Unsung Podcast

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...

Skunk Anansie have sold millions of albums. Paranoid and Sunburnt, their debut, was released to wide acclaim and arrived in the post-grunge period where the UK was in the thrall of Britpop, but what is the band’s legacy? Many of the bands that came out around about this time that didn’t fall into the Britpop category were loosely termed Britrock, and Skunk Anansie were one of the biggest, and most...

Two episodes in a week?! Yes, this week herald’s the return of our Sound is a Pound feature! In it, we each go to the pound shop, by two albums each and then gift them to one another. And boy we have some real doozies for you. NOTE: This is actually BONUS CONTENT - y’know the kind of thing we give to our subscribers on a regular basis. if you like this and want to hear more, consider signing up to...

We were on holiday this week so we’ve gone deep into our catalogue of bonus content and unearthed the very first in a series that we’re calling Unsong. If you like what you hear, consider subscribing here . It’s basically THE UNSUNG SINGLES CLUB. In it, we breakdown a single song to talk about why it works so well. On this episode, Weaver has chosen Blessings Upon the Throne of Tyranny by Dimmu Bo...

Whilst any meaningful distinction between what is “high” and what is “low” are is surely a conversation born out of complete nonsense (who gets to decide this things? Why do such individuals fall into these categories? etc), what we can say is that we are very much out of our wheelhouse on this episode. That’s right. We’re going classical. We’re going Erik Satie. Look, classical musical analysis i...

In case you missed it, last week we discussed the history of the double album. We spoke about how the double album was born, how it paved the way for more conceptual records, some of the big hitters, some of the worst ones, triple albums, quadruple albums…just any and all things related to the very concept of the double album. We also created three loose categories that we think all double albums...