Blogs

It would be nice – and indeed, it’s sometimes professionally expedient – to pretend that we all work in splendid isolation, following our own idiosyncratic paths in directions that no other journalists travel.

Following on from yesterday’s news story about the new Bruce Springsteen album “Wrecking Ball”, “We Take Care Of Our Own” has surfaced this morning.

Bit of a rush this morning, and the relentless bulldozing consistency of New York’s Endless Boogie means that I’ve been round the block covered by “Twenty Minute Jam Getting Out Of The City” a good few times.

One of my favourite labels at the moment is probably RVNG INTL, thanks mostly to the Blues Control & Laraaji album I fixated on at the end of last year, and to the forthcoming collaboration between Sun Araw, M Geddes Gengras and The Congos.

Thinking about it now, it seems as if many of our favourite film makers decided to take 2011 off. Aside from the Coens' True Grit at the start of the year and Martin Scorsese's foray into children's movies at its close, you could be forgiven for wondering where had all the directors we'd so assiduously championed since Uncut began, in 1997, disappeared off to.

A fine morning thus far, thanks to Julia Holter, Leonard Cohen and, as I type, the new album by Lee Ranaldo, “Between The Times & The Tides”.

We’re still just about at that time of the year when there’s ample of it left to look forward to what’s coming up in the rest of it. Everybody’s at it, of course, it’s one of the things we do annually around now.

Rarely has the disparity between the quality of a performance and the quality of a film been so striking.

I’m increasingly conscious that one of the main criteria for inclusion in this column appears to be a penchant for very long tracks. When writing about The Necks, a questing trio from Australia, it is especially easy to come up with a timetable rather than a review.

Strange times, I guess, when the third Howlin Rain album appears to have been delayed to some degree by the small business of Adele. But then, the fact that Ethan Miller’s band have fallen under the enigmatic and somewhat digressive tutelage of Rick Rubin means that, commercially speaking, there are more pressing matters than the construction of the dream 1970 throwback rock record.