Feeding the mice

• David Keenan's 100 essential albums. On first looks an interesting wide-ranging selection. The first ten records are: Springsteen's Nebraska, Throbbing Gristle's Heathen Earth, The Stooges Funhouse, Belle and Sebastian's If You're Feeling Sinister, Kiss Destroyer, The Boatmen's Call by Nick Cave, John Coltrane's Meditations, Odyssey and Oracle by The Zombies, Sonic Youth Sister and Liege and Lief by Fairport Convention (via douze lunes). I own 25 albums of the list. There are several under those I mainly got as they were on other best of lists. Of those there are some albums I never listen to as I find them rather dull and overrated, for example Nico's Marble Index (depressive in the worst sense), Van Morrison's Astral Weeks (ok, but no masterpiece, except maybe for the lyrics which I don't understand), The Incredible String Band's The Hangman's Beautiful Daughter (unlistenable and annoying) and Grateful Dead's Live/Dead (aimless dated noodling). Neither Joy Division nor New Order feature on the list. And where are two of the foremost songwriters: Joni Mitchell and Nick Drake? For you to judge...
• Long ten page interview with Thurston Moore at Nude as the News on Murray Street, the album, the street and the studio. Other topics are the way Sonic Youth compose, what Jim O'Rourke adds to the band etc. (via fluxblog)
• I participated in a thread on Nick Drake on I Love Music where the thread poster asked for good reasons why Nick Drake is considered so highly. I lost the URL as ILM is down again. The skeleton of a new ILM forum outside of Greenspun where posting is possible already is here. For ILM discussion on mainly technical issues concerning the new ILM there is the Yahoo! Group 12 ft lizards (free registration required) which is quite active when the Greenspun hosted ILM is down. P.S. The Nick Drake thread is here: Nick Drake: why???
• Stylus Magazine's Chris Smith writes on each song on the Nuggets box (via badger). By the way after the Sonic Youth concert last Thursday an acquaintance made me discover a wonderful almost forgotten late sixties psychedelic band from Boston: Ultimate Spinach (AMG entry). I think they recorded three albums and disbanded because of drug problems. I listened to their 1968 album Behold & See which is somewhere in between Jefferson Airplane, Love, The Strawbs and Fairport Convention. In view of this crossover between West coast psychedelia and British folk-rock the label Bosstown sound referring to Boston makes a lot of sense. The stand-out track is called Mind Flowers and when listening to it in the right mood you can watch the flowers blossoming in your brain.
• The music weblog vain, selfish and lazy is back after an 8 months hiatus, Fred Solinger starts with his 100 fave albums.
• Two music weblogs I found via Wisdom Goof: modern music from the UK which is indie-oriented and more or less daily. It features news, links and personal opinions. Swordfight from Halifax, Canada is full of humour and offers you the phantastic blogrock feature. You link to Swordfight, e-mail Philip and he makes a song about your weblog which you then upload on your site.