Features

In haste, and listening to an unexpected return to music from Douglas Hart as I type. Twenty-one items on the playlist this week, mostly approved. Special attention here, I think, for the new Oh Sees album (that’s the sleeve above), which very much builds on “Purifiers II”. Increasingly keen on the James Blake, too, especially the RZA track.

The IMDB lists Noah Baumbach’s credits since 2010’s Greenberg as a TV adaptation of Jonathan Franzen’s novel The Corrections and a co-write on Madagascar 3: Europe’s Most Wanted.

Eric Burdon’s new album, ’Til Your River Runs Dry, is reviewed in the new issue of Uncut, dated May 2013 and out now – so for this week’s archive feature we thought we’d revisit this piece from Uncut’s May 2009 issue (Take 144), which examines how Burdon and his Geordie bluesmen somehow turned a lengthy folk staple about a brothel into a massive international hit… but don’t mention the royalties… Words: Nick Hasted

Three weeks and a few hours ago, I found myself on a small plane from Richmond, Virginia, to Washington DC. Most of the other passengers were members of the Harvard baseball team, who had spent the past three hours being harassed by schoolgirls making innumerable Harlem Shake videos. I, though, was sat next to a woman from Colorado, who was studying the use of horses in Gestalt therapy.

Plenty to listen to here again this week, and less dubious content than there was in the 11th playlist. One off-the-scale stinker, though…

Towards the end of the V&A’s terrific David Bowie Is… exhibition, tucked away on a wall next to the handwritten lyrics for “Heroes” and a postcard from Christopher Isherwood, are a set of door keys that have evidently seen better days.

Original Yardbirds members Jim McCarty and Chris Dreja take us through their career in pictures in the latest Uncut, dated April 2013 and out now. Jeff Beck, perhaps the band’s most explosive lead guitarist, took on questions from Uncut readers and famous fans in our March 2010 issue (Take 154), answering queries on haircuts, hot rods and playing with, er, Beverley Craven… Interview: John Lewis __________________________

On their fine "Light Up Gold" album from the end of last year, Parquet Courts often come across like a kind of self-mythologising, self-effacing Brooklynish hipster band, allbeit one who are, of course, a) disdainful of the term 'hipster'; b) focused on a rather old-fashioned hipster sound that, until they became hip, was probably too hip, or not hip enough, for hipsters; c) snarky about self-mythologising, self-effacing Brooklynish hipsters; d) probably reflexively quite snarky about themselves.

Reading about the South By Southwest festival tends to produce, in me at least, a mix of empathetic fatigue and terrible envy, and last week’s bombardment of tweets, blogs, news stories was no different.

From Uncut’s January 2010 issue, John Robinson talks to Bert Jansch about LA Turnaround, alcohol and Led Zeppelin