Features

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”.

In case you’ve stumbled across https://www.www.uncut.co.uk for the first time in the wake of our redesign, each week I post a list of the music we’ve played in the Uncut office.

Just before Christmas, you may remember, I asked for your 2011 Top Tens, in response to my lengthy end-of-year effort.

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.

As you might imagine, plenty of good new things on this week’s list, not least a completely unexpected (by me, at least) return to form from the Tindersticks.

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.