Observer Music Monthly

"Weaknesses" tho needn't prevent a top mark. If the flaws in something don't actually impact on the things that make it amazing, and the amazing things are amazing enough, then sure it's '5 stars'. Top marks need not mean flawless - anyway a 5-point scale is tiny, surely it should mean "in the 81st-100th percentile of records"!

this is getting to be a big problem for magazines, with labels refusing to furnish promos of albums until release dates (way past print deadlines) and offering playbacks instead. but many of the listening-party versions of albums i've reviewed have differed to the finished album, in terms of extra tracks and different takes...

anyway, the omm gave the kings of leon album 5/5 too. so that shows you how stringent they are with ratings. i thought 5/5 should be damn near unattainable, not given out a couple of times a year.

Basically the point of the OMM is to have something to grumble at over your kippers, though.

because every album has weaknesses.

Basically the point of the OMM is to have something to grumble at over your kippers, though.

Heh, I once brought this up with a Q bod, wondering why the Os Mutantes best of only got 3 stars. I didn't expect it to get 5 but 3?
His response was, yeah, but would you want every Q reader to hear it?
YES! I replied.
As the Q review style guide urges you not to hand out 5 stars willy nilly, it does make you wonder why they gave Semisonic 5 stars. I remember one issue from around 95-96 where, obviously sensing they'd been a little parsimonious in the past, they went batshit crazy and gave 5 stars to Van Morrison, Therapy? and Ali Campbell from UB40.
All that "not for everyone but good within its field" thing condemns anything that isn't mainstream pop rock to 3 stars.

time out has recently instituted a six-star rating system. six stars not to be given except in once-in-a-lifetime-type cases. we'll see how long that lasts. i gave sugababes five stars with the aim of testing this system immediately.

i note that rachel stevens doesn't even get a full review in this month's omm.

I don't mind the Stylus report card style. Pitchfork's system is just percentages decimalised, and would be tolerable if their descriptions for each level weren't so lame (what is the point of trying to put out the difference between 6.0-6.4 and 6.5-6.9???)

Also the last Kate Bush album wasn't all that, was it?

I like the single, a definite slowburner, but 'that video' is one of the worst things I've ever seen. Not just the 6th form surrealism but the way they've distorted our Kate, presumably to make her look more appealing.

(xpost)

I mean I like the idea of people gasping, a tribute to Elvis, that's the last thing we expected from KB whereupon KB snarls "EXACTLY!" and winks, but the song's still rub and not nearly as good as the one the Manics did about the Elvis impersonator on Blackpool Pier, whatever that was called, and that shows how low this particular bar has been set.

I remember reading about these albums in things like The Sun's Bizarre column at the time - yes it turns out Piers Morgan actually had enough of a clue to criticise them where criticism was due, while the labels were presumably more concerned what the NME etc. thought. Which in turn begs the question 'why did they think it was more important what the 50,000 or however many who bought NME that week thought than the 3,000,000 or so who read The Sun that day - given that it was probably the latter who cared more about such 'has-beens'?'

outside was given a 7 in nme and hailed as a "storming return to form." voodoo lounge was '86, before they gave marks out of 10, but steel wheels got 9.

mind you the colorblind james experience were at 25, so you can't exactly trust the list.

It should probably be read as a piece about reviewing the new Kate Bush album.

voodoo lounge ('94) - 5/10 in the nme but five stars in q, vox & select.

Q also tried to flog the DCC concept a lot to no avail, IIRC.

I feel like an idiot chiming in on just this point, but to Pfork's credit, last time I went hunting for the 'legend' for their numeric reviews, I couldn't find it - I suspect it's been killed.

