Yesterday evening I put on Marisa Anderson's The Anthology of UnAmerican Folk Music. I listened through to its 37 minute span. Then I put it on and listened to it again. Now I'm listening to it before my day of work begins . It's title is highly pertinent. Where do we come from? Where are we going?
Music is a place I would say more than anything else is a place to lose yourself inside when you need to . To wrap yourself up and regain your body heat when required. To restore your powers. This has been doing that for me over the last twelve hours.
. Marisa Anderson has an interesting backstory and approach before settling in Portland, Oregon, and its helpful to inform yoursellf on both as it helps makes sense of and colour in your enjoyment of UnAmerican Folk Music, It has done with mine. This is music as narrative . This is river of the purest flow.
Punk changed the script in every way. For the better. Any number of bands invented their own existences and mapped out own roads, not acceping what was on their plate or think the way they were told to think. Exhibit A; Playing With a Different Sex. It's a reminder of how exciting and preposterous the radical politics of youth can be. 'Throw your homework onto the fire !'
Calling your record after a Beatles album is a pretty cool move. Seating yourself and the band on the roof for the record's cover shoot is another impossibly cool step. The Replacements were as ragged as you could possibly want. Any number of bands have used this as a benchmark but never so much as lived in its shadow.
Cardinals the Cork band and their debut album Maverick have everything I would wish for if I was 16 rather than 60. They're the kind of band you could fall in love with which let's face it is what you should be doing when you're 16. They have a front row of the grid understanding of Pogues, Libertines and Fontanes D.C that bodes very well. After all. There's no beating. A little Catholic angst and guilt.
U2 are at the far end of the Rock & Roll pike now but I think sensed the value of all this went they set off too. And they understood too that you need Wilde, Joyce and Yeats and the luck of the Irish, insouciance, a quality bookshelf, a sense of where they came from, a taste fora drop of the hard stuff and a drop of mischief. Here's mud in your eye and a bit of what you fancy for the weekend.. Maverick is a rather beautiful set of songs and no mistake.
Albums of the Year for 2026 are in the process of mounting up. Allowing It Starts With a Birthstone to fill in a few days of Song(s) of the Day to catch up on what's been missed. First The Early Years gloriously misty eyed Modern Moonlight. An album of the sort where you think, 'Ah. They don't make like them like this anymore.'
The band's first album in a decade and their third in all. The first came out in 2006. They seem to like to put out albums in years beginning with 6. This is thicker in mystery than a fog bound day in old London town. Rather magnificent. Langorous.
Music can be like an arrow. Taking you unerringly back to a time and place. The Strokes. Is This It? Takes m e back to Wroclaw, Poland in the summer of 2001. I was studying on an intensive teacher training course. Embarked on a new road. Going out with a Ukranian woman on my course. Doing everything by the skin of my teeth. Not knowing what I was doing. Going back to my flat in the evening. Listening to Is This It?
It still sounds utterly wonderful. It took me back to those glorious CBGBs records and attitude. A place I never imagined we'd go back to. The Strokes always refuted the Television influence. But it was essential DNA for me. Along with the whole roster. It was a glorious rebirth. A reaffirmtion.
Ultravox weren't always about sideburns that you could cut bread with and fin de siecle MTV videos that meant nothing to me frankly. Ultravox used to be really good! Check out Ha Ha Ha! their second album which came out on Island in October 1977 while John Foxx was still fronting the band.
It has a wreckless, maniacal edge. Incredibly of its time. The album mantains the bands devotion to Bowie and Roxy of their debut but sensibly attaches itself to Punk too. This is thrill a minute sliding down the bannisters on your rollerskates glee!
Kid A is more than quarter of a century old. It's a remarkable record. An 'important' one if you like me, spend a lot of time documenting and thinking about that/ Radiohead realised that the world was changing and focussed thei endeavours on that transition and change. As ambitious as Sun Ra or Theolonious. A record of constant beauty and wonder.
I've been listening to La Roux's fourth album Old Flames for days now. None of it really sticks but none of it particularly grates either It was six years in the making. It's a bit like a box of Quality Streets.Range. Plenty you might like to dance too. A few if you'd like to sit one out. It worked and works for me.
'Did I tell you my dad had a heart attack .... my mama took the money and put his ashes in the garbage can...'
I'm finding I'm reading less but it doesn't really matter as I'm listening to more music as it provides the same service is your discernible. Take The Delines new album The Set Up. It's the great American Novel in potted form; Carver, Steinbeck, Scott Fitzgerald laid out before you like a tablecloth at the breakfast table. Whisky & Rye. The struggle, the strife.
There are so many lines and moments that stop you in your tracks. The pain and the purity. A fine record to start the week. We may not get to see as much if the world as we'd like to. But records like this make us feel as if we have,
You can't help somehow but covet an album which opens with tracks called Roman Litter and Sempiternal Darkness. Felt walked a singular road. Sometimes opting for Tudor harlequin patterns,. Elsewhere wasted found poetry. Then they were surprised they didn't sell. Perhaps they've had the last laugh but I doub't that comforts Lawrence.
