Album of the Month English Teacher – This Could Be Texas Read about it here. Also Great.. Jane Weaver – Love In Constant Spectacle Read about it here. Pet Shop Boys – Nonetheless Read about it here. Nia Archives – Silence is Loud Pearl Jam – Dark Matter Iron and Wine – Light Verse Read about it here. Justice – Hyperdrama ..read more

In the last few weeks Sam Beam marked the twentieth anniversary of Our Endless Numbered Days release, the album which first brought Iron And Wine to prominence, eventually selling more than half a million copies worldwide. Part of the appeal – as even the title went some way to representing – was how it’s writer blended darkness and light within the rustic Americana, meanings within meanings, riddles wrapped inside enigmas as is so often the case for life in places where an amber light means stop. Beam however found himself grounded by the pandemic, or more specifically in it’s uneasy wake, su ..read more

When you’ve been in the business over four decades any truth is most likely to be your own, hence the Pet Shop Boys Neil Tennant has more than enough license to be able to declare the duo’s fifteenth album their “queer” one, whilst at the same time subjectively having a gentle pop at Taylor Swift‘s perceived lack of an imperial phase. If 2020’s Hotspot charmed but ultimately felt like a dinner date with sepaerate cab rides home, it’s successor has appreciably more warmth and humour. Having snagged producer James Ford in salute to his work in chintzing the Arctic Monkeys, on Nonetheless he brou ..read more

What became known as Madchester had a few antecedents, but musically if you want to go back, at least some of it’s DNA can be found in the Happy Mondays 1986 single, Freaky Dancin’. In an era where pointy shoes, paisley shirts and counterfeit Rickenbacker guitars were the zeitgeist, here was a sloppy, funk sodden tune that came on like the soundtrack to a porno film; about to collapse at any moment, you could happily shuffle to it, throw your arms around like you didn’t care and mumble to the nonsense lyrics. It sounded like almost nothing contemporary. The Mondays‘ stars would align three yea ..read more

What became known as Madchester had a few antecedents, but musically if you want to go back, at least some of it’s DNA can be found in the Happy Mondays 1986 single, Freaky Dancin’. In an era where pointy shoes, paisley shirts and counterfeit Rickenbacker guitars were the zeitgeist, here was a sloppy, funk sodden tune that came on like the soundtrack to a porno film; about to collapse at any moment, you could happily shuffle to it, throw your arms around like you didn’t care and mumble to the nonsense lyrics. It sounded like almost nothing contemporary. The Mondays‘ stars would align three yea ..read more

Released: 1967 So when everything in pop is somehow British, how do you respond as an American artist? Well, the media didn’t really get it, The Baltimore sun musing in late 1963 that “Beatles go home might be just the thing.” The legendary DJ Wolfman Jack was similary disdainful, claiming that real rock n’ roll had been usurped by mop top soundalikes, but within a year nearly every radio station across the country had been subject to a polite and friendly takeover. The Young Rascals formed in New Jersey in 1965, at more or less the phenomenon’s high water mark, and would-be impresario and man ..read more

Released: 1963 They don’t do much surfing in Minneapolis, but The Trashmen found themselves not out in the cold for too long. A quartet featuring Dal Winslow, Bob Reed, Tony Andreason and Steve Wahrer on drums, they named themselves after a honky-tonk song written by city contemporary Kai Ray called Trashman’s Blues, a dirty reference for a clean cut band. This being an era which, like all the ones which produce great leaps forward in culture, everybody was borrowing cues off everybody else, there was a degree of spontaneity to the creation of Surfin’ Bird that owed much to admiration-as-theft ..read more

Thirteen years on or so from their dramatic arrival, the Manic Street Preachers were still masters of making compromise sound uncompromising. Few either would’ve predicted them filling the post Britpop malaise with the anthemic poetry of Everything Must Go, or latterly This Is My Truth, Tell Me Yours, converting existential angst into a public appeal even they seemed to not fully understand. Rather than confer validation, their success made them feel collectively bereft, even further apart from the band’s essence and locked into the ongoing drift which had began with the disappearance of Riche ..read more

Released: 1961 Part of the entertainment industry’s lure is it’s (Supposed) equality of opportunity; you can be anyone, anywhere, and it can make you a star. Lee Dorsey was born in New Orleans on Christmas Eve in 1924 and in his youth was in the orbit of Fats Domino. Having moved with his family to the slightly less sub-Tropical Oregon when he was ten, Dorsey wound up joining the Navy, in which he served during World War II. Home after that he began a short lived career in boxing, calling himself Kid Chocolate (Not to be confused with the successful Cuban fighter of the 1930’s who went by the ..read more

They used to be such nice lads as well. Buzzard Buzzard Buzzard started out as mainly the work of Tom Lees and the music it/he/they made was a daydreamy confection of glam rock and classic pop, from the irresistbly catchy first single Double Denim Hop to singing about John Lennon being Jesus Christ. Without necessarily having much weight to everything, it was still all so..nice. Writing a second album can be an evil thing, however. After their 2022 debut Backhand Deals was nominated for in the Welsh Music Award suddenly the process of following it up didn’t seem so straightforward. Suffering i ..read more