is always slightly coloured by that reflection whenever I listen to one of his records.. This is about how 9/11 was a dreadful beyond belief but that the human spirit will prevail and we'll all get going , hang rogether and have a happy ending. It's alright I suppose ! I confess I didn't listen to all of it. Sorry Norman.
Immerse yourself in Immersion., WTF. Colin Newman of Wire. Working with Malka Spigel of Minimal Compact. New visions. New experiments. New horizons.
I'm sat at my desk. It's my 60th Birthday today. I came to the conclusion that it was just another day. I'm glad I spent the early part of it with Immersion. It's just a damned good record.
On the last day of my fifties I fell asleep on my sofa listening to a Santana album playing on my TV.
James Joyce poems put to song by Adrian Crowley, Matthew Nolan, Lisa Harrigan and others. Spiritual and easeful. Really to me the songs are about appreciating the moment which is an important principle for living as any.
I'm one day away from 60, though I've come to realise as that day closes in that it's nothing but another label. I looked at my voicemails and text messages from yesterday as I woke this morning and realised how far I move on emotionally within twenty four hours. Every passing day. Even the strongest emotions can be completely fleeting.
I don't pretend to understand people thirty or forty years younger than me. Gender, identity or persona related issues leave me unsure and quizzical. I grew up in a world which seemed simpler. Ways of looking at the world seemed less complex. I grew up in an era where things were bountiful in many respects and over the six decades I've been alive this fantastic gift and legacy has been frittered and ravaged..This leaves us at each other's throats
But I write this blog on a daily basis still. It focuses on music but this is really a front to talking about the mysteries of the universe. That's the struggle we're all engaged in. Whether we like it or not. I listen to music and try to say something about it. A different angle to the same fundamental approach.
Today Model/ Actriz would you believe. It's pretension but you're only alive once. You might as well try to make a splash. Pirouette is hardly the Last Splash but it is not just another Drop In the Ocean. OK that's enough alternative inside gags.
Anyway. I like it. It's intense and full blooded. It's reckless. Melodic, melodramatic, artistic, overwrought and nonsensical by turns. Is it Post Post Punk ? I haven't the foggiest It's still Rock & Roll to me
ELO were great but they clearly didn't care about being cool or leading the pack in terms of haircare o.r fashion. And is Discovery any fan's personal favorite. I listened for a but but the cover was clearly the best thing about the whole package
At the time I lost interest in Lloyd Cole after Easy Pieces . I was struggling in many ways and he seemed less essential as his chart position and star faded somewhat. But I picked up a copy for a fiver a few years back and now it seem sparkier that Easy Pieces although Rattlesnakes was pretty much essential as a first year at University Text.
This is mature, a good thing to be. it's slick and they've turned down the Byrds meet, Television meeds the Wild Mercury Sound meets The Staple Sisters and are stretching their songs out and feeling comfortable being themselves. It sounds like the fifth year of a relationship and we're getting used to each others ways.
It's a Beautiful Place from New York minimalist duo Water From Your Eyes made me think I was waking up in New York City.. Urgent sparks. Beautiful noise. Modern rhythms. About time, dinosaurs and space. Apparently. In the words of the Spotify blog slamming their curveballs into home runs.
'I wander through each chartered street,
Near where the charter'd Thames does flow.
And mark in every face I go,
Marks of weakness, marks of woe.'
William Blake wrote these words about London in 1794. They're lines that don't date and could be applied to many imaginable contexts. I had a premature sixtieth birthday do yesterday. In Rosie's which was always and remains and will remain my local. It was a Newcastle affair and it went well . But the Blake lines came to mind. We were most of us coming to a certain point in life.And some of the stories people told of they personal narratives were tough
Times are bleak. Tommy Robinson and his thugboy arseholes had organised a march in Toon earlier that day. Democracy you may protest. But it's not really democracy is it. It threatens all of out peace and sanity and wellbeing. These people have no agenda but discord. And I suppose we need to understand them as well as we can but we can't debate with them because they're not interested in discussing things on our terms.
