Listen Before You Buy

This London group combines a lot of elements that I regard as “preferable criteria” when I evaluate the appropriateness of a piece of music for my listening time. On show are heavy, but spacious Joy Division-esque drums, an almost Strokes-y sensibility to the guitar, sweet boy/girl vocals and big, lush synthesiser pads that fill out [...]

In a recent interview, James Murphy, the mastermind behind LCD Soundsystem was asked what band he expected to fill the gap left by LCD Soundsystem’s retirement this weekend at MSG.  His response: Erik Estrada’s Career Crisis. That’s right, the kids are mining second-rate, late-70s TV shows for their band names now. Regardless, the real question [...]

Yeah…….no. Still not feeling this new ish from the brothers Fab, and the video does nothing for me either.  I think it’s unfair for the rest of The Strokes to have to be all dolled up only for Julian to be prancing around in his after-work-jammies throwing cards around and disrespecting tables, but what do [...]

The fuck? No seriously, the fuck?  Hey, The Strokes!  What the hell is this?  I’m glad this is a b-side because it’s pretty piss poor, but thankfully it’s only a couple of minutes long because if it lasted for anything more than that I’d picking up pieces of speakers from my floor, and floors are [...]

Some bands become so inextricably linked with their city that it’s hard to think of one without the other. For instance, The Strokes = New York, Pulp = Sheffield and Mogwai definitely = Glasgow. Despite being a largely instrumental band, they have managed to reference their home city and its culture in their song titles, [...]

Five years in the making and the waiting (and for a lot of us the wait was agonising) we now have the first piece of new music from The Strokes’ newly-announced and hopefully-awesome new album “Angles”. Unfortunately, on first listen, it kinda sucks. I saw The Strokes at the Reading festival in England back in [...]

One of the fundamental goals of running a music blog is to introduce people to new music.  The primary method of doing this is to highlight new releases, either via up and coming bands that show potential or tried-and-true musical mainstays that generally please the masses.  Lost in this growing blogging race are the building [...]

Photography By Tom Sheehan This came outta nowhere.  Who even knew The Vines were still alive, never mind still making music? When they blew up back in early 2000′s during part of the “The” revolution of bands whose name all seemed to start with The; The Vines, The Strokes, The Hives, The White Stripes, The [...]

Ok it’s not new, been out for a month or so, but I’m only just seeing it. If you partake in a little bit of the Mary Jane, you might want to get sparking or hit that bong before you watch this video for The Suzan‘s “Home”, because when my sober self watched it I [...]

Back in August I posted about the insanely upbeat and wildly exciting new Japanese all-girl band The Suzan, who, even though they only had less than a handful of songs that we could hear without having to see them live, were making some fairly large waves around the music world. In my post I had their song [...]

All of the songs listed below were personally chosen by the artist or blogger above. I got in touch with a lot of artists and bloggers who were all kind enough to get back to me and take part in Desert Island Discs. If you’re unaware of the concept behind Desert Island Discs, check out [...]

Wisconsin’s Meridene specialise in pounding drums, Strokes-esque guitars and rousing choruses. Their latest single “Parade of Fools” has a sense of hardwon optimism in the lyrics, leavening the catchy pop-rock hooks and crackling energy with a grown-up sensibility. The band has a new album, Something Like Blood, which was recorded in just four days at [...]

If you recall I spoke about Moxie Black nearly three weeks ago and all I could do was gush. The crazy thing was that I was gushing after only hearing a few of their songs, but when they sent me the entire album it floored me.  The whole thing, from front to back is a [...]

Yesterday morning as I was going through the blogs that I follow, I found this post by Confusion over at Pigeons and Planes. I had heard the name before, also previously posted by Confusion but admittedly didn’t give it a listen.  This time though I did and now I’m kicking myself for not listening to [...]

I’ve been listening to the debut album “Sounds People Can Hear” by The New Limb over the weekend (thanks to Ash for sending it to me!) and one thing that struck me is the various different influences you can hear from various different genres. Sufjan Stevens, Coldplay, The Strokes, and The Shins could all be [...]

Wow. All it took was 30 seconds of “Lips” by The Dirty Cuts for me to do a double take and wonder if it was a mistake that I had this, if someone was taking the piss and had sent me a song by an established act that’s been around for years. Not the case. [...]