Category: Music

  • that boy needs therapy

    The dopey dad-joke non sequiturs of “Frontier Psychiatrist”, the inescapable hit single, set my teeth a-grind from the very first listen, precisely because they seem so calculated, in a manner that’s entirely of a piece with the masterful joinery of the music itself.

  • merciful release: navel-gaze blogday blahblahblah

    merciful release: navel-gaze blogday blahblahblah

    Happy blogday to me! I have owned and written stuff on this domain since 14th March 2006. Eighteen years! It seems quite astonishing to me, that stretch of time. This will come as not surprise to regular readers, of course, who will be accustomed to me writing “it feels like an eternity, and yet like…

  • Swans

    Intense. More like some sort of art ritual than a gig, in a way; the first “piece” was almost half an hour long, partly improvised, big slow dynamics, old man Gira controlling the vibe by waving and shaking his arms around above his head, while the band cranks the volume and intensity up and down.…

  • sing swan song / remembering Damo Suzuki

    Word came over the wire yesterday that Damo Suzuki, best known as the frontman of krautrockers Can at their creative peak, had passed away. (Ten years after a colon cancer diagnosis, apparently, which puts the guy into the Wilko Johnson league of unexpected and defiant longevity.) It reminded me that I had the fortune to…

  • being a nerd has always meant being a machine for liking things

    Via yer man Jay Springett, a gloriously excoriating piece of writing by Sam Kriss. After quoting a Warhol interview snippet which ends with Andy agreeing with the interviewer that Pop Art is all about “liking things”, and that liking things is being like a machine, “because you do the same thing every time. You do…