The success of the Arctic Monkeys is something that had been mooted for a long time; while one can become jaded with the British music media constantly hyping ‘so and so’ as the next band to take over the world (seriously, there will never be another Beatles – no matter how much you want it [...]

List making and music go hand in hand. Think of the list as the theoretical mixtape; if you had to have 3 albums on a desert island, in theory, the albums you choose will open you up, allowing all in sundry to figure out if your taste sucks, or if you are some sort of [...]

Felix Five Drive’s 3 hours of Mashups on Saturdays is always a fun listen. How so many people manage to find time to remix music is beyond me, but there is always a heap of stuff on the show that makes me think for all the horrible bedroom remixes there are out there, there are [...]

Today was the first time I managed to catch ‘The Fixer’, which is being lauded as Pearl Jam’s return to form. Personally, I think it sounds a little MOR for me. I think PJ hit the top of their bell curve at Vitalogy – it’s easily their darkest and most edgey album – but I [...]

The Dunedin sound was something that I took a long (long) time to appreciate. I think the first time I realised it’s importance was reading Gina Arnold’s ‘On the Road to Nirvana’, where REM’s Mike Mills makes the comment that the second coolest band, at the time of the interview was ‘The Chills’. Then the [...]

Mos Def has been one of my favourite MC’s for sometime; ‘Respiration’, along with pretty much the whole 51 minutes of Blackstar sounds as crisp as it did in 1998. While his solo efforts have been good (if not great) pieces of work, he has always seemed to be able to mix massive highs (‘Ms [...]

It took me so long to get round to checking out Microcastle/Weird Era Cont. I can’t be sure if it was because after reading reviews about it nothing would actually come close to the praise it was getting, or because I’m a lazy bastard, or because I wasn’t so endeared with ‘Cryptograms’. Whatever the reason, [...]

While the prices are a little better than the ACDC ones, combine the cost of the ticket with the cost of getting to Ak, and you’ve got a serious PJ roadblock. Fair enough though – Wellington doesn’t have a suitable venue (the stadium sound is beyond shit), and if they were to play TSB, it [...]