It might not sound like a glowing endorsement at first sight, but look at the following sentence twice and understand the compliment that it's meant to serve: “No band sets out to make an album like Health – The Heavy Blinkers' fifth album.” It is meant to compliment the effort, patience and care which was put into the record's crafting and to recognize how fine the results are;  Health is the sort of treasure which gets revealed to everyone eventually,...

I first saw Raw Geronimo in a packed, hot performance space in Echo Park on my birthday; they were performing on a bill with a friend’s band, Jail Weddings. Some readers might be interested to get that background on how I cam upon the band but, really, it's completely irrelevant; what matters is that I was floored by the energy and complexity of their music. “Prog-punk,” I thought to myself. “Or is it punk-prog?” Either way, they played prog structured...

Booker T Jones is the sound of Memphis Soul. Best known for the instrumental hit “Green Onions,” he wrote and, with his band the MGs, played on numerous hits, including many by Otis Redding and Albert King, as well as pretty much anyone who recorded with Stax Records in the Sixties. He left Stax in the early Seventies and, although he had some success in the Eighties, had largely faded from view. In recent years, he has been staging a...

In life – as well as in music – everything is about balance. The entire musical spectrum cannot simply boil down to one idea; sure, the incendiary sparks of excitement which can be found in the best punk records can feel like a new reason to live when caught by ears ready to receive them, but equally important is the other calmer and more temperate side of life. Every yin needs a yang and incendiary sounds need temperate ones to...

I have mixed feelings about remixes. (Remixed feelings? Sorry.) While I have certainly heard a number of interesting ones, but too often they seem like a self-indulgent exercise which adds nothing to the original song. I would apply the same criteria for judging remixes that I apply to cover songs: if you’re going to do it, make something original out of the song. Make it your own. So here we have remixes of Bob Marley’s entire Legend album. Marley seems...

Lou Reed has gone on the record several times as saying that one of the keystone songwriting principles which informed his writing for the Velvet Underground was Raymond Chndler's writing. With a perfectly understated and almost deadpan tone, Reed will drop lines like “That blonde was as pleasant as a split lip” on documentary film camera lenses to illustrate how potentially exciting and inspiring Chandler's images can be – and the further beauty of them is that they all use...

The moments when a band is recording a new studio album can be remarkable, under the right conditions. With the right songs, the right producer or even just the right moment and energy, the music that the band records could end up being the stuff which, years later, will be regarded as the first big break they enjoyed in a celebrated career. Nothing is ever guaranteed, of course, but the band may discover that they're really onto something and start...

If there are two bands from the Eighties who compliment each other perfectly, it has to be the Go-Go's and the B-52's. Both are still going strong after thirty-plus year careers, have had numerous hits and are responsible for some of the most recognizable songs of the decade. Seems like a no-brainer for both of them to share the bill on a Summer jaunt together. Opening the evening with "Planet Claire,” the B-52's got the near sold-out crowd on their...

What exactly is so wrong with cliche that it makes everyone who works in the music business (be they musician, critic, publicist or whatever) cringe when someone acknowledges its presence on a new record? Contrary to popular belief, cliche can be a handy tool in the pop idiom; in the right hands, it can act as a perfect way to access a sound and let an artist manipulate it – they could even make it sound fresh and vital again...

Let it never be said that Kurt Cobain, Krist Novoselic and Dave Grohl didn't have a sense of humor. Those who require proof that not everything was so dire in the Nirvana camp in 1993 as it has since been painted will get a perverse little giggle when they see a great, bizarre and bizarrely great promotional video which was recently unearthed. Presumably re-discovered by the powers that be as they sought to get a little hunger stirring for a...