Twenty years of touring and recording, of inspiration and graft for moderate acclaim, and it comes down to this. Mark Kozelek, the pivot of first Red House Painters and now Sun Kil Moon, is engaged in one more slog around Europe. It is not going well.
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Today, as you may have heard, is apparently the 50th anniversary of the Rolling Stones’ first gig.
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Following music on Twitter, it sometimes feels as if a hyped album or a track is listened to for, at best, six hours now before it becomes in some way obsolete: if it’s not trending, it must be passé.
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I wrote a long review of the new Sun Kil Moon album, "Among The Leaves", in the latest edition of Uncut. This is the unedited version of the email interview I conducted with Mark Kozelek that runs alongside the piece. Pretty funny and revealing, I think, not unlike his new album.
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A lot of amazing reissues in the mix this week: alongside that big Laurie Spiegel I mentioned last week, there are fine records from Don Cherry, Nick Cave, ZZ Top and of course GZA, whose extraordinary solo debut now appears to be coming complete with a chess set.
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Do opera-goers have low boredom thresholds? It certainly seems that way watching the production of Damon Albarn’s “Dr Dee” at the English National Opera – or at least that director Rufus Norris assumes they do.
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Plenty of gold in this week’s haul, and not much better than the Duane Pitre album whose sleeve is posted above – a truly excellent record that I must admit I missed when it was released a few months back.
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Pondering what to write about this morning, it occurred to me that there were more things to say about my favourite albums of 2012 so far, following up from this Top 40 that I posted last week. For a start, a bunch of records that I forgot to include:
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A serene beginning this morning, with a new Terry Riley album, “Aleph”. Over on my 40 Favourites Of 2012 Thus Far blog, however, things became a little less genteel yesterday, as you can see in the comments thread at the bottom of the chart.
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Since Jack White is back playing in London this week, it seems like a good time to post the full exhaustive interview that I did with him in New York a few months ago...
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