Wonder of wonders. Miracle of miracles I'm not only listening to O My Beloved, Kings of Leons tenth album. I'm enjoying it. It's a while since I enjoyed a Kings Of Leon album. But this is fine. Sparse, lean, supple and slightly sad.
I went to UEA in the Mid Eighties . Looking back I was in the right place at the right time. I started as a History Student using the common judgement of youth of my A Level Results but switched majors in the second term to Literature. It was the right thing to do.
The American & Literature faculty at U.E.A. at the time was unfeasibly strong. Critics, writers. Authorities on the subject. A strong Feminist reputation. Lorna Sage, Angela Carter. gossiping in the bar over cigarettes and shots. As good as it got. In a memorable lectore I attended a fresh faced young woman hasd the temerity to ask Carter if she was a feminist. The response was shrivelling and embarassing to witness.Carter cut her down. I wonder whether the girl concerned has ever forgotten it. We were all so young. Impressionable. Green.
Forty years down the line I'm listening to Paris Paloma's awaited second album, The Fatal Flaw and it's an incredible record. Most certainly Feminist and with an immpressive inventory of melodies and narrative. By turns celebratory and introspective. Joyous and defiant. They're songs which tackle issues.
Occasionally it's slightly pleased with itself and you wonder whether issues are being ticked off but that's not without reason or rhyme. These are the times. She's a brave artist who stands tall and makes artistic statements which are worthy of scrutiny. It's actually the stuff of master's theses which you wonder a little about.
This was probably around the time that I decided I couldn't keep up with everything going on in the music world because I couldn't follow the contours of the conversation.
There are certain sounds you feel comfortable with. A sense that you can huddle back under the duvet and spend a couple more hours in bed. Turn the record over and snuggle down. This is that sound.A wjole set of mellow rtakes on Velvet Underground family favourites.
Wilco don't really sound like a Millennium Band. If anything they sound like the band that picked up the torch from R.E.M. after Bill Berry left. Yankee Hotel Foxtrot has a grand majesty and scope. It's old school but feels like a cool set of dads hitting the dance floor on the High School Reunion Ball.
I saw Wilco in Newcastle about 16 years ago fairly soon after I'd arrived in Newcastle. I'm glad I've seen them. I always get the sense that they're actually quite modest in the way that bands I really love tend to be.
This might be the right time ..... for Slack Times A band from Birmingham, Alabama They ring out the old and ring in the new. On Casting fresh out on Meritorio Records .It's all my favourite things. I'm ... Paisley Underground and Flying Nun. Sitting on my bed at the age of seventeen on my Habitat duvet, recording R.E.M on a TDK Cassette in Concert playing at Rock City, Nottingham in 1984. Listening to The Swimming Pool Qs. Dreaming of The Chills, Look Blue Go Purole and Three O'Clock.
All I really want when I listen to a record is to hear something I haven't heard before. Surely not too much to ask. Richard Llloyd of Television died yesterday. Marquee Moon was certainly this. Caroline Rose latest Gentling The Horse At The Walt Whitman Mall in its smaller, slightly frantic way is this too.
Twelve songs taking different angles of attack to nonconformism. For not doing what you're expected to do. No song follows the same script. Frankly this is a trip to the funfair every bit as much as The Walt Whitman Mall. Offbeat poetry in motion.
The nights are closing in. The countdown is on. I seem to have nothing to do but spend my evenings listening t Blue Note Albums. Finally refining my actual knowledge of Jazz haveing listened to it for so many years in pretty much ignorance and counting down the days to Christmas.
Duke Jordanwas a Jazz pianist of the fist rank who passed at a good age. twenty years back. He was born in Brooklyn and died in Copenhagen. He played in the Charlie Parker Quinetet with Bird and Miles.From the mid Fifties he flew solo and also drove a taxi in New York City for a while in the Sixties.Flight To Jordan is as smooth, as beautiful and wonderful a ride as you could possibly want.
Every age needs its canon. This seems no be highly in the new Millenium's Curiously this one is not yet twenty. I saw Jason Vernon shortly afterwards in a Butlin's Camp in Minehead. and was slightly underwhelmed. The record has a hallowed aura but it's not an album I seldom play. there's a slightly self satisfied air to it which grates rather.
Another countdown. Haven't you heard. Christmas is coming. From shortlist.com. Some you'd expect. Some you wouldn't. This was an early milestone for me. Dexy's hd an anger I didn't umnderstand. But also a swagger, an incredible cool that led me to Mean Streets and no end of others.Dexys and Rowland have made no end of other statements. But they've never quite matched this pure ire .
The Albatross. That mythical bird. And as good as any to start the countdown for this year on It Starts With a Birthstone towards Christmas Day in earnest. Kellie Gregson-MacLeod is a singer songwriter from the Inverness Scotland. Albatross is her fifth long player and I suspect the one that matters
This is flaxen haired folk the way they used to make them. I'm glad they still do. Not unnaturally, Gregson-MacLeod has made waves on Tik Tok. But this is music which cuts deeper and flows like the river to the sea.
