Foul play? Songs about conspiracy theories and paranoia

June 21, 2018 Peter Kimpton

Meeting of metaphor or the literal? Well, it's all a question of scale …

No, it’s not the World Cup. Or is it? This week let’s delve into music’s interpretation of the murky world of imagined or otherwise undercover plots from Roswell to JFK, 9/11 to Russian interference, and er … lizards

People are strange … songs about unexplained phenomena

October 5, 2017 Peter Kimpton

Just a snap of me taking my morning walk.

Mysteries, monsters, miracles, strange sounds, sights and disappearances, UFOs to aliens, paranormal events, witches to ghosts. Who knows what’s going on this week? Maybe it’s in the music …

Sing out, act on CLIMATE CHANGE

CONDEMN RACISM, EMBRACE EQUALITY

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DRINK OF THE WEEK
tartan thermos iced tea

SNACK OF THE WEEK
trail mix

New Albums …

Featured

Jan 27, 2025

Tunng: Love You All Over Again

Jan 27, 2025

New album: An unabashed and beautiful celebratory album of the British pioneering folktronica band’s 20 years of music, with brand new songs fully recapturing their distinctive, delicate, crisply poetic, and playful musical and lyrical style

Jan 27, 2025

Jan 26, 2025

C Duncan: It's Only A Love Song

Jan 26, 2025

New album: The Scottish composer, singer and multi-instrumentalist’s fifth album is timeless, romantic, clever, lush, piano-based orchestral pop with serenely beautiful chord changes and melodies, with heartache on the pain-pleasure axis expressed in the most delicious, old-fashioned form

Jan 26, 2025

FKA twigs: EUSEXUA

Jan 26, 2025

New album: Cheltenham’s Tahliah Barnett returns for a third LP edge-pushing electronica, techno and avant-pop with a self-created title fusing euphoria, ecstasy and sex to express that feeling of transcendent losing yourself in the moment

Jan 26, 2025

Anna B Savage - You and I Are Earth.jpeg

Jan 25, 2025

Anna B Savage: You & i are Earth

Jan 25, 2025

New album: This third album of exquisite folk by the English singer-songwriter is a beautiful love letter to Ireland as a spiritual home as well as her Irish partner, flowing with delicious images, tenderness and intelligence

Jan 25, 2025

Jan 24, 2025

Mogwai: The Bad Fire

Jan 24, 2025

New album: Glasgow’s finest experimental rockers return with their 11th studio album, another classic of dark-humoured, irreverent titles for their dynamic, quiet-to-stormy arpeggio-laden, always stirring songs and instrumentals

Jan 24, 2025

Jan 20, 2025

Songhoy Blues: Héritage

Jan 20, 2025

New album: The Malian band return with a vibrant fourth LP exploring their desert musical roots with more of an acoustic and intricately rhythmic sound than their previous more electrified, distinctive African blues-rock, and includes an appearance on vocals by Rokia Koné and other more traditional instrument guest musicians

Jan 20, 2025

Cameron Winter: Heavy Metal

Jan 20, 2025

New album: Released last month, the Geese frontman’s solo LP is nothing like its title in genre, but a brilliantly eccentric, eclectic, inventive, surreal mosaic of dream-like DIY oddness – blues, folk, pop and psych rolled up in droll humour, existential dread and creative patchwork streams of the sub-conscious and non-sequitur

Jan 20, 2025

Jan 19, 2025

Jasmine 4.t - You Are The Morning

Jan 19, 2025

New album: An outstanding folk/rock debut by the Manchester-based trans singer-songwriter Jasmine Cruickshank, whose moving songs tackle ambiguous relationships, identity, tangled joy, heartache, camaraderie and isolation of trans-feminine life an LP produced by the Boygenius trio of Phoebe Bridgers, Lucy Dacus and Julien Baker

Jan 19, 2025

Jan 18, 2025

The Weather Station: Humanhood

Jan 18, 2025

New album: Beautifully balanced, nuanced, delicate, intimate new experimental folk by Toronto’s Tamara Lindeman on a gorgeous seventh LP that goes to the individual and collective core of being alive, with a free-flowing semi-acoustic songs partly created by improvisation with her six-piece band, decorated with flurries of woodwind

