Unsung Podcast

In the legendarium of hardcore and post-hardcore, there are a whole slew of bands that are arguably unsung. The big hitters are pretty obvious, right? Your Black Flags, Bad Brains, Husker Dus, Fugazis etc have lots of column inches devoted to their huge influence. This week we’ll argue that Jawbox’s third album, For Your Own Special Sweetheart, is just as, if not more influential, than some of tho...

We’ve asked our friend of the pod Babs from the Over/underrated music podcast back to talk about one of her favourite bands - Belgium’s weird alt-rock quartet called Millionaire. This all came about because when we last had her on for our episode on Origin of Symmetry by Muse, it turned out that she and Chris shared common ground in the form of this band. It just made sense that an episode would f...

We always coming out swinging with something BIG after Xmas and this year is no exception as we talk about South of Heaven by Slayer. What is there to say about Slayer that hasn’t already been said? Formed in 1981, it goes without saying that they’re one of the most important metal bands of all time. The “Big 4” of thrash were called that for a reason, and it’s about more than just their rise to f...

The New Year is now well underway but we’re not quite ready to let the Christmas cheer disappear just yet. To that end, we now share the conclusion of our XMAS XTRAVAGANZA. Vicki and Chris are pished, we talk about our favourite albums of 2021, artists who should have joined the 27 club, our favourite discoveries of the year that we made via the pod and a whole lot more. Now seems like a good time...

Happy new year to all you fine folks. I hope you’ve shaken off the hangover and are ready to re-immerse yourself in real life. Part two of our CHRISTMAS XTRAVAGANZA is upon us and we’re having a grand old time. The port is flowing, the opinions are getting gradually more ramble-y and everyone is in an altered state of consciousness. Our questions this week include: what artists are shit but have o...

Merry Christmas one and all! There will be no coal in your stocking this year, oh no. This year you get a big fat Xmas three parter with both David and Vicki joining Mark and Chris. Aren’t you lucky?! As is now tradition, we have canvased our loyal fanbase for fun questions and set about answering them over the course of three episodes that start fairly acceptable and descend into drunken madness....

Well, it was going to strike one of us down eventually. It just so happened to coincide with our fourth birthday and our 200th episodes… That’s right folks, one of us went got the ‘rona. Chris was struck down with COVID-19 just a few days before we were due to record our Xmas special on December 10th and as a result, we were left with no episode, and our plans to release our 200th episode on our 4...

Pitchfork do get it wrong from time to time. That is why we’ve just dedicated two full episodes to how often they, and music journalists as a whole, get it wrong. This week we’re discussion three albums that we think they it got it the most wrong with: Futures by Jimmy Eat World Lateralus by Tool Wishville by The Catherine Wheel With the exception of The Catherine Wheel, who broke up shortly after...

Over the last few episodes we’ve discussed how the music press can make or break a band’s career, and even have a lasting effect on band members psyches’ long after they receive critical acclaim/indifference. My Vitriol and The Sound provide two fascinating case studies in that regard: The former were a band who gained massive buzz in the dying moments of the physical format era. The turn of the 2...

Our favourite Italian post punk encyclopaedia Ferruccio Quercetti joins us this week. He’s nominated the hugely influential, yet strangely underappreciated album Jeopardy by The Sound. Being contemporaries with bands like Wire, Echo and the Bunnymen and Joy Division (to name a few - Ferro gives even more detail in the episode), it’s something of a mystery as to whey The Sound never quite reached t...

We’re back in action! This week our friend Neil from The Accordion podcast joins us to talk about the mythical My Vitriol, and their highly praised debut (and so far only) album Finelines . First off, a little on Neil himself. He hosts a podcast called The Accordion which, if you like ours, we’re absolutely sure you will love. He has interesting conversations about his favourite albums with an arr...

We’re going to be 4 years old soon and for pretty much every single week of those 4 years (with the sole of exception of around this time last year when a technical issue made us lose an entire episode) we’ve been able to release an episode a week. However, this week we just couldn’t. Some life things got in the way and we had to take care of that. We couldn’t just leave everyone hanging though, s...

What you hear in this second episode is the sounds of three people getting gradually drunker whilst a Scottish ex-pat in Australia looks on aghast. Yes, whilst, much like last week we were all jazzed to talk about Caught Up by Millie Jackson, and her career, the night was getting long and it’s well past 1am local time as we record this one. If you thought the first part sound merry then hoo boy, d...

