'Hear Ye ! Hear Ye ! Hear Ye !' No don't bring out your dead. Those barrows will be around presently.. In the meantime Melody's Echo Chamber new album Unclouded is a great thing. That's of you like sparkling pretty jangly things. Who enjoy Christmas and all its trappings. This may be for you
It's definitely highly sacharinne and a bit repetitive but what's Christmas without a couple of spoonfuls of Tate & Lyall and My Fair Lady on TV. In the words of Melody Prochet, who is Melody's Echo Chamber 'It's the alchemist thing.'
Insouciante. Ragged but tight freewheeling sound. Belair Lip Bombs second record; Again. Start again. Attitude and carefree ways. New wave ties. New wave ways.
Belair Lip Bombs are clearly going for it by the sounds of their interviews and the cut of their jib here. It's fabulous swagger. Makes me want to put on my Pretenders and Only Ones change. Some things change. Some things always remain the same.
Australia clearly has the wind in its sails. As ever. Rolling Blackouts, Courtney Barnett. The Triffids, The Go Betweens. Land Ahoy
When I was a boy my brothers, sisters and I used to go down to my Grandparents in Dorchester during the school holidays., My sister drew pictures in pencils and crayons, and I played hopscotch on the garden terrace. We watched Star Trek and Jackanory and played cribbage and card games.. My grandfather smoked his pipe and told us war stories or tried to blow up moles with explosives in the back garden.
My grandparents had a budgerigar which hopped around merrily in its cage in the living room chirping At bedtime My grandmother used to tell us stories and stroke our foreheads to show us how much she loved us. It was an idyll of calm and repose. A bungalow on the end of a cul de sac in Charminster. A dream to return to whenever you require refuge .Fifty years on.
We went on excursions. To Weymouth and Corfe Castle. Or to see The Cerne Giant a large Saxon nude figure with a huge evidently erect penis carved in the hillside and visible from miles around. Not something you discussed as a child with your grandparents so encased are you in the golden bower of childhood.
Listening to English Settlement this morning has reminded me of those long lost days. XTC were starting their rise as we holidayed, with the rest of their provincial kind in the late Seventies, their ambition ignited by Punk and channeled by their own visions and dreams.
XTC hailed from Swindon in Wiltshire. a neighbouring town to Dorset. Hardy Country. Now the home of Beefheart meets Beatles beat quartets trying to resist the magnetic tug of nine to five, marriage and mortgage. .
English Settlement is full of the charms of that part of the world but also a desire to escape their trappings and snares to the meadows of inspiration and forests of imagination, Save us from the ball and chain and escape across the waters. In our Yacht Dance.
You get the sense from the title that you going to get read to from a diary of a troubled relationship. That's what happens, .Likeable but not one I'll revisit. Slightly lachrymose.
A chord pattern that lulls you into the idea that you might be listening t the new Silver Jews record. Until you remember. Never fear. Lean back into your rocking chair and cup an ear to Postcards the latest from Soma/ Napa California's Evening Glass. .
It never gets tiring to watch the Sun Set after all. To recapture the sound of the Paisley Underground, The Velvet Underground. Lo Fi Flying Nun vibes. The idea that Courtney Barnett might be coming round to tea with Kurt Vile in tow.. God's in his heavens. All's right with the world
What d'you mean the Lavender Who? Get with the beat baggy. I've written about these guys on here before. Back in 2018 when the world was young. Before CoVid came along and confused us. Possibly terminally. They seemed cool back them. Like some kind of cross between The Thirteenth Floor Elevators, The Flamin Lips and Sonic Youth. Brian Jonestown Massacre if they didn't have that irritating, deadbeat front guy.
The Lavender Flu's frontman Chris Gunn seems like a much more amiable type. The songs on latest album Tracing The Sand By the Peopleis insnpired. The parts are great, the whole stipendous. As if Hunter S. Thomspon, Don DeLillo, Thomas Pynchon and Rick Moody formed a band. After sitting in the Californian desert for a while doing mescaline. Howling at the moon. I know this is all rather far fetched. Or else just awful writing! I'm just trying to give you an idea of what this soinds like. In fact I'm not sure I'm not doing it justice. This is great stuff.
This has always been what America has been best at, No I don't mean starting or inciting cospiracy theories. Or taking liberties with the English language I mean Rock & Roll the great American invention and its related codes. Genuinely liberated thinking and behaviour. The Lavender Flu point the way forwards. And I don't mean to February. Thanks to Starbuck (Darren Jones) for this latest suggestion. Help yourself at the grog barrel lad. But it might be an idea to steer clear of The Lavender Flu's stash. As good as.The Sand By the People sounds. Their diet seems slightly inadvisable.