Boston's pet Fox have an interesting sound.Robust geometric guitar spin and gather around sturdy vocals like spyrogyra patterns on fourth album Balance .Recorded at Drop of Sun Studios in Asheville, North Carolina. Think Beach Fossils, Real Estate and Omni. Running on the tracks that New Order and Railway Children laid ofrty years and more back. Scattered sound.
This is a record for anyone like me who loves early Seventies Americana. The sense of waste and desperation and wrought grandeur that hangs over so many of its books, records and movies. This is near as dammit Exhibit A.The waves are still rolling in and out on Venice Beach. Much of the cast is no longer on the stage. But I imagine Malibu People still really know how to live.
It's always interesting to find a band that seems to be bending Rock & Roll into fresh shapes, seventy years an more down the road.Improvement Movement work out of Atlanta and are not entirely disimilar to acts like Omni and Canada's defunct Ought.But latest album Your Perfect Real Life yesterday marked out fresh territory to my ears.
Drawing from. on the surface. incongruous ingredients from Prog and Post Punk but the results here are consistently intriguing.There were moment where I found myself drawn back to some of the horrors of listening to late Seventies AOR Easy Listening Radio but the band have a routinely deft touch which hauls the coles from the fire time and again. It's a record that demands little from the listener save for an apprecition of open teritory and minimal clarity. This is unfailingly restless is the bestest fashion,
Sufjan Stevens The human imagination in full flight.His albums are like haunted houses. You can visit different rooms. Take a visit to your own memories.
A band that didn't quite get its due in its day but now bathe in a semi mystical Independent glow.. The roster of bands on Postcard Records were all saintly and put out a set of startling records. Josef K were from Glasgow by contrast with Orange Juice and Aztec Camera who hailed from Glasgow and The Go Betweens from Brisbane, Australa. They took their name from a Franz Kafka character and their sound was appropriately literary, European, imtense and erm angular.Bands that deal in this disciplined, fevered geometry are rare.
Philadelphia's Sadurn's second album The Underworld comes four years after their first. And in the wake of chronic illness and agonising struggle . It's a record of considerable grace and constancy. Not unlike Phoebe Bridgers in terms of temper. It seemed to be a tale of riding the crests and troughs . Enduring....
Listening to Can albums can frequently be like exploring lunar terrains. Take Soon Over Baluma; released in 1974 after the departure of Damo Suzuki who was responsible for so much that was distinctive about the band. But this is a seamless response to him leaving. Michael Karoli and Irmin Schmidt took over vocals and frankly sounded rather like Damo. Many of the tracks here sound like cult exorcisms.
The Knife, The Needle the debut album by Elanor Moss on Merge Records is the kind of Retro Folk record that is becoming more common and more frequent. And more welcome. It takes you back to 1972 whether you were there or you just wish you were. The land of Nick Drake and Bridget St John, Of knitted pullovers and open fires and the modern world a distant dream.
It's lyrical and sweet. Memorable. Played by musicians who make every effort to listen to one another first and foremost Domestic drams are relayed in sensitive tones. The best trick a record can pull is slow down the hands of the clock to a measured tread
Who needs a name when you could be a symbol. @ in the names of the song are currently where it's at on It Starts With a Birthstone. Latest album Autosmile finds them on 4AD. This feels like Roches baroque episode.
I rather wish I'd bought this when it came out. Tanya Donnelly is ome whose 'Star' I didn't watch. This is an album that seems informed by Angela Carter,Lots of Moons and Witches. An album to get to know,
Cindy from San Francisco. They're playing songs from The Velvet Underground Songbook, Their latest album Another Country. As I rise and pack and prepare for a train journey South to be with my elderly parents.
Now I'm down South in my family's bosom with all the madness that entails. I have Another Country on again and actually it feels rather like Christmas. Perfect soundtrack. Mum is downstairs preparing tea. All is right in the World. Frankly, if this is Another Country, I'd like to go there immediately.
We must live in the moment and appreciate our good fortune. I appreciate mine. Cindy make me appreciate it more. They don't veer from a well established formula that has kept me happy for my adult life and will do so as long as I'm on this earth. Until it ends with a tombstone as the blog I write's title implies.
I've just listened to Boy by U2. It came out in 1980 when I turned 15. Now I'm listening to XTRRMNTR in 2000 when it came out. I was in Catania, Sicily. I was 35/ The world had changed as it always does and so had I. I still like both albums but probably prefer Boy .
Both albums are political expressions of a different sort. I'm not sure I buy XTRRMNTR's righteous anger. It frequently feels like a trip to the dentists. It was the time of No Logo. Today is the day of the US Mid Terms. It is always an interesting time to be alive.
Jack Larkin's Purkinje Shift. Charming Pastoral Folk from a teriyaki chicken enthusiast and full time cat daddy. A record from the Fmily Tree of Fleet Foxes and Midlake. But this has a clockwork charm all of its own.
