Category Archives: art pop

Ode

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One of the side effects of attending school in England back in the day was a tendency to remember several lines of poetry that had been drummed into you for the -purpose of answering exam questions.Usually, that meant it was romantic poetry; Coleridge, Wordsworth, Tennyson, and Keats. Consequently, I can still to this day write …

Running up that Hill

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Some years ago, I was driving from Seattle to new york in the dead of winter. I was passing through Southern Idaho on an empty road with only the occasional farmhouse to let you know there were any humans around.On the car stereo, I played a recently released album by Kate Bush called ’50 words …

Quickies

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Stephen Merritt is not a man for the 5-minute guitar solo. Some of his songs are less than a minute long, and many albums have 40 tracks or more.He’s taken this to a natural conclusion on his new album ‘Quickies.’ The theme of his songs is love but love Brooklyn style. Full of wit and, …

Night Moves

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A simple spoken word sound as if he was so laidback, he couldn’t be bothered to sing, Baxter Dury has one of the most distinctive and literate styles in modern pop music.The characters that populate his songs are seedy, often semi-criminal, lounge lizards who are strangely unaware of themselves. They speak to us in a …