His comments on the current state of the mainstream make my most acidic comments look mild by comparison.

I hear a lot of talk about the woefully plastic nature of modern music. The crass commercialism of X-Factor and similar chav-fests. The lowest common denominator boybands and ten-a-penny corporate-indie ensembles with NME-compliant haircuts. The cheap-to-run ‘Interchangeable Emmas’ of the karaoke diva world. All true. All stereotypes, of course, but all true. Yet this is just one part of the world of music. In fact, I’d suggest, this is more the world of television than the world of music. I’ve no doubt the big money comes from folk tapping out premium-rate voting numbers on their phones while revenue from people actually buying ’20 Menstrual Greats’ from Asda probably barely covers the ‘fruit and flowers’ these days.

Electric Nose doesn’t allow comments (Bah!) so I’ll have to use my own blog instead.  Nice to see four of my own top ten in the list, including The Reasoning’s wonderful “Dark Angel”. More significantly, all but one of the others are albums I’ve not actually heard; some of them are almost certainly going to be worth checking out.

Demains I realise I have actually seen live – they supported Anathema back in November.  Due to a combination of Northern Rail playing silly buggers and the most slow-moving queue to enter a venue I’ve ever seen, I didn’t get to see the start of their set, but I don’t remember being blown away by them live.  But a lot of other people whose views I respect like the album.