Gwenno Morgan' a leading figure in Wales neoclassical and music scene.' You didn't hear it here first . New album gwereiddiau goes gently into that dark night and takes you with it for a rather blissful forty minute ride
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
An album that like its cover feels loke suburban night. Yo La Tengo as they progressed took on a Jazzy quality and confidence about making your way down the road. There's a beauty and grace here that's rare indeed. A cool and happy hipster core.
Grumpy. Nobod'sy favourite of the Seven Dwarves. But a canny band from Brooklyn. They swagger and sway in the queasy Southern sunlight on latest album Unfindable Ring a record which draws from the likes of Big Thief and Wednesday and feels rather 'Now'.Singer and songwriter Heaven Schmitt has a lilting presence. 'I'm so hapy I could die' she intones on opener title track. I'm not sure about that but I'm more than content to listen on.
Occasionally this tips over into a queasy, giddy recklessness as if the whole thing is about to fall apart but the incoherence is clearly deliberate and has a giddy steeliness throughout which is rather impressive. Thanks once more to Darren Jones (Starbuck to his friends) for nudging me here.
I become more prone to Prog. This is one of the more ridiculous records I've heard this week. 'Go to work on an egg' as the expression went. Unusual time signatures and apparently a strong Stravinsky inclination.Out with the Clockwork Cuckoos.
Shades. Youth. Attitude. Fringes. Noise. It's not so hard. Heathers eponymous album. Out of Missouri. Sounds pretty much as if it could have come out in any year with a 1 or a 6 in it. The ghosts of Slade, Big Star. Primal Scream and erm The Beatles haunt its grooves.
A classic image. A woman gazing at her reflection at a motel dressing table. Pinning up her hair. Behind her on the bed a slightly more unkempt type in trainers frowning, sullenly. Where are they going. Where have they been. Does anyone significant not know they are together now. What would they think and say.And do?
Ballad of The Broken Seas is classic Nancy & Lee, Johnny & June, Nick & Kylie balladry. Songs to die for and possibly die to. Off we go to war. Never knowing what we're fighting for The confusion of life. The record keeps spinning. Then the stylus rises, returns to its sentry post. Descends again. Click.
A Monday afternoon. Grey and overcast in Canterbury. Nothing better to than listen to When You Smiled & Turned Away the latest album from Melbourne Indie stalwarts, The Cat's Miaow. A band that have taken a 25 year hiatus after first putting out cassettes on the small Australian label Toybox. Anglo strumming in the vein of The Velvet Underground, The Go Betweens and The Sundays. Heaven clearly is a place on earth.
Now this is a record which is incredibly important and which I covet too and I could easily have had two entries for today on It Starts With a Birthstone. But this will do, 'It's a pilgrimage in which an American band asked direcions from English Folk, got lost and found themselves lighting campfires in an undiscovered land.'
There's something quite gripping about the first Fleet Foxes album. It harks back. To Laurel Canyon and Haight Ashbury, but further too.It heads forward from 2008 to a time when albums like this would become commonplace. It has a cover with an image of a Pieter Bruegel the Elder/ Pastoral Life. The album plants you directly into that existence. 'the sound of ancient voices ringing on your ear..'
It's November. It's a beautiful day where I am. I've got up and gone for a walk. The leaves are falling but the light is strong. I'm back and am breakfasting. Listening to a track called Grieving Figure from an album called Burning Song. I don't fancy its chances of the Christmas Number One slot let's put it that way.
What is the sound of one man clapping? Search me readers. Your guess is a good as mine. It Starts With a Birthstone doesn't really deal readily with the deep stuff. This is mainly just a bloke trying to write something worth reading about music on a daily basis.Still, here is a record I really like so here goes....
A couple of years ago I became deeply engrossed with Malone's album All Life Long. And now I'm undergoing a simlar spell, cast by her latest record. They're not the kind of thing I would have listened to ten years ago; never mind twenty, thirty or forty years back. But I suspect they're exactly the kind of records I'm going to find myself increasingly drawn to from now on.
You find yourself talking about 'The drone' and 'tonality'. Wondering whether you need to invest in a subscription to The Wire. This is a record which is not immediately accessible to those who like Rumours. I like Rumours as much as the next person but couldn't listen to it all day.
I've really been primarily guided by melody, by verse and chorus for most of my life but this is music to get lost in and get carried away by. The undertow. Here's a link if you're interested in a more considered and informed response. Otherwise just immerse.
Dazed & Confused was a pivotal film for me. Music is the fundamental thing for me. Hence... erm .... this blog. Dazed & Confused helped me understand to a much greater degree what it must have been like to grow up in the Mid West in the mid Seventies rathe than on the edge of London as I did.It's a film it's tempting to inhabit.
It's easier after watching it to comprehend why Americans like Kiss. Aerosmith. And some band called Foghat who I'd never heard of until I watched the film. Foghat must have been in the record collection of pretty much every kid in the cast of Dazed & Confused. And Foghat's debut album sounds a lot better to me having heard Foghat by Foghat,
It's consistent. And follows its own internal logic. Foghat are actually an English band though they certainly don't sound like one. They signed a deal with Bearsville Records and headed on the road which in many respects they're still on although several members have dropped off the map down the years.
