Unsung Podcast

Surprise! Here’s another interview for ya’ll. We’re delighted to bring you this interview with the wonderful KateJane Garside. Well known for her staggering voice and stunning stage presence, KatieJane has been involved in a number of musical projects since the late 80s, most notably the garage punk outfit Daisy Chainsaw in the early 90s and ferocious noise rockers Queenadreena from 99 to 2010. Sh...

We seem to say this every time we do an electronic record, but…it’s been a while since we did an electronic record! Lord of Dance (not of the dance , although having seen him cut shapes, we can attest that this may also be somewhat accurate) David Weaver has chosen this seminal dubstep album from the influential UK garage and dubstep artist Burial. If you hear the words “dubstep” and think Skrille...

Chris was ill this week so we decided that we would release of the bonus episodes we recorded for subscribers back at the end of last year. This one was a lot of fun. We talk about some of our favourite guilty pleasures. We hope you enjoy - some truly brilliant and also hideous stuff in here. Next week we return with Burial’s self titled album!1

Why donate to our Patreon? Well, if you’re made enough to donate a Crag ($50) then we’ll make an episode on an album of your choosing. Then we’ll let folk hear it. That’s exactly what happened here. Well, kind of. Our aim with this episode was to release this to subscribers only but it turned out so damn well that we asked my Rayce Bannon, the man that asked us to talk about this album, if we coul...

Chris picked a hip hop album. Chris. Chris Cusack. The whitest man in Scotland. He did a good job too. This is Saul Williams’ second album, but it’s the first one where he true voice begins to emerge. It’s a huge clash of styles too, equal parts punk rock, noise, industrial, spoken word and hip hop. His true eclectic style is born on this album, and what a ride it is. Saul would later go on to wor...

We really did go down the rabbit hole last week, eh? Well, grab your cave diving gear cause we’re going deep on The Gray Race and The Process of Belief. Much to the complete indifference of Anna and Weaver. Anna in particular is on top form here, which results in perhaps the funniest goddamn episode we’ve ever produced. Chris and Mark go head to head on their choice of unsung BR album, and they ea...

Chris and Mark have threatened Dave with a Bad Religion episode for years, so we felt it was time to put him out his misery. We decided on a head to head, as the band have so many albums that it’s quite difficult to pick just one unsung record (we fully admit that they have a few sung albums). Dave’s indifference to the band and, well, to a lot of punk music, meant that we had to get a punk in to...

You can hear part one here. Alright, this is where shit gets real. Like really real. This is when our guest and the concept of our podcast collide to create a thing of singular beauty. There is a meeting of minds. There are moments where agreement is reached, and unsung music appreciated. On part 2 of our interview with Steve Von Till, he goes into detail about Neurosis, Neurot Recordings, some of...

It sure took us a wee while to get around to doing another interview, eh? Well, we’re taking steps to resolve that and (hopefully) bring you more in future. The first of those steps is this two parter with the influential Steve Von Till. The truth is that we weren’t actively planning interviews - it was just one of those things where we would occasionally float the idea of doing one but would neve...

Hey folks. We’ve been away preparing for a series of really cool episodes we’ve got coming, and we thought we’d take a small break from our regular recording schedule to do some research. But fear not - we’ve decided we’d drop one of our exclusive subscriber bonus episodes for all you non-subscribers. Our Split 7” series is when we take a listener suggested topic and wax lyrical on it. We recorded...

Many say that alongside Meshuggah, SikTH are one of the forebearers of djent music. A brief listen to this album will suggest that this may be somewhat true, but the influence is probably more apparent on their second album Death of a Dead Day, than this, their debut. The Trees Are Dead & Dried Out, Wait for Something Wilde by SikTH is not a djent album. The elements of the sound are there for sur...

What do Pearl Jam, Marilyn Manson and Miles Davis have in common? Absolutely nothing at all, except that they’re nominated together for our first live album mixtape. Our three live albums actually showcase some of the different kinds of live record we spoke about on the last episode: Neil Young’s ‘Mirrorball’ is not a concert album, but was recorded entirely live, and you can hear that in the reco...

