Listen Before You Buy

You will find traces of any good pop you’ve ever loved with Warm Weather, especially those that come littered with vocal harmonies

The first part of some anticipated albums for this coming year includes Alabama Shakes, Azealia Banks, The Beach Boys, Beach House, Fanfarlo, Frank Ocean, Grizzly Bear, Janelle Monaé, The Killers, Marques Toliver, The Miracals, Memoryhouse, MGMT, Michael Kiwanuka, Miike Snow, MIKA and the morning benders!

TweetShare We all know the story by now. The follow up to The Beach Boys’ “Pet Sounds”, “SMiLE” was to be Brian Wilson’s masterwork, a guaranteed psych-pop classic that would demonstrate the breadth of sound that could be achieved in a recording studio, throwing down the gauntlet to all other rock and pop artists. That [...]

TweetShare A little while back a good friend of mine returned from a trip to St. Louis with a banging gift: a clutch of records from Vintage Vinyl. Among the gems that she picked out was this slightly beat up copy of a record by the Dave Brubeck Quartet that I never even knew existed, [...]

TweetShareWatch the new video for The Beach Boys‘s song “Heroes And Villains” below, taken from the album “The Smile Sessions”.

TweetShare At some point I was arm-twisted into watching “Clueless”. I deny all allegations that I secretly quite enjoyed it. It did have two saving graces: first, Donald Faison; second, a surprisingly good soundtrack. One track featured on it was “My Forgotten Favorite” by Velocity Girl. The point of this story, insofar as any of [...]

TweetShare Black Lips have flirted with the big time in the past. “Bad Kids“, a single off their 2007 album “Good Bad Evil”, brought them some exposure in 2009 when it featured on the soundtrack to “(500) Days Of Summer”, but any chance that this brief encounter with a wider public could lead to something [...]

TweetShare I make no secret of loving early ’90s music, so I’m being totally spoiled by this shoegaze revival that seems to be under way at the moment. I mean, obviously I’m one of the people who would say that it never went away, but for once the rest of the world seems to be [...]

TweetShare There are some classic artists that you can listen to time and again and never grow tired of hearing them. I’d rank crooners like Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, Tony Bennett and Al Martino (to name but a few) in this category. These are the voices that transport you back in time to the golden [...]

TweetShare Oasis, AC/DC, Kings of Leon, The Black Crowes, The Beach Boys, The Stooges…  The list of great bands with brothers in is quite a lengthy one but there’s always room for one more so ladies and gentlemen please welcome Kudos Fiasco to the fray. The brothers in this band are Benny and Dan Juengling [...]

TweetShare Spring has allegedly sprung here in the UK but with the snows in Scotland and rain everywhere else it’s a little hard to believe it. What we need is some music to give us a little bit of happiness and I think I’ve found the cure with Lonesome Ghost. Coming from Dallas, Texas (where [...]

TweetShare The Black Tambourines are a band that I stumbled upon after being sent music by someone else, somewhat like the way that We Were Promised Jetpacks were discovered. As I was perusing their MySpace page I noticed they had a Soundcloud player embedded and so naturally I gravitated towards that since MySpace is a [...]

TweetShare Hi, I’m Franky B Rockafeller and you might remember Sweet Lights from such posts as “[Introducing] – Sweet Lights” and “[Listen/Download] – New Song By Sweet Lights – “Scopitone Scopitone”. Or maybe you don’t, and that’s alright too, but I won’t let you off a third time though.  The song is gorgeous and you [...]

TweetShare It’s been almost five months since I last posted about The Moviegoers, introducing you to their Lo-Fi Summer Pop sound, and now they’ve released a video for their single “Avalanche”. It’s appropriate since it’s cold and a lot of the world is covered in snow at the moment, getting trapped on roads or in [...]

TweetShare Last week one of the bestest and bestest of music blogs called it a day. This Swiss blog Delicious Scopitone were apparently having some internal conflicts that caused them to disband and just last week they shut up shop.  Before that though they did a little visual dedication to Philly’s Sweet Lights and in turn [...]

TweetShare There was a band a few years back called Cotton Mather who I was turned onto by Noel Gallagher after he proclaimed their brilliance on an early morning TV show in the U.K. Being the loyal Oasis follower that I was back then I swiftly ran out to find their CD, mainly because he [...]