Features

For the past week or so, my inbox and mailbag have been assailed by labels and PR companies hyping their Tips For 2011, in readiness no doubt for the Brit Newcomer award and the BBC New Artists Poll. Annual frenzies, really, in which a lot of journalists diligently try and help out the music industry by anointing Clare Maguire or whoever as the next Ellie Goulding, and the odd sullen arrested adolescent like me effectively spoils their ballot paper by voting for the likes of Sun Araw.

This week has mostly been about Steve Coogan. The Trip – his BBC series with Rob Brydon – has prompted much discussion here in the Uncut office. As has the return of Coogan’s most famous creation, Alan Partridge – who as I’m sure you know by now is back in a series of short episodes released online.

Some next-level spam last night, in that someone/some bot tried posting, “I can't believe LeBron is going to the Bulls, he should really just stay where he is” on an old Elliott Smith blog. For what it’s worth, I can’t believe Notts have signed Ben Phillips this morning, either.

A couple of weeks ago, I spent a day trying to sort out the CDs at home; attempting to make some space on the shelves, really, for the piles of stuff that had accumulated over the last year or so. As I was weeding out a lot of mediocre post-rock from the late ‘90s, I kept coming across good things I hadn’t played in years, like Judy Henske & Jerry Yester’s “Farewell Aldebaran”.

The way Joanna Newsom tells it, Ryan Francesconi had a critical role to play in “Have One On Me”: not just as chief arranger and player of the Bulgarian tambura, kaval, mandolin, banjo, recorder and so on, but also (along with drummer Neal Morgan) in steering her towards making “Have One On Me” a triple CD set.

Looks like we’re heading deep into 2011 releases now, and this latest by Arbouretum, slated for January, is a really good one. If you’ve not latched on to this distinctly underrated Baltimore band, there’s a bit of catching-up available here: a piece on their last album, “Song Of The Pearl”; a live review from 2009’s blinding Club Uncut show; and something about Dave Heumann’s recent side-project, Coil Sea.

Thanks for all your comments to last week’s purgative 2010 disappointments thread. Now we’ve got that our of our systems, this week’s playlist features plenty of 2011 releases, as you can see.

Among the many tales about Ariel Pink, there’s one, possibly apocryphal, about a live show where he came onstage and did nothing but intone the word “Xanax” for the duration of the gig. It’s slightly worrying, then, when he emerges out of the leftover Halloween dry ice at this Club Uncut show to solemnly pronounce “Carrots”, then disappears again.

Over the summer, I got pretty hooked on a playlist/mixtape thing, "Wah Wah Cowboys", that turned up on a blog called The Old Straight Track. A triumph of early ‘70s crate-digging, "Wah Wah Cowboys" located a high place where country and country-rock found a groove, and packed a fair few revelations into 45 minutes.

Sitting on stage at London’s BFI Southbank, Bruce Springsteen is reflecting on events 33 years ago, when he and the E Street Band entered New York’s Record Plant studios to record the Darkness On The Edge Of Town album.