Rare as a hen’s gum shield and pricier than a return ticket to Glasgow (possibly) this a real gem of a record. Even the bootleg costs upwards of £40. It’s just one of a number of superlative releases on the Italian Fuzz Dance label, which put out a number of records from owner Maurizio Dami...

First Simon’s post on the excellent Witch and now this.  That’s 2 Italo posts in 2 days!  Madness. ‘Faces’ is much cheesier than ‘Witch’, and all the better for it in my opinion.  There’s no getting away from the fact that the best Italo records are cheesy.  They have a certain innocence to them which...

Shameless Italo disco with a hint of the sinister about it, thus making its title somewhat apt. Not sure I can imagine a witch quite this groovy, but then I’ve never seen a picture of Helen. The track is in a somewhat off-piste 6/4 time signature during the “verses”, which for music boffins is enough to get the chin-stroking gloves out....

Hollie Cook’s self-titled debut album was without doubt my most listened to album of 2011.  I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve listened to it and I’m still nowhere near bored of it. The album never tries to be big, clever or ground-breaking. Instead it’s nine tracks of the most perfect poppy dub...

Bit of a cheat this one because I already featured it on our latest Glittermix. Still, in researching the thing it occurred to me just how good this actually is, so I wanted to give it a little solitary flag-up. Frankly it may as well not be a Christmas song at all, aside from the lyrics. Regardless, it’s a Scientist produced slice...

There’s not much I could tell you about Shriekback that I won’t have taken from Wikipedia as I more or less discovered them just the other day. Of instant interest to me, however, is that the bassist, Dave Allen, was formerly of Gang of Four, performing on their first two albums (“Entertainment” and “Solid Gold”),...

Pretty confidently bonkers slice of American industrial here from Ministry. Shunning drum dynamics in favour of just virtually pounding the crap out of some drum pads, it’s quite obvious that samplers were still a pretty new invention. There’s also a rather paranoid pseudo-acid bassline worming it’s way underneath and some high-pitched Prince-esque vocals in a...