expect delay
Not that I should need a lot of prodding, but this recent feature at The Guitar Magazine exhorting the brilliance of Magazine’s 1978 debut album Real Life has me dipping back into those early days of post-punk. The article does a good job looking at the band’s formation, with a post-Buzzcocks Howard Devoto coming together […]
A little retroactive housekeeping today, the day I finally cross The Cure off my live bucket list. I’ve done a couple posts focusing on their Seventeen Seconds classic “A Forest”, but both have some notable content omissions I’m rectifying now. One of my earliest posts was a live clip from 1981 of the band playing […]
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 […]
