Features

Uncut speaks to the star of the Coen Bros.' masterful 'No Country For Old Men'

I'd say the key moment in Cloverfield -- just the very monster movie the post-9/11 world has been crying out for -- occurs while a giant creature of unknown origin lays spectacular waste to New York City, and one of the characters screams: "I AM SEEING THIS SHIT RIGHT NOW!"

Publishing imperatives being what they are, most of us have virtually forgotten about all the hair-wringing and number-crunching that went into compiling those Best Of 2007 lists. But before we completely write off the last 12 months, here's one last poll that's pretty interesting.

Nice thing turned up in the post the other day from one of my favourite labels at the moment, Tompkins Square. The New York label tends to specialise in fingerpicking guitarists who are very much in the tradition of the Takoma school, which they categorise, neatly enough, as “American Primitive Guitar”.

A few of you have been asking for me to write something about the new Drive-By Truckers album and, to be honest, I’ve been putting off doing so for weeks now, playing the record again and again to come to terms with it.

With the next issue out of the way, we had a fairly constructive bash through a backlog of new releases today, hence not much here has figured on previous playlists. As usual, please let me know what you've been listening to: further to the Cave Singers tip I mentioned the other day, I've been quite taken with Health, who cropped up in one of your posts the other day.

We were listening to the new Elbow album this morning when the first line of Track Four stood out. “I’ve been working on a cocktail called grounds for divorce,” sings Guy Garvey over a ratchety chaingang rhythm, one of those industrial-propulsive beats with which Elbow pepper their Floydian/Talk Talk reveries. Then a crisply distorted guitar cuts through it; far too controlled to be grungy, exactly, but endemic of the way this largely excellent band manage to mix up the grandiose and ethereal with something that’s much more earthy and humane.

Just as I started writing this blog, an email pinged into my inbox to let me know that Juno has now taken $60 million at the US box office and kept the Nic Cage blockbuster National Treasure 2 off the top spot.

A bit of a rush today, since we're trying to finish the next issue of Uncut. But I've been revisiting the MGMT record that turned up last year, and which features fairly prominently in the New Brooklyn Bands feature in the current issue.

A fairly fractious mix over the past day and a half, at least one of which made (for good reason, I must admit) our production editor evacuate the Uncut office at speed. A load of Kraftwerk bootlegs are currently in circulation, following the 1971 session I recommended the other day, and this one from Croydon, 1975, is tremendous.