expect delay
It’s probably overstating things to call “Elegia” one of New Order’s signature tracks – it’s too much of a stylistic outlier for that – but it is one of their most notable and memorable. Opening up side two of 1985’s Low-Life, it’s an elegiac instrumental that bridges the far poppier halves of the album with […]
Here’s another instalment in the series I’ll call “Cocteau for Cocteau’s sake”, where I’ll just throw some Cocteau Twins material out there because doing so makes the world a marginally better place. Wikipedia says that the band had two videos before this one, taken from 1984’s The Spangle Maker EP, but I can’t find it […]
So I’ve just returned from my first trip to New York in over four years, the longest absence in almost 20 years. And with a three-year old at home, you know it’d have to be a pretty good reason to get away, even if just for a weekend, and it was – Melody’s Echo Chamber […]
It may or may not be clear to readers that I’ve descended down a vast and deep rabbit hole of Japanese shoegaze and dreampop which will almost certainly inform content hereabouts for a long time to come. And the white rabbit that led me here is For Tracy Hyde, whose fifth album Hotel Insomnia was […]
A new band with an impeccable pedigree, MEMORIALS is the duo of Matthew Sims – he of It Hugs Back and Wire – and Verity Sussman of Electrelane. Though the two had collaborated off the record for some time, their first officially released output comes in the form of soundtracks for a pair of documentary […]
Sometimes simply Googling the name of an artist and “complete show” can be surprisingly fruitful. There’s not a ton of high quality live I Break Horses footage out there, since Maria Lindén and company aren’t exactly road warriors, but this recording of their performance at the Refinery Gallery in Bratisalva, Slovakia in April 2014 as […]
It’s been four years since Amber Bain – aka The Japanese House – released her sumptuous debut Good At Falling, and she’s been pretty much radio silent since her Chewing Cotton Wool EP came out in late 2020. Official word on the follow-up is still forthcoming, but she’s finally returned with new music in the […]
I’m not sure how a cable network like Showtime makes a business case for financing feature-length documentaries on cult bands like XTC, but I’m certainly glad that they do because ones like 2017’s XTC: This Is Pop are really terrific. In the opening minute, guitarist and frontman Andy Partridge takes the piss out of the […]
Quite a rollercoaster week last week for North American Cure fans. First, there was the excitement around the announcement of their tour this Summer for their forthcoming Songs Of A Lost World. That gave way to confusion when the ticketing was announced to be following the TicketMaster “Verified Fans” model, and turned into anger when […]
New York’s Asobi Seksu certainly had their unique angle in the mid-aughts shoegaze revival with their blend of dreampop and J-pop, complete with bilingual vocals from frontwoman Yuki Chikudate, but as the decade rolled over, their attempts to move away from the elevator pitch that made their early work so appealing yielded diminishing returns and […]
