
If you’ve been reading the music press this week, there was some alarm or peevish glee (depending on where you were doing your reading) that vinyl sales had dropped. A Billboard piece stated that vinyl sales dropped by 33%, which is not insignificant. That’s selling 34.9 million units, down to 23.3 million in 2024. Are…

At the country music awards, they didn’t nominate Beyonce for anything despite her all-conquering country LP and while many shrugged, many were irritated by the whole thing. The irritation came from all sides, but more importantly, so did the shrugs – apart from something for the shelf in the spare toilet or a sticker to…

There’s something about golden era rap that just loves a fancy action figure, to place on your shelves next to your collected essays from hip hop journalism, tchotchkes, rap comics and high-end record middles and the like. It’s very wholesome, honestly. Well, Doom’s ‘Mm… Food’ is getting a reissue for its anniversary on November 15th,…

Once upon a time, music retreated away from the bombast of Britpop and US rap-rock, and all over the place, more introspective bedroom producers were making tricky electronic music and singer-songwriters gravitated toward the acid-folk of the ’70s, focusing more on cottage industries and community. Tunng managed to straddle both worlds, with critics dubbing their…

Look, most bands put a song out to let you know new things are coming, but not 2nd Grade. The power poppers from Philadelphia have chucked THREE whole songs at our ears and mercifully, they’re all really fun and filled with skuzzy pop hooks and jangly guitars. The revival of power pop is very welcome…

Today is John Lennon’s birthday – he would have been 84 – and to celebrate this, we’ve been treated to something rather surprising. While a lot of repackaged music from musicians can feel a little exploitative at times, churning out old stuff without much new going on, that’s not the case with this latest Lennon…

The excellent GULP are having a party for the 8th instalment of their broadsheet counter-culture magazine, which features all the wonderful words, tidbits, diatribes and cool design we’ve come to expect from them now. The issue drops on Friday 11th October and you can get down in person at The New Cross in Manchester’s Northern…

Have you been looking for a Christmas playlist? Doesn’t matter if you like Jesus are not, because it’s basically a secular holiday anyway, what with the amount of booze and gear being done at this most wonderful time of the year. What’s Baileys and beak got to do with a baby being born in the…

Olivia Rodrigo seems to be doing it right. She was catapulted to fame with a giganto hit and, instead of thinking ‘sod it, let’s make a cash grab and do all the arenas immediately!’, she’s made a conscious decision to play smaller venues, and if the arenas come, then she feels she will have earned…

The great thing about running your own blog and not being at all answerable to advertisers and the like, is that you can throw any old cobblers up and it counts as content. Not that this counts as any old cobblers. Someone else, however, has done the work for us. You see, we were going…

Have you ever heard of a more perfect pitch for a television show? It’s Mary J. Blige talking to other people, while making their way through a load of wine. Honestly, this should have been on TV for 20something years already. And what is it called? ‘The Wine Down’, that’s what it is called, and…
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