Wow! Please do call me naïve but is this current procedure in the UK/US music press (I know Rolling Stone rates are decided by whoever’s in charge of the reviews section and not the writers; unfair/ highly debatable but at least they inform the reader about it)? Did the reviews editor (Lester? Peschek?) at least talk to you before changing the rates (not that it’d make much of a practical difference, but still…)?
In my brief time as editor-in-chief in a Portuguese weekly music paper, it never even crossed my mind to change anyone’s rates in record reviews.
I agree with you on this one Marcello: a record’s either worth buying + investing one’s precious time or not. And although I tend to detest the way most star and marks out of 5 or 10 are used in music reviews as a way not to read anything whatsoever, I quite liked the Recommended/ Absolutely Bloody Essential (or something to this effect) star system that Melody Maker used back in the mid-90s, because, since most of the reviews weren’t star-rated, you actually did have to read the bloody things, which weren’t even capsule reviews. The cheek of it, eh?

i heard a story about a film writer who told the distributors of a big blockbuster that he was giving their film five stars, a fact that they subsequently plastered all over the posters. however, the reviews editor didn't know about this, and changed the review to four stars - hilarity ensued.

could be the next haneke, same rules apply.

Lily Allen, unsurprisingly, gets the cover, and even less surprisingly is interviewed by that decrepit old derelict Miranda Sawyer.

The indications seem to point to 2006's M.I.A. but I'll reserve judgement until I've actually heard her music.

Nice to see Morley waxing enthusiastic about Paul Motian in his column.

Not so nice to see Morley revisiting his life 30 years ago for at least the 30th time (i.e. Pistols at Electric Circus, Devoto, Drones, wasn't it all great then, how many more times do we have to go through all this etc.).

The Feeling get album of the month. In his review the moron Mulholland dismisses Supertramp, ELO and Andrew Gold as "soulless," "corporate" and "lacking charm."

Must do better.

neesh bigs up the christina milian single, so that's a plus point! er i can't think of any other plus points.

Do people actually buy it for the magazine, though, or do they buy the paper, and the (largely useless in my experience) magazine happens to come free w/it that month?

omm should be destroyed.

it would make him a better person.

he's just a stand-up/presenter. why would his opinions on music warrant coverage/attention?

The clown has a show on BBC 6 Music ! It's laughable that he got the "Record Doctor" treatment !

So shagging Kate Moss wins a respeck fist? Meaning as long as it's a left hook and it connects with his face?

MS in tongue-in-cheek shocker. There's really no good way to say that your interview subject used to stuff envelopes at your ex's industry-leading PR firm.

"Over a hundred years after the Industrial Revolution, which seemed destined to crush the area into dust and isolation as the world it inspired moved Manchester out of the way, an Emotional Revolution happened that would push Manchester into the 21st Century."

is this just subbing? or does morley think the industrial revolution in manchester took place c. 1876?

but more importantly, it's a lot less interesting than his reaction to '24 hour party people'.

also re: the 6 music playlist i am amazed at some of the generic tripe that makes the playlist.

I reckon the faceless backroom 6 Music management team are to blame. To think they actually select these awful tracks in weekly "playlist meetings".

6 Music duplicates too much of the radio 1/ radio 2 terrain, i call for a mutiny and a listeners leftfield revolution.

Sorry but Peel is dead and he's not coming back. Mainly because I don't think the BBC brass would even tolerate another version of him in the building these days.

Fuck 6 Music, listen to Resonance instead, Martian.

Lying & tongue in cheek are not one and the same.

(Cue Ray Stevens)

There. I type so you don't have to.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

still shocking that.

Apparently Robbie Williams' biography is the third greatest music book ever written. I think that tells us all we need to know about this latest exercise in sorry idiocy.

Thom Yorke on the cover, beginning to look like John Mills. Denies turning into a Cameronite, not very convincingly. He really has become a crashing bore.

Article about Public Enemy falling on hard times. Slags off Fear Of A Black Planet in one sarcastic sentence, including one track which actually appeared on Apocalypse '91. Good old OMM Proper Journalists and researchers, earning their money and doing their jobs properly.

David Tennant has terrible taste in music.

Interesting comparison exercise: if you looked at this month's OMM review pages you'd think it was a dreary and dead month for new releases. If you look at this month's Plan B review pages you'd think it was a new golden age. Plan B (the rapper) gets a few lines and three stars for his album. Any editor with sense and foresight would have made it the lead review.

Morley talks about the new Stoppard play, much as he did on Newsnight Review.

Not a vintage issue.

That could have been a brilliant article on PE, but it was just lazily done. The piece about the Robbie Williams book was by Lynn Barber: I mostly love her interviews, but she knows nothing about pop music (which shows whenever she has to interview someone involved in it)

I could not face the Observer yesterday. Paul Morley has a compilation out, called North By North-West.

