It Starts With a Birthstone...

  Yesterday evening I put on Marisa Anderson's The Anthology of  UnAmerican Folk Music . I listened through to its 37 minute span. Then ...

  Punk changed the script in every way. For the better. Any number of bands invented their own existences and mapped out own roads, not acce...

  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 shoo...

  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 kin...

  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 th...

  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 i...

  Ultravox weren't always about sideburns that you could cut bread with and fin de siecle MTV videos that meant nothing to me frankly. ...

  An hypnotic hour. 

  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 tim...

  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...

  '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...

  You can't help somehow but covet an album which opens with tracks called Roman Litter and Sempiternal Darkness. Felt walked a singula...

  A rather terrifying album in many respects.Genuine courage and embrace of the outside. 

  A band in the great Punk Garage tradition. Churning out riffs and records. Gurning into the void. Myriad invention. 

  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...

  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 comm...

  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...

  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....

  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 ...

  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...

  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...

  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 r...

  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 sho...

  Another countdown. Haven't you heard. Christmas is coming. From shortlist.com . Some you'd expect. Some you wouldn't. This was...

  The Albatross. That mythical bird. And as good as any to start the countdown for this year on   It Starts With a Birthstone towards Christ...

  Boston's pet Fox have an interesting sound.Robust geometric guitar spin and gather around sturdy vocals like spyrogyra patterns on fou...

This is a record for anyone like me who loves early Seventies Americana. The sense of waste and desperation and wrought grandeur that hangs ...

  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...

  Sufjan Stevens  The human imagination in full flight.His albums are like haunted houses. You can visit different rooms. Take a visit to yo...

  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 Re...

  Philadelphia's Sadurn's second album The Underworld comes four years after their first. And in the wake of chronic illness and ago...

  Listening to Can albums can frequently be like exploring lunar terrains. Take   Soon Over Baluma; released in 1974 after the departure of ...

  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 m...

  A rare talent.

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. Late...

  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...

  Cindy from San Francisco. They're playing songs from The Velvet Underground Songbook, Their latest album Another Country . As I rise a...

  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...

  Jack Larkin's Purkinje Shift. Charming Pastoral Folk from a teriyaki chicken enthusiast and full time cat daddy. A record from the Fmi...

  Gwenno Morgan' a leading figure in Wales neoclassical and music scene.' You didn't hear it here first . New album gwereiddiau ...

  'We are all of us in the gutter. But some of us are looking at the stars...'  So it goes. No generation is ever truly different L...

  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...

 

  Grumpy. Nobod'sy favourite of the Seven Dwarves. But a canny band from Brooklyn. They swagger and sway in the queasy Southern sunlight...

  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 e...

  The most urban PJ. I sense it came as rather a relief to the faithful.

  Shades. Youth. Attitude. Fringes. Noise. It's not so hard. Heathers eponymous album. Out of Missouri. Sounds pretty much as if it coul...

 

  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 un...

  A Monday afternoon. Grey and overcast in Canterbury. Nothing better to than listen to When You Smiled & Turned Away the latest album f...