Blogwatch: a bumper edition

SO much good stuff of late, much of it music-related...

The most written-about band in the blogosphere this week? "Quebecois sextet" The Dears. As Mike has pointed out, their Nottingham gig is the subject of posts on Exultations & Difficulties, Swiss Toni's Place and The Bargain Basement, whilst I'm expecting a review of Wednesday's gig in Birmingham to appear on Parallax View sometime soon. Mind you, they're not flavour of the month with everyone - Jon caught up with the tour in Manchester but only to see support act Ambulance Ltd - he'd left by the time The Dears appeared.

The other band getting people stirred up at the moment are Bloc Party - on Pent Up Digitalfury there's a salivating preview of their debut album Silent Alarm, out on Monday, and Jonathan, like me, is a recent convert.

Elsewhere:

On No Matter What You Heard Kevin reviews two new albums currently in heavy rotation on the SWSL stereo, Low's The Great Destroyer and ... And You Will Know Us By The Trail Of Dead's Worlds Apart;

LMT of Between The City And The Deep Blue Sea looks back at Sunday's Asian Tsunami Benefit Gig at the Portsmouth Wedgewood Rooms, where he enjoyed another appearance on guitar with new band Autons;

Welcome to Bedsit Bomber, an electronic musician from Brighton and acquaintance of Jonathan;

David, like Martin, mourns the closure of Nottingham indie venue The Maze;

On No Rock & Roll Fun Simon presents a comprehensive review of the Brit Awards and has great fun at Fred Durst's expense - "He's been quiet on his Xanga site for a while now - we'd assumed that maybe he'd been getting more tattoos or something, or perhaps the Feds had arrested him to ask him why he's a bloke nearing forty pretending to be a teenager online; which does look kind of bad";

Sashinka reveals she once had that young raggamuffin Pete Doherty in her employ once upon a time;

Tom runs through the lessons learnt from DJing at an office party - "Even rockists like "Love Machine" (when they've drunk their way through a five-figure bar tab)".

And now stepping away from the subject of music...

Sarah encounters homophobia at every turn in Edinburgh;

Coincidence sees Mish back in the house her gran lived in eight years ago just weeks after she passed away;

Paul's been to see 'The Play What I Wrote', based on Morecambe and Wise;

Jaymaster indulges in some serious earwigging;

Mike gushes about the delights of the TV schedules over recent weeks and encourages us all to adopt a new acronym, CBATG;

Diamond Geezer invites you to be present at Charles and Camilla's nuptials;

Del, a hoarder, is finding it hard to have to say goodbye to his magazine collection;

Inspector Sands reports on the scrum which ensued at the 3am opening of a new IKEA store - "There should be something witty and pithy in this, but all I can do is shake my head and mutter 'fucking idiots'. These are the sorts of people who probably expect the staff to wipe their arse for them after they've had a dump";

and lastly but not leastly, Jonny B has issues with feminism - "Do not get me wrong, as I was very in favour of the emergence of 'feminism' in the seventies, even though I was only about five at the time. I was a bit young to understand Ms Germaine Greer and all that, but I was certainly impressed by the day-to-day achievements of people like Ms. Bonnie Tyler, who proved that ladies could do just as well in previously male-dominated professions such as soft rock".