* Sad, aren't I?

lol 80s.

Whats he into then?

Growing up in provincial Scotland in the 1980s was pretty dire.

xpost really

Well i'm 33 and according to imdb Tennant is 35.

I don't think any of us knew what indie was. It was either chart pop or pop-rock. Dance and Hip-Hop hadn't taken off yet and Stone Roses/Mondays didnt hit big til the summer we left school.
for the record my favourite band back then was U2. Most people who liked U2 also liked the aforementioned Simple Minds,Deacon Blue & Inxs (i didnt) and Bon Jovi -Slippery When Wet/def leppard - Hysteria (No comment).

There was one metal fan in my year. But never knew for years as it was strictly school uniform and short hair at my school and i didnt know the guy well for the 1st four years or so.
And one of my mates was into Whitesnake, Poison, Motley Crue and even after all this time he has bad taste and i'm sure he secretly still loves those bands though he denies it.

The joys of living in backwards Ayrshire between the ages of 11-18.

Thank christ for Nirvana when i was 18 and had just moved back to Lanarkshire.

he really is just like most people of my age group. Although I wonder how many still like what they did 20 years ago.

Marcello> what were most people into at your school?

Cut was similar to Ireland's Hot Press

They even had personals where teenagers listed their fav bands, this was pre-Select magazine.

These days teenagers have myspace profiles.

They were all looking forward to the new album "Street Survivors".

One day, 1979, there were more sad people than when J.Lennon died.

Clyde 1 = worst station in the world.
Clyde 2 = What my parents listen to. My gran is 92 now and hard of hearing so she doesnt bother now.

Actually the biggest band in Glasgow throughout the 1980s - bigger even than Deacon Blue or Wet Wet Wet, I'd say - were:

(adopts Tom Russell voice)

SCHEME!!!!

And how can we have come this far in the thread without mentioning the anti-Simon Reynolds (his words), Patrick Kane's Hue and Cry?

Why isn't There A Thread For Scotlands Top Music Journalist ..... BILLY SLOAN?

I do indeed. One of them used to work in the original Fopp shop in Renfield Street.

lock and load

this strikes me as a leeeetle beeeet racist.

xpost

Pure comedy gold

Without this ... no Roots Manuva, no Dizzee. In fact, there would be no British urban music scene to speak of.
EJS

JesusJazzie B/Carl Mackintosh/Leee John etc. wept...

Presumably to avoid confusion with, say, Innervisions by Bloc Party or Superfly by Katie Melua.

xpost

Without this: No techno, no dance music; eg Orbital, Chemical Brothers.

BALL BEARING 1794 Philip Vaughan England

Without this: No jazz/funk, jazzfunk, jazz, funk.

Er, you mean it isn't?

With the exception of the Pistols (which is wrong anyway), I would say that was no great loss.

Without these: No Modern Day Festivals.

Knuckles...turning...white...

only with me i know very little about things *since* 1994.

Too busy worrying about that first step on the property ladder rather than whether Robert Rental or The Normal got top billing on the "Live At West Runton Pavilion" LP - get your priorities right!

Oh yes, they'll spend all their time doing it up and then selling it as a profit because that's what matters in Thatcherkid World!

xpost

In which universe are these terms mutually exclusive?

the people on those shows i think of as the kind of '90s, caring yuppies', on board with blair from the off, but not natural labour voters. now they will vote cameron, like that kirsty woman.

What baffles me (or doesn't) about this month's issue is how four stars were appended to what was clearly a two-star Scissor Sisters review.

1. The tip of a sharp anatomical process.
2. A minute round spot differing in color or appearance from the surrounding tissues; a point.

Free Johnny Cash CD.

you got it!

done this already today anyway

What baffles me (or doesn't) about this month's issue is how four stars were appended to what was clearly a two-star Scissor Sisters review.

that was a bit befuddling, yes.

Three stars apiece was an inordinately generous rating.

The Kelis record is a stinker, following two-thirds of a mindblowing first album, a phenomenal second album for which no one spoke up at the time apart from me and Carmody and a curate's egg of a third album.

As for Beyonce, The Writing's On The Wall is the only start-to-finish listenable album with which she's ever been involved.

