when i was 16 i would, and did, pay upwards of 15 quid for stuff like this. how times have changed.



must be dead easy being a record collector kid these days. in my time you had to get the bus into chester and spend 6 hours working out which sabbath album to get. social capital (aka cool) was genuinely linked to musical knowledge, and you had to be dedicated, finanically and otherwise, to a cause to get to know your type of music well. i realise this is the only change i've seen in the way youth culture works in my life, and of course it won't be the last, but still, it made an impact.

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Some recent reviews:

Wild Beasts - Smother

About Group - Start and Complete


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Here's my review of latest wave pictures:

No buggering about at the start of the new Wave Pictures record. A single shimmering jewel of a chord rings out, and then with a crack we’re straight down into David Tattersall’s world, an unchanging world of complex relationships and unashamedly brilliant guitar heroics. Within seconds, the humour and the melancholy of David’s cosmos are making us smile: “We/ pissed in the sea/ and pretended/ to drown one another.” It’s good to be back.

And the pace doesn’t let up. The second, third, fourth tracks all keep up the relentless, pushy brilliance. Like the faster Mountain Goats songs, or some early Dylan, at points it becomes oppressively good with its relentless stream of lyrical excellence which barely breaks for breath. ‘Little Surprise’ features this bright, pizzicato twiddling riff and he lists the parodically clichéd contents of his bohemian girl’s handbag (‘..a ticket from the metro in Milan..’) before sneering, ‘Who/ are you/ to tell me that I look depressed?/ You wouldn’t know it but/ I’m at my best.’

The heat finally drops with the fifth track ‘Walk the Stairs Quiet’, which carries one of David’s best solos on the album; this relentlessly cascading and imploding repetitive trill. Then, back into the boogie with ‘China Wale Back’, all bright and poppy. ‘Pale Thin Lips’ shows how great David is a lyricist, as he seamlessly veers between minimalist platitudes and maximalist, vivid imagery, with both having the same impact: the line ‘I liked the time we had/ I thought it wasn’t all so bad’ can hit you as hard as ‘the crashing windscreen windscreen wipers/ and the arms everywhere/ a comedian’s face on a tram car/ one little electric hair/ your pale thin lips.’ He is just such a glorious songwriter.

‘Two Lemons One Line’ is the best of an excellent bunch. What a track, what a chorus: “You said you wanted a white wine in red wine weather/ You said you never really wanted a red wine, ever.” All this is delivered in a not-angry-just-disappointed, plaintive whine which you never want to end.

‘Rain Down’ has a rubbery, buoyant bassline to start off, then David’s um-cha upstroke-downstroke guitar comes in. It’s as formulaic as Wave Pictures get, with the imagery-full verses and the simple, emotional chorus: ‘when our time comes down/ I will hang on a little while longer’ is the chorus line, and when it’s sung it feels like the most profound thing anyone’s ever said, despite the fact that on paper it’s obviously not. And that’s what good pop music is meant to do.This is easily their best album. The lyrics, the production, the vision, the ambition, all are reaching their zenith in the Wave Pictures world right now. I wouldn’t expect anything less from a band so dedicated to hard work and improvement as them, and I hope they manage to bottle whatever they’ve got running through them right now.


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Here's me being a bit of a stewart leeish prick about rebecca black:

Mozart. John Stuart Mill. Michael Jackson: all of them protégés pushed to extremes by their parents. Personally, a tragedy of course. But historically, a gift. We look at the relentless pressure, the emotional trauma wreaked early on which later echoed throughout their entire lives, and we naturally sympathise. Then, we look at their body of work and we excuse the boorish parents for forcing open the channels which led to such unparalleled genius.

Rebecca Black now takes her rightful place in this pantheon. Her mother commissioned the production of ‘Friday’ as a vanity piece for her daughter, and her daughter has since received death threats and worldwide ridicule, but in the long-term it will of course all be worth it. Black has already become a dominant cultural force of our age, and it is time someone began serious criticism of her work.

The lyrics express a minimalist aesthetic not seen in pop since Talking Heads, or in poetry since Gertrude Stein. The objective minutiae of daily life are depicted with Joycean microscopic focus with verses dedicating to choosing a car seat but, just as with Joyce, tiny details of life are described in the context of appeals to wider philosophical ideas: ‘Gotta have my bowl, gotta have ceral/ Seein’ everything, time is goin’ ‘.

Yet the spectre of divine judgement hovers over even such devout followers of getting down and party-party-party as Rebecca: one lyric runs, ‘Yesterday was Thursday/ Today it is Friday […]/ Tomorrow it’s Saturday/ And Sunday comes after/ wards/ I don’t want this weekend to end!’ Just what kind of doomsome Calvinist Sabbath does she fear? Only the plaintive cries which swarm over the chorus can come close to explaining. Mere words cannot do her religious terror justice. Indeed, mere words cannot express many of Rebecca Black’s thoughts and feelings.

The voice is autotuned to extremity and comes across as a ghostly, soulless whine. Black succinctly evokes the experience of modern teenagers lost in a world of technological dependence: without the aid of machines, she has no voice at all. A verse by an unknown rap artist comes in towards the end as a deliberate post-post-modern Dadaist parody of other hip-hop cameos: the verse merely echoes Black’s verses, placing her in the musical canon but also making a clear anti-musical statement. Like Duchamp did with his found art, Black throws a found rapper into her own song to point out the absurdity of performance.

On the YouTube video of the song, 3 million people have ‘disliked’ the song, whilst a mere 420,000 have liked it. But this is nothing to worry about. Black has become a member of the so-called minority artists, one person against all society, up there with Kafka and Van Gogh, existing to provoke and puncture mainstream values. Rebecca Black is the aesthetic gadfly of our times.


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The highest good chorus:shit verse ratio in all of pop:




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What's good about Roy Orbison is what's good about Alexis Taylor:

1) a profoundly self-confident and unashamed vulnerability and earnestness, like Jesus had

2) the caress it gives the underbelly, which you can physically feel when the high, indignant notes are hit. roy sings the high notes like he's at that very moment recoiling from some emotional shock, like every time he does them he's been dumped 3 seconds beforehand.

3) there is something inherently charming about a conventionally unattractive man just going full pelt for who he loves. anyone sexy like elvis or cheryl cole can sing about loneliness whilst it's patently clear they've never struggled. but roy orbison was damned weird-looking, and you know his songs alone are what make him attractive. THAT's 'authenticity', kids! apologies if anyone finds this offensive but i think it's fairly accurate.

"mock the strong! that's what i say. it's the only thing that separates us from dogs." - stewart lee


get in there, roy lad!




and of course, the quiver. the quiver which leads to the caress, not done so well since piaf:



early rock n roll is charming because of its nerdiness, but roy did the buckled up bright neatness better than all. the high bit in this is just sublimely disarming, it suspends all contempt:



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also check out Cash pretending to know the chords in this:




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as post-modern as it gets: