Tom Ewing’s Top 100 Singles Of The 90s 
“To the sound of the World of Twist, you leaned over and gave me a kiss….”. They coulda been contenders? Well, possibly, though there’s something a bit playful and wilful about WO[…]

“Where’s Your Child” is a 12″ record by Chicago House act Bam Bam, long out of print but available on compilations occasionally, including one called Acid Flashback, where I heard it. It’s a clammy, tauntingly hostile da[…]

Tom Ewing’s Top 100 Singles Of The 90s
This single version is a botch job. Its scatty honkings and weeping free-jazz vapour trails work as music but detract from the icily simple logic of the song: you need, you obtain, you wait to need again. […]

Tom Ewing’s Top 100 Singles Of The 90s 
Like dance writer Simon Reynolds says, Primal Scream are a critic’s band, because all their records, sleeves, haircuts are acts of criticism themselves, statements about how music should be. &#8220[…]

Tom Ewing’s Top 100 Singles of the 90s 
“When they kick on your front door, how you gonna come?” – The Clash’s most palatable, punch-drunk track, Guns Of Brixton, still full of absurd backs-against-the-wallisms but slun[…]

Tom Ewing’s Top 100 Singles of the 90s 
A cover of a forgotten fifties folk tune, “Sally Free And Easy” is the track that makes explicit Flying Saucer Attack’s romantic purpose, tightly drawing the strings together which conn[…]

Tom Ewing’s Top 100 Singles Of The 90s
What you hear is not a test – the Invisibl Skratch Piklz are junkyard jazz, the perfectly po-mo sound of pop culture in meltdown. One of the great ear-boggling pop statements, Vs Da Klamz Uv Deth is […]

Tom Ewing’s Top 100 Singles of the 90s
“You’re talking about things I haven’t done yet!” You and anybody else. Terminator is a record that gets ahead of itself, hurled back from some pure-war future to explode into 1992,[…]

Ingratitude: a key critical quality I’d not much previously thought about, until I got the new CD by Toronto’s Pope Factory through the post. Standing dressing-gowned and bleary-eyed in the hallway of my parents’ house, slimly omino[…]

What was the worst you were hurt? And was it as bad as this?
A simple piano figure echoes through the emptiest room in creation, its notes caked with dust and maybe regret, repeating until it stops being any kind of melody and becomes the sad up and […]