It Starts With a Birthstone...

Rostam Batmanglij has left the nest of Vampire Weekend where it was generally felt he was the driving musical director. His first album...

The premature loss of Grant Hart today is rather sad on every level. A definite pioneer who perhaps never quite got his due, either as a ...

And another from the Part Company record named for something of a French sixties icon.

With Robert Forster off on his publicity tour for Grant & I, reviewed on here a week or so, it seems fitting to post a few songs f...

Also Roscoe. Silent Star who met an unfortunate early death, probably partly due to the sexual scandal ten years previously that brough...

And as an add on. An interesting interview with the same woman.

'To put a name on it. Would be to nail the age of anxiety...' Hannah Rodgers, AKA Pixx's debut album The Age of Anxiety w...

A side project of David Hanke from Renegades of Jazz. Much funkiness going down on their current album,  Liberated Thoughts.

Plaintive and utterly typical moment from Tomo Nakyama's new, float out in space album. Pieces of Sky.

It's unusual that I post a song on here that I don't actually particularly like but there's reason for it here. The tag lin...

Courtney Barnett, quite a favourite of this blog, has become something of an indie superstar since I started writing it which is a very...

' If there'd been rock critics in 1959 and one of them had written of Bo Diddley as 'Rock and Roll Future' he'd ha...

A very lovely set of songs on an EP called Slow Return, released this year,   from Frankie Broyles,one-third of Atlanta, Georgia's ...

Bryan Ferry's dad was called Fred. Fred Ferry. ' Ferry adored his dad so much that when he became a star he asked him to move i...

Yesterday was a day when four wonderful new albums were released to comfort me through a bad dose of flu which kept me off work. Dream...

The new Alvvays album Antisocialites , also out today is full of jaunty indie pop songs like this one in honour of the Jesus & Mary ...

On a day when most of the music world's attention will be focused on the release of The National's new album, (which I'll g...

And another from the pair, from Broken Heart Surgery, for the altogether rather wonderful Betty Ford.

A project involving Terry Bickers, once maverick guitarist for House of Love and Levitation, and Pete Fijalkowski, former Adorable fron...

In the same way as you can wait for a book you've been wanting to read without knowing of its existence, as I was with This is Memo...

The odious Jeff Koons, one of the very few modern artists to boil my blood, gets appropriately satirical tribute from Momus.

I can tell you very little about Travis Bretzer except that he's from Edmonton, Alberta, that he's released an album this year ...

 Libertines on the jukebox. A drunken and threatening man in Rosie's. It seemed apt.

And here the two of them talk about a few of their best known songs and how they came to write them.

Robert Forster always had the most poetic imagination and an ability to make connections. Here he makes romantic ones with Princess Car...

                                                       'I just want some affection...' In Karen, his  first song of note, his...

A small Go Betweens feature to mark my finishing Robert Forster's Grant & I memoir, (review coming up next). So here are two gr...

One for Bogie from German band Elvis Dog.

Cool Sunday morning music from my radio.

Sparky first single from a young duo on James Endeacott's always interesting 1965 record label.

There's a guy at work who I share a staffroom with. He swears by The Damned and we sometimes have conversations about music which i...

One of the most intriguing, exciting and genuinely edgy records I've heard for some time is Elytral, the second album from British ...