Everlasting Pop and Dexys Midnight Runners
There is pop, and there is popular, and then there’s popular. And there’s also “timeless”. Sometimes when people say that a record is “timeless” – let’s pick o[…]

The Gossip, The Point Oxford, sometime in August
There I am running rivers of sweat down my neck, down my chest, down my belly and through my shirt, and I’m dancing harder than I’ve ever danced to a rock band. (more…)[…]

The Origin Of The Species
The tape itself is some fifteen years old, from a time when buying new blank tapes seemed as big a thing as buying shoes, so the same four or five were recorded over again, and again, matted with sound and fuzz. This one pro[…]

Before we go any further, let us get one thing clear between ourselves: I am 31 years old. It’s not a fact that adds a jaunty skip to my gait but then again it doesn’t make me want to lay down and DIE either – it is what it is, an[…]

An explanation is in order…
Freaky Trigger is a website about pop music and the people who listen to it. It’s free and independent, has no advertising, no set areas of coverage and it doesn’t even review records that often. What&#82[…]

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 […]