Everything's cool and everything's fine

I reviewed the new Meat Puppets' album, Rat Farm, for this month's Q. Zero carping about the band's influence on a certain radio-friendly unit-shifting grunge act, plenty of dues for those sweet, country harmonies the Kirkwoods still do so well.

All the gods hang around where you are

I reviewed Marnie Stern's Chronicles of Marnia album for The Guardian. File this record under BMO2013 (in non crit parlance: best music of 2013).

The wind was sweet and smelled of home/the sea was rough and felt unknown

I reviewed Woodkid's excellently sad debut album, The Golden Age, for The Guardian. The themes - mourning yr childhood, general existential yearning, facing/fleeing adulthood through escapism, fairy tales and fantasy - are ones I totally dig, especially this year. So many end-of-an-era changes afoot, so many emotional rites of passage to traverse! I know this is all rather cryptic; Hold tight for a blog or two sometime in the near future.