The Chameleons / Edge Sessions

Interpersonal tensions aside, the passing of drummer John Lever in 2017 pretty much put an end to hopes for any kind of follow-up to The Chameleons‘ fourth album, 2001’s Why Call It Anything. Fans have done alright with finding things to buy thanks to a steady stream of reissues of their studio albums and ’80s […]

Ride – “Birdman”

The common narrative for the first era of Ride is their early EPs and 1990 debut Nowhere are the hallowed records and shoegaze blueprints, 1992’s Going Blank Again perfecting the balance of noise and pop, but 1996’s Tarantula and their attempts to pivot to Britpop was too late and too bad, putting the band on […]

Wire – “Stepping Off Too Quick”

Wire’s penchant for revisiting and reconstructing old material is a topic I’ve meant to go deeper into for a while, but it’s not happening here or now. Instead, a selection from their latest official release, which is a wide release of a former limited release which was a re-release of a decades-old unofficial release. Not […]

Cocteau Twins – “Crushed”

One of the great things about a band with the longevity and prolificness as Cocteau Twins is that even 25 years after they disbanded, there is still more of their music to be discovered. The flip side of that is that finding this new music can be maddening. For example, the song “Crushed”, which appears […]

Bauhaus’ Daniel Ash and his Wobble Boxes

I spend an inordinate amount of time researching what kind of equipment players who were so skint they played whatever the could find and afford. It’s not healthy. Case in point, the delicious clangy tone that Daniel Ash got on those early Bauhaus records – not some meticulously crafted tone recipe involving sacrificial blood or […]