What makes a new band stand out? In an increasingly difficult marketplace, it must be hard, because often our decisions are made before we even listen to bands. A bad name, for instance can put people right off. I know it can put me off. I’ve no plans to listen to Royworld for instance, unless [...]
Is prog rock necessarily a bad thing? The term is definitely used in the pejorative sense by a lot of music writers, as in ‘that’s a bit prog’ = ‘not good’. I had a bit of a discussion on this theme with a couple of friends last week, sparked off by the new Black Mountain [...]
In case anyone’s wondering why none of the mp3 links work, that’s because my file host has just terminated my account. So that’s everything that was still available on this blog gone - just like that! I know it’s an occupational hazard in this game and I can accept it, but it’s still bloody annoying. [...]
As regular readers of this blog will know, a small baby at home means that my gig-going these days is limited, so I usually have to choose my trips carefully and well in advance. So far though, my record of getting great shows has been pretty good. This gig however was a bit of a [...]
It’s not just the internet’s fault. Sure, the many circulating tracks from Vampire Weekend’s debut self-titled album have meant that not many songs were new to me on my first proper listen to the album last week, but between their debut EP and first single for XL, tracks 1-4 on the album have also been [...]
This post has been a long time in coming for reasons that are just too boring to go into right here, but my tardiness has proved to be quite timely. The songs posted below come from a live radio session recorded by The Young Republic for WOXY.com last May, but having them here today gives [...]
This post has been a long time in coming for reasons that are just too boring to go into right here, but my tardiness has proved to be quite timely. The songs posted below come from a live radio session recorded by The Young Republic for WOXY.com last May, but having them here today gives [...]
It’s been a long time coming, but this week it’s finally with us. It’s almost a year since Dev Hynes flew to Omaha to record his debut album as Lightspeed Champion, produced by Saddle Creek and Bright Eyes mainstay Mike Mogis. Although it’s been in the can waiting for release all that time, we were [...]
So that worked out quite well then. Last March I did a post about Lincoln, my favourite ever alt-country band from Stoke Newington. If you’ve never heard of them, they released two mini-albums and a full-length back in 2001 and 2002 then disappeared. I wrote the post wondering out loud what happened to them. I [...]
For an artist once famed for being erratic and inconsistent, Cat Power has hit a rare groove of regular form. The new clean, sober and focused Chan Marshall now knows when she’s onto a good thing. The Greatest was in many ways her breakthrough album, so new record Jukebox was unlikely to mess with the [...]
