I’m soon to jump on a plane and head to Sydney where I’ll be covering the opening weekend of the Vivid Festival – a festival of “lights, music and ideas”. I’ll take in a few talks, the future of photojournalism, the demands of writing content for the digital world. I’ll see the Sydney Harbour Bridge [...]
Bob Seger & The Silver Bullet Band, Stranger In Town (1978) You ever move the turntable around in your house? Like try it in a new room, a different room? Just did that with one of the turntables last week – it’s under the TV now. In the lounge. So put a crate of records [...]
The Exponents Documentary Prime Rocks Screening on Prime, this Wednesday, May 22, as part of the Prime Rocks series, The Exponents – the documentary – takes a look at The Exponents – the band. Starting off back when they were The Dance Exponents. Commissioned to help celebrate the band’s 30th anniversary it’s a very fine [...]
The National Trouble Will Find Me 4AD Records The new album by The National, the band’s sixth is a snore-fest, as dreary and mopey meet up and slow-bone while the worst albums by The Arcade Fire and Interpol are alternated in the background and the DVD box-set of one of the more recent seasons of [...]
Jan Hellriegel Lost Songs Blind Date Records It’s been a long journey for Jan Hellriegel, something her last album, 2009’s “comeback”, All Grown Up, certainly announced. With the release of this collection of bits and bobs, the Lost Songs of her career to date, she seeks to clarify that. Liner notes help tell the story [...]
Bruce Springsteen, Greetings From Asbury Park, N.J. (1973) Newly hooked on the Bruce Springsteen debut; years ago I sorta wrote it off – it wasn’t what I wanted to hear; was nothing more than a curiosity but my trusty LP has been getting a few spins again lately – due of course to reading the [...]
Eels Wonderful, Glorious E Works/V2 Since 2005’s overreaching double, Blinking Lights And Other Revelations it’s been a lot harder to care about Eels. Mark Oliver Everett (or “E”) was more intriguing, thoughtful and interesting across the documentary, memoir and a few guest-spots and stray covers than on the measured – ultimately quite boring, obvious Eels [...]
Guns Stephen King Philtrum Press/Amazon Digital Services, Inc. Stephen King’s first non-fiction Kindle Single is a powerful, timely essay about guns. Obviously he addresses the politics surrounding gun control, the red and blue votes and voters but he makes this about the victims and the crime – rather than about the round-and-round-in-circles debate/s over legislation. [...]
The Impending Adorations Intentions Mushroom Why it seems like only a few months ago I was gushing about The Impending Adorations, the latest name for a Paul McLaney project. Oh, well, um, it was only months ago – he released Gestalt at the end of 2012 and then, boom, here we go with album number [...]
Sly & The Family Stone, The Best of Sly & The Family Stone (1998) There’s a lot of reasons to like Sly & The Family Stone and a good many of them are here on this double-LP. I got hooked on Sly & The Family Stone via all the Vietnam-era compilations/soundtracks – and of course [...]
Donald Fagen Sunken Condos Reprise Airtight – seems a good word for the music that Donald Fagen creates as one half of the creative-pairing that is Steely Dan and across four solo albums, Sunken Condos the most recent of those; arguably the most Dan-like too, in sound and feel. Not that the others weren’t – [...]
Blind Melon Blind Melon Capitol Blind Melon’s self-titled debut was released in 1992 – and reissued this year for Record Store Day on deluxe vinyl and as a CD with bonus tracks. It’s a 20th/21st Anniversary I guess – for a band that never really got past the grunge-lite have-training-wheels-will-try-to-travel sound and approach. I remember [...]