Morley, as usual, knows nothing about Nothing.

no one pays £15 for an album any more! and marcello, you like the richard hawley album which is none of those things. why are they qualities you demand of r&b but not singer-songwriter snooze?

The Kelis record is a stinker, following two-thirds of a mindblowing first album, a phenomenal second album for which no one spoke up at the time apart from me and Carmody and a curate's egg of a third album.

kelis has never made a bad album, and i totally repped for wanderland at the time (in um my student paper).

As for Beyonce, The Writing's On The Wall is the only start-to-finish listenable album with which she's ever been involved.

i would also add survivor and bidet but again why the emphasis on start-to-finish listenable? i would rather have a dangerously in love with two killer singles than a 'start-to-finish listenable' of richard hawley-esque pleasantness which never scales the heights, and if ballad filler is the price i have to pay for it then i'm happy with that. i want GREATNESS! and 'baby boy' gives me it.

hmmmmmmmm...

Coles Corner is futuristic and strange. Listen to how it starts and how it finishes and how he gets there. Just because the record doesn't flaunt these elements doesn't mean they're not there.

I would rather have two killer singles for four quid than a tedious album of coma-inducing, pimp-soundtracking ballads (track five onwards) for thrice that price.

"Baby Boy" is actually less great than Bob the Builder's version of "Mambo No 5."

I was thinking about getting that. No more though. Rhino Handmade records are priced like they literally are handmade.

the combined resources of online retail, amazon marketplace, supermarkets and just about every shop i've been into recently mean that £15 is not a price i ever have to contemplate! seriously, a tenner is pretty much the upper limit i've had to pay for the past few years.

Coles Corner is futuristic and strange. Listen to how it starts and how it finishes and how he gets there. Just because the record doesn't flaunt these elements doesn't mean they're not there.

my point stands that music doesn't have to be futuristic or strange to be good (especially if you're applying those words to production values alone, as mr racistjustice does in his lazy reviews). i don't know if you ever heard nancy sinatra's 'baby's coming back to me' but that's what springs to mind for me - theer's nothing weird, or futuristic, or strange about it, but it's lovely and beautiful nonetheless.

I would rather have two killer singles for four quid than a tedious album of coma-inducing, pimp-soundtracking ballads (track five onwards) for thrice that price.

you can get dangerously in love for £4 in tesco at the moment.

'baby boy' is terrible.

it's incredible, it's taut and tense and jerky and perfect in a club.

POV beyoncé solo:

1 baby boy
2 in da club
3 irreplaceable
4 ring the alarm
5 work it out

Agree about "Baby's Coming Back To Me."

I wouldn't have any problems with the new Kelis record not being futuristic or strange if it were any good.

I paid a tenner for Dangerously In Love out of Mister CD. But I reviewed it for Uncut so I claimed expenses; otherwise I would have had to go to a Special Listening which I never do because you have to listen to an album more than once when reviewing it and it has to be to hand for reference purposes.

any particular reason?

Also it is silly to criticise OMM for being racist when they ran the only fair review for the Fun-Da-Mental album which I've seen anywhere in print.

it is, though! am not going to expand because my review is on my blog and my thoughts are on the album thread here.

I would have had to go to a Special Listening which I never do because you have to listen to an album more than once when reviewing it and it has to be to hand for reference purposes.

special listenings >>>>>> getting sent shoddy 128 bitrate mp3s to download yourself.

(my one listening session was surprisingly enjoyable, though if i hadn't been left completely alone with the album for 4 hours - and was given the opportunity to listen as many times as i wanted, by which time i had taken 9 pages of notes for a 100-word review - this might not have been the case)

haven't made up my mind on scissor sisters album as have only listened to it once. i think the single is dreadful. the album is not as good as the last one - too few disco numbers! too many guitar solos! - but it might be a grower.

But that just proves my point even more. How much does "a few with the lads after work" cost you know in London? £25? £40? And people will spend that willingly every week but can't find £12.99 for a CD? These people need to get fucked.

if i could order pints over the internet for half the price some people ask i might.

You can.

Evidently.

Period of time that you have your investment for though, Tom - maybe it wont get five plays in the first week or month or even year, but who's to say after that?

and I don't go to the pub much in London, normally getting one pint at most if I do. it's not worth it.

