Natalie Merchant recently released her sixth solo album, Keep Your Courage. It seems like a good opportunity to revisit her catalogue. On this countdown, I rank her albums as a solo artist and as the lead singer of 10,000 Maniacs.…
In partnership Robert Forster, Grant McLennan was one half of the songwriting team behind The Go-Betweens. While The Go-Betweens were on hiatus during the 1990s, Grant McLennan embarked on a solo career, releasing four solo albums, two albums with The…
Last week’s debut album quiz proved a little tough – Tony snuck through with a 19 This week your challenge is to identify an artist by a portmanteau of the last words of three of their songs. Whoever made it…
New Zealand is presently enjoying a very strong crop of female asinger-songwriters. Along with Hollie Fullbrook of Tiny Ruins, we also have the weirdness of Aldous Harding and the imagery-laden writing of Nadia Reid. Pop superstar Lorde isn’t a singer-songwriter but shares the…
For better or worse, there’s far less sex and violence this week than the names New Pornographers and Anna B Savage imply. The New Pornographers Continue as a Guest 2023, 7/10You could make a strong case that Vancouver’s The New…
Before he became Patti Smith’s lead guitarist, Lenny Kaye compiled the 2 album set, Nuggets: Original Artyfacts from the First Psychedelic Era. Released in 1972, the two-LP set covered American garage rock and psychedelia from the years 1965-1968 and was…
Congratulations to Rich from KamerTunesBlog, who scored the only 30/30 in last week’s quiz. This week, your challenge is to correctly identify the title of a debut album when given three choices for each artist. As a hint, the self-titled…
It’s a week of milestones this week – we have marriage and motherhood and an engagement. Meanwhile, Fever Ray’s Karin Dreijer is inscrutable about their private life, but returns with more unsettling music. Tiny Ruins Ceremony 2023, 9/10New Zealand singer-songwriter…
Caroline Polachek has enjoyed a breakout year, enjoying critical adoration for her second solo album, Desire, I Want to Turn Into You. Her 2019 single, ‘So Hot You’re Hurting My Feelings’ turned into a sleeper success via TikTok, paving the…
