New Zealand Music month always makes me wonder whether we are right to give our local music a whole month’s worth of celebration. Possibly in the past, it would have been hard to justify such an event. There would have been only so much ‘Ardijah’ and ‘Herbs’ I could have coped with. But since the [...]

It’s been over a year now since I put my thoughts down about the Opensouls long player Kaleidoscope, and looking at my review now, I still feel as good about it as I did then. Even today, when I listened to it on my walk home I picked up some nice percussion work that I [...]

Drumming up further interest for Era Vulgaris seems to be something that Universal is keen to do…in the past, this has preceeded some nasty flops, but thankfully the tracks leaked today show that this next album is going to be (mostly) a cracker. Available for download at eravulgaris.col.uk, four tracks from the album due in [...]

Having never experienced the ‘Flight of the Conchords’ before, I wasn’t quite sure what the joke would be. I love Jermaine Clement’s work for the L&P ads, but wondered how the low-brow humour would work as a TV show. Surprisingly, pretty damn well. Check out the full season opener at HBO.com. It’s funny, but possibly [...]

…and not in Marilyn Manson way either. The video for ‘Sick, Sick, Sick’ is out there amping up the people for ‘Era Vulgaris’…and it’s working (at least on me). The two tracks I’ve caught so far (‘Sick, Sick, Sick’ and ‘You Know What You Did’) sound damn good…which makes for good listening after the recent [...]

This year has signalled a wealth of bands reforming (or continuing their reformed ways) – The Pixies are still going strong, The Lemonheads self-titled was okay, The Police aren’t killing each other, and Dinosaur Jr.’s ‘Beyond’ continues to rock my world. Another of the reformed – Billy Corgan has decided to start leaking tracks from [...]

My first real album was “License To Ill”. At 13, riding to school everyday on a train (30 minutes each direction) was a complete drag. I knew some of the people that rode the train, but there is only so much 13 year old boys can say to each other (‘Yeah’, ‘Nah’, ‘Um’ and ‘Okay’ [...]

“Young Folks” was one of those videos I caught in the wee smalls on C4. Up mooching with my baby, the cartoon video and the super-melodic whistling had me. It could have been the tiredness I suppose, because I didn’t really know who it was or what it was called. Subsequently, I did nothing to [...]