The Cure – “A Forest”, live at Werchter Festival, 1981
A very young, three-piece Cure perform the Seventeen Seconds classic in Belgium in July 1981.
Frank Yang
In Praise of the Pro Co Rat 2
If you were to tell me I could only have one guitar pedal, first I would say, “no way in hell”, but if pressed, I suspect I’d opt for my ProCo Rat 2. The specifics are lost to the mists of time but I think it’s a late ’80s model that I got it around […]
Blue Monday is not a thing but “Blue Monday” is.
A reminder that anything you see today about the third Monday in January being the saddest day of the year is nonsense created by an advertising cohmpany to promote travel bookings, and that the joke is absolutely on them this year. Or it would be if the company that solicited the campaign was still in […]
Searching For The Sundays
The Sundays’ debut album Reading, Writing & Arithmetic turns 31 years old today, and so I grudgingly salute the bands ability and willingness to remain disappeared completely after wrapping their Static & Silence tour in December 1997. Aside from some Record Store Day releases of their three albums in the last few years that sell […]
Long Live Vinyl talks to Vaughan Oliver
There was rightly an outpouring of coverage when legendary graphic designer Vaughan Oliver – responsible for the visual language of 4AD records from its inception through the late ’90s – sadly passed away in December of 2019. Long Live Vinyl was fortunate enough to talk to Oliver about his work in August of 2018.
Brian Eno’s “The Big Ship” and Me and Earl and The Dying Girl
Even relative to his immensely otherworldly and experimental discography, Brian Eno’s Another Green World stands out as an especially magical record (Fripp!). And I’m not too embarrassed to admit that I was led into exploring Eno’s solo work – particularly the more conventional rock/vocal records of the ’70s – through a movie soundtrack. “The Big […]
Reverb talks songwriting with Japanese Breakfast
Reverb.com’s main purpose is as a music gear marketplace, responsible for inciting poor decision making from impulse control-deficient musicians (I’m looking at you, me). But they also maintain a respectable editorial department, and so there’s pieces like this March 2018 interview with Michelle Zauner of Japanese Breakfast about her second album, Sad Songs From Another […]
Iterations: David Bowie’s “Absolute Beginners”
“Absolute Beginners” is one of my favourite Bowie songs, and one I fear gets unjustly overlooked in the general “everything after ‘Scary Monsters’ is bad” narrative that gets applied to his ’80s output. I mean, yes, his studio albums of the era aren’t great, but if you get into the singles and soundtrack contributions, there’s […]
Emma Anderson of Lush on The Return Of The Durutti Column
Emma Anderson of Lush and Sing Sing pens an essay for Sonic Cathedral on discovering The Return Of The Durutti Column, the majestic debut album from Vini Reilly and company.
Producer Stephen Hague on recording New Order’s “True Faith”
From the March 2005 issue of Sound On Sound – producer Stephen Hague gets heavy into the nuts and bolts of recording of New Order’s 2005 single, “True Faith”. CLASSIC TRACKS: New Order ‘True Faith’ @ Sound On Sound