You Are Here Vol. 5 (Less Than Jake, Oasis, The Cardigans, Fat Boy Slim, Miles Davis, Mercury Rev, more)
Silent Words Speak Loudest (Free subscription) | yesterday
Pump up the volume The My Bloody Valentine-curated ATP Nightmare Before Christmas in a word? Loud. In two words? Effing loud. In three words? Really effing loud. And seriously, seriously good. I've got a bit of a backlog of gig reviews to post first, but the festival write-up will appear at some point - and, when it does, expect all of the following: " brown noise ", songs about the Manson...
Sweeping The Nation (Free subscription) | 12/02/2009
50 MJ Hibbett & The Validators - Regardez, Ecoutez Et Repetez No disrespect here, but this feels like a natural number 50. When we wrote about the bard of Peterborough's shot across the bows of the idea that only the young have anything to say about live as the narrator lives it, we speculated that his work is not easy to review in the same context as the rest of the pop nonsense we drivel on about....
An Idiot's Guide to Dreaming (Free subscription) | 11/29/2009
And so with the decade rapidly drawing to a close, I call upon all contributors to this blog (past & present) to nominate their Album of the Noughties. As individuals, none of us will have heard enough actual albums to even begin to have a properly informed opinion, but perhaps some universal truths will leak out if we all pull together just one last time and try to get our collective shit together,...
The Mad Mackerel (Free subscription) | 11/29/2009
Golden Shoulders are a band from Nevada City in California who, led by Adam Kline, have been around a while (since 2001) with a pretty fluid and rotating line-up.There are enough radio friendly melodies on the band's third album Get Reasonable to draw comparisons with CSNY and the big mid-tempo pop harmonies of the 70s, but thankfully without tipping over into blandness or formulaic MOR. Visit
Beard (Free subscription) | 11/20/2009
With the skies above Glasgow weeping, Beard Radio brings you sunshine and joy . And it seems to have worked, cos the morning after we woke up to a beautiful autumn day. Holger Czukay - Cool In The Pool; Movies (EMI) Ducktails - Let's Rock The Beach; Landscape (No Not Fun) Todd Rundgren - International Feel/Never Never Land; A Wizard A True Star (Bearsville) Mercury Rev - Empire State (Son House In...
The Decibel Tolls (Free subscription) | 11/18/2009
Haven’t done a real time review in a while, and hey, Fall Be Kind just leaked. Let’s see what’s up. Here’s a live blogging of my thoughts, revisited only for editorial clarity or to fix grammatical errors… Graze (5:22) - Dang, kinda sounds like a Disney film. Like, this fits in well in Aladdin specifically. A [...]
The Rawking Refuses to Stop! (Free subscription) | 11/18/2009
It’s been over a decade since Mercury Rev’s Deserter’s Songs and Neutral Milk Hotel’s In The Aeroplane Over The Sea, two albums that pushed the boundaries of chamber-pop and psychedelic rock in an era of indie innovation that has few rivals. Without shouldering them with the burden of exaggerated expectations, blossoming Los Angeles act Pepper [...]
The Independent (Free subscription) | 11/13/2009
Mercury Rev are the kind of group for whom Peel Sessions were originally conceived: an all-channels-open, questing outfit who took the opportunity to reassess old favourites and break virgin territory.
Cloudland Blue - A Diary (Free subscription) | 11/02/2009
Playlist Porcupine Tree - The Incident Various - The Old Grey Whistle Test (DVD) Cloudland Blue Quartet - Blend: The Best of CBQ 1996-2009 Cloudland Blue Quartet - Souvenir XVII - Acoustic Soundingfall Cloudland Blue Quartet - Soundingfall Cloudland Blue Quartet - Ersatzreal Mercury Rev - The Secret Migration Gilrs Aloud - Out of Control Highlight of the Day : The Thick of It
Cloudland Blue - A Diary (Free subscription) | 10/31/2009
Julie Miller - By Way of Sorrow Porcupine Tree - Remember Me Lover Mercury Rev - Black Forest (Lorelei)
XO's Middle Eight (Free subscription) | 10/28/2009
Paris photo by Stuck In Customs We know 2001 as a demode Michael Bay movie come to life. Literally, a few hours when we thought civilization was ending, or at least that is what it seemed like here in Washington. I don't like documentaries about that day because they always begin with how pretty the weather was and how la dee da... and then you know what is coming and you can't do anything about it....
The Decibel Tolls (Free subscription) | 10/27/2009
I believe that, technically, Atlas Sound is the headliner, but I’m treating this show as if Broadcast was. I love both artists, obviously. However, Bradford Cox, to quote The Spirit of Truth, makes his “ass very available,” whereas Broadcast hasn’t been around in a minute. So for me finally seeing Broadcast, after being a huge [...]
17 SECONDS (Free subscription) | 10/19/2009
The Delgados -’The Great Eastern’ (Chemikal Underground, 2000) The Delgados third album, The Great Eastern was released in 2000. It wasn’t the album that got me into them -that was their sophomore release, Peloton, a couple of years previously. But it was the album where the fantastic four, Emma Pollock, Alun Woodward, Paul Savage and Stewart [...]
SwissToni's Place (Free subscription) | 10/16/2009
-- Earworms of the Week > " Harold of the Rocks " - Primus Amazingly, in spite of having quite a few of their albums, I don't actually have any Primus ripped onto my iPod. That's a situation that must change. How can anyone manage without some gloriously random, almost jazzy, bass driven metal on their portable MP3 player? I ask you? This song is on " Frizzle Fry ", an album...
PopMatters Music (Free subscription) | 10/13/2009
Hudson Valley psych heroes return with its most out-there recording to date. There aren’t two finer bands representing the rich rock history of New York’s Hudson Valley quite like Hopewell and Mercury Rev. And when Rev frontman Jonathan Donahue invited the Dutchess County psych rockers to create a 30-minute piece of improvised space magic for his radio show on the Woodstock-based alt-rock...
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