Rock & Roll is Dead quoth dreadful article on local US paper’s website. Boo hoo. What the article is saying is that the thing called ‘rock and roll’ which used to sell a lot of records (and hence make rock writers’ lives […]

Let me be the first to state the obvious: that is the worst title for a pop single ever. It brings to mind crapping-toddler birthday card designs in its tumourous cuteness, and when you imagine it sung you imagine it accompanied by a winsome giggle-g[…]

“Inspired by no-one / Other groups bore us / How can you say we sound like Frazier Chorus?” is perhaps my favourite Half Man Half Biscuit lyric, and in hot anticipation of the English issue, wherein they may well be mentioned quite a lot,[…]

Haven’t caught up with The War Against Silence in a while. A recent blockbuster includes a review of the new Trembling Blue Stars album and some funny stuff about his first ever computer.[…]

So here we have Fly Online: it looks way gorgeous and cutting-edgey, and when you get in it talks about bucking the mainstream and how there are still skiploads of underground visionaries out there waiting to be discovered, and generally it makes me […]

I thought about doing a similar piece for the Love Issue, and now I’ve been beaten to it: The art of the mixtape. This link swiped from jejune.net.[…]

The Cedar Room is seven-and-a-half minutes long. Why? Maybe Doves would answer “Because it has to be”, but that’s obviously nonsense. There’s no lyrical development, no groove to speak of, no big musical build-up, nothing exce[…]

A very informative page about avant-disco (and the normal kind) producer Arthur Russell, whose World Of Echo album is probably the longest-standing title on my internalised Wants List.[…]

For the few readers to whom I haven’t crowed about this already, I now have a proper domain name, and everything will be moving there as soon as I’ve made the older articles more readable.[…]

Yes? Good. I never thought I’d see the day when online bastion of modernist indie sensitivity Tangents went pop on us, but what do I find there but a whacking great article on Stock Aitken and Waterman. It makes its points well enough but it&#8[…]