Ingratitude: a key critical quality I’d not much previously thought about, until I got the new CD by Toronto’s Pope Factory through the post. Standing dressing-gowned and bleary-eyed in the hallway of my parents’ house, slimly omino[…]

England under the knife: the second great British pop album of 1999 is a sick and bruised twin of the first. XTC’s Apple Venus painted England as a rustic, mystic utopia, where lives find rest and satisfaction in changeless countryside ritual. […]

What was the worst you were hurt? And was it as bad as this?
A simple piano figure echoes through the emptiest room in creation, its notes caked with dust and maybe regret, repeating until it stops being any kind of melody and becomes the sad up and […]

IT’S GOOD TO TALK
What is The Matrix? Mostly, an advert. The vehicle of communication, transport and ultimate liberation in this modern-and-knows-it film isn’t the dowdy, sinister computer but the telephone, specifically the Nokia mobile […]

The Chemical Brothers – Surrender
There’s very little that’s tougher to write about than enjoyable music. Should you blunder across a record that harrows your soul or corrodes your skull or scrapes your brainstem with iron claws, we[…]

This is a selection of the Funny Folk cartoons which ran on Freaky Trigger during 1999. Script and Art by Al Ewing except * where Script is by Al and Tom Ewing.
“Choke – it’s predicted DOOM – for ME!”
“I’ll &[…]

HEY BROTHER, POUR THE WINE
I wanted to write something about crooning and the figure of the crooner, the great crooners being the true dinosaurs of the rock era: old, cold-blooded, and powerful. Through one lens, the songs sung by Dino or Frankie or […]

If he had been born in any pop era, Brian Wilson would’ve flourished at least to some degree with those mad skills of his. He wrote and co-wrote cunning songs about surfing, hotrods and teenage autonomy without any firsthand experience; doubtle[…]

I really don’t have much of an introduction for this essay, and I use the term loosely. I just had my initial listening to the album as Dominic Priore believes, to the best of his knowledge, it would’ve appeared, and my mind became inunda[…]

Part of the attraction of Smile to the journalistic and maybe the ‘alternative’ mind is its encapsulation of writerly failure – the deadlines that quietly slip away, the fragmented masterpieces kept in shoeboxes, the way some people can liv[…]