
Pearl Charles is great. She’s made shimmering ’70s pop, glitterball disco, and cosmic singer-songwritery stuff. It’s the latter that her latest release errs on the side of, and it’s one of her best songs to date! She’s been working with the brilliant Michael Rault on her new music, and ‘Step Too Far’ is a brooding,…

Look, you should already be subscribed to BANDSPLAINING on YouTube. If you’re not, this is your heads-up. The latest video explains Library Music, so if you’ve been jonesing for someone to dissect what it is, what’s good about it, and who it influenced, this is a great primer to get you going. If you’re already…

Remember us telling you about the documentary about Scottish girl groups? We did, y’know? It sounded great didn’t it? Well, you may have thought you wouldn’t be able to watch it without getting in some narrow window of when it was aired at some fun, cool indie cinema somewhere. The good news is that you’ll…

Gracie Abrams has opened a can of worms this week, and that’s fine. Pop stars are supposed to run their mouths occasionally, and everyone else in turn, gets to run theirs. That’s the way pop culture works – it’s a contact sport. Speaking about Taylor Swift, she said: “There’s also nothing that comes close to…

Such is the paid-for media churn these days, it almost feels redundant writing about bit single releases. What’s the point in telling you what we think, when you’ve already been alerted to the existence of a song, and listened to it yourself? It all reeks of us trying to vaguely grab some traffic off the…

The new radio show of ours – Free Range – is out. Music from all over the globe as ever, with new music from Panda Bear, Hayley Williams’ granddad, Everything Is Recorded, Vulfmon, and loads more. There’s a tribute to dear Marianne Faithfull too, as well as the usual shenanigans with a dreadful AI co-host.…
Hatebeak are a thrash metal band that have a parrot for their lead singer. Of course it randomly entered the ol’ brain putty.

The High Llamas are ace and it’s lovely to have them back. They’ve got a new song called ‘Toriafan’, which is different enough from the old stuff to make it worth your while, but also containing that High Llamas magic of years past. Sean O’Hagan, who basically is the band, sez: “The song is about…

Brazil has a rich heritage of musical inventiveness, giving the world the languid sophistication of Bossa Nova and the erupting joy of Samba. Of course, through the ‘60s and ‘70s, in the face of a brutal, military dictatorship, Brazilian intellectuals and the youth forged an artistic path through Cinema Novo and now famous Tropicalia music…

Country music has always got a raw deal for being racist hick music, but that’s usually from the worst kind of person who hasn’t listened to a lick of country music in their life. Fact is, it’s a genre as enduring as any other, and as broad a church as you’ll find anywhere. That said,…
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