I was listening to Ultravox just before I downloaded this and imagine my glee when Pink’s new single starts with a hyper-authentic back-to-’81 tak-tak-tak bass sound. ‘Glee!’ I thought, ‘This is going to be like a Girls […]

You can check out any time you want BUT YOU CAN NEVER LEAVE: David Gedge is guest DJing at indie nitespot How Does It Feel To Be Loved? this Friday and yes dammit I am going. Well, maybe. I can always leave if it’s too frightening. Or never act[…]

JUNIOR BOYS – “Birthday”
So, context: The Junior Boys make skippy, snappy 2-step ala Dem 2 and filter it through chilly-the-most nuevo wavo romanticism. Fair enough.
“Take all this weight behind me, and let it go.” He […]

I think it’s safe to say that Kevin Rowland means it (see Pete’s entry below). Meaning it is pretty much what Kevin Rowland does. There was a character in 2000AD called the Mean Machine, who had a dial on his forehead with numbers from 1 […]

KEVIN ROWLAND – Thunder Road
When it pops up on a compilation which I am unaware of the contents of, I think to myself – is that Thunder Road? It sure sounds like it. Thunder Road is proabably my favourite Bruce Springsteen song, marking […]

Popular: this is probably the most ambitious thing I have ever tried, so I rate its chances of success at about .2% (It’ll also take a good five years even if I do manage it.) Check back every so often, in other words, but it should be a fun li[…]

DA BAND – “Bad Boy This, Bad Boy That”
Imagine you are an R&B singer. Imagine that you’ve been trying for a while to get your big break and have had limited success, but haven’t really blown up the way you’d[…]

Quarks And Charms: the “Blogosphere” just keeps on grrrrrrrowing. (Though I prefer Simon R’s other coining, “music press in exile”, both for its chest-puffing qualities and the vision it summons of a bunch of squabbling,[…]

Leakedalbums.com: the embryo of a very good idea indeed – systematically finding out which albums have leaked, pointing you at them and writing about them. So far the site seems fairly tethered to what a typical ILM reader (or as typical a read[…]

RYAN ADAMS – “SO ALIVE”
another year, another handful of ryan adams releases. now, say what you will about the whiskeytown records (i’ll say they were mostly patchy), but they did hint at, if nothing else, an individual voice.[…]