While the world apparently holds its breath thrilled and aroused to highly excitable degrees to witness the near miracle of a bunch of lads from Burnage sharing a stage once more. I'm not I'm afraid. I don't give a crap ! I'm sorry folks this is not, definitively not The Beatles. Noel has just got divorced and needs money. There is little to see here I suspect.I certainly see little to say about it musically I'm afraid.Yeah, I'm a snob ! In the end you're driven to snobbery. Have they written any new songs or is it pure cashing in of chips.
It Starts With a Birthstone meanwhile sails on to fresher and clearer waters and destinations on the ocean horizon that appear to it to have slightly more current relevance to the crew of cut throats pressganged into service in pursuit of the Great White. What year is it again lads? Oh yes 2025. Let's see what we can find me hearties to keep us entertained as the Peqod cuts through the breakers cresting th ocean waves. in pursuit of quarry.
Daily Toil. That will do. First of all I like the band name. What does it mean. The band name it seems has spiritual weight. They have a new album called A Profound Non-Event out. I started listening last night on a whim and four tracks in I found myself dragged into its vortex which is all you can ask of a new record. Something happening here. What it is ain't exactly clear !
So who pray are Daily Toll. A Sydney Australian three piece seeing as you ask and A Profound Non-Event I was delighted to hear is artistically driven. More than that it determindely and resolutely refuses to do what it says on the tin. The album title is a complete disnomer unless you choose to read it philosophically. Existetially. The record meanwhile by turns surprising, engaged, riveting and inspired. And other positive thumbs up adjectives. Break out your synonyms dictionraries land lubbers !
Australians seem to do this better than others right now. And Daily Toll do it better than most of those.The alternative is no alternative. To conclude 'You'd better roll with it. You'd better take your time. You'd better say what you say, don't let anybody get in your way. Don't ever stand aside, don't ever be denied.... Repeat ad nauseum....I rest my case......
I was never much one for Nineties dancefloor culture. The drugs don't work for me and I never fancied the idea of dancing in strobe lights with a bunch of strangers didn't really strike me as my idea of a great night out, But Underworld always dragged me in and I found them utterly compelling. There was a literary undertow to their albums and they seemed like natural pre-millennial heirs in some ways to Suicide,
I like a record that takes you somewhere . This one carries me to New Orleans Union Passenger Terminal. Imagine yourself there in the 1950's. Blanche Dubois getting off a train to meet Stella. Akk if that life, And in the background The Black Saint And The Sinner Lady chugs like pistons pumping. An album of inexpressible desire and wonder. A bruised peach.
It's Thursday. So naturally it's Wednesday Knudsen. His album Atrium. A wad of atmospheric ambient space. Like the orchestra warming up for Benjamin Britten's Young Person's Guide to The Orchestra. Like the new day dawning and us retreating to the shower or our morning bath to prepare ourselves for the coming day.
This is a beautiful record and I've returned to it all morning as I plan my classes and do my paperwork. Dot the 't's' and cross the 'i's' . Slip into gear like an athlete warming up and stretching their muscles taut before a cross country run or the Olympic 800 Meter Semi Final starting gum fires.
There's great beauty in music like this. Space. The important frontier. It takes its time and allows you to interpret it as you wish. But most of all it encourages positivity. The record is housed in a sleeve bedecked on an image of variegated light. The new day has dawned. Listen to this and start out right.
'We are rough around the edges.Almost finished prototypes.'
Miles Davis famously didn't like the term Jazz as a descsiption for the area of activity which he was involved and engaged in all of his adult life.He preferred Social Music. Labels are notoriously slippery. In music and and generally just as lists of preferences ot sexual or mental mindset descriptions can be.
But as human beings we need some ways of arranging the things we listen to and read, just as supermarkets need systems for arranging their products on shelves. Otherwise shopping would be a particularly feverish and demented social activity,
Take Imaginary Family's fascinating Builders, Believers the first newly released album that's really blown me away un 2025. The moniker of Joanna Issele, born in the French Alps, working out of Ghent singing in English. This is glorious Art.
In theSpotifybio for the project, the music here is described as Indie Folk expanding toa broader music palette. This will do. Listening toBuilders, Believers is an experience akin to watching a film at the Arts Cinema. Reading a short story. Eating a rich soup at a local cafe.
