Mull Historical Society, “Animal Cannabus” get it on Loss (2001) The real curse of being old is knowing that you’re destined to be old-fashioned. As the idiot Abe Simpson once said, “I used to be with it. Then they changed what it was. Now what’s it seems scary and weird to me.” Not exactly the [...]

I wasn’t much into Saint Etienne before about 1998. I hadn’t yet developed a taste for treacly pop or learned how to forgive bluntly shallow lyrics, and the songs I’d heard of theirs like “He’s On The Phone” were more pop than I could take at the time. I can’t remember why I gave their [...]

Justin Townes Earle, “Harlem River Blues” find it on Harlem River Blues (2010) I was never a Steve Earle fan. His music always struck me as self-conscious as his politics, with every moment too carefully considered and dropped on you with a huge expectation that you’re supposed to respond to it in a certain way. [...]

Frente!, trailblazers in annoyingly punctuated band names, were best known for their beautiful, fragile cover of New Order’s “Bizarre Love Triangle”, and had a lot of chart success in their native Australia and indie success in the US with the album that followed up that single, Marvin The Album. But as much as I loved [...]

With a simple doorbell begins the album From A to B  by New Musik. Something so familiar but incredibly listenable, danceable, singalong-able. Why haven’t I heard this before? The glorious-but-lamentable discovery of something that existed all this time: a secret, just waiting to be found. Something that could make you so happy, something that could quite [...]

We’ve had recorded music long enough so that a chart of the history of a certain sound is starting to look kind of Escher-esque. In this case, it’s a sound that was popular in the late 80s and early 90s that was based on British bands that were indebted to their New Wave forebearers, which [...]

A lot of my “that’s where I heard it first stories” revolve around record stores because, frankly, I used to spend a lot a lot of time in them. This story is no different. The same night I found (with an extraordinary sense of glee that has stuck with me for, what, nearly 20 years [...]

For the last half century or so, the British music press has generally loved two things: music that sounds unmistakably British, and music that sounds unmistakably American. And when I was in London in the fall of 1993, just after Suede’s rise, but before Parklife and Britpop dominance, the English music press loved Grant Lee [...]

It’s kind of tough to write about music when we live in the music-saturated world of the internet. It’s hard to know what’s classic and what isn’t; hard to know if what you’re writing about is something that’s universally known among anyone interested in music history or if it would be a discovery beyond just [...]

Tribute albums are usually pretty spotty affairs. The vast majority of the songs tend to either try too hard to radically change the song or barely change it at all. The best you can hope for is one or two truly inspired readings surrounded by songs where the covering artists at least seem to actually [...]