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 [...]

AlunaGeorge, “You Know You Like It” find it on You Know You Like It (2011) Okay. Now this is more like it. Dubstep with a purpose, neosoul that’s really just neo, and top-shelf, quality pop without the unnecessary sugar. There’s at least four solid hooks in here, and while the vocals verge dangerously close to [...]

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 [...]

Florence + The Machine, “Shake it Out” get it on Ceremonials Every now and then, a band comes along that makes you use the phrase “every now and then, a band comes along”. Florence + the Machine (does anyone know the sum of that equation? I’m bad at math) is one of those bands, but [...]

The Go! Team, “Buy Nothing Day (feat. Bethany Cosentino)” find it on Rolling Blackouts I slept really hard on this new Go! Team record. It was put out in January, but I just never bothered picking it up for some reason. Okay, so Proof of Youth didn’t really do much for me, but Thunder, Lightning, Strike [...]

Slow Club, “Two Cousins” (2011) get it on Paradise “Two Cousins” has been floating around me for a couple of months now, coming up on shuffle and lumped in with the rest of the album, but it’s only been recently that it’s seriously stuck in my head, and I find myself constantly wanting to hear [...]

Veronica Falls, “Wedding Day” (2011) get it on Veronica Falls Gossip! So. There’s this guy named Stephen, apparently, who one or more of the members of Veronica Falls have kind of a flirty, it-might-happen thing. The catch? Stephen is married. I know! Yeah! Married! Now, there may be some romantics in you that would actually [...]

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 [...]

Pete & The Pirates, “Half Moon Street” (2011) find it on One Thousand Pictures The first record from Pete & the Pirates, Little Death, was a corker, if that’s a thing and it means “awesome in a really fun way”. Energetic tunes that fused the better parts of the Buzzcocks and power pop, with some [...]

Alex Turner, “It’s Hard To Get Around The Wind” (2011) find it on Submarine It’s been a melancholy (yes I just used that word) week for me, which is why this track off Arctic Monkey (proper noun, not actual monkey, arctic or otherwise) Alex Turner’s highly-rec’d 6-track “soundtrack” Submarine has been getting so many spins [...]