Category ACROSS THE DECADES
ROCKIN’ ALL OVER THE WORLD – INTRO/USA
One of the delights of blogging is the sense of sharing interests and passions with people around the globe. This is especially true of music with its capacity to cross boundaries, cultures and even language. Now and then I’ll bring up the map of the world showing number of views (by country) depicted in varying […]
ENJOY EVERY SANDWICH
You’ve lived the rock and roll lifestyle and it’s taken a toll. Diagnosed with terminal lung cancer and given three months to live, you decide to make an album, to soundtrack your own wake. A last musical hurrah. Comrades heed the call. The last call. August 2002 For Warren Zevon it is The Wind. Jorge […]
COUCH MUSIC
I was looking for a particular kind of music. The head being fuzzy and the legs a little shaky, instead of wandering around the shelves, it seemed more self-caring to let the fingers do the walking. So opening up the ever useful Vinyl Connection database, I engaged the ‘find’ function and typed in ‘music’. Surely […]
SOUTH OF REALITY
Fun! Eccentricity! Experimentation! Swooshy noises! Unapologetic eclecticism! We could be talking about the wonder years of UK psychedelic pop, but we are not. Those descriptors, and more, belong to twenty-first century outfit The Claypool Lennon Delirium whose second album—South of Reality—was released in February 2019. And let it be known that this record is a […]
DREAM OF HADES
How many times have you bought the same album? I don’t mean by accident—that’s simply forgetfulness, a free giveaway from Universal Ageing Inc—but because some new and improved whiz-bang re-issue of one of your favourites has appeared. Of course there’s always a sweetener. The lure of restored artwork, a promise of revelatory sound, alternate versions, […]
JAZZ DAY
Although quite a lot of jazz is played at Vinyl Connection headquarters, I rarely write about it. There are a couple of reasons. Firstly, I am less confident writing about America’s contribution to world music; it somehow seems harder to capture in words than rock. Perhaps the language of jazz is less comfortable, less familiar. […]
EMBRYO—STEIG AUS
More a collective than a formal band, Embryo were formed in Munich in 1970 by keyboard player Christian Burchard. It is as impossible to define their music as it would be to list all of the hundreds of musicians who have contributed to the Embryo story over the decades. However it is the early albums […]
I NEED DIRECTION
A Catholic Education Bandwagonesque Thirteen Grand Prix Songs From Northern Britain Howdy! The millennial year was a challenging one. Having formed a strong and passionate connection with a new partner, I was dismayed to hear that she was decamping to her English homeland for an indeterminate period. This was not my fantasy of how the […]
IMMUNOLOGY REPORT
Is a world of hardening national borders an expression of a global hardening of hearts? UK based multi-national group Vanishing Twin hope not, and on their 2019 album The Age of Immunology invite us to open our ears and minds to a vision of music sans frontières. Formed in Britain in 2015 around the talents […]
LAB REPORT
There are only so many times you can say g’day to a workplace acquaintance before you find yourself talking about music. This well known fact was supported by extensive laboratory research at the second-last university I worked for. One morning, queuing at the best caffeine source on campus, I struck up a conversation with a […]
ALBUM COVER QUIZ – THE SEVENTIES
A long time ago (about a year) we ran a series of Album Cover quizzes on various decades. We covered three epochs (60s, 80s, 00s) but skipped over Vinyl Connection’s favourite decade, the Seventies. Welcome, then, to the post-sixties comedown. * THE RULES Below are fourteen album covers (CD sized) resting on a 12″ LP. […]
BRIGHT SKY BLUE
White Music Go 2 Drums and Wires Black Sea English Settlement Mummer What an amazing band XTC were. Few rock outfits have produced such an interesting and diverse catalogue of albums, nor shown the kind of growth and development the lads from Swindon demonstrated across fourteen albums between 1978 and 2000. From angular post-punk through […]
