Blogs

In 2005’s Brick, Rian Johnson played a cute twist on the high school movie genre, importing the tropes of film noir for a murder thriller set in the halls of academe. The Brothers Bloom, last night’s premier at the London Film Festival, is a similarly knowing piece of work. On face value, it’s a movie about two con men brothers, played by Mark Ruffalo and Adrien Brody; but, more than that, it’s also a movie about the act of fiction itself.

A few weeks ago now, I blogged about the third Brightblack Morning Light, “Motion To Rejoin”. In the interim, I’ve played it to death, decided it’s one of my favourite albums of 2008, and written about it at length for the new issue of Uncut.

Kidderminster has been found abandoned in a hedge. The M25 is missing. Events are continually unravelling. And Lynda Chalker exists.

Saturday Night Fever, a 30th anniversary orchestral disco inferno celebration, helmed by Bee Gee Robin Gibb...

Burt Bacharach was joined onstage by guest vocalists Adele, Beth Rowley and Jamie Cullum at the opening night of the BBC Electric Proms in London last night (October 22).

Just spent a few minutes online learning about a musical genre that, until a few days ago, I must admit I’d never heard of. It’s called kuduro, a combination of ballistic African percussion samples with raw, bouncing techno soundsystems and rapping, that seems to have originated in Angola and spread across the Portuguese-speaking world all the way back to Lisbon.

80 per cent lame, idiotic or just pretentious music! That’s us, and a heartwarmingly lively response to yesterday’s blog on the Animal Collective’s new album, which I’m now starting to think is their best album. Someone on the blog wondered when this excellent band would make their definitive album: I think, with “Merriweather Post Pavilion”, they just have.

Judging by the arrival on yesterday’s blog of a bunch of fans asking me to leak “Merriweather Post Pavilion”, there’s a fair bit of anticipation for this new Animal Collective album that I got hold of on Monday. Unfortunately, folks, I’m not going to leak this, or any other album, because: a) I like to play nice; b) I’d get sacked if I did leak it (the CD is watermarked with my name, so it’d be traceable if I uploaded it); and c) I’m much too technically incompetent to do that, in any case. Hope that’s clear.

Funny how things cluster together sometimes. I don’t want it to look like we’re stuck in some canyon of the mind here at Uncut, but no sooner had Neil Young’s “Sugar Mountain” turned up towards the end of last week, but a neat reissue of Graham Nash’s solo debut arrived too. I promise I’ll get somewhere closer to the cutting edge, whatever that means, later in the week: I have new things by Animal Collective, Buraka Som Sistema and Marnie Stern needing to be written about, for a start.

QUANTUM OF SOLACE HHH DIRECTED BY Marc Forster STARRING Daniel Craig, Matthieu Amalric, Olga Kurylenko OPENS October 30 CERT 12A 105 MINS Cumbersome title aside, it would be churlish to underestimate the amount of goodwill directed towards what, for brevity’s sake, we’ll stick to calling Bond 22.