'Conor Oberst' is not, as some would have you believe (I'm looking at you, Metro newspaper) the debut solo album from, well, Conor Oberst. It's the fourth one, and that's not even counting the work he's done with Bright Eyes, Commander Venus, Desaparacidos and Park Avenue (of which I count a combined fourteen albums, but feel free to correct me in the comments). It seems, in fact, that the numb...
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Every line of influence passes straight through Sam Phillips. In her own music there's shades of Patti Smith and Cyndi Lauper and Billie Holliday, Bobbie Gentry and Emmylou Harris and Martha Reeves. In turn you can hear Sam in Neko Case and Leslie Feist and Nicole Atkins; even Sarah McLachlan and yes, Scarlett Johannson owe something of their sounds to Ms. Phillips.With so much influence before...
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Sooo... nice one, John. Right after you write this gushing post about how you're not taking time off from MOG, despite the fact that work is piling up around you, your house is a mess and you have an increasingly pregnant wife to look after, you disappear for a month. Great. Madden, you suck.I know. But I'm back! Again. I genuinely miss this place when I'm gone and I get a tingly sensation in m...
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It can't be easy when you're hailed as the new someone-who's-still-around. It bugs me as a listener - The View were the new Kooks who were the new Arctic Monkeys, all before the Monkeys had a second album out. And is 'the new Winehouse' really a compliment?Adele doesn't seem to mind, though presumably because the comparison is more to do with musical styles than an accusation of being volatile, u
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Hi Boys and Girls,A brief interlude into the not quite music related, but I've been, to quote the Sounds, dying to say this to you.with the recent spate of disappearances and hiatuses (Hiati? Do we have a stylebook ruling for this?), including one of my personal faves, Bartleby, I wanted to clear the air and answer a question i've been asked by a few non-Moggers lately.Yes, I'm sticking around....
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The biggest problem with Coldplay is that nobody seems able to accurately judge how good or bad they are. Put 'Coldplay+boring' or 'Coldplay+brilliant' into Google and you get almost the same (at least on the scale of the internet) number of results. For every review proclaiming them as 'the next U2' (and there are many- do a Google search for this, too - I'm trying to convince myself Gwyneth P...
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I love The Who. I love them like I’m far too young to, like a man twice my age. I don’t even remember them properly – Keith Moon died when I was six months old (almost to the day) and prior to the release of 2006’s ‘Endless Wire’, they’d only released three studio albums in my lifetime. In fact – and this is kind of my point here– ‘Endless Wire’ arguably wasn’t even The Who
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A quick note: I’ve been doing just album reviews lately, and I really wanted to do something on a live show. So what follows is a short, spontaneous and disjointed bit on The Hold Steady at The Academy, Dublin on May 13th. Sorry if it’s repetitive and/or incoherent…Craig Finn is clearly delighted to be here. As he and the rest of the Hold Steady plug in their instruments he welcomes The Aca
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Just a brief interlude between reviews to introduce you to The Kanyu Tree.The Kanyu Tree are brothers Daniel, Shane and Oisin McCluskey, a boyband-handsome trio from Galway, Ireland who do jangly, melodic summery rock - imagine 'Surfin' USA' era Beach Boys covering 'Out Of Time' era R.E.M. and you're probably not too far off the mark.If you were at The Hold Steady in The Academy last night, you...
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