So that’s it, the first decade of the century down and what do we have to show for it? This half arsed semi-functional blog-come-website that more than a few people read, but  few care about?
A sad state of affairs indeed . . . but if you’re in need of some time to kill you could [...]

Dear Grant,
Such a funny thing for me to try to explain …
I can remember coming back from our half-year in Russia and hearing ‘Crazy in Love’ on Radio 1 for the first time. I couldn’t believe it. This tune felt like the one we’d all been waiting for, a tune that sounded totally of the [...]

Sometimes it feels like Richard D James saw the shit that was coming this decade, stuck two fingers up at it, and then buggered off to do the things he actually cared about. He returned to his analog love with the hugely underrated Analord series of wonky acid vinyl released as AFX, and if you [...]

Youthful aggression and unjustified arrogance will get you a long in the world. Young people may be naïve, inexperienced idiots, but they don’t half do some fucking incredible things because of it. I Luv U smashes you over the head and grabs you by the balls. It sounded like nothing else then, and it sounds [...]

‘As I gazed at the quiet rubble, one thing
puzzled me: What had happened, and why?’
(John Ashbery, ‘A Worldly Country’, 2007)
‘I didn’t understand’.
(Fleet Foxes, ‘He Doesn’t Know Why’, 2008)

If Bjork’s final act of the nineties was an extroverted, attention grabbing scream of emotion and a refusal to be a passenger in life then her first (and a few might say greatest) act after the millennium was an introspective gentle evolution. Homogenic stands in sharp contrast to her noughties output even though Vespertine may [...]

One actually quite good thing about the current spate of ‘best of the decade’ lists, once you get past their irritating ubiquity, is the almost laughably basic fact that they’re forcing people to engage seriously with the realities of the epoch. Musically, the two great evils of the last ten years were those perennial bedfellows, [...]

At the end of 2009, dance music as a whole is far from being ‘in trouble’. However, as noted in the previous entry on Underworld’s ‘Two Months Off’, a certain kind of tradition in British electronica of popular experimentalism has dwindled with the unfolding of the decade. What I term a significant minority act – [...]

Deerhoof could have been massive; if they’d have wanted to I’m certain they could have been a top ten juggernaut, spewing out hit after hit of giddy J- pop like the bastard cousins of McFly. But of course, they’re not, they have eschewed a potentially lucrative future to splice their pop nuggets with chaotic dissonance [...]

We’ve got nothing against guitar music per se here at The Grain. The absence of any of the decade’s most successful purveyors of trad-oriented indie rock in our Top 50 tunes list hasn’t been intentional, more a natural expression of our several individual tastes.
If it seems faintly polemical to have included so few ‘nu-rock’ and [...]