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The Love Hangover: Simple Minds’ New Gold Dream Revisited
40 years on, Richard Foster revisits Simple Minds' classic New Gold Dream (81-82-83-84) and finds an album full of dreamlike shifts in time, other worlds and disorientation Sometimes our minds throw...
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The Abyss Stares Back: Nine Inch Nails’ Broken Revisited
As Broken turns 30, Darran Anderson revisits a blazing and uncompromising record that would take Nine Inch Nails to new heights, as well as depths that Trent Reznor almost did not escape One of the...
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Into The Pre-Gap: Forty Years Of The CD
40 years since the first album was released on CD, Daryl Worthington pays tribute to the unique experimental potential of the format, explores how it changed the parameters of the album itself, and...
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There’s A Certain Satisfaction In A Little Bit Of Pain: Thirty Years of...
30 years on, Matthew Barton explores how Erotica changed the game for mainstream pop stars, an album that traded Madonna’s imperial pop for deep bass, vinyl crackles, chilly house and spoken word Two...
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Accept The Unknowable: Aphex Twin’s Selected Ambient Works 85-92 Revisited
30 years on, Darran Anderson revisits Aphex Twin’s first volume of ambient works, and finds an album of musical genius, but also a disarming innocence One of the most interesting aspects of the...
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From The Front Lines Of Lyrical Warfare: Canibus’ Mic Club 20 Years On
The combative rhyme master has paid the price for his inability to compromise, says Angus Batey, as the rap laureate's master's thesis turns 20 Canibus' name isn't one we see on most lists of GOAT...
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Sad Season: Ze Records’ Christmas Album, 40 Years On
Ian MacMillan looks back 40 years to Ze Records’ classic festive compilation, and finds a Yuletide ‘state of the nation’ that captured an America burdened with financial struggle, loneliness, broken...
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Rediscovering Ripeness: Echo & The Bunnymen’s Porcupine At 40
Richard Foster considers Marvin The Paranoid Android, the charnel house-like plays of Jacobean England and the owl of Athena (and speaks to Will Sergeant) while writing about Echo & The Bunnymen's...
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In Bloom: Einstürzende Neubauten’s Tabula Rasa Revisited
Jeremy Allen looks back to EN's glorious sixth album, Tabula Rasa, and praises the idea of the post-hype masterpiece In 2009, Blixa Bargeld published a semi-fictional tour diary that doubled-up as a...
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Pink Floyd: From Dark Side Of The Moon To The Final Cut In Ten Years
Recently there has been much ado about Dark Side Of The Moon, but significantly less fuss made about The Final Cut. David Bennun examines how we got from one to the other in a single decade and how...
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Reissue Of The Week: Moss Icon’s Lyburnum Wits End Liberation Fly
You can call it post hardcore if you like or you can refer to it as an essential corner stone of first wave emo; Noel Gardner just wants to celebrate an essential underground album seeing the light of...
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40 Years On: Malcolm McLaren’s Duck Rock Revisited
Malcolm McLaren’s innovative Duck Rock is often held up as the embodiment of cultural appropriation, though the dues the roguish impresario owes to the French are less often acknowledged or explored,...
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Nothing Matters: The Decline Of British Sea Power 20 Years On
Richard Foster revisits Sea Power's debut album and finds a record for the ages; and one that has not lost its mystery Imagine yourself in the rural Sussex of 1972; Hastings to be precise, in the...
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What Are We Rejecting When We Reject St. Anger? Metallica’s Mid-Life Crisis...
Is it time to re-evaluate Metallica's least-loved album and celebrate it for the extraordinary work that it is? But enough about Lulu. Keith Kahn-Harris wants to talk about St. Anger… There is a...
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Passion Always Wins: Kate Bush In 1978
When looking back over Kate Bush's astounding career, critics are often quick to gloss over her first two albums. Here Matthew Lindsay looks at 1978 as the most crucial year in her development, and...
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Songs Of Innocence & Arrogance: Patrick Wolf’s Lycanthropy, 20 Years On
Patrick Wolf's debut album marks a transition from boyhood to adulthood, says Luke Turner, but now, just 20 years later, it forms an impossibly distant seeming time capsule of a different capital For...
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The Oral History Of Marc And The Mambas’ Torment And Toreros
Forty years ago this week Marc Almond released the album that almost finished his career. Derided at the time as an overblown, self-obsessed indulgence, Torment and Toreros is now considered a flawed...
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A Balancing Act: Depeche Mode’s Construction Time Again At 40
Depeche Mode were already pop stars but it was their intersection with the world of industrial music on their third album that ensured their longevity, says Ned Raggett Who invented industrial music?...
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Make It Uneasy On Yourself: Lou Reed’s Berlin At 50
Matthew Lindsay tells the story of Lou Reed's most difficult album; an often misunderstood masterpiece which is also a problematic ode to rage, jealousy and loss. CW: Contains some discussion of...
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Angelic Conversation: Cocteau Twins’ Head Over Heels At 40
Darran Anderson slashes away at many of the myths surrounding Cocteau Twins while revisiting their glorious second album The idea of telecommunications existed long before the telegraph and the...
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