Blogs

A big mention first off for our coverage from the Latitude Festival, which should be kicking off any minute now. The Uncut team will be blogging pretty much non-stop for the next three days, so please keep an eye on our dedicated blog for the first reviews of Thom Yorke, Nick Cave, Spiritualized and so on.

It came as something of a surprise the other day to discover that it’s been something like eight years since Jim O’Rourke released a new solo album. In the interim, he’s not been entirely quiet, as involvement with Sonic Youth and the Loose Fur project with Jeff Tweedy and Glenn Kotche, as well as sundry other lower-profile activities prove.

Over the next few weeks, there’s probably going to be a lot of words expended on how much the Arctic Monkeys have radically changed on this, “Humbug”, their third album. There’ll be a lot about the influence of Josh Homme, about the lack of perceived immediate hits and so on. Plenty of more parochial music fans may well see “Humbug” as a Great British band absolving their local cultural responsibilities and becoming seduced with America and the desert rock sound nurtured so assiduously by Homme over the past decade and a half.

Apologies, but not much time to file a proper blog today, as deadlines for the mag loom. One of today’s jobs is to write a review of the forthcoming DVD release of “Flight Of The Conchords”: Series Two, so here’s my favourite song from those ten episodes, “Carol Brown”, with a video by guest director, Michel Gondry. Like the best Conchords songs, this one transcends mere comedy, or neat pastiche, and sails straight into the rare territory of fundamentally excellent music. Enjoy…

The sixth Cornbury Festival rode out the recession in grand style this weekend with 20,000 or so local music fans rocking up to the picturesque Cornbury Estate near Charlbury in Oxfordshire for a bill that featured diverse headline turns from Fleetwood Mac's Peter Green, Sugababes and Scouting For Girls.

Putting aside my morbid suspicion of quirky cover versions for five minutes, have a look at this: an enjoyable take on Joy Division’s “Transmission”, filmed at Jeremy Deller’s Procession for the Manchester International Festival last weekend.

When I reviewed Bon Iver’s “For Emma, Forever Ago” last year, I ended the piece by saying, “Whether [Justin Vernon] is heading out of his father’s cabin towards a long, significant career is hard to predict, and the perverse romantic in me almost wants him not to bother trying. “For Emma, Forever Ago” is such a hermetically sealed, complete and satisfying album, the prospect of a follow-up – of a life for Vernon beyond the wilderness, even - seems merely extraneous.

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I’m not necessarily the best judge of which bands are likely to make some kind of significant hipster/commercial breakthrough. But listening to this Ganglians album, “Monster Head Room”, on Woodsist, it surely makes sense that they should be right at the forefront of this new indie/lo-fi/garage scene that’s coming out of the States right now.

When these two Hyde Park shows were announced last December, we ran a piece in UNCUT celebrating the return to active service of Blur, where David Cavanagh quite reasonably asked the question: which Blur are coming back? After all, here was a band who had undergone many creative iterations during their recording lifetime; equally, so much had happened since the four of them last played together, in July 2000, it seemed appropriate to wonder what Blur would do with these shows. Could they really reconnect with the moptops who made the buoyant baggy pop of “There’s No Other Way”? Would they really revisit “Parklife”, a song intrinsically linked to an era and movement they’d subsequently gone to considerable lengths to distance themselves from? And what about the more abstract, edgier material from the later albums – what place would that have in Hyde Park?