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 [...]

Yuck, “Georgia” (2011) find it on Yuck “Georgia”‘s been a favorite of this year for a while now, but it’s getting the Fine Tune Friday treatment today for two reasons, neither of which have anything to do with the royal wedding. Reason number one: here in Our Nation’s Capital (disclaimer: is ours, but may not [...]

Like a ton of other people, I’m sure, my Smiths fandom has gotten a good stoking lately by the flurry of articles around the 25th anniversary of The Queen Is Dead. But instead of tackling that album, I’m starting a fight about something that’s always bugged me: Hatful Of Hollow‘s status as a classic, and [...]

James Blake, “The Wilhelm Scream” (2011) find it on James Blake James Blake’s already had a good chunk of the internet fawning over him, but I’m guessing that the hype will just get louder once his debut full-length album comes out in February. His cover of Feist’s “Limit To Your Love” is the lead single [...]

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 [...]

Fifteen (!) years ago, there was a question being asked of English music fans that was so pervasive, it even made it into the UK national news: “Who do you like better, Blur or Oasis?” At least, I’m told that this was a question asked a lot. The only personal knowledge I have of it [...]