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2014 has been another bumper year for synthpop releases, but it’s also been a year where quantity has often ruled over quality: 2014 saw many, many decent synthpop singles and albums released throughout the year, but only a small handful have had that “wow” factor. The big-hitter artists – old-school classic bands who’ve seen such a resurgence in the past few years – were largely absent this year (with [...]

A couple of years ago I was helping out at an electropop night in London and got chatting with Rusty Egan, DJ and maestro behind 80s synthpop legends Visage. I mentioned that I wrote a blog about Spotify and he was perplexed. Not because he didn’t know what Spotify was – the music-streaming service had already started to enter the mainstream psyche – but he couldn’t see how someone could dedicate a blog to it. “Well, [...]

“The Fastest Way To Get Quality Deep House Out Now –  GUARANTEED!” That’s a bold claim made by DeepHouseHQ, a Spotify-friendly blog that specialises in deep house, chill-out, and other related sub-genres of electronic music. Site owner Pov Vysniauskas kindly spared some time to let us know what his site is all about. Over to you Pov! How did your site get its name?  Since the start of the blog (2010) I have [...]

Indiekingss is a new Spotify-centered blog about indie music. Site owner Ryan Freeman got in touch to tell us about the site, so I persuaded him to tell us some more… How did your site get its name? Well, I picked up the name Indiekingss when I started sharing music on tumblr, but I couldn’t seem to gain much traction in getting attention. I still use tumblr all the time, but not for sharing music. Nevertheless, the name lived [...]

Here are three albums that had a big impact on me growing up. Ostensibly all progressive rock, each album played a big part in my early music listening pleasure. ALL THREE are now on Spotify, so you can check them out right away.

So 2013 then: what another great year for music! Especially if you’re a fan of synthpop, electropop, new wave and the like. From classic-era heavyweights releasing career highlights (OMD, Pet Shop Boys, Alison Moyet) through to expectation-defying returns to form (Depeche Mode, Covenant) and dynamite debuts (CHVRCHES, Vile Electrodes), this past year has shown that the long-form album is still king. You can listen to what I thought [...]

To follow on from my retrospective article about Schmoof over on The Electricity Club, here is a brand-new interview with Schmoof!   Lloyd and Sarah Schmoof: it’s great to hear from you both again! When I interviewed you last you were just about to release your second album, The Glamour and preparing for a UK tour to promote it. That album turned out to be my favourite release of 2007, but I think a lot of your potential fanbase [...]

The Edinburgh Science Fiction Book Group first met 10 years ago this month. Started by Joe Gordon (who now writes the blog for Forbidden Planet but at the time was a bookseller at Waterstone’s), the group’s remit is this: We take it in turns to select books to discuss, with regulars getting a month each to pick out a book. The criteria is pretty flexible – we take in traditional SF, modern and classic, horror, fantasy, [...]

While waiting for albums from CHVRCHES, Covenant, Northern Kind, Vile Electrodes, and VNV Nation (all due this year!) here’s another selection of excellent electronica from the past month or two.   SYNTHPOP   Iamamiwhoami – Bounty Marnie – Crystal World Pet Shop Boys – Electric Slave Republic – Quest for Love Zynic – Blindsided     ELECTRO-INDUSTRIAL   Nine Inch Nails – Hesitation [...]

I’ve been posting “Best Albums of the Year” lists for some years now, originally on MySpace then on this site. Feeling all retrospective, I thought I’d put together a quick “list of lists” to help keep track of them all. Unfortunately some of the older lists have gone AWOL: Wayback Machine has a few snapshots of my old MySpace homepage, but alas the blog posts were not archived. Google’s cache does [...]