How much is one of Those, in London now?

I've been banging my head over this sentiment for so long now. People don't understand why such-and-such and so-an-so aren't massive, yet they aren't actually willing to pay for it themselves. If you're not and you say you think they're great, why the hell would anyone else?

x-post - Yes of course whenever you buy an album you HOPE it will end up in the 100 plays bracket and not in the 1 play and off to the charity shop one. Whereas with a pint you know what you're getting! (though yr £3 is also a 'stake' in a social event usually and who knows maybe THIS night out will be the one where you hatch an amazing idea/take part in the funniest conversation/meet yr soulmate etc etc. - albums can catalyse all those things too of course...)

You most definitely do NOT always know what you're getting when your order a pint!

i DID buy 'anniemal' for more than a tenner though.

11 years ago I paid between £17 and £22 for Goldie's 2 CD 'Timeless' - can't remember the exact price. Think that's the highest I've ever gone. I bought 'Anniemal' on vinyl for a tenenr in Selectadisc. Can't actually remember if I paid for my CD copy or not!

This is true, but essentially £15 is an arbitrary, strawman figure - it's the idea of being unwilling to pay at all that's the problem. "Here's this great MP3 I downloaded for free, she'll sell loads oif records!" Not if everyone downloads it, then she'll sell fuck all.

I only drink about 3 pints a week in a pub on average

Wow!

I can't remember the last time I had a pint in a pub.

What do you do with all the CDs you get sent Marcello? Take 'em down to Music & Video Exchange? Assuming you buy the ones you do like.

99% of the CDs I get sent are so useless and unsaleable that it's less hassle just to bin them than to drag them all the way to Berwick Street to get a fiver in return for the lot.

(xpost)

xpost David Tennant's NAME is a music review! The guy is a walking billboard - presumably they're hoping it'll be David Annie next.

(i take the view that any money i waste or overspend on a cd/too many drinks/etc is offset by the amount i save by free cds/guestlist/not drinking in clubs.

i don't believe stevem's estimated pint consumption.

Can't be bad!

More pointless nostalgia this month: Top 25 Gigs compiled by Old Hacks.

And also plentiful free advertisements for 2007 corporate state pop - Jamie T, the View, Pop Levi, the Klaxons and everything else they haven't been able to sell for the last two years.

The feature on Icelandic folk music was quite interesting, though.

A question I've always been too timid to ask Jon Savage: in The Kenneth Williams Diaries circa 1964 he meets a young boy in the street who calls himself Johnny Savage and wants to be a rock & roll star ("I gave him ten bob and told him to take the train back home"). Surely not the same...?

Are ALL OMM albums under review given four-out-of-five stars? I may have seen a couple with only three stars, and a couple with five, but it seems like QUITE a coincidence..

haha! i just noticed that (re the good, the bad, and the queen) this very morning!

Reasonable Nik Cohn piece on Cambodian pop; though marred by the standard ageing music writer getting into world music and therefore needing to slag everything else off meme ("They cover 'Both Sides Now' and 'A Whiter Shade of Pale', and reimagine them in Khmer, transforming artsy posturings into agonised love plaints") it tells a story for which the adjectives "gruesome" and "vile" are nowhere near adequate. I must find that 4CD box set.

Reactionary rubbish - the concept of "over-intellectual" is one of which Pol Pot would have approved.

Otherwise, pages and PAGES on San Fran 40 years after the Summer Of Love, that fucking summer that no one will allow us to forget, keep hammering it into our heads - "You were BORN TOO LATE hahahah!" Morley also goes on in his column about Seven Ages Of Rock and how much longer etc. but of course by using his page to write about it he's adding to the problem. Also, an arselicking interview with Ozzy which reveals him as the world's most boring man, second only to Alan Sugar.

In the review pages, Justice not unreasonably get Album Of The Month, but badly rewritten press releases are not the way to persuade dubious outsiders.

Interesting perspectives in OMM's Candie Payne review where Emma Bunton's (actually rather good) last album is dismissed as "polo-neck wearing dreck" but Ms Payne is applauded and lauded because, well, her brother's in the Zutons and blah blah the Stands, the Stairs, Noonday Underground and other MVE bargain basement perennials - the clear inference being: "she's one of US." I looked her up on YouTube and she is hideously awful. Onward goes the Buggins' turn nepotism which is doing far more to kill British music than any amount of downloading.