Jan 18, 2025

Jan 17, 2025

Ela Minus: DÍA

Jan 17, 2025

New album: A wonderfully eclectic, inventive, darkly ecstatic, introspective yet musically expansive electronica and dance music follow-up to 2020’s debut, Acts of Rebellion, on the theme of light and self-discovery by the Colombian singer-songwriter, musician and producer

Jan 17, 2025

Jan 10, 2025

Lambrini Girls: Who Let The Dogs Out

Jan 10, 2025

New album: This feisty, humorous, angry, intelligent, kick-ass debut by the Brighton queer-punk band fronted by duo Lily Macieira and Phoebe Lunny is an explosion of artful, acerbic attitude and energy, and produced by Gilla Band’s Daniel Fox

Jan 10, 2025

Franz Ferdinand: The Human Fear

Jan 10, 2025

New album: After a greatest hits tour and two recently new band members, the Glasgow art-rockers fronted by the sharp-witted Alex Kapranos return with renewed vim and vigour, with an unashamed air of going full-tilt on classic FF in their sound and style perky, pacy, hooky indie-pop

Jan 10, 2025

Moonchild Sanelly: Full Moon

Jan 10, 2025

New album: Always infectiously fun and effervescently charismatic, the blue-haired South African star’s third LP bursts with witty, sex-positive braggadocio, sung in Xhosa and English, and spanning the rhythms and sounds of Johannesburg and Durban with electro-pop and cross-genre dance

Jan 10, 2025

Jan 8, 2025

Ethel Cain: Perverts

Jan 8, 2025

New album: Dark, challenging, otherworldly, experimental, ethereally oddball but at times alluring electronica and ghostly vocalisations? It’s the Tallahassee artist Hayden Anhedönia, who after the successful 2022 LP Preacher’s Daughter, pushes the musical envelope into most unusual territory

Jan 8, 2025

new songs …

Featured

Jan 27, 2025

Song of the Day: The Moonlandingz - The Sign of A Man

Jan 27, 2025

Song of the Day: The mischievous band featuring Sheffield’s Adrian Flanagan, Dean Honer and Fat White Family’s frontman Lias Saoudi serve up a catchy, colourful cocktail of 80s-era European electro-disco with a fabulously tongue-in-cheek dance-costume video

Jan 27, 2025

Jan 26, 2025

Song of the Day: Neal Francis - What's Left Of Me

Jan 26, 2025

Song of the Day: Classic 70s-inspired lush piano pop with shades of Electric Light Orchestra by the Chicago-based singer-songwriter with a single about the toils of life the road, heralding his third album, Return to Zero, out 14 March via ATO Records

Jan 26, 2025

Jan 25, 2025

Song of the Day: Viagra Boys - Man Made Of Meat

Jan 25, 2025

Song of the Day: A humorously vivid title with punchy, catchy number and video with this ironic take on consumerism and the art world by the mischievous Swedish punk band, in this first single from the forthcoming album viagr aboys, due out on 25 April on Shrimptech Enterprises

Jan 25, 2025

Jan 24, 2025

Song of the Day: Self Esteem - Focus Is Power

Jan 24, 2025

Song of the Day: Full vocal force with rich gospel-style harmonies and an affirmingly defiant message from the charismatic Rotherham singer-songwriter Rebecca Taylor, heralding her upcoming third LP as Self Esteem, A Complicated Woman, out on 25 April on Polydor Records

Jan 24, 2025

Jan 23, 2025

Song of the Day: Prima Queen - The Prize

Jan 23, 2025

Song of the Day: After a series of strong singles and EPs, new serene, poignant, post-breakup, uplifting indie dream pop from charismatic transatlantic pair of Louise Macphail and Kristin McFadden with this title track from their forthcoming debut album, out on 25 April, via Submarine Cat Records

