I’ve had this lingering unease about Tom’s “Vox” article since I read it, how his criteria work against his choices, and just what the real underlying criteria are. He looks for the best vocals as those that work integrally to[…]

British Bubblegum Pop 1968-1972

“Sunday morning, up with the lark,I think I’ll take a walk in the park,Hey hey hey, it’s a beautiful day …”Daniel Boone, “Beautiful Sunday”, 1972

British bubblegum pop, c[…]

It’s inescapable. Anytime some music documentary takes a look back on the 1990s, there’s bound to be THAT SEGMENT. You know, that point where some rock musician or rock journalist extols the unending virtues of Kurt Cobain and Nirvana. […]

Piano Magic’s Seasonally Affective
Memory: winter, 1986. I am eight years old. Snow has been falling since six p.m.; I wake – compelled awake, no less – sometime after midnight, peering with squinty eyes through a slatted blind. The[…]

Jan Jelinek, Bjork and the Evolution of Glitch
These past two weeks I’ve been listening fairly constantly to Jan Jelinek’s loop-finding-jazz-records, and thinking about beauty. Beauty in IDM and glitch techno is something I’ve been […]

This is a very difficult album to review. This is usually quite a good thing since initially difficult records are usually the most enduring. But Pulp were Laura’s favourite band. In the final stages of her illness one of my stock catchphrases […]

“Who has the best voice in modern music?” asked an I Love Music punter. It seemed a simple enough question and I was surprised to find myself struggling to answer it. The idea of the ‘good voice’ is central to pop music, from […]

Bran Van 3000 are a Montreal nonette known primarily for a one hit wonder. In fact I am not sure how popular “Drinking in L.A.” was outside of Canada. So when I got Discosis I was shocked by it. They have managed to make one of the most […]

I hear the music. Which is patently obvious, I suppose, give what I write about for both pleasure and for pay. Started with my youth, very very young days, Sesame Street, Free To Be, You and Me, that kind of seventies upbringing. And from those alb[…]

With their 1995 album See You on the Other Side, Mercury Rev created a world for the listener to inhabit. It was a world where adagios and allegros lived together in peace, where the boundaries of the staff were not strictly enforced, where tones wer[…]