The other day, it occurred to me that, after nearly two years of doing Wild Mercury Sound, I should put together some kind of list of other blogs I like. To that end, it’d be great if you could post your recommendations at the bottom of today’s playlist; that’d be really helpful (plug your own if you like, too).
Sorry for the spoiler in the title, but Yo La Tengo’s temporary reinvention as a bunch of garage rockers from New London, Connecticut is pretty easy to unpick. The press release suggests that the fragrantly-named “Fuckbook” is the Condo Fucks’ sixth album (the previous five all appear to have been given Matador catalogue numbers).
Something of an adventure getting into work today, and I appear to be alone at Uncut for the moment. Helping me on the yomp through the snow, however, were a couple of quietly magical records on Time-Lag that I’ve got hold of recently.
I’ve just finished a longish review of this new Bill Callahan album, “Sometimes I Wish We Were An Eagle”, for the next issue of Uncut, so I’ll try not to repeat myself too much here; save some adjectives, maybe, for the magazine. It is, though, one of the best records Callahan has made in what’s now a reasonably long, generally underestimated career.
Reeling slightly from the bad news about John Martyn, here are the records played in the Uncut office over the last couple of days. Mildly weird mix this week: the glut of Smog is due to me trying to review the new Bill Callahan album, which I'll try and blog about in the next few days.
A busy night at Club Uncut, with Banjo Or Freakout, The Delta Spirit and Crystal Antlers, though annoyingly I managed to miss the first band (I was held up at a screening of Armando Iannucci’s Thick Of It movie, In The Loop, if that’s a good enough excuse). If anyone caught Banjo Or Freakout and fancies filing us a quick review at the bottom of this blog, that’d be great.
First off, a quick plug, since we have Crystal Antlersplaying Club Uncut tonight (Tuesday January 27) in London. Tickets still available, apparently, and the supports (The Delta Spirit and Banjo Or Freakout) are worth a look, too. Secondly, we’ve just announced that March’s headliners (after Richard Swift next month) will be Baltimore’s excellent Arbouretum, so it’s high time I wrote something about their “Song Of The Pearl” album that we’ve been playing a fair bit for the past few weeks.
Not, perhaps, the sort of thing that I write about here very often, but The Rakes always sounded round these parts as one of the best bands to emerge from the whole post-Libertines/post-punk/Britpop Nouveau thing of a few years ago. They seemed to have a fair bit more wit and interesting angles than most of their contemporaries, and maybe a healthy affinity to Elastica.
A couple of weeks ago, I posted this blog which, in a slightly bewildered-old-man way, wondered why a raft of electropop types like La Roux and Little Boots were being tipped so enthusiastically for success in 2009.