Jan 23, 2025

Jan 22, 2025

Song of the Day: Youth Lagoon - Speed Freak

Jan 22, 2025

Song of the Day: A mesmeric new banger with the whispering voice of Trevor Powers, the shapeshifting, innovative Idaho-based songwriter and producer, taken from his forthcoming new album, Rarely Do I Dream, out Fat Possum Records on 21 February

Jan 22, 2025

Jan 21, 2025

Song of the Day: Lucy Dacus - Ankles

Jan 21, 2025

Song of the Day: A beautiful string-laden, tactile love song new single by the singer-songwriter from Richmond, Virginia and one third of the trio Boygenius, taken from her from forthcoming new album, Forever Is A Feeling, out on 28 March, via Geffen Records

Jan 21, 2025

Skunk Anansie - An Artist is an artist.jpg

Jan 20, 2025

Song of the Day: Skunk Anansie - An Artist Is An Artist

Jan 20, 2025

Song of the Day: A welcome and excellent return from the London rockers fronted by the inimitable Deborah "Skin" Dyer with a punchy, uncompromising number about creative life, its disciplines, sacrifices and identity, out on Frontiers Records

Jan 20, 2025

We Shall All Be Gone Shortly : Brutes by Caolán Austin.jpeg

Jan 19, 2025

Song of the Day: Caolán Austin - We Shall All Be Gone Shortly

Jan 19, 2025

Song of the Day: Beautiful, tranquil, delicately experimental instrumental electronica with piano by the Irish composer, producer musician from Derry, with additional fiddle by Joshua Burnside, out on Only You Recordings

Jan 19, 2025

Jan 18, 2025

Song of the Day: Goat + MC Yallah - Nimerudi

Jan 18, 2025

Song of the Day: Meaning “I’m Back” in Swahili, an excellent, energised fusion of break beats, Afrobeat, fuzz psych and hip-hop by the mysterious masked Swedish band and the Kenya-born, Uganda-raised high-speed rapper

Jan 18, 2025

Jan 17, 2025

Song of the Day: Perfume Genius - It's a Mirror

Jan 17, 2025

Song of the Day: With this lead single, the US musical shapeshifter Mike Hadreas returns with a compelling Americana-style number about reflective horizons and paradoxes, heralding his seventh album, out on 28 March on Matador Records

Jan 17, 2025

Jan 16, 2025

Song of the Day: Joy Crookes - Pass the Salt (featuring Vince Staples)

Jan 16, 2025

Song of the Day: With a big, meaty, menacing bass and drum sound, the serenely smooth-voiced Brixton British singer returns, following her acclaimed 2021 LP Skin, with a spicy, bitch-back number expressing anger at someone telling lies about her, with added verse by the American rappe

Jan 16, 2025

Word of the week

Featured

Jan 16, 2025

Word of the week: yepsen

Jan 16, 2025

Word of the week: A timeless noun emanating from Middle English ȝespen and first used in around 1325, meaning a unit of measurement being the amount of that can be held in two hands cupped together

Jan 16, 2025

Jan 9, 2025

Word of the week: zingiberaceous / zinziberaceous

Jan 9, 2025

Word of the week: Two alternative spellings, spicily evocative and colourful, they are adjectives pertaining to the Zingiberaceae family of flowering plants that variously bring that distinctive flavour of, and are a rather fancy way of saying – ginger

Jan 9, 2025

Dec 12, 2024

Word of the week: aquabob

Dec 12, 2024

Word of the week: Sounding like some water-based children’s TV superhero, it’s actually a particularly apt and descriptive word for wintertime, being an 18th-century English Kent dialect noun meaning icicle

Dec 12, 2024

Nov 27, 2024

Word of the week: broticolous

Nov 27, 2024

Word of the week: Mice, rats, spiders, foxes to raccoons, this obscure adjective, connected to the French noun broticole, this relates to any animal and insect species with a tendency to live around and alongside humans and their dwellings perhaps as scavengers, but also showing adaptability

Nov 27, 2024

Nov 15, 2024

Word of the week: circumbendibus

Nov 15, 2024

Word of the week: Not a snaking elongated piece of public transport but still a very evocative 17th-century word for a circuitous, long-winded route or way of doing something or telling a story …

Nov 15, 2024