Enjoy An Album with Liam Withnail & Christopher Macarthur-Boyd

Released on Rough Trade Records in 1988, Lucinda Williams’ self-titled third album is considered by some to be the birth of alt-country. Ignored by the world at large but critically adored, the album was out of print for many years until it was re-released twenty-five years later. Although somewhat overshadowed in Lucinda’s discography by her magnum opus Car Wheels On A Gravel Road, every single s...

Two years before he blasted out his Greatest Hits in 1975, Al Green released Call Me - a sumptuous chunk of Memphis soul. Including renditions of heartrending country ballads So Lonesome I Could Cry by Hank Williams and Funny How Time Slips Away by Willie Nelson, it also includes world-beating originals such as You Ought To Be With Me, which was later sampled by Ghostface Killah on his debut album...

Proto-grunge post-hardcore St Paul punkers Hüsker Dü stood out from the macho-masochism that defined SST Records and their independent ilk with a strain of guitar rock that was emotionally intelligent and predictability-averse. By combining the methamphetamine speed and buzzsaw riffage of early Black Flag and the Ramones with the jangly melodies and harmonies of the Byrds and the Beatles, they suc...

Our second LIVE episode which... did not go to plan :/

The last Motown record to be crafted by the legendary trio of Holland, Dozier & Holland before they hit it and quit, Reach Out was a crossover smash racially by blending Levi Stubbs’ terse soulful howl with white pop covers like If I Were A Carpenter and I’m A Believer. With titanic slabs of perfect emo anguish like Standing In The Shadow Of Love, Bernadette and the title track - as well as th...

Recorded in front of a live audience at the Edinburgh Fringe 2022 in Monkey Barrel Studios on August 6th! Christopher Macarthur-Boyd and Liam Withnail listened to nu-metal classic Meteora by Linkin Park, which is somehow not on the Rolling Stone magazine list of the 500 Greatest Albums of All Time. It is, however, the highest selling album in the history of the Billboard Alternative Chart and has...

An overnight success after seven years of plugging away on the London pub-rock circuit, Declan Patrick McManus took on the nom de plume Elvis Costello as a pop-art statement of intent. My Aim Is True was recorded in 1977 six separate four-hour sessions with an all-American session band who would go on to be The News alongside Huey Lewis. Too angry to be new wave - and too clever to be truly punk -...

Arguably the best wedding band in the history of East L.A., Los Lobos stood out on a punk scene full of primitive rockers like The Blasters and X with their blend of rootsy rockabilly and traditional tex-mex balladeering. Named after a headline on the front cover of National Geographic magazine and produced by T-Bone Burnett, How Will The Wolf Survive? raised Los Lobos’ profile to the point that t...

Teaming up with Lil Jon for a crunkified version of his signature smooth R&B sound on Yeah, Usher then spends the rest of this 2004 album confessing his sins - not only is he cheating on his girlfriend, but his sidepiece has just let him know that she’s pregnant and the baby is his. What a story! Interestingly, the concept behind the album is a complete invention for the sake of buzz; the incident...

Spending over a decade in New York as a perennial indie-rock no-hoper sound engineer, James Murphy reinvented himself in his early 30s as LCD Soundsystem. He established himself as a self-effacing obscuro-muso king on his debut two-disc self-titled record, but it was his sophomore effort that would be his magnum opus. Sound Of Silver threw back to the transgressive sounds of the seventies and the...

After parting ways with their rambunctious older drummer Gary Young, slacker-gods Pavement followed a promising run of EP’s and a killer debut album (heavily indebted to English post-punk bands like The Fall and Swell Maps) with Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain - a wry sunstroken take on 70’s classic rock through the lens of the American independent underground. Featuring their biggest hits Cut Your Hai...

Former music journalist Neil Tennant and trainee architect Chris Lowe bonded after a chance encounter in a hi-fi shop, before a meeting with legendary hi-NRG disco producer Bobby Orlando led to the formation of what would become the most successful British pop duo of all time. Initially thought to be a one-hit-wonder novelty act after the queer-noir proto-rap of ‘West End Girls’, The Pet Shop Boys...

Less than a year before he was supposedly drive-by’d to death in Las Vegas, 2Pac released the double album All Eyez On Me on Death Row Records. Fresh out of jail for sexual assault and sodomy, Tupac Shakur wrote and recorded this two-disc west coast classic in less than a fortnight. Collaborating with Death Row luminaries such as Snoop Dogg and Dr Dre, as well as funk legends like Roger Troutman a...

