Robyn's new album (Part 1) is not very good. Instead of the good old days of songs about nazis, bees, and doing incomprehensible things to her enemies, she's aiming at cool-as-ice synth-pop diva. Or more likely, she's coming in the studio for 10 minutes, mumbling a bit, then going down the pub. The first track, Don't Fucking Tell Me What To Do, ( Read more... )

Last night I watched Band Slam. Although produced by Walden Pictures, the family-friendly Christians behind the Chronicles of Narnia, it is halfway to being a classic teen movie, despite certain flaws. The plot makes no sense whatsoever. The pacing is terrible. Characters have nonsensical secrets. A lot of the music is really bad: there is ( Read more... )

Strange.

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This year the Brit awards are giving a prize for the best performance at the Brits of the past 30 years. Unbelievably, this is not nominated:

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When you think of the Brit awards there are only two performances that come to mind, one featuring the KLF and Extreme Noise Terror and the other interrupted by Jarvis Cocker. But at least they have ( Read more... )

I've not managed to do any of my traditional review of the year, because 2009 has been shit for TV, mediocre for film, and not brilliant for albums (the Animal Collective's Merriweather Post Pavilion, top of everybody else's list, is mostly unlistenable despite a couple of gems). But I have put together today a quick Spotify playlist of the best ( Read more... )

• Gov't Cheese
• Uncivil Servants
• People of the Sun
• Calm like a Bomb
• Bulls on Parade

( pop videos )

Awesome band bios of our time: Naomi Hates HumansI started writing music as Naomi Hates Humans in 2006. I'd been out of uni for a couple of years and had moved to London (having grown up in rural sussex and gone to uni in bournemouth). I hated my job and my flat, my band had split up, I'd stopped writing songs and was incredibly lonely. I came in ( Read more... )

At the Ark tonight for some music. We missed the first act on the bill but caught the second, who didn't say what they were called, but I assume were Snide Rhythms. For a few seconds they sounded like the Minutemen. They didn't have a guitarist or any other instrumentalist, just bass, drums, and shouty bloke. Given practice they could approach ( Read more... )

Never mind Amelle (Britain's leading quasi-Muslim pop star) leaving the Sugababes, or Avril Lavigne divorcing, the most shocking pop news of the year has to be Azerbaijani police tracing and interrogating people who voted for Armenia in Eurovision. I'm sure lots more of this goes on, and not just in eastern Europe (or to be more accurate, western ( Read more... )