It Starts With a Birthstone...

From an incredibly evocative lo-fi album, Youth Lagoon's 2011 record The Year of Hibernation.

Imagining your life as a movie with Postal Service.

I very much like The Shins. They're melodic and quirky and original too somehow, though it's clear they fit quite neatly within...

' Pianist Billy Ward's band became famous or at least notorious, for making some of the lewdest R & B numbers of  the early...

The NME, the music paper that I used to devour religiously, mostly during the eighties, is not a free magazine which you can pick up at...

Twee for the 'I was so much older then, I'm younger than that now,' line as well as the whole damned beauty of the thing. T...

One of two drummers who played on ABBA records over the course of their long career. Didn't make the videos but his drums are there...

First track on here.

I haven't yet got round to posting anything about Hinds yet. Their Leave Me Alone album is one of the most sheerly enjoyable I'...

                                          'Tough Twee'. If that's no contradiction in terms.

Last night on Jools Holland Later  the prime, (well only), terrestrial British TV music programme, they cut after a discussion with Jimmy...

By no means obscure. This was a huge  hit in 1974 and is an example of an artist hitting big, (David Bowie, if it needs saying),  and...

Lulu, is such an established, straight down the middle of the road family entertainer that it's easy to disregard her voice and she...

I'm a hot knife. I'm a hot knife. He's a pat of butter. I'f I get a chance, I'm going to show him that, he's neve...

No direct link to this cover of a Gary Glitter song, though 'cover' is a loose word here because they utterly transform it. But...

'The Appian Way. Will we get there today? Or will there be some delay?' Some of the oddest stuff you're ever likely to he...

So to Vampire Weekend, one of my own small musical epiphanies of the last couple of months. Now I know that they're far from a ne...

Of course there are more of these West Coast Dream Haze Pop bands around at the moment than you can shake a stick at, should you wish t...

Feeling gravity's pull! With bespectacled Utrecht band Riverdistrict. From their 2010 album, Portrait of Portraits.

' Their second single but the first one that really clicked, partly because Smokey Robinson provided them with the greatest rhythm...

Cleveland, Ohio Punk Rock band and a single from 1980. Lacking something in terms of its production values as a record but nothing in r...

The first all female rock band signed to a major record label putting out records during their career from 1962 to 1967 on Decca and At...

' So far ahead of its time was this first-ever American reggae hit that I actually heard the speculation that Dekker's then-un...

As a postscript to the Nick Cave review below, here's the original of the song which rolls across its closing credits. A song co-wr...

In terms of keeping this series ticking over there is always a multitude of calypso songs in tribute to the great cricketers to fall ba...

                   Last night I was at one the national premieres of Nick Cave's One More Time With Feeling, (taking place across the...

A beautifully judged selection this one. The childhood bedroom in the parental home is a sacred place for Twee consciousness. As Morris...

Proper guitar driven Rock and Roll the way they used to make it. And apparently still do.

As a follow up to yesterday's Sunflower Bean post. The splendid Van T's, their support.

From The Go Betweens to The Smiths on this series and surely Morrissey does a lyrical steal from them here, with the 'eskimo blood ...

And so from the young to one sadly long since not with us. Buddy Holly would have been eighty today. One of the great question marks in P...

And while we're with the young, here are Sunflower Bean. My last day at work yesterday and as the afternoon drew on it caught my atte...

My new favourite Amsterdam based indie guitar band. Eerie Wanda's album from earlier this year, entitled Hum is a rare gem. Li...

Oh that's nice. The original is by Talking Heads of course if that needs to be said.