expect delay
This one’s a little bit of a cheat because I’ve been listening to MONO for years, and odds are if you’re here you know who they are, too. But you know, I’m totally okay with that. They recently announced their 12th album, Oath, which is due out on June 14, and while they’ve pretty well […]
I’ve yet to go fully down the rabbit hole of Japanese shoegaze and dreampop as it is both vast and deep, but if and when I do, it will probably be Toyko quartet yuragi that leads me there. They won me over with their initial short-players – 2016’s Nightlife EP and 2018’s epic mini-album Still […]
I’m not huge on film soundtracks or scores, even if they’re by artists I like, as their inherent background music-ness tends to not hold my interest. A strong exception to this is Mogwai, who obviously know a thing or two about making atmospheric instrumental music bracing and exciting. So when the band releases a soundtrack, […]
Every once in a while I think about would-be supergroup Minor Victories and wonder why I didn’t love their 2016 self-titled debut more than I did. I listened to it a lot on its release, and it certainly hit a lot of sweet spots for me, but didn’t end up having the shelf life I […]
Mogwai wrapped their Spring North American tour in support of As The Love Continues this past weekend, and as a parting gift, they’ve released a new, non-album track along with video. Recording of it began alongside the rest of the Continues material at VADA Studios near Birmingham, England, but wasn’t completed until last month at […]
Tonight, I’ll be seeing Mogwai for the eighth time, but the first in over five years and the first time touring behind a regular studio album in a decade. That January 2017 show was for their 2016 soundtrack Atomic, which I loved and was thrilled to hear performed front to back, but it’s a different […]
As most Mogwai song titles are wonderful nonsense, I’m pretty sure there’s nothing deliberately Christmas-y about this track from their 1999 EP release, but it’s pretty and doesn’t at any point sound like a thousand blenders being thrown into a trash compactor, so it’s probably as Christmas-y as they get.
Okay, the provenance of this performance is a little misleading as Mogwai were nowhere near KEXP’s Seattle studios in March but extraordinary times call for extraordinary measures and all that. Unable to tour or perform for an audience after releasing one of their best records in February, the band took to streaming performances from a […]
Conventional wisdom holds that Slowdive’s second album Souvlaki is their masterpiece – certainly it’s my go-to of their catalog – but the critical re-evaluation Pygmalion – their once-but-no-longer swan song – has gotten over the past quarter-century is pretty remarkable. On its initial release in February of 1995, it seemed to be cursed. Drummer Simon […]
Finding info on indie Japanese bands is not so easy; I had to sift through three bands with the same name (and one anime series) just to make sure I had the right people in the promo photo. But as far as I’ve been able to discern, they’re a four-piece from Shiga prefecture in Japan, […]
