Week in Music May 10th - 16th

 Exciting week with two of the best bands - Fightmilk & Desperate Journalist - releasing new music. 

The new Fightmilk record, Contender, is killer. Great tunes that both rock and are very catchy, good lyrics too. My current favourite is 'Maybe'. Gorgeous. And the way it builds throughout the song to such a sumptuous juggernaut at the end is wonderful 

Desperate Journalist are back with a great new tune and video, 'Personality Girlfriend'. I really dig the mood of this one, the minor slow romp of the verses, and especially when Jo goes high with the vocal, smoothly flowing into a chorus where the light of a major key makes for cool shadows

David Shah's new Zeitklein project has released a nice new tune, 'Skydivers'

My favourite Facebook group is The Go-Betweens one and someone mentioned there's a Triffids 'Great Australian Albums' documentary for Born Sandy Devotional so I hopped on that right away.

'Spanish Blue' is in it, well before the album, but what a good single.

And then of course 'Wide Open Road' is one of the best songs ever written. Great performance of it here

And the Church cover of it is fantastic

Still making my way through Colin Harper's excellent John McLaughlin bio Bathed In Lightning. A good compilation of John's pre-Miles 60s recordings here

And finally I was playing quadruple solitaire with the family last night and I put on Burt Bacharach's '20th Century Masters' compilation for us to listen to, not realizing these are instrumental versions of the hits. But OMG, the version of 'Don't Make Me Over' is FANTASTIC. Especially the 'accept me for what I am' part. Intense. 

And if anyone here is a comics fan, I wrote an appreciation of one of my favourite comics creators, the Belgian master Maurice Tillieux, for The Comics Journal, published this week. I love his style, one could describe it as a cross between Franquin and Hergé but it's definitely all his own, his art and dialogue are excellent. 

Week In Music May 2nd - May 9th

Happy Mother's Day, all! I'll keep this short as I'm spending time with mine.

A song I absolutely love that my mom used to play all the time when I was growing up and that I've been listening to a lot the past few days. Sly & The Family Stone's 'Everybody Is A Star'

What else has been in my headphones this week. A lot of Yoko Ono. Exploring more of her work. 1995' 'Rising' album with IMA is incredible. Lots of stylistic territory explored and two gorgeous tunes in 'Goodbye, My Love' and 'Revelations'. The 'Yes, I'm A Witch' remix/collaboration record is really great too and the version of 'Revelations' with Cat Power is very moving

I've also been slowly making my way through Colin Harper's excellent 'Bathed In Lightning' book about John McLaughlin, and so much more. Incredibly dense history, that 200 pages in has provided much detail on the 60s session scene in London. There's many curios to stop and look up along the way. Including John & Duffy Power's take on 'God Bless The Child'

And this amazing performance of 'Cherokee' on the Tonight Show in 1984

It was pouring earlier this week and sitting by the window watching the drops fall it was pleasant to be reminded of Terri Rae's 'It's Raining'. One day I'll find her whole record

And I had a fantastic conversation with Fightmilk for an upcoming episode of the ETC podcast, out May 17th. Their new record, 'Contender', is out before that on the 14th and oh boy, are you in for a treat! They've expanded their palette and taken things up a couple notches. Killer tunes, especially this one. And a great video by Jono Ganz.  'Overbite':

That's all for now. I'm thinking of turning this blog into an email newsletter. Let me know what you think about that idea

Week In Music April 24th-May 1st

A sad week this week as I woke up on Wednesday to the news that Anita Lane had died. I'd had her & Barry Adamson's excellent version of 'These Boots Are Made For Walking' stuck in my head for the previous week, perhaps with good reason.

I was reminiscing about how in 1998 on my fateful trip to Europe where that stranger told me that Nick Cave owned a bar in Berlin, setting in motion that epic adventure, I was reading Ian Johnston's 'Bad Seed' biography and Anita seemed like such both a powerful muse and creator in her own right. And then at the end of that trip I went to London and found her 'The World's A Girl' EP, her and Nick's version of 'Je T'aime...' introducing me to the world of Serge Gainsbourg. And those Gainsbourg covers she did with Mick Harvey! Their version of 'Overseas Telegram' is my definition of gorgeous.

I quickly sought out her 'Dirty Pearl' album and then a couple years later, I was going to Canada with my band Lifestyle to play some gigs and I picked up the newly released 'Sex O'Clock' at a record shop in Buffalo, NY. We were fascinated by it. Mute is reissuing that record later this year and I was hoping to speak with Anita about it for the ETC podcast. I spent a lot of time on Twitter looking at all the lovely tributes to her and it was great to see that so many people knew of her and what a powerful force she was. 

It was one such tweet that introduced me to the work of Penelope Trappes. Her new song 'Fur & Feather' is lovely.

Also on Twitter was introduced to the catchy spacey electronic sounds of wor_kspace. 

And the lush dreampop of Phantom Handshakes, whose album cover for their new 'No More Summer Songs' was nice enough to inspire me to listen and I really enjoyed it. 

I seem to find out about a lot of music through Twitter these days. Not a bad thing. And it was the same for the new illuminati hotties song 'MMMOOOAAAAAYAYA'. Sarah really knows how to write an energetic pop song

And speaking of energetic pop, last weekend I watched 'Josie & The Pussycats' again on my birthday and that soundtrack is so good. I really like the countdown from six in the chorus '3 Small Words'. 

And I wouldn't have thought it possible to love Charly Bliss any more than I do, but reading this The Fader oral history of the film, I found out that CB covered the entire soundtrack for Halloween a couple years ago. 

Guided By Voices are back with a new album, 'Earth Man Blues', which Rolling Stone called their best since 'Alien Lanes'. That's a mighty call, but after one listen there are some good tunes on there. I'm particularly fond of 'How Can A Plumb Be Perfected?' 

Anton Barbeau is back with a cool video for his ace new wavey 'Across The Drama Pond'. If you don't know Anton's work, I highly recommend checking it out. Especially if you like Robyn Hitchcock, Julian Cope, XTC, or just really good pop music. He's an American English eccentric. 

I kept hearing Sonny & Cher's 'The Beat Goes On' last week and then Telex covered it. 

New Quicksand song, 'Inversion', that I'm digging

The Quietus ran a Pet Shop Boys 'Beyond The Hits' piece and I contributed a blurb about 'Nightlife', a tune I've always loved. 

And also it was rad to see Yoko Ono tweet Bobby from The Quietus' review of the Plastic Ono Band boxset. The songs he mentions at the end are lovely. 

After reading the review, I put on her 1973 'Approximately Infinite Universe' double album. Excellent stuff.