They may have been overhyped, but it’s a good album for coming up and getting the party started: “Soma” or “Barely legal” sound good on headphones coming out of the door. I associate them, along with Fennesz’s […]

I agree with what Napaj says in his/her great posts.

I live in Sendai in the 2011 Tohoku Earthquake/ Tsunami region, where there was always scepticism about diverting investment (yet again) to Tokyo for the […]

More of a bass lick than a solo, but Steven Hanley is good:

Not the worst disappointment in life, but Happy Mondays, “Pills ‘n’ Thrills and Bellyaches”: made them chart contenders, and may have seemed like progression to some, but the music wasn’t as clever or strange as […]

Originally on Apple Records

Does Andrew Marvell , onetime MP as well as poet extraordinaire, get a statue?

Not sure if John Cale doing Chopin is what you want, but it’s good.

Respect! That’s an amazing (short) record.

No! Nor am I the racist or the Dutch guy who shouts ‘Play more music!”

Not a live album, but a live track on the 1992 Consolidated album “Play More Music”: in fact I can be heard talking to the band on it, which was mortifying when I first heard it, but as no one else did and the […]

Until Damo chips in 2.30, it seems like an instrumental.

An “illusion” is always ( putting me back in all this) “confusion”, although the two are not necessarily the same.

If there is Rentaghost then there is this:

If someone has posted this here before, I am sorry, but here is a musicologist explaining at some length why Rick Wright’s contribution to PF was significant.

I got my copy today and will listen properly over the weekend, but so far it sounds good, and has a Future Days vibe.

FWIW, I think the official albums are marvels of brilliant production, and so do not crave […]

Indeed. I think the switch from the debut ( a rather clean and guitar-heavy new wave record) in March to the dark strangeness of the follow up in October is the great transformation of MES as an artist.

Pere Ubu: The Modern Dance and Dub Housing, both 1978.

The Fall: Live At The Witch Trials and Dragnet, both 1979.

I maintain that the cream of The Pretty Things late sixties recordings were on the stray singles, or even the knocked-off De Wolfe Library recordings, and not the SF Sorrow album that now gets all the attention.

The Stipe/Mills “Dreams they complicate / complement my life” duet on “Get Up” is good as well.

From the pre-CD 80s, The Electric Prunes, “Long Day’s Flight” and The Seeds, “Evil Hoodoo” are excellent LP distillations of patchy albums and more recent overlong CDs.