The new issue of Uncut is out sometime this week, and among many other things it contains an interview I did a few weeks back with Gillian Welch and Dave Rawlings in Nashville.
Thanks once again to Nick this week, who’s added a load more albums to the Wild Mercury Sound Spotify playlist. I doubt whether many of these selections will be available; the Bon Iver, maybe?
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.
Many thanks to everyone who has contributed lists to our Best Of 2011: Halftime Report blog – please keep them coming. I’m staying staunch, for the time being at least, and refusing to publish that list of disappointments you’ve been asking for; I guess you can probably figure a lot of it out, given what doesn’t appear in my Top 30 anyway.
Given we’re coming up to the end of June, I figured it should be time for this annual bit of anal-retentive album-crunching. A lot of fine records here , though not necessarily the 30 I might have envisaged at the start of 2011; as I’ve alluded to before, I feel like there have been a lot of eagerly-anticipated letdowns this year.
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?
When an artist spends eight years working on – or at least working towards – a new record, it is easy to expect a certain extravagance: complex arrangements, perhaps; an unusual number of songs; possibly even a challenging new direction.
I guess there’s some fairly auspicious new entries in this lot, though I’d also direct your attention to a couple of the other records here, by Bitchin Bajas (a Cave spin-off, I believe) and Jonathan Wilson. Really good stuff.
In 1995, Van Dyke Parks and Brian Wilson released a mostly-forgotten album together called "Orange Crate Art", and I found myself in LA interviewing the pair. It was a pretty unusual trip, ending in Wilson’s front room, where he claimed that his secret was “abstaining from orgasm”,performed “Satisfaction” and an updated version of “Surfer Girl” for me on his grand piano, then offered me $100 to get my ropey dictaphone recordings played on the radio.
There is something deeply weird about seeing four people onstage at a Low gig. In recent years, it has often seemed as if Alan Sparhawk, in particular, has sought to transcend or subvert people’s expectations of how Low should sound. Surely, though, filling out the sound with a keyboard player is tantamount to sacrilege?