Not just that though. It was my first night out for a while and I was catching up with people I hadn't seen for a long time. A pattern emerged early and repeated itself across the evening. People brutalised by employers and the ravages of life. 'Stand up and fight until you hear the bell. Stand up and fight like hell !' You said it !
Nevertheless it was a fantastic evening with people I like and respect. We laughed a lot .At the end of the night, I packed my laptop which had provided the music behind the bar and all of the cards and gifts I'd been given I headed five minutes down the road to my flat. I went to bed. I was tired.
When I woke up I opened everything as I had my breakfast. There was a parcel emblazoned with colour containing two Elvis albums. I like Elvis increasingly as I age. I have a friend who likes him too. She says there's something about his voice. I agree with her. Nice gift ! There's a match on this afternoon. Off to Rosie's ,
'Mama's little baby likes clambake too'.
Here's a record that came out a few weeks ago and I listened to and liked but haven't written about. 1.000 Variations on Song by Frog. A duo of brothers from Rochelle, New York who seem to specilise in quirky Indie, Quirky in the respect that Modern Lovers, Feelies, Jad Fair or Shins were quirky.
The sound of the suburbs were always odder than the sound of the city lets face it. Oddballs move to the city to find a set of other oddballs to hang out, be accepted and validated and form a band with, Make an eccentric and artistic noise with. Oddballs in the suburbs can form bands too. But there's a sense that they can be band prone to squealing 'Eek, we're stuck here. Forever'
1.000 Variations on Song is based on a concept. that of the title.During the rehearsal process for the album the band found they were churning out songs that were variations on the same template, decided to make a virtue of it and this is the result. It's all rather charming and more-ish.
Frog also have something rather winning going for them. They sound nothing like Modern Lovers, Feelies, Jad Fair or Shins. Or Pavement for that matter . If I was pressed to describe them I'd say they sounded a bit like Curtis Mayfield meets nutty Seventies Pop Radio. Andrew Gold. It's all rather. disarming and engaging frankly,
It's not a huge surprise to find that Jeff Tweedy's new album Twilight Overdrive sounds a bit like Wilco. Slightly wistful reflective songs about the condition of life.
Life doesn't get any easier. Tweedy is aware of this.. But the sun keeps coming out and will continue to do so when we're no longer here. There's plenty of stoical spring in Tweedy's step here. Plenty of lyrical twists and turns.
'Howd'you grow a girl. In this world.' Feminism will never be enough, To stop a girl from wanting love.'
Rock & Roll was not invented in 1955. It had precedents. Rock & Roll figures. Oscar Wilde. Aubrey Beardsley. Byron. Shelley. It's not as if we're the only people ever to recognise what it feels like to young.
Mary Wollstencraft. A precursor for Ari Up. The wife of William Godwin. The mother of Mary Shelley. But most of all Mary Wollstencraft. A writer, philospher and product of enlightenment scourge of patriarchal Georgian society..Pioneer of women's rights.
Still important these ideas. More important than ever given the state of the world and the game. So here's Billy Nomates with a excellent new record. Mary & the Hyenas. Wollstencraft was famously derided by Horace Walpole as' a hyena in petticoats'.An indication of the naked fear her ideas must have invited.
Anyhow, the record. A soundtrack for a theatrical production and an imaginary band. A fascinating and groovy record full of ideas and valuable provocation. I haven't discussed the ideas brought up here in any depth. They're really oirth delving into. The tunes are fab too.
Cate Le Bon's Michelangelo Dying is out today. So of course it's Song of The Day.. I'll put it on my TV, heat up a jacket potato and see what I think. I'm done for the week.
The first thing that comes to mind is that it sounds lush. Luxuriant, like Cate's a painte. Mixing her colours and employing flamboyant brushstrokes. She's less angular than she tended to be on her earlier records.
She sounds a little like she's had an expensive transfer and is curreently playing centre forward for Warpaint. I must say it's a rille which suits her. And with fifteen miutes gone, she's knoching in shots from impossible angles and they're all hitting the target.