'Look at that mama spider crawling on the bouganvillea'
Day Two of the World Cup. And while I eagerly await witnessing the best football team Canada have ever produced at 8 o'clock according to reports. In the meantime, I'm listening to The Landfill Fruit Bats twelth album. It's a comforting record. Distinctly old school. As if Dylan and Van the Man and Harry Nilsson are still in their prime and putting out excellent product. The same record forever. Not the worst idea.
Funeral was a big deal and so were Arcade Fire for quite a while. Never ones to shy way from melodrama. the quixioic. The grand gesture. It was one of those albums that came out and you sensed it has changed things in some respect. It had tremendous ambition. It still feels like a classy Art film
Queen of the Stoneage don't lose their ability to plunge in the knife when that's what the scene and the moment require. Life after all's a walking shadow as The bard 'quilled' and it always makes sense to have some dramatic flair. To have some semblance of fun while you're on alive if you can.
On Perfecth their latest and ninth album in all they strut and fret their hour upon the stage once more and it's just shy of forty minutes short of beaudacious guitar wizardry. and preening. One foot on on the speaker stand and grurning into the moshpit on their forthcoming global tour of ghastly enormodomes.
I took a while with this band but there comes a point at which you click into their pitch. And that moment has come for me. I doff my hat to them. They walk the highwire that describes how deeply and scary life can be. But how the best response is to get yourself up and dust yourself down. To stand up and spar until you hear the bell.
The original incarnation of Fleetwood Mac are the rare kind of band that make you long for a bygone time.There's a fluidiy and flair, a capcaity to slow down time that is quite peerless
The turn of the century was definitely a turning point you realise ,usically. Musically bands like Flaming Lips and Mercury Rev came into their own. Perhaps they feel like transitional artists now. John The Baptists for the younger generation. Yoshimi is an awestruck album. Struggling with fragility and wonder.
'INTENSE1' A Repo Man's life is always intense.' Repo Man
If you like intensity you might like Lamplight. Their records burn with a rare intensity. I liked their album Lamplight, from 2024. I like their current one Lick The Spoon Let It Soften.Here was a paragraph from my review of Lamplight,
In the sway of a rural breeze, Ian Hatcher -Williams vocals soothe and enchant the listener on his self-titled debut album as Lamplight which recounts his odyssey from a child raised in a Virginia cult to a burnt out tech worker in New York, then back to Virginia, happily married to his childhood friend, Throughout the album Hatcher -Williams explores how identity as it relates to where a person is from and evolves with where they live, and how that facet of self is further compounded by the agency one has over where they call home. To some extent Lamplight is about learning when to take the reins and when to let go - discovering what parts of yourself should be pruned so new branches can grow.'
Some backstory. Lick The Spoon Let It Soften. has literary qualities, which I realise is what I'm most inclined to. There are the slow determined qualities of Red House Painters. Making our way up a hill. Pushing your shoulder to the wheel. It uses personal narrative as fuel. It isn't afraid to burn,
When I was nineteen I went for six months to a hotel in Switzerland. It was pretty much the best six months of my life though I've had plenty and am anticipating plenty more. But this was a special time. A golden period. I was young and falling in love for the first time. It's always a good idea to fall in love.
The hotel I worked in was in Locarno in Ticino, Switzerland. On the slope of the alps above Locarno. Looking over the Lake Maggiore and across to Italy. To get to the hotel here you took a funiculaire up the mountain side. The journey was the stuff of dreams; as is the memory of it now as I close my eyes at the end of a long day. Memory can do that if you have the right soundtrack and I'm experiencimg the right album.
This is exactly the right album for this endeavour. It's Spacemoth's Inward Eye and its motorik rhythms and instincts are wrapping me in the cotton memories of forty one years and more. This is very clearly School of Stereolab and there's a very clear utopian centrifugal flow and momentum to music of this kid. An integral logic and coherent and purposeful pulse. 'A journey through inner and outer worlds' as it says on the tin.
Shredded Sun come motoring out of Chicago, Illinois with waterpistols blazing on latest album Never Odd Or Even. They trip through the tulips, unpack their hamper of Indie tricks and picnic in a field. Another suggestion of loveliness from Darren Jones / First Mate Starbuck. Thanks Darren.
One moment the Velvet Underground , (who provide the essence and base ingredients and moral and artistic compass for projects like these) are chugging in the slowlane. Next C-86 pick up the batons and press down on the accelerator. Never Odd Or Even. strike a good balance and lasts the course.
'It's been a long time since...'.Our Space. Twenty years to be precise. There are people who went to school with the Arctic Monkeys who are grandparents now. This was in conversation with The Smiths who were in conversation with The Beatles and The Stones who were in conversation with Dylan Thomas who was in conversation ...
It talks about a rites of passage we all go throuugh. Where we speak too loud and its always coming up to closing time and we don't really listen to each other as well as we might. It's never too late...
It's always interesting to find a band that seems to be bending Rock & Roll into fresh shapes, seventy years an more down the road.Improvement Movement work out of Atlanta and are not entirely disimilar to acts like Omni and Canada's defunct Ought.But latest album Your Perfect Real Life yesterday marked out fresh territory to my ears.
