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My most played album?
@LPGroup, which I like as a concept but not so much as an actuality (the communal nature of voting and decision making over what records to listen to and tweet about together seems to often result in...
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On end-of-year lists…
End-of-year lists seem to be coming earlier and earlier each year – the last couple seem to have hit even before December has started, presumably in a joint effort to a) attract attention by getting...
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National Motorways
All Tomorrow’s Parties, curated by The National I’ve often wondered whether one day we’ll get to the point where we don’t need roadworks anymore – all the nation’s motorways beautifully surfaced, all...
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12 albums from 2012
People (and by people I mean music writers and geeks and fans of various stripes) often talk about fallow years for music, about an occasional paucity of great albums across a calendar year. I’m not...
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12 albums not from 2012
Sometimes, in fact often, the most important records for me in any given year aren’t the salivated-over new releases, but the “why didn’t I hear this before?” discoveries, the things you’d ignored or...
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12 songs from 12
There is, of course, a huge amount of music that I consumed (what an awful word to use when we really mean “appreciated”) through 2012 that came outside of the context of albums. I gather, from The...
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On the long demise of HMV
On Sunday I went in HMV Exeter desperate to spend £20 (that I don’t really have, because it’s January) on season 4 of Breaking Bad on DVD. I vaguely hoped it might be in the fire blue cross sale. It...
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Repetition is a form of change: My Bloody Valentine, Loveless, and what to...
Specificity can be a boon to music – the little lyrical details that make a song feel more real; the clarity of something in the mix bursting through the listener’s metaphorical fourth-wall – but a...
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Why the vinyl revival can sod off as far as I’m concerned
Straight off the bat, for the record, I love Danny Baker as a radio broadcaster; his Saturday morning show on Radio 5 live beautifully demonstrates his story-telling skills, his appreciation of the...
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Inside a volcano of sound – My Bloody Valentine live
“It makes you wonder, if they’re handing out earplugs to everyone, why they don’t just… y’know, turn it down a bit” commented Paul in the pub before the gig. “Because sound doesn’t work like that” was...
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Records from 2013 that are at least worth listening to and probably buying...
A quick post, because we’re 1/3 of the way through 2013 and I’ve not really written anything about new music yet this year, due to all the noughties stuff I’ve been doing. My Bloody Valentine – MBV...
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Albums from May, part 1
There seem to have been almost as many albums released in May that are worth giving a damn about as there were in the whole of the previous four months of 2013. They’re probably strategically launched...
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Albums from May, part 2; Daft Punk
Daft Punk – Random Access Memories If I’m honest, I don’t think Daft Punk are all that, and I never really did. I’ve liked all their singles enough, and bought all their studio albums pretty much as...
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Holden – The Inheritors
Border Community, 2013. Let’s write something about Holden, shall we? Wikipedia says he was born in Exeter in June 1979, which means he was almost certainly born in the same hospital as me, and which...
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Embrace – Drawn From Memory / Out of Nothing (2000 / 2004)
“Bands, those funny little plans, that never turn out right.” So sang Mercury Rev’s Jonathan Donohue in 1998, presumably about his own relationship with his band, their problems over the years, and...
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On criticism
On Tuesday 15 October 2013, on the main ‘new releases’ index page for music on the website Metacritic (a service which aggregates reviews and gives an average score) out of approximately 200 albums...
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An alternative Mercury Music Prize Shortlist
Because there really aren’t enough of these already, are there? (BBC. DiS. The Guardian. Dead Albatross?) And not enough of them feature These New Puritans or Steve Mason. (All of them feature These...
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Arcade Fire – Reflektor
If you’d told me 16 years ago that one of ‘our’ bands would have a number one album on both sides of the Atlantic, win a Grammy for it (and a BRIT, and a Juno, and a Polaris), and then, for their...
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Albums of 2013
I’ve been debating whether or not to put together a list of my favourite records for 2013. Various thoughts are telling me not to bother; who cares about a list I might compile? Will I get shouted at...
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Not albums of 2013
Of course the full ‘story’ of 2013 musically, as far as I’m concerned, involves a lot more than just the twenty albums in my last post. There are several other categories of records beyond albums...
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