Blogs

Looking back at my blog on “Smoke Ring For My Halo”, I started with an Uncut quote from Kurt Vile that is salient here, too. “We recorded a lot of rockers,” he said of “Smoke Ring”, “but they just didn’t seem to fit.”

Before we settled on the “Music That Made Bolan Boogie” CD to go with this month’s issue, we toyed with a compilation of new, glam-influenced music.

Bit of a hack through the backlog today, beginning with a mild disappointment, Stephen Malkmus & The Jicks’ “Mirror Traffic”.

It is hard not to be nostalgic on nights like this. About an NME night when Pulp were on the bottom of a bill headlined, I think, by Kingmaker. About the party for “OU” at the Leadmill, with a problematic balloon launch and a large papier mache head, and the party for “Do You Remember The First Time” at the ICA.

As has probably been pointed out ad nauseam, Jeff Tweedy seems to take a constant pleasure in wrongfooting Wilco fans. So it is with the start of “The Whole Love”, the band’s eighth studio album. “Art Of Almost” begins with a burst of staticky guitar and pulses along, mixing orchestral stabs, a plausibly funky bassline, a motorik core akin to “Spiders” and “Bull Black Nova”, and a distracted melody from Tweedy.

About five years ago, one of those serendipitous quirks of the music business made it seem, fleetingly, as if a bunch of underground folk musicians might find their way into the mainstream.

In his book Hotel California, Barney Hoskyns describes Laurel Canyon, Los Angeles, in the 1970s as “A funky Shangri-La for the laid-back and longhaired, who perched in cabins with awesome views of LA’s sprawling basin.”

I’ve been playing a lot of music by Alex Gray, a guy from Oxnard, California, who tends to work under the name of Deep Magic.

When Bob Dylan dances onstage - and he does seem to dance, after a fashion - at 9.15, it is easier than usual to draw battlelines in the crowd. Mostly, they have been at this Feis festival in Finsbury Park (very much a pack-em-in and get-em-pissed throwback to the pre-boutique era) all day, have had a selection of rain, mud, corporate beverages and Cranberries thrown at them, and in some cases are probably expecting The Saw Doctors to headline the main stage.

How many Wooden Shjips do you actually need? As someone who receives their records for free, I may not be in the best position to make that call. But as I was playing “West”, their third album, again this morning, at least a couple of songs began in a way which made me think of “We Ask You To Ride”, and I wondered: is it a blessing or a curse for all of your songs to be so instantly identifiable that they start blending into one another?