What you hear in this first episode is the sounds of four people on the second attempt at recording. Yes, whilst we were all jazzed to talk about Caught Up by Millie Jackson, and her career, a catastrophic technical issue turned this two parter into a mammoth 5 hour recording session. So when you hear how this rapidly begins to sound like a Christmas special, you know why. The booze was flowing as...

Still with us? Good. In part two of our Muse exploration, our guests Fran and Babs from the excellent Over/underrated music podcast make a case for why Origin of Symmetry is an Unsung classic. We ponder what a “birth squeeze” is and what a llama’s toenail looks like…. We also talk about the band’s entire discography and friends, let me tell you, it was a journey . There are definitely highs - some...

EVEN MORE GUESTS?! WHY! Well, because it’s fun and across these next two episodes you’ll really begin to see why because our guests Fran and Babs from the excellent Over/underrated music podcast have chosen Origin of Symmetry by Muse. This turned into the most EPIC of two parters, so you better strap the fuck in for this one because we had so much to talk about that we didn’t even get to the band’...

Our good pal Anna Goldthorp joins us this week and takes us into a genre of music we have not yet covered with Shannon and the Clams’ third album, Dreams in the Rat House. Hailing from Oakland, Shannon and the Clams are part of a rather deep, and popular, retro garage rock revival scene. They’ve been going since 2009 and have six albums in that time to critical acclaim. The band themselves are ver...

This week we’re joined by the multi-talented troubadour, promoter and friend, Kapil Seshasayee as he picks the debut album by little known Scottish post rockers Long Fin Killie. Post rock is perhaps only one way of defining this band., but it’s probably the most accurate label to affix to them when it comes to Houdini. Incorporating a myriad of American post rock influences that were floating arou...

IT’S A PODCAST CROSSOVER, BABY! This week we’ve asked Ryan Schaff from The Broken Record Player Podcast to come chat to us about an album he thinks is an unsung classic. His choice? Tinderbox by Siouxsie and the Banshees. We always knew that we’d need to address these guys at some point, so it was great to have a fan come on and do the job with us. Ryan’s a super lovely dude and Siouxsie and the B...

Dave is MIA this week so we’ve drafted in our pal Vicki and asked her to pick an album. Her choices is Stubborn Persistent Illusions by Canadian post-rock troupe Do Make Say Think. Hailing from Toronto and part of Constellation Records, it would be fair to consider Do Make Say Think’s jazzy, dual drummer, almost joyful approach to post-rock the yin to Godspeed You! Black Emperor’s doomy, melanchol...

It’s incredibly difficult to categorise Arthur Russell. His music ranged from the purely experimental, to disco, warped 80s synth pop and so much more. It’s the latter that makes Calling out of Context, the first posthumous complication released by his estate such an intriguing listen. Arthur rose to prominence as the musical director of Manhattan’s avant-garde musical playground The Kitchen. He r...

Alright, so in the grand scheme of things, Humbug by the Arctic Monkeys isn’t exactly bereft of plays on the ol’ streaming platforms. Hell, it still sold a lot of physical copies too. However, in comparison to the rest of their discography? It’s certainly one of the albums that has shown the least love. It did have some big-ish singles of course, but nothing on the scale of some of the others. The...

The cat is truly among the pigeons this week, as Chris puts the Arctic Monkeys’ third album Humbug forth for our consideration. Is this the biggest band we’ve ever covered?! Probably not, no - we did cover Metallica after all - but they are the first band we’ve ever covered with a song on Spotify that is has over 1 billion plays (It’s Do I Wanna Know? incidentally) so I suppose you could argue tha...

Screamo is still a dirty word to those of a certain generation. It conjures up images of The Used and Hawthorne Heights and Silverstein. Well we’re here to tell you that before those bands became a thing, screamo was something entirely different. The best example of this is, of course, As the Roots Undo by Circle Takes the Square. Won’t harp on about screamo too long in this post (you’ll need to l...

And so we’re back to talk some more about Skunk Anansie and this time, THIS TIME, to actually chat about the album we said we would talk about, Paranoid and Sunburnt. But before we get there of course, we also chat about Skin because her influence and mere presence in the music both back in the 90s and now, are huge. She’s a very interesting character in her own right, so it would be remiss of us...