expect delay
I’d thought I already posted the first of these Dry Cleaning studio sessions from Seattle’s KEXP, but no – those were other live sets, so let’s make this one a twofer. Or threefer, since I didn’t even know about the middle one. And they make a nice little pre-post-pandemic triptych, if “nice” can be used […]
It’s been a hot minute – or three years – since Sweeping Promises dropped their terrific debut Hunger For A Way Out, but they’ve been busy in that time, signing to SubPop internationally, relocating their home base from Boston to Lawrence, Kansas, and crafting their follow-up record which they’ve now announced to the world: Good […]
Reams have been written about New Order’s iconic “Blue Monday” – I did my best to collect a lot of them a couple years ago – but in honour of the song’s 40th anniversary, podcast Song Exploder has devoted an episode to the genesis of the song. There’s interviews with all the original members of […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
When I started up this blog I was afraid it’d turn into a kind of Wire fansite, so obsessed was I with exploring their expansive back catalog. Well I’m no less a fan these days, but they do make up a smaller percentage of my overall listening. But that’s no excuse for having not done […]
At a casual glance of their discography, you might think that Echo & The Bunnymen‘s cover of Television’s “Friction” was a live staple for the band in the ’80s – it certainly seems to appear on a lot of releases, both official and unofficial. But as it turns out, there seems to be only the […]