Drawing from. on the surface. incongruous ingredients from Prog and Post Punk but the results here are consistently intriguing.There were moment where I found myself drawn back to some of the horrors of listening to late Seventies AOR Easy Listening Radio but the band have a routinely deft touch which hauls the coles from the fire time and again. It's a record that demands little from the listener save for an apprecition of open teritory and minimal clarity. This is unfailingly restless is the bestest fashion,
Buffalo Tom chimed and clanged like a Paisley Underground band reborn throughout the early Nineties.Dream Syndicate. True West. True values They never had the personality or the pure firepower to make the front page but they lit the fire in the bellies of honest triers like me who appreciated the real stuff. Creedence Clearwater Revival, Neil Young & Crazy Horse, Dinosaur Jr. .
There's a lot of heartbreak in Buffalo Tom songs. Hearts on sleeves. Men behaving emotionally. There's something valiant about the band. Emotionally courageous They never let up, or desert the banner. their songs sweat buckets and I imagine they did most nights onstage. They don't short change which is all you can ask from anyone.
Big Red Letter Day is their Valentine's Day album. The one where you get the sense that they drop to their knees and pop the big question.. I haven't heard this album for probably thirty years and the years just fall away. The way I feel hasn't changed.
If you read many Uncut Magazines publications you are likely going to be directed to a lot of Bob Dylan product. You may well have made up your mind over whether you're inclined to heed these directions.
I'm in the mood to listen to little remembered second albums by mid ranking little remembered left field American bands who surfaced and joined the circuit in the early Nineties and I recall from my time in Germany from 1992 to '94. A fondly remember time. Of going to Cologne and Dussledorf. with my best friend from these times. Seeing bands at the weekend or during the week.Making a point of catching the support, Drinking and smoking as if there was no tomorrow.
Madder Rose's Panic On will serve the purpose for today It's their second album and came out in March '94. I was about to leave Dortmund and head out to Izmir, Turkey for an aborted sojourn with a job that never materialised before heading on to Warsaw as the snow started to fall. Panic On was recorded in Hoboken, New Jersey and has a poetic, arresting quality. A bittersweet essence which drew me back to the record throughout today. Essentially calming. An essential sense that everything will be alright.
Yes, yes, yes. it's my autumn almanac. All the leaves are brown. And the sky is grey. But the great records keep flowing up the pike . Not least Angela Autumn's new one. An unholy mix of Adrianne Lenker, Karen Dalton and Janis J. New album Believer is as rich and ripe to fall as you could possibly want.
A songwriter and banjo player based in Nashville Tennnessee although she hails from an appalachian region of Pennsylvania. Believe is the sound of someone raised in bluegrass roots music. A brave, bucolic and heady record,
Grumpy. Nobod'sy favourite of the Seven Dwarves. But a canny band from Brooklyn. They swagger and sway in the queasy Southern sunlight on latest album Unfindable Ring a record which draws from the likes of Big Thief and Wednesday and feels rather 'Now'.Singer and songwriter Heaven Schmitt has a lilting presence. 'I'm so hapy I could die' she intones on opener title track. I'm not sure about that but I'm more than content to listen on.
Occasionally this tips over into a queasy, giddy recklessness as if the whole thing is about to fall apart but the incoherence is clearly deliberate and has a giddy steeliness throughout which is rather impressive. Thanks once more to Darren Jones (Starbuck to his friends) for nudging me here.
Cale's first album sounds like sloppy early Glam before the event on Colombia Records. Cale himself is dismissive of the album saying essentially he's trying on clothes in an attempt to find a voice. but it works for me. It's artistic, bohemian has a set of great tunes which swing from melancholy to whimsy.
There's an unorthodoxy about Joanna Newsom's work which in itself is remarkable and noteworthy. But then you listen to her records and surely the central kernal of her charm and appeal is clear. It's childhood itself.
Steff Chura has a good pedigree. She's from Detroit, Michigan.Tight band .Neat formula. Three or four minute New New Wave songs that hark back to the sharpest parts of previous decades. Chrissie Hynde, Liz Phair. Steff Chura.
She first made a record because a good friend died and she decided she needed to do so. This strikes me as a good basis for decision making, She's on Saddle Creek Records which also seems a fine idea. Dancing Alone On The Concrete is her third album and her first since 2019.
She exhibits control of the form and how she wants to project it on all of her nine innings here.She has the Art and the Smarts. Peter Buck and Mike Mills contribute and everything shines. Songs of the street. Songs of how broken hearts have a remarkable knack of healing.
When you were young you could hold a shell to your years. And hear the murmur of the oceans. The enchanted state of childhood. Chancing upon astonishing new music is not unlike this sensation. The low door in the wall The beckoning finger to the golden chamber of youth.
Listening to the eponymous debut album from Crayon Angels out of Northwest Territories, Canada last night at the end of a long day's work felt something like this. It's an extraordinary record. Not their first but the first that's come to my attention.
