Tom Ewing’s Top 100 Singles of the 90s
There’s something wearyingly earnest about Lauryn Hill, but then there’s something irresistibly peppy and kinetic about “Doo-Wop (That Thing)” which lets you forget all her chic aut[…]

Are You Scared To Get Angsty?
You don’t decide to listen to this kind of music: it chooses you. Indie kids are born not made, see, and one day at the crossroads, after the seventeenth pointless, exhausting infatuation, after the twenty-fifth re[…]

Tom Ewing’s Top 100 Singles Of The 90s
Even before they put their money where their matches were, the KLF, also known as the Justified Ancients Of Mu Mu, furthermore known as the JAMMS, were the most brilliant pop-artists of the decade. They we[…]

Tom Ewing’s Top 100 Singles Of The 90s
“The Green Man” is crude, heady stuff – a paranoiac hoover-noise vortex breaks into a primitive hardcore stomp with jittery shrieks and silvery stacatto jabs of synth, and then suddenly t[…]

Tom Ewing’s Top 100 Singles Of The 90s
“Gimme The Nite” hit me first time as funny, catchy, clever and good for maybe two listens. After three listens, it stopped sounding brittle and started sounding brilliant. Laptop’s deadp[…]

Tom Ewing’s Top 100 Singles Of The 90s
No good indie kid ever forgets their first insult. It was the late 80s, I was at school, and Nick Smith (local, well-bred, gangly, wanker) accused me of listening to “stupid weird noise shit”. […]

Tom Ewing’s Top 100 Singles Of The 90s
One tiny peevelet of mine about pop criticism is the gawping that results when a mainstream band dares to use an ‘unusual’ word in a song. The classic example being Oasis’ “Acquiesc[…]

Tom Ewing’s Top 100 Singles Of The 90s
At a pinch you could have imagined this shiver of wide-eyed, wide-pupilled kinder-folk being plucked out on guitars, with Kirsty Hawkshaw being contextually transformed into some wild, wildly annoying, for[…]

Tom Ewing’s Top 100 Singles Of The 90s
Kurt Wagner thoughtfully massages his cheek with his tongue and launches into another tight, cryptic slice of something. ‘Alternative country’ doesn’t seem to fit, certainly – there[…]

Tom Ewing’s Top 100 Singles Of The 90s
How to stop time: people talk a lot about the imperceptible shifts of detail in ultra-minimal techno tracks, but I don’t think any listener truly notices them until after playback. That would imply a[…]