Empty exercises in formalism are the lifeblood of rock criticism (see 1000) and hence I am delighted that Nick Mirov of monosyllabic has turned his webthing over to an alphabetical rundown of all the albums he heard in 2000. Good reviews, too.[…]

How To Be A Feisty Rock Critic (via Bleeding Ears). So sad, so true. Spot the bits where I cringed.[…]

Maura reviews some singles over at her site. Good writing: about 60% right, too. Go L’Trimm! (she also isolates the appeal of the increasingly irritating Queens Of The Stone Age: nostalgia-rock for ex-grungers feeling the first-time bite of the[…]

A new ‘episode’ of A Thousand Songs is up – I bet you all thought I’d given up on it.[…]

Thankyou very much to the people who voted for this site in the bloggies, something I’ve not been mentioning because I think, what with one thing and another, that it’s a bad idea. I might write about why it’s a bad idea somewhere e[…]

Swish Cottage writes about the Kirsty MacColl memorial service.[…]

Elision Fields: good review of the Magnetic Fields’ 2-night London shows. Harder core Merritt fans than I might demur but I found a lot to agree with here.[…]

The complete text of Stuart Home’s Cranked Up Really High, which is a rather good book about punk rock (very rude to Greil Marcus!). It’s in super-unwieldy text format but I’m sure you techie people can work out a way round that.[…]

A special AICON plea: can we please have some of you men reading FT sending your pictures in? This is not to say that women sending their pictures to Am I Cool Or Not are unwelcome – in fact when I started the feature I thought I’d be luc[…]

This weekend I finished Paul Morley’s Nothing which I urge everyone to buy. A response – belated, possibly, though that’s the (a) point of the book – to the suicide of his father, it’s one of the most intelligent and aff[…]