Accirding to Rolling Stone Magazine this is opaquely alluring . I concur. That's actually a good desciption for Le Bon's music. It's also beguiling. It's also got John Cale on it. In short t's terrific work. Avant Garde Himalayas.
Steely Dan were closer to the days of The Golden Age of Hollywood, Vaudeville and Prohibition than they are to the here and now. They sound like it on Pretzel Logic. This is highly adult and occasionally slightly sleazy stuff. They talk of guns and fraud and keep it as tight as Elmore Leonard and Dashiell Hammett. This is well thumbed, funky and jazzy by tyrns. Incredibly licud and erudite and reads as delicious gossip about a cast of characters that you feel you know even though you've never actually met them .
Rancid is such a wonderful Rock & Roll word. It describes a certain kund of teenage state and attitude. I'm nor sure I really care to listen to the band. But needs must.
I can do no better than filch this review wholesale from Did Not Chart. Hey people are wunning novel awards with albums they've written using Chat GBT. I.e. not writing but using a machine to write something for them. Anyway this is charm itself.
James Joyce poems put to song by Adrian Crowley, Matthew Nolan, Lisa Harrigan and others. Spiritual and easeful. Really to me the songs are about appreciating the moment which is an important principle for living as any.
Bombay Bicycle Club cake to the fire aat a point when I had taken my eye off new music. Subsequently I'm not an authority. I gave it a listen. It was rather bland . But I swayed gently while getting dressed. I give it 4.1.
It's Wednesday so it must be Wednesday. And their latest album Bleeds. My Bloody Valntine meet Repacements meet Sonic Youth meet Pixies mee Gram Parsons at the crossroads. At mindight. Ot something along those lines.
There's nothing on here that particularly screams that M J Lendemann, whose was a sensation last year, plays in the band.He takes the mic at one point. Bleeds favours bleeding guitar fo the most part to laid back steel pedal.
But it sounds pretty great as I'm eating my Fruit 'n Fibre having my bath, Then boiling my egg. This takes me to my 9.15.with a fantastic Dutch Morroccan in Amsterdam. A little heartbreak. But hearts are resilient. They mend. Onwards we go.....
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I find band names odd.Hey guys let's call our band Laminate. Form a Rick & Roll band and conquer the world. Or failing that, the neighbouring bands on the mid West Circuit. Mke a loud godawfyl row,
If that doesn't work get a job in an office. Laminate stuff until the time comes to retore. Get married have 2.3 kids. Chill out to Sonic Youth and Nirvana records in the evening. Hold high school reunion barbecues.
Seattle band Laminate know their Throwing Muses from their Babes in Toyland and Sleater Kinney. They rick it u no end on latest record kiss unltd. Howl at the moon until the sun comes up. It Starts With a Birthdtone heartily endirse this kind of behaviour.
When you reach a certain age, the state of happiness become easier to experience and define. Take this morning as my latest example. A full late, bright September sky in Newcastle. A new stereo and Dave Brubeck Quartet's stretching and purring on the turntable. A boiled egg on the go. A lesson with the morst boring man of earth, I won't name and shame him. Anyhow it's receding in my rear view mirror. I'm done A lesson with the most exciting guys in IT Surveillance and Crisis Management approaching my inbox in fifty minutes. Life us full of small happy moments. We forget,
Cutthroat. Shame's fourth album, is a slab of great unapologetic noise that has a great howl at the state of the world yet always keeps its shape.Very Laandan Excellent work.
I use the Idler review for this. A strange, enchanting and magical record: 'Recorded directly onto a Niagra machine in the Polish village of Sokolowsko - legendarily the village which inspired Thomas Mann's 1924 novel The Magic Mountain, Hiraeth is an exploratory and dream-;ole blend of ambiend folk and environmental sound.. With zithers, harpsm Minimoog , pipe, organ and layered field recordings, the album drifts through a vivid,improvised, landscape that theduo likens to a ' little ecosystem, alive and spirited.' Named after the intranslateable Welsh word for a kind of longing, Hiraeth channels that ache fpr place and memory. This is healing music, an essential balm for uneasy times.
