It occurred to me yesterday that I’m pretty bad at covering singles here, having neglected one of my favourite tracks of the year – Radiohead’s “Supercollider” – as a consequence, and also having passed over a bunch of rather good Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy one-offs (the latest in that sequence, “There Is No God”, arrived at the end of last week).
Kind of out of practice with blogging, I’ve been so distracted by other stuff these past few weeks. I have a long list of stuff to cover, though, and this album by Weyes Blood & The Dark Juices seems a good place to start.
X MEN: FIRST CLASS
HHH
DIRECTED BY Matthew Vaughn
STARRING James McAvoy, Michael Fassbinder
OPENS JUNE 1 // CERT 12A // 131 MINS
As evangelists, millenarians and scholars have learned to their disappointment, predicting the apocalypse has never been an entirely accurate business.
Thank you one and all for your extraordinary patience and willingness to play along with the game, and my apologies for not publishing messages from those of you who guessed correctly. Today, finally, I can reveal the tremendous mystery record that’s been preoccupying me for the past few weeks: check out Number Four in the list below.
It is about five minutes into “The Frame” before Terry Reid arrives onstage at the Jazz Café. As his scratch band lock into limpid funk that sounds like it could go on forever (and very nearly does), Reid comes grooving down the staircase, an odd but endearing mix of West Coast rock gentry and bumbling shires uncle.
When I have to talk to interns about live reviewing, I often advise against reviewing crowds, unless something really unusual happens. It’s hardly unusual for a crowd to be excited and passionate – they’ve just paid ten, 20, 30 pounds to see one of their favourite artists, it’s what they expect to do.
Club Uncut’s final night in Brighton can’t quite match the high of Josh T. Pearson’s performance on Friday, but a strong, diverse bill of female talent doesn’t disappoint.
“I’m tired,” Josh T. Pearson says. “It’s been a long life. I don’t even know what day of the week it is...” Someone in the crowd tells him the day and the date. “Friday the 13th?” he wryly muses, as if his life has been full of nothing but such days of potential reckoning in the ten long years since his band Lift To Experience released their fearsome album, The Texas-Jerusalem Crossroads, and soon after blew apart. That record imagined humanity making its last stand in Texas during the apocalypse. Pearson’s eventual follow-up Last Of The Country Gentlemen considers a recent relationship in similar terms. There’s the rare sense tonight of every bitter, funny, helpless word mattering, because they’re being pulled up from a harrowing place and being relived on stage.
As the first night of Club Uncut’s annual seaside trip to Brighton’s Great Escape festival comes to an end, a girl passes me yelling “My ears! My ears!”. New York’s Gang Gang Dance have just come off stage at the Pavilion Theatre, where they’ve cranked up the decibels to ear-splitting levels. Really, it was loud. Earlier this week, I’d been listening to their latest album, Eye Contact, recorded in relaxed circumstances near rural Woodstock, and been impressed by the ambient textures of tracks like “Glass Jar”. Live, they’re clearly a very different proposition: the sheer intense forcefulness of their sound physically impacts on the body. It had all been so very different three hours earlier…
