Playlists

This week's playlist, then. Still no sign of the complete Bob Dylan album, I'm afraid, though compensation of sorts comes from The Grateful Dead's "Rocking The Cradle", which proves that their 1978 shows by the pyramids in Egypt weren't quite as shabby as myth has suggested. "Fire On The Mountain" and "Shakedown Street", in particular, are strong enough to make me want to re-evaluate that late '70s studio stuff.

A couple of interesting posts to draw your attention to, before we get into the business of this week’s playlist. First, Robin Pecknold from Fleet Foxes called in at the Department Of Eagles blog to tell us about the two bands having vague joint plans. And on last week’s playlist blog, liamdog7 posted something interesting about how much money Columbia are charging for Bob Dylan’s “Tell Tale Signs”. “As a completist fan I'm being taken advantage of,” he writes. “It's actions like these from record companies that actually promotes illegal downloading.”

Morning, all. Just playing the excellent Telepathe album one more time, as I file the playlist from the last couple of days. I should get round to filing a review of that one next week, all being well. In the meantime, here's this week's pretty handsome selection. Don't forget to download the free Bob Dylan MP3 from http://bobdylan.com. A tantalising first taste of "Bootleg Series No 8: Tell Tale Signs", I'd say.

I guess we’ve finally mentally returned from Latitude, so it’s the time of the week to unveil Uncut’s office playlist. A few nice new entries that I need to spend more time with, and only a couple of obvious weak links here. Dive in. . .

As the clouds gather, we’re readying ourselves for a weekend at Latitude. One more reminder that an extensive Uncut team will be blogging there non-stop from tomorrow morning. I’ll be vacating Wild Mercury Sound for the duration, and working on our special Latitude blog, where I imagine I’ll be covering Joanna Newsom, Elbow, Julian Cope, Michael Nyman, Wild Beasts and the children’s play area, amongst other things. Should be fun.

Not much time to muck about this morning (not least because the test match starts again in half an hour). So here’s the playlist of stuff that has graced the Uncut stereo over the past couple of days. One of those weeks, I should say, where a mention on the playlist really doesn’t automatically equate with an endorsement. . .

Thanks for all your half-year Top Tens; some interesting choices there, as well as The Charlatans. Keep them coming, and I’ll do some kind of dark mathematics and rustle up a collective Wild Mercury Sound chart next week.

First off, a brand new Brightblack Morning Light track, complete with visuals, has appeared, and it’s fantastic. The second Brightblack album – West Coast acid-folk-funk infused with gris-gris and a sort of horizontal, post-Spiritualized drone-funk, if any of that makes sense – was a huge hit here at Uncut during the ferociously sticky summer of 2006, and “Hologram Buffalo” is every bit as good.

I was just settling down to watch the football last night, when the phone rang. I picked up the receiver, but it was one of those – usually incredibly annoying – calls from a gig, where you can just hear a song reverberating around the venue. After a few seconds I could make out a baritone invocation, some ethereal harmonies in the far distance, and a generally spectral air that was uncannily enhanced by the phoneline. Leonard Cohen, singing “Who By Fire” in Manchester, at his first British date for some 15 years.

So this is what we’ve played thus far this week: a glut of hip-hop; a few selections from the private collections of John Robinson and Mark Bentley; a Walter Becker solo album that doesn’t quite cut it next to all those wonderful Steely Dan and Donald Fagen records; and a Radiohead cover of Portishead, which makes this an uncharacteristically prophetic blog.