As soon as the vintage casio starts in the first track, you’re hooked. The voices are laid back and smooth like a number of teen beat bands, which is maybe no surprise since barcelona hail from d.c. (more…)

I’m sure it’s in one of those asimov books I read in 5th grade where a robot is convinced he’s human and a human asks him something like ‘how do you feel?’ the robot responds, ‘feel ..?… bleep…bleep …. feel… ‘ while his head spins around and smoke pours out of his head. (more…)

As biased as I usually am, I still feel the need to throw out a great big warning for anyone expecting objective commentary in this review: Everything Bjork touches is gold. (more…)

I don’t know of anyone whose vision of pop music is as grand as Neil Hannon’s.

A Secret History is a ‘best of…’ collection, featuring two previously unreleased tracks, a re-recorded ‘The Pop Singer’s Fear of the Pollen Count,’ and ‘I’ve Been To a Marvellous Party,’ Neil’s contribution to Twentieth Century Blues - the songs of Noel Coward. (more…)

as you may know, from reading my other reviews, one of my pet peeves is the decline of the album as a work unto itself. it seems a rare thing when a band makes a coherent record with each track as important as the others. these days, it’s all too common for a band to record one single and a bunch of filler around it and release it as an ‘album.’ (more…)

[This piece appeared on Bombast-xxx.]

Okay, so this isn’t the guided by voices that gave us alien lanes or under the bushes, under the stars. I can understand how fans of those two albums could dismiss the ‘new’ guided by voices. It bears little resemblance to the GBV of ‘watch me jumpstart.’ But it bears significant resemblance to a great pop record. (more…)