Ah, the fabled live album. It takes guts to do one, and it takes true talent to choose a single gig as opposed to throwing together a compilation of tracks recorded over the course of a tour. On this episode we put the live album into some distinct categories, and from there each of us talk about some of our favourites. We discuss the history of the live album, what it means, why there are so few...

Our voyage into continuous music comes to a close as we dig into Lubomyr Melnyk’s eighteenth (!) album Corollaries. For the unfamiliar, Melnyk categorises his style as being something almost beyond classical music, yet this release sees him team up with neoclassical composers Nils Frahm and Peter Broderick. This album seemed to give Melnyk a new lease of life; upon getting together with Frahm and...

OH GOOD LORD IT’S ANOTHER TWO PARTER. Maybe we should get better at planning these things… Anyway. Chris has been chomping at the bit to do this Lubomyr Melnyk album for a while. In fact, some may even remember that he brought it up during our Pandemic Mixtape. Well, the time has come to finally tackle this post-classical/minimalist work and in doing so we absolutely had to cover his…interesting t...

Finally, after the extensive preamble, we’re now down to talking about J Dilla’s third album Donuts. Because of the nature of this record, we didn’t break it down track by track as the whole thing flows as a kind of suite, so we do a little bit of track analysis and talk more extensively about the composition of the album, the techniques and technology used to create it, the samples used, the mess...

Rarely do we go into an episode thinking it’ll be a two parter. It certainly wasn’t the intention with this one. Yet it turns out there’s rather a lot to say about J Dilla. He was a truly gifted producer and musician, who created an incredible amount of music in his short term here on Earth. Donuts was his second (or third) full length album, and was released a mere 3 days before his untimely deat...

It’s time for another emergency mixtape, folks! Due to unforeseen circumstances Weaver wasn’t available this week, so as something of a response to what seems like a deluge of people live streaming acoustic gigs from their bedrooms, Mark and Chris decided to rustle up this little number about singer-songwriters. It goes without saying that we’re mostly focusing on solo artists in this episode, and...

Doing these two Dillinger Escape Plan episodes was a blast. You can hear part one here , where we spoke about the band’s history, live shows, touring and all of the other albums we’re not covering on this episode. It’s a good deep dive into one of metal and hardcore’s most influential acts. On part two we each make that case as to why the DEP album of our choice is the correct one. Chris has backe...

Aye so at the start of the year we thought we were absolutely capable of make our episodes a bit more concise. We were wrong. Sorta. One of the few good things to come out of lockdown is that we can spend more time researching and then talking about artists. PJ Harvey is a good example of that, and we expand upon that idea with our Dillinger Escape Plan threesome. The idea was to pit three DEP alb...

It’s part two of our PJ Harvey episode, and this week we talk about her fourth album Is This Desire? in full. We get into the flow of the album, how it differs from her other work, and do our usual track by track breakdown. Weaver also drops in via voice mail to give us his thoughts. Plus we have the usual nexus shenanigans too as we look to try and connect PJ Harvey with the bloody Peperami masco...

Chris has been deliberating on which PJ Harvey to pick since before this whole podcast even started. It was a choice so difficult, that he’s had to call in back up in friend of the pod, and resident PJ Harvey expert, Vicki. Weaver couldn’t join us in full this week due to a myriad of technical issues (seriously, we tried for like half an hour to find a work around), which further proves we’ve yet...

Weaver’s taking us back to France this week, as he gives us the lowdown on 90s house music and we give Daft Punk a good analysis. It’s difficult to imagine a time when Daft Punk were not one of the biggest electronic artists in the world. Everyone’s heard them. In fact, there’s a pretty high chance that you’ve heard “Around the World”, which was taken from this very album! The story goes that Daft...

After last week’s vote ended in 100% of people agreeing that Mule Variations should go into the discography, we thought we’d return to punk and cover Sing Sing Death House by The Distillers. We also welcome back Anna Goldthorp! The Distillers only released 3 albums in their career, and people generally tend to look more favourably on their 3rd (and to date, final) album Coral Fang. But this week A...

It’s difficult to imagine a world without Tom Waits. You may not be a fan, or even at all familiar with his music, but he’s been such a well known cult musical figure for so long that he’s taken on an almost mythical air. And mystical. And mythological. Basically, anything that starts with m and ends in al. That’s largely because he remains something of an enigma. An intensely private person, fans...