Thanks to.... Darren Jones for this. Again. thanks Darren. I've no idea of your source for many of your albums you send my way but you certainly add another dimension to It Starts With a Birthstone.
Back to the record. The band are named after a Judee Sill song but this sounds nothing like Judy Sill except for its vaulting ambition and imagination. It recalls Arcade Fire. Another ambitious, Canadian band. But I find this purer. More open hearted. Less stentorian . In fact quite the opposite. This is a very gerous record and doesn't show off as arcade fire generally do, as good as they get.You can sense the terrain. The glory..This has some of the wild eyed rapture of The Children's Crusades.
Not the happiest person by all accounts. But a supernova talent. Influenced by Bach. Sounded like the Karen Carpenter of the drugged Underground. Made records not quite like anyone elses. Lived a quite extraordinary life and committed armed robberies of liquor stores and gas stations in her youth. Discovered heroin early and set her hand to sex work and fraud before deciding on a music career. Came to the attention of Crosby, Stills and Nash and signed to David Geffen's Asylum label . There's an intense purity to her work, astonishing intricacy and condensed mystical passion for the rapture but I wouldn't recommend the lifestyle. She died of a drugs overdose . Her reputation will surely endure
I kind of dig Arab Strap. They come from Falkirk .They're drawn to the darkness. The bleak. The disturbing and uncanny. .They drag me relentlessly back to te Nineties . The vibes and moment of Trainspotting. But they have a voice that endures. Latest album Half-Told Tales (their ninth I think) sticks to the script . It's a minimal, relentless, pulsating record which will make few converts but appeal to admirers.
This is 50 minutes long. A pretty ideal length for a vinyl record. I bought it at the time on CD and played it a lot and liked it a lot though I never fell hard for White Stripes. I always found them easier to respect than adore. But this is pretty mean Rock & Roll and is difficult to knock in terms of its design, its appetite and execution.
A Monday afternoon. Grey and overcast in Canterbury. Nothing better to than listen to When You Smiled & Turned Away the latest album from Melbourne Indie stalwarts, The Cat's Miaow. A band that have taken a 25 year hiatus after first putting out cassettes on the small Australian label Toybox. Anglo strumming in the vein of The Velvet Underground, The Go Betweens and The Sundays. Heaven clearly is a place on earth.
I've surprised myself by falling hard for American Football's self tutled fourth album over the last couple of days. It's spacey and grandiose. In The Smith and Radiohead's ballpark. Incredibly inventive and slightly remote and withdrawn. The band are pegged as Emo and hail from Urbana, Illinois. It makes sadness feel slightly stately.
Intertextuality. Texts feeding in to other text. A Grand Doesn't Come For Free feeds off The Oddysey, Ulysees, Good Fellas, Eastenders. A track closes . Another one begins. This is how we all live The sun rises. The sun sets. It starts again.
Hip Hop takes different pathways. I confess I sometimes find its narrowness slightly difficult but Shabazz Palaces stand apart from the herd and latest record It's a Style Sport is a pathway to the stars. I listened last thing last night and got lost there. Astral
There are so many ideas here on every track. It's pure ingenuity. bravery and wonder. A spectral journey to return to and incorporate into your day. I felt like I was in a Star Trek episode. The original gang.I sailed through its thirty eight minutes then went back to the top of the slide.
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 was in Marks & Spencer's in Canterbury today. Lovefool was playing on the retail sound system. It made me think of my oldest nephew who had loved the song as a little boy. He came round unexpectedly today with his wife and young and utterly charming baby boy. All the old stories came out. Baby stories. This is what families are for.
Now I'm listening and coveting Life, The Cardigans second album. Jonkoping's finest; the band came sailing in on the taste for the easy going and kitsch which had a palpable resurgence at a certain point when Brit Pop was in full swing. It was a CD that I played relentlessly throughout the second half of the Nineties and I wonder whether I need a vinyl copy now.
It's a record that wallows in longing for both the Fifties and Sixties and their classic and clockwork arrangements and also for the bands own childhoods I suspect. It has any number of ingenious narratives and moods. It's a masterful record in every respect.
An artist who mkes life rich. Where every album feels like an event. Meeting up with an old friend after a couple of years of down time. Nixon has multitudes.
Well it certainly feels like it. The evenings are drawing in. The sky is darkening. The rain is falling and so are the leaves. Never fear. Because Sigil, the second album from Oakland, California's Sour Widows is here. 'Every crack in the ceiling. Let's another angel in....'
It's pure witchy wonder. There's a swan on the cover, struggling with the snow and trying to rise to the heavens. Sigil documents this constant struggle. The agonising towards epiphany. Throwing Muses provide the guiding pilot 'Light the candle.' 'put a candle in the window.' we're bound for home.
So many album like these come out on a regular basis these days. Albums made by willowy artists in flowing dresses summoning back the golden age of Folk.
Michael Kiwanuka's latest album Fudge is immediately a sunlit meadow and a great way for the weekend to begin. Soul flecked utopian semiments and melodies. I'v never really found a Kiwanuka' album to wallow in.
i'm doing just this as four closes in upon five .. It's a record that sends the message that labour is done and its time to restore .Fudge is staggering mellowness.
