Hatchie – “Quicksand”

I’ve been waiting for details on the sophomore effort from Hariette Pilbeam – aka Hatchie – since lead single “This Enchanted” dropped back in September, and that patience was rewarded yesterday with a flurry of good news from Brisbane’s dreampop queen. First, the new record is called Giving The World Away and it will be […]

Wire – “Ahead”

Fact: the first three Wire albums are unimpeachable and if they had stayed broken up after releasing 154 in 1979, their place in music history would still be assured. But they didn’t stay broken up, and it shouldn’t be overlooked that their musical output since reuniting in 1987 is also very, very, very good. Their […]

Synthesizing Men I Trust

I guess there’s just something about Men I Trust’s smooth, synthetic sounds that makes you want to close your eyes, drift away, and then obsessively reverse-engineer their creative process. How else to explain why there’s not one but two pieces online deconstructing their songs down to the synthesizer settings. Not that I’m complaining – I […]

Ladytron – “Ghosts”

So just as a heads up – over the holidays I went into a fairly deep synthesizer rabbit hole, both the music and the gear. So that’ll probably be informing a fair bit of what I’m posting for the next bit. Hope that’s okay, don’t really care if it’s not. We’ll start with a random […]

Robin Guthrie / Springtime

If it seems like there’s been a rush of new music from former Cocteaus guitarist Robin Guthrie… well it’s because there has been. Yesterday, to coincide with his 60th birthday, Guthrie released the Springtime EP – a set of four gossamer guitar instrumentals. This follows last year’s relative deluge of material, starting with the Mockingbird […]

Cocteau Twins / Snow

Let’s kick of the last week before Christmas with the lowest-hanging of fruit for the season. In December 1993, just a couple months from releasing their major-label debut Four-Calendar Cafe, Cocteau Twins got into the festive spirit with Snow, a two-song EP comprised of covers of Christmas standards, albeit secular ones. A strange choice from […]