#413 Alela Diane – The Pirate’s Gospel

This is the official 2006 release of Alela Diane’s debut, after its word of mouth demo version slowly but surely drew the rest of the world's attention. It’s raw yet smart alt-folk. Diane has a distinctive yearning voice, a knack of finding a fine yet unusual melody and deceptively simple yet highly effective guitar playing. …

#1499 Various Artists – Hi-Fidelity (a taste of stereo sound)

Well here’s a thing. At the end of 2017, Sainsbury’s, the large British supermarket retailer, announced it was setting up its own record label called, appropriately enough, Own Label, off the back of the vinyl revival. Two LPs swiftly followed, to be sold in a selection of their larger stores only, this one and Coming …

#77 Syd Barrett – The Madcap Laughs

Syd Barrett (nee Roger Keith) may well be jangle pop’s antihero. The ramshackle recording of this, his debut record, of barely scraped together takes from a number of sessions is lo-fi in the extreme. His influence as the originator of Pink Floyd and prime composer of their mind-blowing debut The Piper At The Gates Of …

#529 Fleet Foxes – Fleet Foxes

This album was such a breath of fresh air when released, that listening to it now (after a few days of doom-laden drone rock) it took me right back to those heady carefree days of 2008 when we weren’t fighting fascists in the streets, a global plague, or in deadly denial about the oncoming environmental …

#346 Lloyd Cole – Don’t Get Weird On Me Babe

Cole’s second solo album which is similar to the stripped-down, acoustic(ish) vibe of Paul Weller’s far more successful Wild Wood, but released two years earlier. Perhaps because he was a little ahead of his time this album didn’t fare so well and is not that well known. If he brought it out now in an …

#1549 VG Toba Samosir – A Sing Sing So

I bought this cassette direct from the band when they performed a concert in the guesthouse we stayed in on Samosir Island in Danau Toba, Indonesia. Lake (Danau in Indonesian) Toba is situated in the caldera of a supervolcano, one that is ground zero geologically speaking, considered to be the largest volcanic explosion in the …

#118 Beck – Mellow Gold

Beck seems to have invented an entirely new musical language here: gravel-scraping scratchy and funky acoustic guitars, sharp yet muffled beats, growling blues-man vocals with a sound collage of record samples and unusual field recordings thrown into the mix. Listening to the album now (after a long time away from it) it still sounds entirely …

#965 Beth Orton – Pass In Time: The Definitive Collection

I’ve seen Beth Orton twice in concert, both times by accident. A happy accident, I hasten to add. The first time was in 1999 and I was in Barcelona for my girlfriend's 30th birthday. It was the end of September and by chance we were there for La Merce Festival with its famous fire runs, …

#1350 Jake Thackray – The Very Best Of

Jake Thackray was a brilliantly witty wordsmith, specialising in poems-set-to-music insights of Yorkshire life that shine with both comedic hilarity and real-world pathos. Often bawdy, but never rude for the sake of it, he was called the “Northern Noel Coward” at the height of his success. And he was pretty successful, performing his satirical songs …

#130 Belle & Sebastian – The Boy With The Arab Strap

This is a great album, and for many (including myself) their entry point into the distinctive, delightful and deceptively dark world of Belle & Sebastian. It’s not necessarily a significant leap forward from their debut Tigermilk but it appeared around the same time that word of mouth had spread sufficiently for them to be namechecked …