Toiling midgets

Gearing up for the Atoms For Peace show tonight with this lot: please note (and in some cases listen to) new Forest Swords, Feral Ohms (another Ethan Miller band, this one very much in the Comets On Fire zone) and a reissue for Robbie Basho’s long-unavailable first Windham Hill album. The Desert Heat record sounds better with every play, too…

One of the records I’ve been playing the absolute hell out of these last couple of weeks is The Graceless Age, the new album by John Murry, who Uncut regulars may remember from World Without End, a sensationally bleak 2006 collection of contemporary murder ballads he made with the Memphis singer-songwriter Bob Frank. The Graceless Age, like World Without End, produced by Tim Mooney, the former American Music Club drummer, at Closer Recording, the studio Tim owned in San Francisco, at 1441 Howard Street. The more I played it, the more The Graceless Age sounded like one of the best things Mooney had been involved in, as either producer or musician, a dark and festering masterpiece.