50 quid bloke

Brain food from Dan Hill over at City of Sound. To be honest, I’ve only just skimmed it - but it looks well worth a read (or at least a re-skim). [via Tom]

Alexis Petridis reviews  Fiona Apple, Extraordinary Machine and rather likes it (in a four star kind of way). Personally, I’m not convinced it was quite worth all the bother (it was neither bad enough to scrap, or good enough to fight for, IMHO)- but it’s nice to have her back.

iPod gloves, of course…phew thought I was going to have to go through the whole winter having to take my gloves off in order to skip a track on my Nano.

Apparently loud music has made Pete Townshend go deaf

Chris Anderson has been crunching some numbers on The decade the blockbuster died. I have no idea what they are/were as I was in a club at the time listening to things that go bleep. In fact, 1991 - 95 was in fact the golden period for big sellers. You would have thought it was the late 70s wouldn’t you?

Found myself listening over and over to Landed by Ben Folds today. Here’s the video (real video, other formats here). Yes, I know it’s old, but it’s lovely. Go on - treat yourself over on iTunes.

Do you ever buy an item of clothing then get it home, decide you don’t like it, keep it in your wardrobe, until a year or two later when you suddenly take it out, and for no reason whatsoever, it suddenly becomes one of your favourites?

Don’t worry - this isn’t turning into a fashion blog. But, exactly the same has just happened to me with Bob Scheider’s I’m Good Now [Amazon]. Can’t remember who recommended it to me, but it’s never really found a place in my life. Then all of a sudden, the iPod is on random play and up pops ‘God Is My Friend’ and I (and my 10 month old daughter) absolutely love it. And for some reason it’s proved the perfect background album for the bank holiday weekend.

I think on first listen it was just a little too straightforward semi-acoustic singer songwriter stuff. But, you know what - this weekend, I just fancied a bit of straightforward singer songwriter stuff.

Bromheads Jacket anyone? More new, new wave Northerners with jagged guitars and ‘observational’ lyrics. NME is raving about their new single, What If’s and Maybes (which I can only seem to find here on 7″ vinyl, which might be very cool, but is frankly worse than useless). There’s a couple of downloads on their site from an earlier ep called Surrey Girls and Samsung Ringtones -( which, incidentally, has exactly the same meter as my favourite Arctic Monkeys track: Bigger Boys and Stolen Sweethearts.) Lots of fun, if you like that sort of thing.

Well, it was time for a change - and I’ve become a complete Wordpress addict; and for some reason while I was on Typepad, my domain never really appeared on Google; and I really want to put all my blogging effort under one roof; and and and…Will be sorting the design of this page out in the coming weeks…

At this rate, I might not buy any music for the first 11 months of 2006, and just wait till everyone starts to do their ‘best of’ lists and just hoover up.

Eric over at Marathonpacks has released four mixes of tracks of the year - still available for download as I write this, but probably not for much longer.

Volumes 1 & 2 are here. Volumes 3 & 4 are here. Even if you don’t get the downloads, I suggest you follow his suggestions to make your own playlists.

Gawd bless you, as they say.