U2 flex their pectorals and try to show they're relevant in 2004. This listening doesn't last too long. Sound and fury, but they've been here before.
Pulp are back. With More their first new album for twenty five. Following the passing of Sreve Mackey and without Russell Senior they're down to the core four ; Cocker, Banks, Doyle and Webber, I'm listening to the record as I make my way through my Friday of online lessons and it feels like a slightly odd experience.
There are some great songs which sound instantly like Pulp, an Art Pop experience that will draw the faithful sixty somethings to the enormodomes to relive all our yesterday's. The songs are alright. Good lyrics perky tunes. I'm just not convinced as to what this sound means in 2025. The world has changed. I'm just not sure that Pulp can.
Contrast points are to the marvellous Stereolab album which came out a few weeks back. Ot the Blur record of a couple of years back The Ballad Of Darren.Or The Cure. More didn't really ring with me, it felt like a retread and I found myself getting impatient and searching for something by Massive Attack halway through.
I came back later in the day. It's a nuanced record, a favourite wird of mine. Songs you need to get to know and live inside and allow to blossom within you. It all seems slightly familiar to me as of yet. Well crafted as it is. I'll get back to you. At the moment it's a 7.5.
Black Lips have long been one of the specfic and interesting bands we've got. Now in 2025 with 26 years in their legs and onto their umpteenth line up and eleventh album Season Of The Peach.
As always it's a grab bag of inspirations and influences. Fourteen songs. Forty minutes of Rock & Roll, Southern stew, disgruntled country and frankly whatever else they feel like getting up to .
I enjoyed it greatly frankly waiting for my jacket potato to soften in the oven. By turns deranged, and arranged. A peach indeed.
Canadian Homespum wisdom from the Wilco school.
It's the second of June and I've had a full day. Four online lessons in all to Germans . Quarter Past Eight until just now actually. Gosh how happy I am not to be in an office with unhappy colleagues. Time for some Rock & Roll.
Florry tick that box and all number of other on their latest Sounds Like.... Slightly wasted . In the way that The Stones were when they holed out in a French mansion to lay down Exile On Main Street. Or Kings of Leon when they were young. And good.
Florry are from Philly Vermont and call themselves an Alt Country band. But really labels are spurious Siynd like good old fashioned Rock & Rill to me. Of the best kund. Thanks Darrem.
Idler feature Radio Anorak this month. Remember is the debut album from the indie collective, It;s a classoc British Indie Refusenik text. This is what makes us great. Not the pageantry. Not the turgid class deference and kissing bullies arses. But the dissent that rises from below. The cultural pick and mix. .
Radio Anorak are Brighton snots. They don't belong to and don't wish tp They create cut and paste tracts. Thus is distinctly DIY and all the more magical for that. If you want to attach yourself to a Punk Narrative, forget the Skids or Damned tours. Go and see a band like this .The Seventies are a long time ago.
This is only available for purchase on cassette. Radio Anorak.draw on a broad tradition, But snub their noses at the man, Scuffling through the cultural debris. 'The truth is still only known by guttersnipes'.
It's Sunday. How are you feeling, Need cheering up. It's that kund of wiirld. We all might do a bit at the moment, You could do wirse than pittung on the latest Bicep album TAKKUUK.
It's a funky world dancefloor concoction. An update in some wats if the Leftfueld formula in the late Nineties.And why not. There's always an internatuinal hunger for these kind of ingreduents. Very delicious as my Chinese students used to say.!
Insomniac? Green Day are hardly likely to help
My universe increasingly resembles a screensaver of vanishing icecaps. The world receding before my eyes.Yesterday an old school friend wrote letting me know she'd had enough of the Zuckerberg Empire and was deleting her facebook account but we could send letters. I can't say I blame her. We will send letters..
Never mind . I've got Joan Shelley's Real Warmth playing on my TV. Isn't technology wonderful . I'll let you know. Frankly the jury's out. But the album has real warmth. A slightly ghastly cover perhaps. But I'll do my ablutions. It's a Saturday. So I have all the time I want. I'll bathe and shave and make breakfast and share my thoughts wuth you on It Starts With a Birthstone.
