December 2011
1 post
Top Ten Tracks of 2011
Colin Stetson – The Stars In His Head (Dark Lights Remix)
Just look at the size of the man’s sax FFS. Probably the most original album of the year. This is a pulsating beast of a song, layers of looping, howling brass. Not quite sure how he does it, which is not a question much music asks of you at the moment.
Kurt Vile – Runner Ups
The magic of Kurt Vile is that he somehow takes a load of...
August 2011
2 posts
The War on Drugs: a wrestle to the death
If there’s one adjective which has almost entirely dropped out of the lexicon of music criticism over the past couple of decades, it’s ‘Dylanesque’. It’s perhaps not unrelated that the albatrossian concept of x or y singer-singwriter being billed as the ‘new Dylan’ seems to have died a death too – the last one I can think of is Willy Mason, and that...
The riots and the brooms
The pictures of local residents in Clapham gathering, brooms aloft, waiting to help clean up their destroyed high street have been for many an uplifting counterpart to the images of burning buildings and pimp-rolling hoodies clutching their swag (the best picture in lolz terms, by the way, being the guy proudly holding up a giant bag of Tesco Value rice). The Guardian had a double page spread of...
December 2010
1 post
This is not politics as usual
Soon after seeming to congratulate police for not shooting protestors, Boris Johnson told this morning’s Today programme that he hoped the student fees protests would soon be at an end.
‘People will understand that democratic procedures have taken place and they cannot adjust this by taking to the streets,’ he said.
This is no doubt what Nick Clegg was hoping for too when he...
November 2010
1 post
Millbank Tower and the failure of the 'Innocent...
Just before heading down to the Millbank protests on Wednesday, I read a couple of interesting tweets. One was from @_richardking, who works at Domino Records. He wrote: “Hats off to everyone marching today, especially young people - showing the innocent smoothie generation how it’s done”.
The other was from @wdjstraw of Left Foot Forward. He wrote “Good luck everyone on #demo2010. We...
March 2010
5 posts
1 tag
“I don’t have to tell you things are bad. Everybody knows things are bad....”
– Howard Beale, Network
1 tag