Similarly, elsewhere in the review pages there are remarks which speak volumes to those in the know: "It may not be on the cutting edge, but..." "They won't win any points for originality, but..." Enough of the butitis which is doing far more to kill British print music writing than any amount of blogging; music is either worth spending time and money on or it isn't. I don't care who owes whom a favour or who's scared about not getting an interview. McCartney's new album is hailed as a stunning return to form. The White Stripes are another crass press release rewrite. Michael Brecker's great now that he's dead.

Let's bring it all down.

Oh, and the new Amerie album gets not a mention.

Ha! I enjoyed reading Marcello's review of OMM far more than I enjoyed reading OMM. I think I might get that Amerie album today! Poss. also that MES/Mouse on Mars collab. if I can find it.

The letters about the Iron Maiden article in the previous issue were ok.

they gave the new dizzee album 5/5. something is not right. apart from the XL-OMM synergy i mean.

I have never read OMM

they'll balance it out by giving Kala 1

titchy the dizzee album is v good!

What's the point in reading and reviewing in depth a publication you have never enjoyed?

lex plz give me a copy!

None of your business (xpost).

"What's the point in reading and reviewing in depth a publication you have never enjoyed?"

see also: ILX :-(

good question braveclub

i guess (maybe?) MC's point is that OMM *should* be readable and enjoyable

if so, its a good point, difficult to argue. but somehow...i dont feel it. it would take a lot for me to want to read something like the OMM, though it would be nice if it were better

And much less like Saga Radio attempting to rock.

ffs, Schoenberg's 12-tone works actually have too much feeling within.

Maxwell Davies lecture ws a bit LOLz but what I've heard of his stuff for the Fires of London ensemble in the mid-70s is white-hot fury but also quite funny, better than anything the ppl in that list have written.

April 2007:
"'Earth Intruders' is pretty good, too, its martial robo-stomp lent much-needed soul by experimental Congolese band Konono No 1 (no, me neither)."
(Bjork, Volta review, Craig Mclean)

July 2008:
"A gorgeous cover of Fleetwood Mac's 'Over & Over' (no, me neither)"
(Primal Scream, Beautiful future review, Caspar Llewellyn Smith)

Are these just examples of stunning ignorance, or is there some running gag that I've missed? I don't even know what he's trying to say in the second one.

No, me neither.

Now, alas, with Malc's departure, we're left with Jason 'J' Brown, 'formerly of the boy band Five' it says here (no, me neither); and... former Catatonia singer Cerys Matthews. (Casper Llewellyn Smith, November 2007)

'no, me neither' is nearly as bad as '(x), anyone?'

"Heroes of rock like Farnham (no, me neither)" James Anthony, Guardian blog, March 2007 (having already mentioned Farnham twice so it doesn't even make sense)

"Dutch fashion label B-Young (no, me neither)" Tim Lusher, Guardian blog, Sept 2004

Looks like Caspar's just taking the piss though.

For some reason (no, me neither) sounds about 8million times less smug when referring to Dutch fashion labels rather than African musicians. By all rights it shouldn't.

you need to stop hanging out with the lex

PRIMAL SCREAM Beautiful Future (B-Unique) £11.99 *****

No, me neither. Worst album I've heard all year.

With OMM "writers," Paul Weller's song "Empty Ring" comes to mind.

omm is all albums: FIVE STARS. because music is a must have lifestyle accessory.

MIKA on the cover w/ the strapline "pop's next superstar" WTFFFFFFF is this a real thing?

smells of payola. on what planet is mika a significant recording artist in 2009? the whole article is written like a giddy PR release: "it's worth saying, Mike is VERY strange" oh come on

Spectactularly unreadable on Sunday actually. An article about session musicians, woo.