Joan Shelley has basic artillery. An accoustic guitar and minimal instrumentation. Simple fare. I can't see Donald Trump warming to it. Does that man or any of his inner circle actially listen to music. Do they listen to anyone. Only the march of the drum. This it strikes me is beyond their ken.
I just had a bath. I ran the water hot. Joan and her band hummed on in the background. I tried not to think about the cogs ticking and the preposterous energy bill being automated. I got out of the bath and boiled my egg. More ludicrous cogs ticking and automation. I sighed at the Spotify ads coming from my TV set. about monetising my passion. I don't want to monetise my passion. I want to listen to Joan.
Back she came as the water rose to a boil and my egg went in. Perhaps I'll have soilders. Bread ones. Not Elon Musk's'Bramy Android Army' .Real Warmth. Joan's got it. It's good. Better than Suede's latest. Trust me !
Old school melodic folk. A warm, stirring sound. Like warming your hands round a open fire,
A lie in allows me forty five minutes with Prince Billy and his latest album The Purple Bird. He's an ornery critter. Very much his own man. He's created his whole alternative universe and now he's revelling in it. Not unlike Nick Cave.
By contrast with Cave though Billy seems to have made his way to the light. 'After the bright night comes day. Yellow and grey.' 'Love overcomes.' It's such a pleasure to be in such company
Over his career the man has made a crucial shift form The Blues to C & W. And although both genres are imbued with religious intensity. Battles with the beer and the darknight outside. Struggles with the soul and the cry of the demons. There's a constant sense of community here though. This a record of enormous communal warmth, One last hoedown around the campfire then we make for hearth and home arm in arm.
Prince Billy is sleeping with the dogs tonight. 'I'm all bark and she's all bite.' It's hokey as hell and unashamedly so. But the vein of humour is incredibly rich and so are the tunes. This has a glorious understanding of the ancient musical welI it draws upon,
This is a wonderfulm sentimental record to draw us into the day. Ultimately this is a record that draw you into the water and then drags you to the surface of the ;ake into the bright sunlight. Cleansed. Restored.
Forty minutes with the new El Michels album 24 hr Sports. Oh I wouldn't say no/. They're one of the best cinematic, widescreen options available to the modern hipster or would be hipster.
So cool your boots. Recline in your hammock. What d'you mean you don't have a hammock? I imagine a sofa would suffice. 24 hr Sports make you feel that your back in that cool hostel hanging with Brazilians, Australians, South Africans, Polish people and Koreans and the world is one endless horizon.
'Climb in back. Heaven's waiting down on the track.'
Cheers Bruce. Good idea. I've packed a picnic in the hold. Paradise in the Hold by Yazz Ahmed. Sinuous Bahrani rhthms from a London based trumpeter and fugelhiornist. It's her fourth album apparently but she's new to me. This is a great place to start.Sailing out. To the lonely sea !
Music is an imaginative journey. So choose your destination. Pack your things, cast yourself adrift and we're away . Close your eyes. And you're exploring teritory of the soul. A great way to journey from seven to eight . The weeknd's ahead.
Off the beaten track. Starbuck at the wheel . Darren Jones who intriduced me to Sagittaire's fabulous 2023 albumL ucian & Caroline by LA visionary maverick Ivan Mairesss.
That was a Trip Hoppish exploration about the affair between Lucian Freud and Lady Caroline Blackwood. This new record Coventry Suite Pt 1 is Collisoion Music, the vein of experimentation associated wurg Bull Laswell accoding to its bandcamp page.
Cinematic and layered like the best dreams. Help yourself to Grog Starbuck . More splendid stuff. Fill your boots..
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Cutthroat. Shame's fourth album, is a slab ofgreat unapolegitic noise that has a great howl at the state of the world yet always keeps its shape.Very Laandan Excellent work.
