It Starts With a Birthstone...

 

 

  Wistful Country reflections. Michael Hurley is one of the true stalwarts. A veteran of the Greenwich Village Folk Scene of the 60s and 70s...

A band that made it initially with a Rolling Stones cover and had a not inconsiderate career in the States,  

 

 

 

  Janelle Monae is one of the best we've got. I thought her last record, 2018's Dirty Computer was the best album I heard that year...

  There are so many records around like this at the moment. The Billie Eilish and Arlo Parks ones. The young women sitting in their bedrooms...

  Ennui. That's as good a description of the new Jesse Williamson  album  Time Ain't Accidental as any . A song from here should hav...

  The Mighty Lemon Drops, who went on longer than you might imagine and had no little success in America.

 

 

 

 

Bought on Sunday. Signed generously in the evening by the wonderful Pete Astor. Read with increasing appreciation ever since. Appreciation o...

 

 

 

                                    '                                             Tell me a story. Let me drift..' Frantic Drift The...

Grizzly Bear seem to have been put aside as an ongoing project for the indefinite future. This is a shame. They're one of the brightest ...

 

 

  I very much liked Spectre , the last album from Vancouver synth duo Lightning Dust. I placed it as my seventh favourite album of 2019, in ...

 

Very much inspired by Depeche Mode, Yazoo, Visage and all that. But that's hardly a failing. Decisive Punk find Synth utopia on debut al...

 

 

 

  Israeli pop. Dudu Tassa is still a young 'un but he already seems like an institution. He's been doing this since he was 13 years ...

  'I watched the swans in diesel river. I struck a match and watched it burn against the night. I almost prayed ...' The Weather Pro...

  Last year I went to see Canadian Japanese avant nutters at Headful of Steam, just round the corner from me in the Newcastle city centre. I...

  English musician Keaton Henson seems to be mining a particular area of music that's rather neglected. The road that R.E.M. took with O...

 

 

 

  I've written about Guardian Singles before. On the occasion of their debut album, in 2021. They're back with their second Feed Me ...

  I love New York City. The way The Bronx is up and The Battery's down. Manhattan. Brooklyn. Rockaway Beach and the way it's not ao ...

 

 

 

  Kate Staples, who essentially if the driving motor and heart of This is the Kit has been an important part of many people lives for some y...

  Melbourne seems to have all angles covered music wise at the minute. Hot on the heels of RVG's deeply emotive bloodletting on Blood Wo...

  A great couple of sunny hours in Rosie's with tunes of the early Seventies booming out of the jukebox.

 

 

 

  A record I've been playing on and off over the last few weeks since just after its release. A thirty three minute record that sounds m...

  I like disembodied qualities in musicians. The unhinged and possibly unwell.  Syd Barrett, and Skip Spence in the late Sixties. Patti Smit...