Just googled to find this piece online and erroneously clicked on a 49-page thread about the article at mikafanclub.com :/

nothing wrong with articles about session musicians as long as they are interesting and well written; unfortunately this was neither.

given that mika had a number one album and single in 2007 and has new stuff coming out you have to grit your teeth and deal with the fact that omm readers will be interested in him.

but then omm isn't really "our" universe is it? it's written by old people for old people (hmmm...), it is what it is, we're never going to get on there. maybe i'm just mellowing out of late but really there are bigger fish to fry. not a coin flip, just moving on.

It can on occasions still be worth reading - not last month though. I'm sort of glad it's there even when I don't care about it.

Did any of youse get "Sleeve Notes" in yr inbox today?

Basically, a 'digest' of Guard/Obvser Music columns via Tim Jonze....

to be fair i didn't know about the major lazer album and i was intrigued by mulholland's review.

If Mika is actually going to go above and beyond his first-album status, which was some way short of 'pop superstar', when a new thing comes out, then fine... OMM just seems to be out there on a limb with that one is all

this mag seems more and more pointless. the reviews are so tame.

i've seen some pretty scathing three star reviews in this

So there hasn't been an OMM since last month. In fact, there hasn't been any monthly supplements in The Observer recently, after all those stories about closure and cost-cutting started going around. RIP?

I'm sure I read that the all the various monthly magazines had been put on hold during August due to some rubbish about people going on summer holidays and therefore not having time to sit around reading on the weekend, and not at all to do with the fact the Observer's head of magazines has left to join The Times?

Am pretty sure the next food mag is due for mid-september.

(didn't like the way popstars were shoe-horned into today's gardening special).

RIP: http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2009/nov/10/observer-sections-redesign

I have to say I never really rated The Observer Music Monthly; I disagreed with their opinion an awful lot. But what I did like was it was probably the best coverage a national paper was offering, and the writing often was of a great standard, I just happened to disagree a lot.

Its another sad blow for British music journalism.

It had a lot wrong with it but what doesn't i guess. The first press piece ever written about Xenomania was in the Observer Music Monthly, well certainly the first proper long article. Must have been a good 5 years ago now. God the rest of the uk music coverage in the national dailies sucks so hard.

I saw a copy of The Sun (on a train, yeah I know etcet), and was surprised by it's coverage.

Maybe coloured by the fact I was more expecting it to be on the level of "Katie Price is making a new album about her life over the past 6 months" standard, I dunno.

The Sun's pop coverage is nuts. They'll make Six Organs of Admittance their lead story and give Dead Moon albums 5 stars and stuff.

If you have to appear in a specific music page buried in the middle of the Sun then you are de facto not pop music. The Sun's pop coverage is X Factor and pictures of Amy Winehouse falling out of nightclubs, not reviews of the hobbyhorse indie bands of the editor of a section that is probably even less read than the City pages.

You have to admit it's pretty weird how someone gets free rein to just casually drop stuff like that in there though - I mean they don't have a comparable situation in any other area of the paper AFAICT

Yeah it's because no one gives a shit. They probably have to fill it with jobbing indie bands because any pop star of status gets bumped forward to the news section or Bizarre.

The Sun covers that stuff because Simon Cosyns, who edits the SFTW section, is an assistant editor of the paper and therefore senior enough not to have other people fucking with his commissioning. The fact that the Sun thinks its worthwhile lies in the fact that he is given a staff to run it with.

Whether it actually makes much difference or not ... Well, the PR firms are all happy to go with a paper that sells 3m copies, but they don't expect to sell many Black Mountain albums on the back of it. However, readers to read those pages. In Jan 06 I had the misfortune to be in a pub with Dan Treacey. A couple of weeks earlier the Sun had tipped the TVPs as one of their "six for 06". Which was obviously madness. Anyway, Treacey said the previous couple of weeks had been a nightmare of white van drivers shouting at him: "You was in the Sun, fella."

Good god!

Still, dammmed if you do...

http://www.rocksbackpagesblogs.com/2009/11/music-magazine-malaise-another-one-bites-the-dust/

OMM did a decade issue on November 29th, so will there be a final OMM end of year issue on Sunday: December 27th?

as from January 3rd 2010 should see a new look Observer

Observer makes raft of appointments

Paper gears up for relaunch with four weekly sections next year
http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2009/dec/11/observer-appointments

Guardian News & Media's Sunday title will have four weekly sections – news, sport, an expanded Review section and the Observer Magazine.