For me, it’s enough that this track rescues the main melody from Musiq’s lackluster ‘halfcrazy’ and implements it beautifully in the pre-chorus bridge. Hell, I’ll even let the obvious vocal Pro-Tooling slide. Ever sinc[…]

A cover so humble that it’s almost just a mix, but glued to my playlist anyway. I don’t know what people were expecting from this – self-reference? snare rushes? sex? – but what they’re getting is a faithful version, with a litt[…]

The Neptunes Present… Clones
Let’s get the bad bit out of the way immediately. What is this Spymob/High Speed Scene pair of tracks in the middle of the album? Tedious rock tracks that are utterly out of keeping and not obviously linked in[…]

RACHEL STEVENS – “Sweet Dreams (My L.A. Ex)”
Check out the parentheses for how seriously Rachel S Club is taking the whole grown-up market thing. Not only has she been going out with someone, not only was that someone from exoticall[…]

There’s a lot of lame Hornboid detritus silted up round the idea of the mix-tape, all the more urgent to clear up for its being half-true, or worse. A letter from a convalescent friend put me in mind to make some, and send them to her: the task[…]

It’s All In The Mind is a good blog I only found today – I read this entry on Auden and Rilke just after I’d written the Lene review below. Few are fonder than I of queasy middle Englishness but I see what he’s getting at &#82[…]

Some of the other pop logs have been talking this one up and they’re quite correct. Lene Nystrom used to be in Aqua and now songwrites for Girls Aloud among others: “Duty” could have fetched good money on the pop transfer market but[…]

TSURUBAMI – GEKKYUKEKKAICHI
REBEL POWERS – NOT ONE STAR WILL STAND THE NIGHT
Kawabata Makoto is a one-man Neptunes, a Timbaland of rock, in his own sphere. There’s a style, a sound, an approach that is his but not solely his, someth[…]

Further proof of my indie deprogramming – I downloaded the Postal Service’s puddly version of Phil’s monster ballad and the wind-machine original and Phil’s version sounded so much better than the Postal’s blips-and-rain[…]

Sometimes David Bowie’s love of technology is the funniest thing in the world. There is nothing new about seeing live events in a cinema. They used to do this with boxing in the seventies. If you can’t be arsed to travel and want to recre[…]