I'm just back from Dublin. My bath is running. My stereo has packed in and I'm listening to Carson McHone's Pentimento on headphones . It's Uncut Album of the Month which gives you the sense before you start listening that it'll be a slice of Ameruca wistfulness. So it proves.
We get a series of melodic, heartfelt Pop songs with a country songs from Austin, Texas, now removed to Ontario, Canada..Inerspersed with poetic, instrumental reflections in the state of existence. That stirs my tea nicely. Homely.!
He's the Boss isn't he. But he wasn't then. He was a street poet, rough and tender by turn. With a band that swayed and swang and could mix it when require.. The Future of Rock & Roll.
Back from a holiday weekend in Dublin with an important, irreplaceable friend of my lifetime. The Westmoreland album I Got The Feeling In Bakersfield is spinning. It answers my needs. Another fishie on a little dishie from a blogs best friend Darren Jones.
The album deals with the passing of his father and Westmoreland alter ego Zach Alva. Also reflections on grief, loss and being a Latino artist creating in what aree predominantly whute musicaal spaces.This is a folk rock record esswsntially if you need a label. Hey we need somehwere to hang your ideas on..
Nothing changes. This is a record which could easily have come out un the early Sixties. The early Eightues or the eatly Noughties. Or I ssspect the 1460s. Nothing changes, everything changes. Dogwood is in the front yard. You are waking from a good dream and the pool tables are free.
Hold the front page ! It's the Big E, The new album from Editrix . And it sounds like Minutemen fronted by the Cate Blanchett fairy queen in Lord of the Rings. What do you mean are you sure that's a good thing. We're only alive once.
And the Big E makes you realise pretty immediately that being alive is a great thing. We forget sometimes. The record is frequently pure lunacy. Prog meets Punk un a Kenwood iuxer. I enjoyed this a lot.
'The first day of spring' Songs about love, death love and alotments and animals played in a seat of pants kind of way. Family Selection Box, Modern Gardening. What more could you want.
This cosy, content with your lot stream of consciousness.doesn't date or get tired .Whuch one's your favourute
Cutthroat. Shame's fourth album, is a slab ofgreat unapolegitic noise that has a great howl at the state of the world yet always keeps its shape.Very Laandan Excellent work.
In the early Eighties I fell big time for The New Psychedelia. Teardrop Explodes, Echo & The Bunnymen, Psychedelic Furs. Felt. XTC, The French Magazine Les Inkoruptibles wrote an article which I struggled with with my PGCE French, couldn't make head or tail of and settled for their playlists.Went out and bought some records
Forty years on in less innocent times, Endtimes. For New Psychedia read New Dystopia. The Waeve. Rats on Rafts. I can't think of any others off the top of my head. I'll get back to you. In the meantime check out Elon Musk's Android Army. That should go down well with your muesli.
Why not listen to Rats on Rafts second album Deep Below and tuck into toast and orange juice. Rats on Rafts are an intense and earnest young quintent from Rotterdam who I'm much taken with. A Go Betweens for dark times. Cool hair dos and cheekbones. Fuelled I suspect by Orwell, Camus and Koestler paperbacks and ssecond hand copies of Diamond Dogs, Their vision is inspiring and contagious.
The dreaded Post Punk standby apellation seems appropriate. Deep Below is by turns Oriental. Angular. Cosistentlt gloomy and dramatic. Fabulous. 'The ice age is coming, the sun's zoomin' in...' I see Rats on Rafts are playing tound the corner from me in a few days. I'm tempted to pop along. In the meantime this will more than do.
Valerie June's latest album Owls, Omens & Oracles alnost slipped through my net a couple of weeks back.How remiss of me. But I gave it a listen late last night and here it is as song of the days. And very excellent it is too.
June has a voice that sounds slightly squeezed and on the verge of anguish and an exquisite grasp on the soul songbook. Having a song called Joy ! Joy! that sounds like The Chipmunks trying their hand at Jean Knight is a good start. Find the Joy Joy in your Soul people. You know you want to.
