It’s Top Ten time at Mackerel Headquarters, with all the usual suspects listening, compiling and scribing. It’s been a tickety boo year for new music: long dog walks or runs in empty frozen fields with Mr M Dog are just the medicine for listening, dancing and singing along. But it’s just so damn hard to choose, and as Blackadder once said: “ We are in the stickiest situation since Sticky the stick insect got stuck on a sticky bun .” For some reason MM and I laughed rather a lot at this; the passage of time [...]
Alt-country (or Americana, if you must) was all over the music press in the late 1990s and early 2000s, with Uncut magazine, in particular, making the genre its de facto in-house sound. Since then, its visibility has faded somewhat, but the quality of the music hasn't suffered — while the work of artists like Lambchop, Jason Lytle and Grandaddy (who've recently reunited — yay!), Wilco, Calexico, Iron & Wine, Mark Kozelek et al remains well-renowned, there are plenty of other artists similarly deserving of your attention. We've rounded up a selection of such musicians after the jump. Do let [...]
This weekend will be spent standing at the sea’s edge in Devon, in search of some little rays of sunshine, as daughter sprat and I take to the open road with Bing and little Span. Actually, it’s more likely that we will be spent dodging torrential rain showers and drinking a lot of coffee. Still, one can dream. Mass excitement in the small feminine corner of Mackerel Towers, as come Monday, I will be off to collect my very own silver fish mini racer. They are rather sweetly known as Doopers, but this has nothing, I stress nothing, [...]
Ninebullets Radio is a radio extension of the blog ninebullets.net that airs every Thursday night in Tampa, Florida on WMNF 88.5 FM at 10pm Eastern. The show is archived for one week after it’s original air date and is available for streaming here . Also, don’t forget to head over to Facebook and like the Ninebullets Radio page . Below is the playlist for February 02, 2012 01. Todd Farrell - Ninebullets Theme Song 02. Shooter Jennings - Southern Family Anthem 03. The Drive-By [...]
And not just any cats, those two fuckwits in the picture up there. Yep, Mrs. Toad managed to keep her despair at the loss of Floyd under control for just about six months before she decided that not just one cat, but TWO fucking cats was the answer. I think the idea is that because I work from home they will keep themselves entertained and not pester me the whole fucking time, but I honestly think this is ambitious. I think they are going to be climbing all over the keyboard all the time and making a right [...]
Ever had one of those albums that you know, had you not been in the right mood when you heard it the first time you wouldn’t have liked it? Well for me Kill County’s The Year Of Getting By is one of those albums. I’d cued it up one afternoon as work was wrapping up so I had to pause it halfway through the first track and didn’t get back to it until the next morning. One could say fate had intervened. The next morning, with a foggy head waiting for its morning dose of coffee, I pressed [...]
Jan 28, 2011, 11:27am
DOA
This fresh six-track mini-album confirms Last Harbour’s prowess in the realms of short-form releases.
Hooray, it's my fucking birthday. Whoop-de-fucking-doo. The thing is, I genuinely don't care about birthdays, either in a positive or a negative sense, but Facebook and birthdays are an ungodly fucking combination, really they are. "Yo, happy birthday dude." "Hey man, have a good one." Fuck off! If you really, truly care then at least buy me something expensive, and if you don't care enough to do that, which you shouldn't, then let's just drop all the shallow platitudes shall we. I don't care about my birthday, so there's no need for you to pretend to. [...]
Hoarse. Horse. Hoarse. Horse. Geddit geddit, see what I did there? Yes, another tedious pun, but I know you know to expect no better from me these days. Anyway, it's only called the Hoarsecast because I have a bit of a phlegmy flu which, whilst not fun, is hardly very debilitating so there is no need for me to moan really. Not that this usually stops me, but anyhewww... It's a funny old mix, this playlist. I rearranged the songs time and again, swapped a few in and out here and there and just couldn't find a way [...]
My brother heads off today, so I figured we'd take one last chance to do a podcast while we can. This is mostly new stuff and inbox though, so I am not sure how he'll react. Actually, he was in the room last week while I went through my inbox, played stuff, replied to emails, deleted things, and so on and so forth. I think his response was that he simply wouldn't be able to handle the avalanche of shit I have to get through, and that it would simply turn him off music completely. I [...]
