It Starts With a Birthstone...

Appropriate folky reel for Laurie Lee.

It's wonderful to see New Yorkers Olden Yolk back so soon with their beautifully textured second album Living Theatre. (out today) ...

Calmness and ease are much underrated. So I'm grateful when I fall upon a new album which just oozes those emotions even if it'...

One of the most wildly ambitious albums you'll hear all year, Kevin Morby's gargantuan new record  Oh My God  came out a few we...

And another from a couple of years back from the same band. For an icon of French New Wave cinema.

Portland, Oregon quartet who skate the lakes between Jim Morrison, Lou Reed and Ian Curtis's. Their new album A Dangerous Crossing ...

Another from The Pearlfishers from a few years back... 

Sensitive, crafted pop songs from Love & Other Hopeless Things  the latest album by The Pearlfishers, the way that Roddy Frame and ...

One for Doris.

The Get Up Kids. Still Emo twenty years on.

Ex-Lucksmith Mark Mannone, not quite alone, but with his supporting, bearded band, releases his first album for six years and it's ...

Grateful Dead. One of the most difficult of bands to warm to. American Beauty is probably the album to listen to.

Radiohead. They're not dull.

More Von Spar, and again distinctly Underworld territory here. From 2012.

Cologne band Von Spar establish early on on the first track of new record  Under Pressure that they're equipped with a kinetic flee...

Following the Boogarins review it feels appropriate to post a clutch of songs from the soundtrack to 1970's 'Tostao a Fera de Our...

Author Brett Easton Ellis being fantastically odd on early Sunday afternoon BBC 6 Music radio. You get two from the show. Petula Clark ...

Brazilian band Boogarins are back with a new album  Sombre Duvida and it's one long pleasurable dive into aquatic sound, like the r...

Saturday night in Rosie's.

The delightfully named Olivia Neutron-John has a new eponymous five track EP out. It's not all to my taste but when it hits, it hit...

Lazy Saturday morning listening to the wonderful  Turtle Soup last album by The Turtles. I was introduced to this record by a recommendation...

I have a friend called Sean who was a barman at my local Rosie's in Newcastle and who I still see there as we're both still reg...

Memphis veterans Lucero honour Zevon and everything he came to represent...

Coming from a similar angle to things as Mystery Lights except that there's is a distinctly English take on the Voodoo Punk paradox. ...

Too Much Tension! is right. The Mystery Lights, once of Salinas, California but now of New York certainly know what they like. They lik...

One for the late, great...

International Teachers of Pop released their eponymous album a few months back and I've been negligent not to listen through it rig...

Spanish Garage Band Zodiacs make a fine and appropriate tribute to Roky. From ten years back.

Julia Shapiro of Chastity Belt is making solo records but doing so very much in the existential spirit of her band. This has a wonderfu...

A second classical piece in a row in this particular series.

'There are ancient societies that value the dreaming world on an equal level as the waking world. I've always had one foot in t...