The record moves on to different miids, dufferent temois. It's all deeply romantic in a milennial slightly David Lynch way. Occasionally slightly chintzy but the heart is firmly in the right place.
Stillness is a very difficult state to achieve in music. Jazz, Brian Eno, Paul Simon, Cass McCombs, Red House Painters, Bill Withers, Al Green, Marvin Gaye. That's a complete random set of names. Add Paco Cathcart to that. His latest album Down On Them, us a wonderfully 'still' record. In motion but the 'still centre of the turning world.'
Paco works from NYC and has worked with the likes if Water From Your Eyes, Palberta and Open Eyes. Down On Them is a lilting, minimal record. Very light if touch and positive.Mindful of a sunny day and stones skipping across the surface of a lake. A great start to the weekend.
How to wind up your mates in a pub. This one's for free. Next time you're in a social situation. And the converstion palls. Try this one. 'Lads have you heard the latest album by Ian Hawgood. It's called Savage Modern Structures and it's ever so good. It plays into the liminal spaces discourse. Hauntology ! Psychogeography !!! Why don't you give it a listen fellas.'.
I imagine your friends probably know you. They'll just give you a funny look and someone will probably change the subject. Or else they'll just tell you to shut up or something worse. But persevere because the record is really a very good and impressive and atmospheric one of the kind of lefrfield endeavour that is increasingly grabbing my attention these days.Craven Faults. Lankum. Now Ian Hawgood.
.Savage Modern Structures has a photo of a fogbound deserted set of ruins on the front cover. Listening to the record feels like you're exploring it physically frankly. On a bleak overclouded day in the middle of winter. It's an album of instrumental guitar and mellotron orchestrations that have plenty of mood and little conventional punctuation, I enjoyed it yesterday in the way that you might enjoy a modern art exhibition focusing on something slightly depressing and oppressive but also strangely emotionally upliftung. .Nice to visit but secretly making you feel rather glad you don't live actually there.
'Broadway looks so medueval. It seemed to flap like little pages.'
Probably my favourite song of all . Art Rick, Thus us Television one of the early Punk band. But they're not Punk.They transcend labels. They have a fantastic guitar sound which positively glows. They're from New York and this is crucial for they epitimise the wonder and the glow of being in that wonderful city.I was seventeen when I duscivered this and un many ways I've never been the same since because they, like all the best music allow you a different portal of thinking and being.
It's the lyrics. The sound of the guitars and the magical emotion. The whole thimg rimgs and chimes with potency. It's about being alive and different and recognising it..
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Music for an alternative universe airport lounge. A strangely relaxing and undemading way to wait to go somewhere nice. You wonder whether devotees of the record have favourite tracks ir what the rationale behind the track ordering is. On the Best Ever Albums chart this is listed as the 340th best album of all time. Is it really not quite as good as Pink Flag but better than Ram. You decude !
A couple of hours to kill before I meet a lovely Dutch lady and discuss Tax if she'll let me. I have a great swoony Jazzy album to float through
Laufey's A Matter Of Time is a very ,odern sounding record. It's a little bit Jisephune Baker. A little bit Carole King. A great big bloody meringue of a record in fact. I like it, it has charm and fulls you up without really winning your heart completely.
That seems to be the modern experience in many ways and i'm certainly not blaming Laufey for this malaise.I sometimes felt like I was drowning in meringue, but hey we've got to go with the times. . This is a very nice way to spend fifty minutes of yours.
Another delivery of early Christmas presents from first mate of It Starts With a Birthstone. Thanks Darren Jones. This is a wondrous gift indeed. Gold , Frankinsence and Myrrh? You can keep 'em pal. I'm sticking with Herbal Tea's debut album Hear As The Mirror Echoes.
Bristol based songwriter and producer Helena Walker is behind Herbal Tea' and frankly this is Mint ! Dreamy aesthetic poetry as the sun sets on a Tuesday evening
I knew The B52s three years before I really discovered that Athens was not only a place in Greece. My best friend had thus record. It was just the kund if record you wanted to hear at teenage parties. Even if you didn't really know who Jacky O or a Plymouth Satellite was. It made you want to find out.
