expect delay
Videos, live performances, documentaries. Moving pictures. Talkies.
Gig-going wasn’t the primary purpose of going to Japan earlier this year – it ranked somewhat below taking my son to see a giant Buddha statue an hour outside of Tokyo – but I was still thrilled to be able to manage both a huge arena show – Hitsujibungaku in Yokohama – and a little […]
Pretty quiet day on the internet if you’re not a retail outlet, so I’ll wrap up the week/month with this complete live Chameleons show, professionally recorded in multi-camera style by French filmmaker Sébastien Faits-Divers, from almost exactly a year ago in Porto, Portugal. This was not one of the Strange Times shows that kept the […]
Christmas came early today for fans of Japanese indie, with new tracks dropping from Moon In June, Beachside Talks, and Yuragi, to name a few, but I’ll put the spotlight on Hammer Head Shark. They not only released a new single in “a . to . the . la . ru” (「アトゥダラル僻地」in Japanese, yes the […]
Slowdive announced the next North American leg of their everything is alive tour this week, which I’d been waiting for since since they were announced as being part of Boston’s Something In The Way festival back in September. The fact that this will be their fourth set of dates in Canada and the US in […]
The current explosion of Japanese shoegaze bands can usually be traced back to the early 2010s and the Kinoko Teikoku supernova, but if you go further back in time you’ll find the real big bang began in the late ’90s – not quite early enough to be contemporaries of the UK forebears, but certainly immediate […]
Amelia Murray’s return as Fazerdaze is complete today with the release of her second album Soft Power, and she celebrated in advance by not only streaming the whole album a day early on YouTube – academic, since it’s available to stream everywhere now unless you don’t subscribe to any streaming services in which case have […]
YouTube channel Angura is a pretty terrific English-language entry point to the world of Japanese indie rock, and they just dropped an excellent mini-documentary about arguably the most successful Japanese indie band in the west right now, Mass Of The Fermenting Dregs. After all, how many other Japanese indie acts can boast sold-out large-venue shows […]
Returning to my intermittent series on quality dreampop from around the corner from me (I almost wrote “from the Six” but nope, can’t do it), we’ve got Toronto trio Swiims, who celebrated the one-year anniversary of their debut album Into The Blue Night yesterday. It’s an assured debut that doesn’t lag or get too samey […]
Just as Kinoko Teikoku spawned a generation of Japanese emo-shoegaze bands, I think we’re starting to see the legacy of For Tracy Hyde and their hyper-melodic, nostalgia-soaked ethos, manifest itself in a new wave of J-gaze bands. One of them is Tokyo’s KILDREN, whose debut single last year is a six-minute sugarblast of noise and […]
After an eternity of variable length – 16 years since their last studio album, five years since it was recorded, two years since Robert Smith revealed its title, and over a year since the world tour for it concluded, The Cure’s Songs From A Lost World is finally out… or so I’m told, as no […]
