Or – “What the fuck happened to my attention span?”. 2001 was the year when I gave records less space than ever to ‘grow on me’. After spending the mid-90s learning to appreciate all kinds of out there shit, and after sp[…]

TOWARDS A TOP 10 LIST, 1: The Kylie Problem
Or, “How much account in a Top 10 albums list should you take of the fact that you like albums you just bought more than the ones you bought in January?” This is particularly acute with a pop re[…]

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[…]

quicksilver shapeshifter is a great-looking new music weblog by ILM regular Mel W. Too early to make any kind of overview of what she’ll be talking about but a look at her top 50 2001 LPs will give you some idea of the range.[…]

And while I sorted out the archives, I made myself a tape![…]

Freaky Trigger Archives: before we get onto all that, though, here is a sorted-out FT Archive. There’d been snarl-ups in the archiving of some of the restored pieces, so stuff like Sterling’s Hannah Marcus review (complete with awful edit[…]

This year the Village Voice sent me a Pazz And Jopp poll ballot, which was surprising and kind of them. I’m not a professional rock critic, after all, and I’ve hardly even been keeping my end in as a hobbyist this year. I felt excited abo[…]

The holidays were particularly good to me, especially in one respect — thanks to a gift certificate and the idiocy of some crackheads in San Francisco who clearly needed some money to support their habits, I picked up three of the PSB reissues […]

What the holidays mean to me, an avowed cynic with half-hearted aspirations of an optimistic rebirth: stress over buying Christmas gifts; traffic surround malls & other shopping areas that would shame most rotaries; wrapping paper that won&#8217[…]