Listening to it as I wrote this I experienced a range of emotions. Just as we do as we do within a short timespan as human beings. By turn I found myself engaged, reflective, intrigued, moved. In short, this is a rich and splendid cultural experience which relaxed me and just set me up nicely for the day ahead. It's highly nuanced art. Looks like 2025 is up and running onIt Starts With a Birthstone,
Ryan Adams is no longer the bright young thing, It's a long time since Gold when he appeared to be Gram, Bryan Adams and Elton reborn. He's been cancelled for seriously questionable behaviour. His music, though constantly issuing reminders of other, earlier artists, is bewilderingly labyrinthine.
The pubs and the bars will be open soon. But I'm so happy here.'
Great records have a Soul. Of course they do.This one certainly does. If it requires an adjective that adjective is sad. The forecast is for rain. We experience so many emotions in a single day. They're just happy and sad road bums we need to weather.
Bill Ryder Jones is frim Liverpool but he could have been in The Beach Boys. A melancholic Wilson. And god knows they were melancholic enough. .He's touched by genius. That scouse moroseness and humour. The wisdom. Let's have a cup of tea. Should we go out fir a pint.
Michelle Zanner of Japanese Breakfast is the consumate modern artist. Bestselling author and social commentator. Friend of the stars. Brought up in Eugene, Oregon and setting off with modest objectives and aspirations she's beem moving in from the margins for years. For Melancholy Brunettes (& sad women) is her latest record.
No surprise. It's worth listening to. Zanner is a creative artist first and foremost. Someone who focuses in the artwork. The market is not the prime consideration. Even though for anybody looking to communicate with as broad an audience as possible, it's always a factor, That's not a sell out. It's consideration.
She lives in Brooklyn now and has written a memoir about food, Koren American identity and her late mother. Her music is nuanced and expressive. For Melancholy Brunettes is less celebratory than 2021's Jubilee. She's East Coast. But it's another fine record to get to know and treasure, She's aware of mortality and in a hurry.
Geese from New York City, There work has been recommended to me twice in recent days by sources I trust and now I'm enjoying their latest album Getting Killed as I make my way to my eight o'clock in Dussledorf with Compliance Professionals.
Geese take unconventional paths to known destinations. This us a rather nice start to the day.. They sing of mental imbalance and instability but that's what we expect of Rock & Roll. Sauce for the Geese
Primordial Chaos. Too much cheap cider. I loves me a record that's willing to take a punt. The New Eves are barking but certainly willing to take a punt. Out of Brighton naturally. They fuse the various strands of their record collection; Velvets drone; Hippy Anarcho Punk Folk, Barmy, dance round the fire Wicker Man pagan energy into a fine head of steam and fire and brimstone.on debut album The New Eve is Rising .
There is indeed a New Eve on the rise. This energy will never date or dissipate, People will always fight for their right to be silly or free. To dance round a maypole or a blazing inferno. To gather together and let their hair down and dance a jig. On the sleeve of this record the band gather together in white sacrificial dresses around the battle banner emblazoned with their battle cry, A great time is had by all..
This record has a particular personal emotional resonance for me. Forty years ago was my first year at university, That year is and always will be a hallowed glade within my memory banks. Yeah my soul. I do believe in the soul. This one takes me back to the impossible and unsurpassable experience of youth. Spending time with friends you've become fast with immediately. And just happen to be rooming in the same corridor together .In four adjoining rooms. Listening to music. Talking about life in the quiet glow of the night. It only happens once.
Rod had this record. And Rod, Ben, James and I used to listen to it in his room the first and second terms of our first year at Fifer's Lane Student Residence in Norwich. We were probably back from the Fifer's Lane Bar full at the end of the evening of pints of snakebite and black.
Hands clasped around steaming mugs of coffee. Minds aglow with the events if the day. As close as human beings are ever likely to get in some ways. before events eased us apart like a spider's web being brushed aside in morning dewlight on a forest walk.
I'm listening to What Goes On now that glorious rollercoaster mesh of guitars, organ , bass and drums at the heart of the record speeding inti the everlasting night and the moment is aglow again. Lou Reed and his gang beckoning us into the night to whatever lay ahead. We had no idea. That's the inescapable mystery of life. We're fools if we imagine we know what it's all about and where the road is going to take us.. 'It's the beginning of a new age...' .
Bullying is Back ! Haven'r you heard. Big time !. I've just listened to Salman Rushdie talking about going into Act Five of the Play and his thoughts on Nigel Farage and recent accusations of schoolyard antisemitism racism and general grubbiness.. I have parents who are thirty years down the line from me. I can't imagine what this is like for them.
Rushdie says we never forget our youthful moments of being bullied. That they stay within us waiting for the right moment for them to unfold like pockets of immediately identifiable and familiar pain. That the urgency of life and examining the significance and implications of these increases with time. I'm with Salman.
