Blogs

The new April issue of Uncut, out now, features a fascinating look at the history of Sam Phillips’ Sun Studio, which brought the world Howlin’ Wolf, Jerry Lee Lewis, Roy Orbison and others. Elvis Presley was one future star who cut his debut recordings at the Memphis studio – and in this archive piece from the fourth ever issue of Uncut (September 1997), comedian Frank Skinner talks about the King’s early years and the huge impact the Sun recordings had on him.

Thanks to Damien Love for reminding me to blog about this. It's been on my radar for a couple of weeks, but it's only since Damien emailed me a Youtube link to a trailer earlier today that I've finally got something to write about.

They start with the tropical strum of “Buenos Aires Beach”, from their debut album Wagonwheel Blues, whose balmy unfolding might strike you as an inappropriate opener for a chilly night in Camden, far from the sun-kissed climes the song so breezily evokes.

The writer of No Country For Old Men and The Road is back, but not quite as you might expect...

Some stats: it has been 27 years since the last Dexys album, and nine since they released two new songs ("Manhood" and "My Life in England") on a compilation album that coincided with their reunion tour.

First things first: you can grab this one for free right now, by heading over to http://natchmusic.tumblr.com. As you’ll see there from the Tumblr’s subtitle, this marvellous Steve Gunn/Black Twig Pickers session is the first in a series of “collaborative recordings from Black Dirt Studio”; Black Dirt being a facility in upstate New York that’s birthed a bunch of superb records in the past few years.

After spending last weekend catching up with what seems like a veritable deluge of great new music, I had a yen for some old favourites this weekend, among them two albums by the cult singer-songwriter, Paul Siebel, Woodsmoke & Oranges and Jack-Knife Gypsy.

A quick video to carry us through the weekend. I've been playing the new Starving Weirdos album, "Land Lines", for a few weeks now.

I was playing a new record the other day that was, to all intensive purposes, mediocre American indie-rock; maybe with a touch of mediocre American post-rock. Uneventful enough, you might imagine, except for the fact that a constant barrage of overcomplicated arrangements – shooting for some kind of avant-garde audacity, I guess - made it actively annoying rather than merely nondescript.

A little over a month into 2012 and great new albums seem to be a-popping up all over the shop, something arriving in the post every day almost that either thrills or beguiles, demanding our attention and more often than not handsomely rewarding it. Leonard Cohen’s Old Ideas was rightly applauded in last month's Uncut, and in the current issue similar praise is lavished on Lambchop’s Mr M, which reminds us why we have loved them for so long and also what it was in the first place that got us so excited about Kurt Wagner’s Nashville country-soul collective.