Features

Panda Bear: “Tomboy”

Listening to “Tomboy” on the way to work this morning, I started thinking about how Radiohead and Panda Bear have both played the internet these past few weeks/months. I read a very good piece yesterday by Stephen Troussé, that’ll be in the next print edition of Uncut, about “The King Of Limbs” and what he calls “the re-enchantment of the album release.”

D Charles Speer & The Helix, “Leaving The Commonwealth”; Chris Forsyth, “Paranoid Cat”; D Charles Speer, “Arghiledes”

I have a good few mysterious records in my collection, as you can probably imagine. Among the more obtuse are a bunch by a shadowy New York collective called The No-Neck Blues Band. It’s not always easy to read these albums, since the band have an apparent disdain for even the most fundamental marketing expediencies. Often, their name is nowhere to be found on the package, replaced by a kind of glyph that, decoded, reads NNCK.

Kurt Vile: “Smoke Ring For My Halo”

I was reading the latest edition of Uncut last night, as I should, when I came across this quote from Kurt Vile, sat at the bottom of Louis Pattison’s review of “Smoke Ring For My Halo”. “It’s got this kind of wandering, mellow feel,” Vile says of his album. “We recorded a lot of rockers, but they just didn’t seem to fit.”

The Eighth Uncut Playlist Of 2011

Thanks to everyone who contributed to last week’s very interesting playlist thread. If you haven’t had a look, there’s some good talk about the Radiohead and REM albums; dubious thanks to John E, who successfully encouraged/goaded me into unpacking a good month or two’s worth of irritation with regard to “Collapse Into Now”. Better now.

PJ Harvey: London Troxy, February 28, 2011

I don’t mean to suggest “Let England Shake” is anything other than excellent, but I can’t help thinking that one supplementary reason why PJ Harvey’s latest album has had such laudatory reviews (better, mostly, than the equally good “White Chalk”) is that offers journalists so much to write about. “Let England Shake” is so full of imagery, content, allusion, it offers up boundless possibilities of meaning. Reductively, it has been called a protest album. Expansively, you can parse (or, maybe, project on) it for all manner of ideas about war and nationality.

The Seventh Uncut Playlist Of 2011

I was hoping to include the new Wild Beasts album, “Smother”, in this week’s rundown, but it doesn’t seem to have turned up yet. Today, hopefully.

Julianna Barwick: “The Magic Place”

About ten years ago, I saw a terrific show at the Whitechapel Gallery in London by an artist called Janet Cardiff. The centrepiece of the exhibition, as I remember it, was a room in which were placed a large ring of speakers, playing Thomas Tallis’ choral piece, “Spem In Alium”, in such a way that each singer’s voice emanated from a separate point.

Cornershop & Bubbley Kaur: “Cornershop & Double ‘O’ Groove Of…”

A few years ago, Cornershop’s somewhat capricious practices threw up a single called “Topknot”, fronted by a singer, Bubbley Kaur, who Tjinder Singh claimed that he’d discovered singing in a laundrette. A sort of hugely enjoyable bubblegum Punjabi folk song, it was trailed as the first track from a whole album of Cornershop/Bubbley Kaur collaborations.

Radiohead, “The King Of Limbs”, second thoughts, + Zomes, “Earth Grid”

A weekend after Radiohead's “The King Of Limbs” came out, it occurs to me that there’s an interesting experiment to be done sometime about how our responses change to a record over time. Maybe we should do a real-time live blog run-through of the album every Friday for the next six months and see how opinions evolve?

Radiohead: “King Of Limbs”

OK we're downloading "King Of Limbs" now, and I think we're going to have a go at liveblogging it as we go. Join in,won't you?
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