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 […]

Beautiful Noise

DVDs are hardly the most collectible things these days – I wager a lot of people don’t have the technology to even play one if they wanted to – but I’ve finally gotten my hands back on one of my most precious digital video discs after a couple years where I almost wrote it off […]

Warpaint – “Paralysed”

This year’s Gang Of Four tribute album The Problem of Leisure: A Celebration Of Gang Of Four is a genuine blast, with an A-list of acts managing to be both reverent and reinventive of the source material. One of the highlights, for me, is Warpaint’s take on the opening track of the band’s second album, […]

The Cure / Live In Japan

The Top is not an especially well-regarded Cure record, but if there’s one positive, it’s that the world tour in support of it yielded this live performance at the Nakano Sun Plaza in Tokyo in October 1984. It was recorded and released as the Live In Japan VHS tape in 1986, the band’s first live […]