Features

A couple of records today that I’ve mysteriously failed to write about over the past month or two, both excellent.

Plenty of discussion on last week’s Neil Young blog, and also, more fractiously, over at Thrasher’s Wheat, about the value/usefulness/etc of “Archives”.

This month's Club Uncut openers, Sparrow And The Workshop, are an interesting beast - a Scottish folk trio on mainly acoustic instruments, there's a real violent attack to their sound.

It says something, though I’m not sure what, about the strange place Evan Dando occupies in the culture, that the new Lemonheads album seems to actively involve both Gibby Haynes and Kate Moss, as well as Liv Tyler and John Perry from The Only Ones.

I was making some notes on the new Sonic Youth album, “The Eternal”, this morning, when it occurred to me that writing “pop” down again and again was pretty absurd – one of those delusional fallacies that people who don’t listen to too much actual pop have, I guess, when a rock band starts working in a notionally punchy way.

There’s a telling clip buried somewhere in “Archives Volume One”, where Neil Young is poring over a tableful of photographs and clippings with Joel Bernstein. Here, it seems, everything is ready for this release. Young talks enthusiastically about the recording of the Massey Hall show he’s been listening to – and then you notice the date of the footage. It is 1997. Not only has Young been talking up this project for decades, he also seems to have had most of the material sorted and to hand for most of that time.

After a couple of weeks away, there was quite a selection of stuff waiting for me when I returned to Uncut on Tuesday, as this playlist hopefully shows. A situation compounded yesterday by the arrival of Neil Young’s fabled first volume of “Archives”.

Four or five listens in, I figured it might be useful to postpone the new playlist for a day and blog some preliminary thoughts on the new Wilco album, “Wilco (The Album)” (not crazy about the title). Jeff Tweedy has already been talking it up as something of a return to more “experimental” terrain which, at this point, seems to be a bit of a stretch.

STAR TREK HHHH DIRECTED BY JJ Abrams STARRING Chris Pine, Zachary Quinto, Eric Bana, Zoe Saldana, Simon Pegg OPENS MAY 8, CERT 12A, 126 MINS Rebooted with energy and wit, Star Trek has pulled off another generational shift. JJ Abrams may have invited flak from fans by claiming he wasn’t a big admirer of the science-fiction giant’s 43-year past (ten films, six separate series), but he’s ensured its future will now extend well into the 21st century. The new model is a sleek machine, marrying just the right degrees of cheeky irreverence, fresh ideas and awareness of when not to mess with a proud heritage. In short, it’ll please everyone, while never being as bland as that might sound.

As Bob Dylan, garbed in another of the natty Pimp-My-Confederate-General ensembles that have served as his working clothes these past few years, steps onto the stage of the Playhouse in Edinburgh on Sunday night into a jolting “Leopard-Skin Pill-Box Hat”, there is the small matter of him having just this afternoon officially clocked up his first Number One (with a bullet!) album in the UK for almost 40 years.