That political and personal outrage and violence what seemed exceptional back in the Eighties has become more frequent, if not normalised. .
Which brings us to Tears For Fears. My record player sends me spinning back in space and time once more . To my first ever gig. At The Hammersmith Palais. Late '83. In Support of Thompson Twins.
I watch my 17 year old self a few rows from the lip of the stage with his steel rimmed Lennon glasses and aloof, mournful air. While my 60 year old self lets the cartridge descend on The Hurting, the opening track on, erm The Hurtingsurely one of the best singles never released.
Lionel Bart meets New Romanticism on a green in Bath. Curt and Roland Excellent teeth and stellar haircuts. Arthur Janov paperbacks perched in their long coat pockets. Primal Scream ? Eat yer heart out ! .Pavlov's dog fetch the bone rover. Let Tears For Fears take over !
There's a lot of misery and gloom on The Hurting. But it's immaculately packaged. Like Milk Tray ! chocolate supposititorries for the teen scene born just too late ... for Joy Division. Bit never fear. Pale Shelter is nearly here!
I still like this record. It's cool and bristles with inchoate rage and commendable ambition. Suspicion and pretension and chunky jumpers. Lots of hits ! You can change !
I'm at the Sven Wunder Wunder Bar at day break. Listening to Daybreak. Wunder is actually Swedish musician Joel Daniel This is his fifth album. This record feeds in to the idea of daily renwal, the idea that we start again every morning as the sun rises. Get to our boulder and put our shoulders to the rock and begin our push upward; toward the light. It's easy listening Wunder ! Marvelous.
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 !
New Order always make me think of a stately family house. Just off the Sheen Road in Richmond. An a garden with overhanging elms and oaks which seemed somehow bent forward in silent grief. Like morning sleepwalkers gathered around an open grave. I was with a friend who had bought Power, Corruption & Lies and we we'd gone back to his family home to listen to it. Hus parents weren't hime. We might as well have neem listening to Movement.
Eighteen, which is probably about how old we were is too young to grab hold of music like this too earnestly. How can you lay pretense to such solemnity. You might read Musil or Baudelaire or Joyce or Thomas Mann. .That's what you aim to do at that age. Impress. Encourage others to long for you. To bed you and wed you and share the same dreams. New Oder like Joy Division who they essentially still were, minus Curtis.
Twenty years and it feels like a different world. A different mindset. Indie Landfill. It's somebody's youth but in a lot of ways it feels like a record made my people who are echoing what they picked up listening to Jam, Clash and Specials records in their formative years.
It's December and we're closing in in the inevitable with MF Tomlinson's Die To Wake Up From a Dream a languid album in the slipstream of Divine Comedy, Ed Harcourt and the like.
The kind of record that employs half the percussion section. of the local junior orchestra. Straining for Pet Sounds but staying in Dorking. It's slightly wirkaday byt charming nevertheless.
'There's a heat in the pavement... my mercury's raising...... don't know if it's love or if it's ovulation..the mist from the fountain is kissibg my neck. The liquid crystal is in my grip. Some days I'm a woman. some days I'm a man....' And on it rolls. I likes me a bit of intensity
It's Friday Morning and I'm listening to Lorde's new album Virgin. I don't feel myself a natural constituent perhaps. But hey I like pop music. I've got Martha & The Vandellas, Supremes and Shangri La and Nancy Sinatra records. Madonna.
I remember the first time I saw Britney Spears. On Winter Language Teaching Tour in Austria in 1998. Sitting on a hotel bed wih Beth Stavely. The Audrey Hepburn of EFL. She lent me her sunglasses when I had a dose of conjuinctivitis when we finally made it to Vienna a week or so later. In between cigarettes.We both smoked a lot of cigarettes. No romance. Just nicotine breaks.
Beth . Beth Stavely. I salute you. Wherever you are. Watching the Hit Me Baby video on MTV, I mean I like R.E.M. But I've got time in my life for that too. You have to. . Otherwise you've forgotten that you were ever young. That you're alive
Virgin is crammed choc a bloc wuth these Pop bursts.Tiny Explosions. That's what Pop Music'sfor after all. Literary and Filmic moments. Lorde does cerebral.You could write a thesis on this if you wanted to . But why bother when you can listen to it with your breakfast instead. Realisations that it's time to break free and hit the highway. Go with that girl. Go with that guy. Go out on your own. Break loose.
This reminded me of similar spirits. Ezra Furman, Sharon Van Etten. This will inspire teenagers. Sound great on radios in old age homes. Put a spring in steps as we go into our own new days. Great record !
