This is not my best-loved time of year: it’s cold, dark and tainted by too many unhappy holiday memories. All the decorations remind me of when I was very young, and how I dreaded the annual construction of our plastic fir tree, anticipating my dad[…]

If I really wanted to – and I don’t – I could fall down a rabbit hole reading various essays and blog posts about the death of the album. But for the sake of simplicity (and laziness), let’s say the first knell sounded shortly after t[…]

Se Dice Bisonte, No Bùfalo shares many similarities with A Manual Dexterity: Soundtrack Volume I in that both are atmospheric, mostly instrumental filmic albums. However, unlike the latter, Se Dice isn’t technically a soundtrack; the liner notes a[…]

Despite being six years into this project, I have yet to review A Manual Dexterity: Soundtrack Volume One, Omar Rodríguez-López’s debut solo album, which was released twenty years ago today (no Sergeant references: denied). Sadly, neither the fil[…]

You would expect an artist often designated (or perhaps saddled) with the ‘progressive’ label to continually evolve and reinvent themselves, and in this respect Omar Rodríguez-López has not disappointed. Over his decades-long career he’s upen[…]

Shortly after this project began, I was lucky enough to watch Richard Ayoade and Black Francis perform “Hey” during Adam Buxton’s live podcast. It was an evening packed with hilarious AI-generated art, charming anecdotes and general ramblechat,[…]

Skip to the end: Old Clavdivs is now Current Clavdivs. He lies motionless, watched over by a haughty woman and her heavily rouged and lipsticked son – his fourth wife, Agrippinilla and his stepson, the Nero. Upon confirming that he is dead, nei[…]

This week’s flash-forward is just a few frames of Clavdivs, continuing to write into the night. The scene dissolves into a view of Messawina and her lover, the Greek actor Mnester, rolling around in a post-coital glow. She assesses the damage her v[…]

This week’s flash-forward is ultra short: just a few frames of Old Clavdivs in his study late at night, scowling at his crown of gold-plated laurel leaves. The previous episode’s concluding cheer long live the Emperor increases in volume as the s[…]

On paper, Some Need It Lonely should be exactly what I want in an ORL record. Personnel is broadly made up of Mars Volta musicians, plus Teri Gender Bender on most lead vocals. The fact that this line-up features a broad range of Volta drummers, from[…]