The Tepid Take

The nights are drawing in, 2023 is drawing to a close, I'm drawing a musical blank. Usually it's so easy to reinvoke the albums that meant something to me in the year! I've done it for four years now, each time coming up with a mollycoddle of crap indie and semi-good post-punk/other that may or  may not  be from the year it's supposed to be from.           This year, however, in part thanks to Rough Trade East, and in part thanks to someone with better musical taste than me, I've tried to come up with seven albums from this year, actually from this year  that I think are actually  good... And then three that aren't. Look, need a bit of leeway for the ol' sentimentality. So listen up! Or read on! I really couldn't care less! BLOGGING. 1. Snake Sideways by Do Nothing     Come on Claude, at least start with one that you didn't nick from Rough Trade's list. Okay, here's Snake Sideways, the first full-length LP from Nottinghamshire sadbois Do Noth

In the UK, the county of Surrey has a special reputation. High streets paved with gold, land rovers stalking the tarmac hills, McMansions poking out of perfect little glades.       Surrey is everything that's wrong with England. At least, that was my expectation.      I thought, I'll go to the old Top Gear test track, it'll mean going through Surrey, but that's fine, necessary evils. The site of many a Reasonably Priced Car journey and innumerable drag races (not the fun kind), the test track is found on the site of the former Dunsfold Aerodrome, located close to Surrey's southern border with Sussex, before the downs clear the way to the sea. So to get to Dunsfold, I had to track along the length of most of Surrey. A HuffPost style line would assert here that "what I found will shock you" - but what I found wasn't shocking, it was just a touch surprising.      When I got off at Guildford, I found the town to be more varied than expected. Like many mark