9 August 2016

Just over two weeks ago, I was doing this. During that, I fell off that stage and broke a couple of ribs. It hurts. I can't drive, so I've not made it into the studio. By the time I get back up there, the selection I made for the 9th of August will be well out of date. So consider this an online exclusive.

Dada Baba - Chinese Fried Rice
Let's start in Hong Kong. This came out a week ago on Metal Postcard which is your one-stop shop for things Pacific rim.

Cowtown - Tweak
DIY stuff from Leeds. the album Paranormal Romance is out a week on Friday, it's production delayed due to the flooding in Leeds last winter and the damage to MJ's studio (MJ of Hookworms that is).

Angel Olsen - Shut Up Kiss Me
From St Louis and bound to do well commercially, this is off My Woman which is out in September.

Featured album: Air - Le Voyage Dans La Lune
Seven Stars
Sonic Armada
Air's seventh studio LP was a new soundtrack for the 1902 Georges Méliès film, Le Voyage Dans La Lune. It coincided with a new colourised cut of the film.

Papernut Cambridge - I Believe In Love
The LP Nutlets 1967-80 sees Papernut Cambridge revisit old pop hits that they listened to as youths. This is an old Hot Chocolate record, for instance.

Super Besse - Dym
Our favourite Minsk band by far, this is the B-side to their last single Nasilie.

A Hundred Million - Master Of The Ship You Painted
A Cardiff duo who put this out as a digital single last week.

Cabbage - Kevin
Manchester now and a five-piece who put out the album Le Chou in January.

The Wedding Present - Rachel
More new stuff from Gedge et al as we count down to a new LP.

Scatter Factory - PowWow
Oxford's Will Foster is Scatter Factory and this is off the self-titled debut LP which came out in June.

Featured album: Air - Le Voyage Dans La Lune
Astronomic Club
The opening track from the 2012 concept album.

The KVB - In Deep
Kat Day and Nick Wood are The KVB. This is off the album Of Desire which came out in March and is dead good.

65daysofstatic - Supermoon
Sheffield now and a track from No Man's Sky: Music For An Infinite Universe, the soundtrack to the video game No Man's Sky.

Swet Shop Boys - T5
Riz Ahmed teams up with American rapper Heems on this project which will see the LP Cashmere released in October.

Shift Work - Contact High
Off Notes To Self 1 which came out last month and is crammed with bangers.

And here are your playlists and ting. YouTube:



Soundcloud:



Bandcamp:



and that'll have to do you for a while.

24 November 2015

Me again.

Idles - CHANT
Bristolians post-piunkers pay homage to The Monks. From the new EP MEAT - everything's in capitals - which is out now.

Practical Lovers - Put It Bluntly
These are from Nottingham and while this was originally released as a single in 2011, it also forms part of the new album Agony which is out on Friday.

Last Great Dreamers - Dope School
Back together well after their '90s heyday, they were retro then and nothing's changed. This is the new single and there's an album due soon.

Featured Album
Arab Strap - Coming Down
Arab Strap - I Work In A Saloon
This week, we feature The Week Never Starts Round Here, the debut release from Malcolm Middleton and Aidan Moffatt. Dating from 1996, it still sounds good. "Completely undiluted and free of the self-expectation that came later", said Middleton of it. Coming Down is the opener.

Fat White Family - Whitest Boy On The Beach
The first track taken from the forthcoming second album, Songs For Our Mothers, which is out in January. They're playing Hebden Trades next month too. Should be fun.

Iron Triangle - Glass Shadows
Well someone likes Depeche Mode. Me, more precisely. But that might explain why I like this quite so much. Dan Walsh and Mark Dixon are Iron Triangle and they're from Peckham. Their self-titled EP is out now.

FVC - Jacket On Fire
The FVC in question is Florence van Camerlijk who is from Amsterdam but now based in Hackney. The EP Walking came out last Friday.

The Sneaky Nixons - Thick, Thin And Thinner
Great name. The self-styled rock n roll terrorists are from Liverpool and their new record Sex is out now.

Ratatosk - I Awoke
More Welsh DIY now as we head for Aberdare for some folky stuff. The album Detachment came out in late September.

Featured Album
Arab Strap - The First Big Weekend
The first single taken from The Week Never Starts Round Here.

Josefin Öhrn and The Liberation - Sunny Afternoon
A bit krautrocky, but also in the Lykke Li envelope. Swedish, is Ms Öhrn. The album is Horse Dance and it's out now.

Vieux Farka Touré - Masters Of War feat. Julie Easterlin
Malian songsmith Touré collaborates with American singer Easterlin on the LP touristes which came out in September.

Shunkan - The Pink Noise
We've had a track off the album before, but here's the title track from the New Zealanders LP.

Shift Work - SBFM
The EP Scaled To Fit from Shift Work blew our proverbial socks off. Document I, the new one, loks set to do the same given this track. It's out now.

Your YouTube mix:



and Soundcloud:



Week off next week. Back in a fortnight.

Best of 2014

If you're not aware, I also do some stuff over at In Bed With Maradona. There's some cross-over, inevitably, but any stuff I like that's... shall we say 'not exactly radio-friendly' tends to end up there.
Anyway, as part of that, the editor said a few weeks ago, 'why not make a playlist of your 50 favourite tracks of the year?' So I did. On Spotify. It's not in any particular order - not a chart or anything.
It's here, in this link. Go listen at your leisure.

The thing is, however, that not everything I wanted to put on it lives on Spotify. So here are the things that should be on that list but aren't.

4 November 2011

Early nights, cold nights... Cosy up with this week's selection.