Another day, another series. I plan twenty of these and haven't made my list yet. Just a set of evenings and experiences that stick out in my mind for one reason or other. Starting with this, my very first gig, and ample evidence that this is not some late bid for credibility. I was seventeen when I went, a late developer emerging from a spotty undistinguished teenage phase, looking for ways of constructing a self.
Hammersmith was a bus ride away from my family home in South West London. Still my favourite part of that city. Even now, I dream about being on that and other local bus routes. I went to this on my own. Not ready for a girlfriend to share a particular teenage rites of passage with at this moment. Thompson Twins and Tears For Fears were both set to embark on what turned out to be sustained assaults on the British and global pop charts which would bear decidedly mixed fruit though we were none of us to know that at the time. The pop world, particularly in Britain was about to change, reflecting the times. Undoubtedly for the worse. I'll brook no arguments with that
Tears For Fears first. I had quite a bit of time for them at round about that point. Their debut album The Hurting was out and I'd bought it. All exaggerated teenage mannerisms and psychodramas but I was a bit like that at that moment and still have the diaries to prove it. Late developer as I said.
I'm listening to it now. I'd maintain it's a reasonable record but that may be my teenage self confusing me. Still, some fine melodies, magpie thievery and the title track, Mad World and Pale Shelter, some opening salvo. The singles are generally the ones that stand the test of time best. I stood a few rows back from the stage in my John Lennon specs and curly mop of hair, probably swaying slightly. Lost in irredeemably teenage thought.
The record overcomes me now eventually in terms of it's non-stop angsty projections, particularly when the pace drops. Some tracks actively repel me. I no longer have a Holden Caulfield fixation. They had tunes but little depth. Still, they were right for me at the time. I enjoyed them and they were probably one of the best support bands I've ever seen, all these years later.
Now, after a tea break to come down from Orzabal and Smith's emotional contortions I'm back to reflect on Thompson Twins. They had just made one of the most remarkable transitions in all of pop history. From a seven piece, Talking Heads fixated political seven piece to a mop haired trio of almost cartoon-ish quality, probably better suited to their name, derived from the moustachioed detectives in Tintin
I was unaware of the complete nature of the band's metamorphosis when I bought the ticket for this. I think I would probably have preferred to witness their earlier incarnation. Listening to the record this gig presaged, their breakthrough album Quick Step & Side Kick now is frankly a much more harrowing experience than getting through The Hurting, which is at least supposed to be distressing. The pop version of the Thompson Twins were one of the most conspicuous attendees of the garish pop party of the early Eighties. Duran Duran and Nik Kershaw were also there along with numerous other fortunately mostly forgotten arriviste ghouls. It was an unedifying spectacle. As for Quick Step & Side Kick, itwas at the time and is still a deeply vacuous and frankly upsetting listening experience. I'm not a snob. At least not completely. There is always space for pop records that don't appeal to Velvet Underground fans like me. Some of them are just fabulous. But this is an affront. Listen to it yourself if you don't believe me. On second thoughts don't. I wouldn't wish it on anyone.
I think I enjoyed them well enough. The sound was certainly impressive for a trio. Then they put down their instruments and started dancing around the stage. The music continued. It was an early lesson for me, both about the nature of the music business and about life itself. Thompson Twins and I pretty much parted company when I left the venue. Tears For Fears and I a couple of years down the line when I heard the singles from their world conquering second album Songs From the Big Chair and they left me utterly cold. Still, for better or worse, these two were my first. Oh good, I can take Quick Step & Side Kick off now. The things I do for this blog...
Cometh the hour, cometh the sound and the scene. Chicago's TV Buddha's debut album Hallelujah Anyway is unhinged on any number of levels but rather loveable. Garage Nuggets if you're looking for a peg to hang this on. Beach Boys meet 13th Floor Elevators down by the corner. Post Pandemic Pop of the kind that young Chicagoans like National Photo Committee Horsegirl, Sharp Pins are highly conversant in.these days. Urgency, abandon and slightly tone deaf joy. This is loads of fun ! Playing New York next March. Be ahead of the herd.
I find myself coveting albums I never imagined myself coveting. And in vinyl form. The act of ownership is something we couldn't really explain to ourselves or anyone else. I'm long past the point of buying records because the NME tells me to. Or because I feel the need to impress anybody. This just strikes me as very good. Something I had no real realisation of when it came out. I wasn't really interested.
The Hour Of Bewilderbeast seems easier to place within a context now to me than it did when it came out in 1999. Things seemed to be slowing down in the UK after Brit Pop and the great, slightly depressive and mordant slabs of OK Computer, Urban Hymns and Mezzanine.
This was a smalller statement. Homier. A Baby Bird with a stab at the Mercury Prize which it won in 2000.. Something to buy alongside Travis, Belle & Sebastian and Elbow. Now it feels significant and bold and slightly poetic. Damon Gough. An Elliott Smith who would stay the course.
