Velcro City Tourist Board

Category: Music

  • blues funeral

    Mark Lanegan’s gone. Hard pressed to pick a favourite tune, though Bubblegum is easily the album I’ve listened to most, so here’s one of the ones that’s always struck me as a masterpiece marriage of songwriting and delivery: Sad to lose another of the singers that shaped my youth, but—as I remarked to L____ when…

  • cultural fracking / “indie sleaze”

    Nothing is more eyerollingly contemptible than someone else’s nostalgia, for the very obvious reason that—d’uh—there were better things to be nostalgic about when I was young. The above, for the avoidance of doubt, is meant to be read as deeply ironic, but there’s also an element of truth to it. This has become very apparent…

  • organ donation

    Trying to get back into a proper working groove this morning, as there is (long-past-deadline) writing to be done; thus trying to purge myself of a deeply cursed earworm. (Bowling for Soup, thanks for asking. No idea how that fucker got in there.) Stoner-space-doom it is, then—more particularly, Lowrider’s “Ode to Ganymede”, from 2020’s excellent…

  • music doesn’t matter so much (and that’s ok)

    [ Editorial note: this is an essay I wrote in 2014 for the last weeks of sadly defunct rock’n’metal blog Demon Pigeon. I’m repubbing it here today in response to this piece at Louder Than War, which not unreasonably laments the disappearance of a sort of music fandom which, even in my own personal golden…

  • (self)creation stories

    It’s probably just a function of my age, and the associated movement of my generational cohort into what it is no longer possible to depict to ourselves as anything other than the latter half of our likely time on the planet, but damn, I seem to be doing a lot of thinking about the Nineties…