I'm rather preocuupied with German culture and language at the moment. The German Harmonist are a reminder of innocence and sweetness before Nazis tore fabrics of cilture and Europe apart.There's something ncredibly innocent abour it all. But you're aware that. Actually.
'Iceland sensation' Arny Margret. At least according ti her Spotify bio. And its a nicely apt description. At least as far as her latest album I Miss You, I Do. her latest album. It's a gentle, quietly yearning record. Intimate and soft Folk Indie that charmed me yesterday afternoon while I waned away an hour yesterday afternoon between four and five, waiting for my five o'clock online lesson.
It's a record that walks the line. Which whispers and never feels the need to riase its voice and lean on the unsubtle or vulgar. Arny has a good way about herm a master of the subtle arts. The songs on the record sit as snugly together as a comfy sweater on a winter's evening spent in front of a comfy fire. Lovely. She's one to wtch
It's a Beautiful Place from New York minimalist duo Water From Your Eyes made me think I was waking up in New York City.. Urgent sparks. Beautiful noise. Modern rhythms. About time, dinosaurs and space. Apparently. In the words of the Spotify blog slamming their curveballs into home runs.
The second time in twenty four hours as I make my way to my ten o'lock with insurance salesman. There's more poetry here than in a poetry anthology. So much joy and grief and colou that it wrenches your soul free from its roots and sends it floating off into space. This is a record that lives too fast as an example to others.
Brown Dog in the ring. La, la, la, la, la. Hardly in this case. Brown Dog are glummer , more introverted and contradicted than that. A record called I Thought I Was Gonna Dance with a road to nowhere on the picture on the sleeve and songs of melancholy and guarded hope on the record.
I can't tell you much more about the record or the band. I have a location. Berkely, California That wlll do. We're all citizens of the world regardless of how we might like to construct walls .I Thought I Was Gonna Dance doesn't choose to do so. Instead it heads oof on the road. Guitar strumming. Gentle backdrop. Invoherent mumbled lyrical sentiments.
Another fine album suggested by Darren Jones and enjoyed by me and forwarded to you on It Starts. There's sadness here. But also pride. Determination. Put that in your pope and smoke it this Wednesday. Thanks Darren.
* Not on YouTube, So no clips.
Yes. Smart, angular songcraft. That's what yiy want on n a Monday morning.
'So young. So young'
Antidepressants, the slightly depressing new Suede album. 'Come down and disentegrate with me' Do I have to Brett. That doesn't sound like you anyway. It sounds like you've been possessed by the spirit pf Gary Numan from 1979. Are Friends Electric? Let me know either way.
In second song he's running like a ribbon. Look at him go ! Then dancing wuth the Europeans. Wanting to belong to the road and the rail and being where death had no dominion. Nurse ! Strap that man down.
This is total bollocks ! I mean Suede were always daft. Bowie wannabes that lacked the man's class and ability to produce genuine transformative art.They did some truly great stuff. A long time ago! But Brett had swallowed the thesaurus this time round and no mistake.
Brett was on antudepressants and lying awake by track five. Trying to define his 'infinite space.'. Like Kenneth Williams . Risen from the dead and having a nervous breakdiwn. Well I guess we all have to pay the bills somehow.
Every song, but every song seems to be an attempt to rewrite She Sells Sanctuary. There was Broken Music For Broken People lurking lower down the list. But I'd given up in despair and put on. Sons & Fascination by then .
Keep taking the pills boys. Sleeping Pills. It's unkind but perhaps you do need them. There us no excuse for this. It will do well.
Gold Dust apparently are 'more than a band.They're a family. In a time of greater isolation and existential anxiety they form a vital community,' Certainly their lastest record, In The Shade of the Living Light is pretty vital though it works its way down established mineshafts.
Pink Floyd, Fairport Convention, The traces of Gold Dust's record collection are scattered all over In The Shade of the Living Light like erm. You got it, Still it's a more than passable 2025 retread through all our yesterdays. Off we go into the new week.
