Far be it from me to encourage you to buy any music book this year that isn't called Still In A Dream.... But I concede that there are some other interesting music books out there. A couple of which I have blurbed. There's ex-Contortion Adele Bertei's No New York: A Memoir of No Wave and the Women Who Shaped the Scene. About which I offered: "Adele Berte...

  Excited to announce the publication this summer of  Still In A Dream: Shoegaze, Slackers and the Reinvention of Rock, 1984-94. On White Rabbit Books. It's a love letter to the music of my youth - and a flashback to the most exciting time of my writing life, when week by week I was on the frontline of covering a cascade of thrilling developments in unde...

Stephen Alexander, at his always interesting and insanely prolific blog Torpedo the Ark, brightens my day, at this ever more darkening time, with a post about three Simons of roughly the same age and with certain affinities: Armitage, Critchley, Reynolds. As I note in his comments section, it was a ridiculously common name for boys born from the late '50s to ...

Really happy to have the opportunity to write about one of my favorite albums of the 21st Century so far: Suburban Tours by Rangers. For Pitchfork's Sunday Review series. It was also an opportunity to get started - possibly jumping a gun a bit, since it's only 16 years since, but why not? - on feeling nostalgic about chillwave a/k/a hypnagogic pop. Here's an epic 13 mi...

Sweeping up the mince pie crumbs and taking down the tinsel, while feeling distinctly under the weather and one-sherry-too-many green-about-the-gills - that's yours truly the day after the party celebrating 20 Years of Ghost Box.The anniversary party came about when a bright bulb went off above my head and I realized that I'd extravagantly celebrated Creel Pone earlier this year...