D is for…”Don’t Talk (Put Your Head On My Shoulder)”, one of the more sublimely wimpy cuts from Pet Sounds. Kathleen found this article, which takes a pop at that album’s canonical status. Fair enough, Pet Sounds is an o[…]

C is for….”Circa” by Flare, aka LD Beghtol of 69 Love Songs fame. This is the first Flare I’ve heard, and it’s every bit as lugubrious as I’d expected. Beghtol’s smooth, cold voice always makes me think of so[…]

B is for….”Balham To Brooklyn” by Turin Brakes, a Spartan, folky London duo whose State Of Things EP has come as a surprising pleasure to me. It’s impossible to describe the band (or song) in a way that doesn’t make them[…]

A is for…Alistair Fitchett, who started this alphabetical ball rolling, somewhat, and gave me the idea for the next 26 entries of ABC playlisting. It’s also for “Amongst The Books An Angel” by Piano Magic, yet another coy medi[…]

Critic’s Cliche: summing entire genres up on single pages is about as thankless a task as can be. Plenty to disagree with here but if you fancy raising your blood pressure a point or two you could do worse.[…]

Here we go again: “Rock band Radiohead are emerging as the pretenders to The Beatles’ rock and pop throne, according to a wide-ranging survey of musical tastes”. Precisely what definition of ‘wide-ranging’ are they using[…]

Rachel Stevenson’s article on Spiller encapsulates precisely why any right-thinking person has now got thoroughly sick of “Groovejet”. Once in Theaudience, always in Theaudience, say I. Spiller has exactly two good features: i) it k[…]

THE WEDDING PRESENT – Bizarro
I’ve never woken up after a night on the tiles with someone I didn’t know, but I’ve often woken up to find a tell-tale Tower Records bag lying on the floor. There are records you just have to have[…]

1471: Gareth’s ‘what’s new’ section at Surface Vs Depth has a name of its own, and has very regular updates, and they’re about music, and clever, and…..well, he doesn’t use the dreaded word, but essentially w[…]

What’s a nice Britpop boy like Damon Albarn doing in a place like Mali?: wonder if the Times sub-header writer realised how dodgy that sounds…..anyway, “cooking up a solo album” is the answer. It’s all in a good cause, u[…]