Of je er nu zin in hebt of niet- als muzikant ontkom je er niet aan om iets aan marketing en PR te doen. Je kunt via Myspace, Twitter of een mailinglist proberen een band met de fans op te bouwen. De site moet er natuurlijk goed uitzien en interactief zijn en het is altijd een goed idee om bloggers te bestoken met MP3-tjes en digitale albums. En vergeet ook niet de “papieren”pers, oftewel de ‘dead tree press’. Ook die jongens zijn altijd blij met een promo-exemplaar van een nieuw album. Jeffrey Luck Lewis [...]
happy monday! i never thought i would be so happy to be at work as i am today. the wife worked two doubles this weekend so it was me and the raging lunatics all weekend. sure we had some fun, but damn if by about 5 pm yesterday, i had had enough. btw, dont ever google "skeeter eater" when your child is around, it aint pretty. in my defense though, he wanted to see pictures of the bugs that eat mosquitos and wanted to me to google that particular phrase. found this over the weekend, and as [...]
coz all those other saviours were, you know, pussies... willard grant conpiracy : the suffering song Posted in amusements, eyeball, found, mp3 Tagged: jesus, music, photography, random, religion, the suffering saviour, willard grant conspiracy
We've know Barry Sean for a long, long time. We first met him in 1975, he likes West Brom, his dog Cyrille, making most excellent cakes, Midsomer Murders (no one's perfect) and music, especially Echo & The Bunnymen. He keeps one end of our office as untidy as he possibly can and makes tea too strong, but like we say, no-one's perfect. Last night he won the ten-pin bowling at the office do. This
Here is the first of Mad Mackerel’s best of 2009 lists.We could pretend we’re way too cool for lists, that we don’t really enjoy them, that they are too subjective, a necessary evil, a waste of time.But that’s all bollocks as far as we’re concerned.We love making lists and nothing lends itself so well to them as music does, after all its how popular music has been judged for the past sixty years
I know I promised the Notcraigcast last week, but it didn't happen I'm afraid. After last week's amazing Craigcast Neil and I were intending to introduce Craig to all sorts of modern music which we thought continued some of the traditions of the blues music he was describing to us, but circumstances have rather conspired against us unfortunately. Neil is off on tour with Meursault playing his songs, and Craig is off on tour with his liver, taking it around the watering holes of Edinburgh and giving it a good, hard kicking in each one. Consequently [...]
Jesus fucking Christ. I think I may actually have a badger living in my mouth. Or a muskrat. Or one of those little yappy dog bastard things which always make me want to feed them to our bloody cat. Gin is raping my brain. Fucking bastard. To make matters worse, that insufferable weasel Mrs. Toad is malingering at home, lolling around in bed, watching movies on iTunes and generally just doing bugger all. I WANT TO GET SICK! I never get fucking sick. If I ever have time off work it's either because my back is crippling me, [...]
Mrs. Toad and I went out for dinner last night and I mentioned the fact that I have now been in Edinburgh for over four years - the longest I've lived anywhere since I left Vienna in 1987 after six years. That's weird, really, because I kind of moved here by accident. Certainly I didn't have it even in the back of my mind to move here back in 2003 when we first started seeing each other (we met in 1991, but that's a different story). At that point I had just divested myself of a particularly tenacious [...]
[After his highly successful stint Toadsitting while we were away on holiday, Euan returns to write what is going to become a monthly column in our new Sunday Supplement section. You can find more of his stuff on his blog , at his gigs or with his band , so please go and have a sniff.] “The only true currency in this bankrupt world is what you share with someone else when you're uncool.” This quote is taken from the film Almost [...]
This is an oddly tricky review to write, because I am so familiar with all of these songs already. This album sees Robert Fisher and a bare-bones band revisit their back catalogue and rework an album's worth of material in more low-fi style that than in which it was (generally) first released. This recording was done with a small group of musicians who formed the core of the band in the early days and, according to the website, is intended to capture the "living room nature" of their early performances. Those of us who have seen [...]
Mad Mackerel's Blog
Flavorwire
Nine Bullets
Song, by Toad
Ketelmuziek
Captain's Dead
cowsarejustfood
Green Day all'Ohibò di Milano, secret show a sorpresa
Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros - Better Days
Edward Sharpe & The Magnetic Zeros imploran por días mejores en su nueva canción
Listen To New Arctic Monkeys: Do I Wanna Know? (Live)
Giorgio Moroder dj-set
