Do you remember the Indie Index, which was blogged here a while back? Well, it’s moved, though the basic idea seems to be the same (meet other indie kids and swap records and spit with them). I can’t describe the indie delights to be foun[…]

Fans of Duel! wanting some more hot voting action might like to note that Kathleen is running a poll on her site to determine the most repulsive man in rock. Her list of candidates is indeed stomach-turning (although speaking of stomachs, where is Ti[…]

Josh has lots of interesting stuff to say about musical dialogue: he sees mainstream pop as not providing any dialogue, I obviously see it as providing lots, at least by my biased definition of dialogue, where the art in question doesn’t have t[…]

DUEL! – Semi Finals: shock results yesterday leave Skunk Anansie clear favourites. Can they be beaten by the Smashing Pumpkins??[…]

‘DOCK’ BOGGS – “Pretty Polly”
BAN THIS SICK RECORD! “Pretty Polly” is a misogynist tract full of hatred and bile, narrating the killing of a defenseless girl from the amoral murderer’s point of view. It[…]

The changing of the avant-garde: “these songs are not, strictly speaking, songs at all. They are jams, montages, sonic experiments, unrelieved by vocal melodies or hooklines. Yorke’s voice seems to have become another instrument rather th[…]

A difficult one this, as a member of another rock band writes asking me to criticise a group I have never actually heard. Where is the sense of musicianly community, I ask you? I write back, pointing out that my ears have remained happily unsullied b[…]

If Semisonic were indeed semi-sonic, that would mean that they would be barely audible, and that could only be an improvement. Semisonic, in their skittish reconstructed way released a song called “Secret Smile” which was all about a woma[…]

Of all the foul inventions – a poll which forces me to choose between two behemoths of mediocrity like The Stereophonics and Travis, the least defensible acts doing the rounds in Britain. A poll which saw the swift exit of REM and the even swif[…]

If there’s one thing I hate, and obviously there’s more than one or I wouldn’t be doing this, it’s Musical Chameleons. You know the type: those musicians who either ride the bucking bronco of the sonic zeitgeist, or defy the s[…]