CTMF - Zero Emission
Who needs records longer than two minutes? Given I have several over six minutes... Anyway. The B-side to their recent 7" Punk Rock Enough For Me, which I think I prefer.

Beau - The Night Before Trafalgar
I heard an acoustic version of this a couple of weeks ago, but this is the original from the 2012 album Fables And Facades.

Vision Thing - Living With Ghosts
Liverpool alt-folk band whose new LP is called Hauntology. I'll declare an interest - the bassist is a friend which is how I came across it. Still wouldn't have played it if I didn't like it.

Cover Version Corner
Nick Cave and The Bad Seeds/PJ Harvey - Red Right Hand
PJ Harvey's version may be familiar to viewers of Peaky Blinders, which I understand is on television. Before that, from 1994's Let Love In.

Curxes - Valkyrie
Pronounced Curses and off a forthcoming album called Verxe, which is annoying. The music however, is fantastic. More of this please.

Ωracles - Melt Tonight
To Berlin now and another daft name, albeit replacing a letter with a Greek semi-equivalent rather than the wrong letter. Off their debut EP Standford Torus. 

The Horn The Hunt - Find It Free It
Bit closer to home now - Leeds to be clearer. Off their latest LP Terrafidella which is out now.

The Unfortunates - Margate Sands
There are a few bands called The Unfortunates. These ones are from London and this is off an EP called For Boys With One Track Minds which came out in August.

Ghost Society - Under The Sun
To Denmark now and a great track off an album called The Back Of His Hands, Then The Palms. No, me neither.

Hopeku - Ambush
Canada now, Quebec more precisely, off an EP called Kosoku, all of which I got through without tripping over my own tongue.

One Degree of Separation
Barcelona - Kasey Keller
John MOuse - Robbie Savage
Retired footballers for this week's. Exquisite story-telling from Cardiff's John MOuse off his current LP The Death Of John MOuse. Before that, from 2000 off the album Zero One Infinity.

Shift Work - Scaled To Fit
I know I've played this before, but so what when it's this good. Seriously, as good a track as I've heard in years.

Hells Kitchen - It's Not For Me
And we round off this week with this from Krasnodar in Russia. Reminds me a lot of mid-period Underworld which can never be a bad thing. The album is called Letters and is out on Festival Lounge.

Some of that's on YouTube:


and some of it on Soundcloud:


More next week.

2 September 2014

We were bumped for football again last week. Stupid midweek games... Anyway, we're back and in a first for the show, we have LIVE MUSIC in the studio.

John MOuse - I Was A Goalkeeper
From the album The Death Of John MOuse which came out in July and was criminally overlooked by myself. I'm making good on it now though. There's a quite remarkable version of the national anthem, On Ilkley Moor Baht 'At, on there as well which is worth seeking out.

Modern Faces - Lufthansa
An unsigned  band from Dunfermline, this is part of a double-A side release with Matter Of Time on the flip side to this. I travelled a lot with Lufthansa when I worked in Germany. I always wondered where they found pickles so small to fit in their teeny-tiny pastrami sandwiches. No answers to that conundrum are to be found here, but it's a bloody good tune anyway. It was released last week.

Ravioli Me Away - Cat Call
Quirky, to say the least. From the album The Inevitable Album, which is among the best titles of this and any other year, which came out two weeks ago. It really gets in your head.

Live session, part 1
Ross Taylor - Song To Woody (live)
Delighted to welcome Ross to the studio to play us a few tracks, starting with this cover of a Dylan number. We spoke about influences, other projects and the songwriting process as well. I recorded the show and will attempt to get clips of the live sections up on here at some point. Needless to say, I was hoping rather than trusting that this was all going to work, but it did so beautifully. Apologies to Ross for using him as a guinea pig, but someone had to be first. I will definitely be doing it again.

Here he is tuning up, mic and level-checking.


The Pooh Sticks - On Tape
From 1988 and the album Orgasm. Bit of an earworm this, but no less bad for it.

Pulled Apart By Horses - Lizard Baby
Bit of a Leeds-a-thon for the next three tracks starting with this. The new album Blood came out yesterday.

Hookworms - The Impasse
Their debut album Pearl Mystic was quite remarkable, so the expectations for their second are huge. It's coming out in November, it's called the Hum and this is the first release from that. Fantastic.

Flies On Me - Can You Smell That Burning Noise?
Self-styled musical revolutionaries, this is available as a free download from their bandcamp page. And well worth getting hold of, just as I did.

The Landseers - The Royal We
It's things like this that make Twitter work for me. Without chatting to, ostensibly, strangers about the Tour de France, I'd not have found it.

Teen Brains - Fluke
Another one from the compilation put out by Beech Coma records - volume 2, specifically.

Live session, part 2
Ross Taylor - A Story For Louise (live)
Ross Taylor - The Garden (live)
Two Taylor originals for the second part of our live session. Both can be found on the forthcoming EP also called The Garden. For more of Ross, check out his Facebook page and he's on Soundcloud too. Do check him out. We'll definitely be having him back in and huge, huge thanks again to him for coming in.

warrenpeace - Hungry
And now for something completely different... The album release passed me by, which is odd as I've played a track from it ages ago. The whole, SDR007, is a work of twisted genius fusing manic guitar and some heavy beats. Well worth checking out.

Whilst - Umgebung
From the EP Everything There Was Was There, which is easy for me to say.

Shift Work - Scaled To Fit
And to end, this from an EP of the same name. The best thing I've heard this year, maybe in five years, maybe even in ten. Utterly brilliant. I've basically had it on a loop for a fortnight. Absolutely love it.

Here's most of that on YouTube:



and some of it on Soundcloud:



and I'll try to get the live bits up somewhere at some point.
Back next week.