Bobby Gillespie’s Primal Scream were a bog standard indie-rock band until they were introduced to MDMA and collaborated with acid house DJ Andrew Weatherall on a track called “Loaded” which took a rubbish ballad from their previous album and remixed it into an eccied rave-up. “Screamadelica” followed - a diverse concept record of gospel, post-punk, soul and blues that charts the ecstasy and the ag...

£60,000 in debt after an ill-conceived American tour and having released two albums that didn’t quite make the splash that they wanted, Colchester bad boys Blur were about as penniless as the privately educated can be. Fully turning away from the baggy sound of their debut and sticking two fingers up at the skuzzed-out U.S. grunge that dominated music journalism (as well as the po-faced shy fuzz o...

Fellas, I’m ready to get up and do my thing. (Yeah, that’s right! Do it!) I want to get into it, man, you know? (Go ahead! Yeah!) Like a podcast machine, man. (Yeah!) “Sex Machine” by James Brown is a half-fake live album of overdubbed ersatz crowd noise atop pitch-perfect “on-the-one” funk jam bliss, that went on to influence the likes of Fela Kuti. Recorded at the apex of the “Popcorn” dance cra...

Loretta Lynn was born a humble coal miner’s daughter in rural Kentucky, but went on to win a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award, and was eventually a recipient of the Presidential Medal of Freedom by noted centrist drone-strike enthusiast Barack Obama. “Coal Miner’s Daughter” was her sixteenth and most celebrated album, featuring the autobiographical title track as well as covers by country legends...

Although it barely dented the charts compared to the mega-smashes of her Miss American teen dreams, Britney teamed up with the likes of Pharrel Williams, Robyn and Junkie XL for her fifth album, ‘Blackout’. Recorded between her divorce with back-up dancer Kevin Federline and the conservatorship dispute that plagued her thirties, this 2007 collection of forward-thinking electro-bangers both charted...

Cocaine! Torontonian sex-jammer Abel Tesfaye combined moody dream-pop samples with the Ethopian music that soundtracked his youth to become The Weeknd: a purveyor of glassy-eyed cum-soaked nihilistic R&B that set the indiesphere on fire in the early 10s with the ‘House of Balloons’ trilogy of underground EPs. After a flailing start with 2013’s flat ‘Kiss Land’, he made the leap to Super Bowl-l...

Sandwiched between the raw kraut-pop of his late-seventies Berlin period and the 1981 ultra-plastic megatunes of Let’s Dance, “Scary Monsters And Super Creeps” is regarded by many as a transitional record. But the sheer palpable fearful bile that Bowie had for the shiny young pretenders of the burgeoning New Romantic movement made for cringingly moreish art. Tony Visconti and Robert Fripp would ne...

Postponed for years by Epic Records who thought that it lacked commercial appeal, early demos and bootlegs from Extraordinary Machine were eventually leaked forcing the label to “Free Fiona”. Originally produced by Paul Thomas Anderson collaborator Jon Brion and then later mastered by Mike Elizondo, Extraordinary Machine is a hard-nosed alt-pop record filled with odd percussion, biting lyrics and...

Bill Bruford quit playing drums for Yes after they released “Close To The Edge” in 1972 to shack up with Robert Fripp in King Crimson, citing the trouble they had composing music due to the different social backgrounds of the various members as a contributing factor. Some have wrongly speculated that he left due to the overly ambitious nature of the record - a three-track suite of long, complicate...

Alice Coltrane described the period after her husband John’s death as ‘tapas’ - a Sanskrit word meaning ‘a painful and austere ordeal’. This avant-garde fusion of modal post-bop jazz and traditional Indian drone music is the process of grief writ large - teaming up with fellow members of her late husband’s band including ace drummer Rashied Ali and multiphonic saxophonist extraordinaire Pharoah Sa...

First making waves in his native Puerto Rico as a viral teenage Soundcloud rapper, Bad Bunny’s winningly emo-adjacent blend of reggaeton and trap music blew up the charts internationally with a series of uncompiled solo singles and guest appearances on tracks by artists such as Cardi B, Will Smith and Ricky Martin. However, his manager and labelhead DJ Luian refused to let him record an actual LP....

On October 15th, Volt released ‘Complete And Unbelievable: The Otis Redding Dictionary Of Soul’, otherwise known as ‘Dictionary Of Soul’. Fourteen months later he would die in a plane crash that claimed the life of his entire backing group, bar the trumpet player. The record’s supple muscular Memphis soul take on ‘Day Tripper’ by the beautiful Paul McCartney and his evil sideman John Lennon, as we...