The new music world is nothing if not thoroughly impatient, rejecting the new for being the norm the very instant people outside their world take notice.

In itself, this is fine, but the relentless pace of change is exhausting – both for the listener and for the music itself.

1991 are poised nicely to operate in a void of their own manufacture. Their moniker namechecks a recent past that is just far enough away to suggest a re-visitation, but too close to be nostalgic. Their music, more importantly, performs a similar trick.

So, how do we get a handle on them? Like this, …

I’ve been doing this for too long.

It was confirmed the moment when I posed myself the question “hey – are Tropical Popsicle Trop Pop?”, as if tenuously connecting a band’s name with a micro-niche music genre I’d only really encountered once before is enough to make a question valid.

They’re not Trop Pop, by the way – this sub-sub-meta-genre is Cold Wave, of course – but let’s not get bogged down in the ludicrous world of pigeon-holing, and prise open a song like The  Beach With No Footprints, where tinny zing!s of noise punctuate the thoughts …

Upstarts, hey? They’re everywhere. You know you’re getting older when Policemen and fey Indie bands start looking younger.

Look at this photograph of Dignan Porch. How does that make you feel? Are they your contemporaries, or are you looking at yourself ten, twenty years ago?

What of they sounded like the bands from back then too? What if they sounded like a beautiful, goose-down soft, blissful version of the Jesus and Mary Chain?

Dignan Porch‘s songs are delicate, organic and exquisite, like eggshells, or complex arithmetic, or dust floating in a shaft of light. The Game We Made…

It’s a wonder any electronic songs get made at all. As anyone who has tried to make computer-based music knows, danger lurks within your laptop.

Like all the most troublesome dangers, it’s characterised by its allure and temptation. The problem hides in the vast, glittering array of endlessly-tweakable options. Any sound can be altered in infinitesimal, bewildering number of ways, and it’s easy – no, almost obligatory – to get bogged down in honing an individual sound rather than forming an actual song.

Some people can ignore these twinkling distractions, and manage to get on with the task at hand: …

Another day, another new band that deserves an exclamation mark after their name. Call me a huge pedant, but a surprise doesn’t feel surprising unless there’s the relevant punctuation to ram home the shock. Such are the myriad nuances of life.

Top Surprise! recorded their new EP in their bedrooms – I imagine the drummer was shoved in the bathroom (drummers are always made to record in the bathroom) – over a two day period. This nugget of information is all the justification I need to continue to complain loudly about bands who spend small fortunes over many weeks …

Is there a new wave – OK, bad choice of words – a new glut of rock bands emerging?

Rock has been persona non grata for a while now. It has a straightforwardness, simple parameters and predisposition towards sound, not image. It has not been cool enough to fulfil the dreams for a generation of kids for whom  tightness of their jeans and catch-up faux-reminiscence of an ill-defined period of hedonism is the primary focus.

So by ‘rock’, I mean, simple, perhaps. Bands that spend equally little time between fussing over hair and wondering whether one quasi-ironic keyboard sound …

So, 17 years later, they’re still here, the Rolling Stones of dance – a tag with all the same associations of cred-yo-yo-ing, borderline ridiculousness and begrudging likeability.

And having long ago abandoned breakbeat thrills, The Chemical Brothers are now producing epic, fine-tuned songs like Swoon.

Swoon sounds remarkably like Orbital’s Lush 3.1. This is almost certainly deliberate, and frankly, is to be applauded – and yet it’s also their undoing. Listen to the two back-to-back – and, emerging from a nagging,  submerged state, the flaw in the Chem’s shtick becomes apparent. There’s no – yikes! – soul.…

Spending a vast proportion of your time listening to new bands affects your behaviour in unexpected ways.

The ups I don’t need to tell you about – they are all documented here – and the downs I will spare you. The unforeseen result has been to spend the rest of the time scouring the albums of my past for safety and comfort.

Seeking solace in cherished and half-forgotten albums is clearly a reflex action to counteract all the newness – and a quick glance at the ‘Recently Played’ list on Spotify tells a story of mid-90s teen infatuation: It’s A …

The world evolves quickly, and the superseded are forgotten just as fast. So as the bulk of internet users flocks away from clunky old Myspace to Facebook, Twitter and the rest, take this opportunity for reappraisal and care to wonder if what’s driving the majority away isn’t the same reason that you ought to love it.

The innate beauty of Myspace is exactly what most people hate: rank flexibility – the terrible opportunity to entirely personalise an online space. What horrors!

Oh, please. Myspace is the only place to find the scrappy home-made creativity of ‘Zines on a large …

How to induce a technologically-assisted breakdown in a zillion easy steps:

The process begins with breaking your phone by dropping it in a strip club that you never even wanted to be in in the first place, and then ends with you finally managing to fix the phone after a full ten days of hassle.

But only assuming you’ve ordered a special cable, special software, and spent hours tinkering with the computer, and stifled a sob upon realising that all of your contacts’ phone numbers have vanished, and you have no way of retrieving them other than asking each person …