I’m sure this stop motion video is referencing something, I just can’t figure out what. Directed by Andy Martin for Dress Up from the new album Old Fears by School of Language, it’s a brilliant...

Annoying / cool / annoying / cool / annoying / cool / annoying / cool

This is a tough one. As much as I love Eels / E / Mark Everett, there’s no single album that I would say sits above all the others as a must-have: Electro-Shock Blues is...

Finally, an album that would be a shoe-in if I actually sat down and attempted a truly definitive list. Released at the tail end of 1991, Bandwagonesque is technically Teenage Fanclub’s third album, but only...

Look! It’s that Mark Morriss from The Bluetones, whose début album back in 1996 got me as excited as a very excited young music fan with its brilliant hooks and singalongability. He has a newish...

After an initial burst of excitement and enormous piles of hype and all the pre-release publicity, Reflektor turned out to be a sporadically brilliant, wilfully indulgent offering whose peaks were not quite high enough to...

I don’t like to use the under-rated tag if I can help it, but when a début album as good as Natural History misses the top 100 altogether, it feels deserved. Mancunians I am Kloot...

I’ve been meaning to write about this track for days, but time has its own ways…

Time for this playlist to show its early 90s Indie roots. For a day, at least.

I really think more albums should start with a gentle nine-minute spoken-word piece that takes in custard creams, a job nearly done, a job not done at all, cigars, the little-observed truth that On Her...

After the break-up, after the break, after the reformation, what next from Tindersticks Mk II?

This was always going to be a problem album. After 10 years and 6 albums, live offerings released as official bootlegs, and some soundtrack work to boot, a new Tindersticks album after an almost five...

The more things change the more they stay the same. For their final album with their original six-piece line-up, Tindersticks dripped some of the strings of their earlier releases over the soul of newer material,...

The first three Tindersticks albums comprised 21, 16 and 15 tracks respectively; the next two were made up of just nine songs and eight songs. What can we conclude from this? Well, for a start,...

After three albums of increasingly easy on the ear orchestral vignettes, Tindersticks decided to shake it up a bit for fourth album Simple Pleasure. The strings are still very much in place, but now they’re...

On Tindersticks’ third album Curtains the band stick largely to the familiar: lush orchestration, sweeping strings, tales of love, lust, and desperate dependency. And just as they refined and cleaned their sonic make-up for the...

On a number of levels, Tindersticks Second Album is a continuation of where the band left off at the end of their début eighteen months earlier. The orchestral grandeur is there, the lovelorn tales, the...

Tindersticks’ debut album is a smoky piano bar; a doomed love; a long dark soul. Arriving in the Autumn of 1993, just before Britpop stormed the barricades of a nation’s musical conscience, it stands in...

Looking back, it's a little disappointing that one of my most treasured musical moments took place in a city center branch of a well-known high street music chain. I could have at least been in...

Harmless indie rock for the quiet kids. Occasionally they go big (“The New Year”, “Tiny Vessels”), but mostly keep a light touch, gently unfolding melodies in their own time.