Features

On their fine "Light Up Gold" album from the end of last year, Parquet Courts often come across like a kind of self-mythologising, self-effacing Brooklynish hipster band, allbeit one who are, of course, a) disdainful of the term 'hipster'; b) focused on a rather old-fashioned hipster sound that, until they became hip, was probably too hip, or not hip enough, for hipsters; c) snarky about self-mythologising, self-effacing Brooklynish hipsters; d) probably reflexively quite snarky about themselves.

Reading about the South By Southwest festival tends to produce, in me at least, a mix of empathetic fatigue and terrible envy, and last week’s bombardment of tweets, blogs, news stories was no different.

From Uncut’s January 2010 issue, John Robinson talks to Bert Jansch about LA Turnaround, alcohol and Led Zeppelin

The distraction of a Laura Marling blog yesterday has had the knock-on effect of making this week’s playlist longer than usual: 27 tracks/albums in all.

It’s easy – and probably useful, sometimes – to lambast major labels for what looks from the outside like chronic short-termism. The climate is, understandably I guess, a neurotic one, and those days are long gone when labels would work long-term with a select group of trophy artists, whose usefulness to the company was more silvery and nebulous, more about cachet than quick profit.

Rather a long time after the event, I thought it worthwhile posting my live review of Kraftwerk at the Tate Modern (it was published in Uncut's print edition a couple of weeks ago). It was Trans Europe Express night, by the way...

We look into the touching, awkward new film about Bill Callahan, Apocalypse: A Bill Callahan Tour Film, in the new issue of Uncut, dated April 2013, and out now. As a companion piece, check out this fantastic piece with Callahan, aka Smog, recalling how he made his greatest albums, from May 2010’s Uncut (Take 156).

Maybe not as much here as some weeks, thanks I guess to the Daft Punk loop that I’ve been playing for at least an hour a day. Try it…

The world and nearly everyone in it has been reduced to trembling excitement by the return of David Bowie, but for some of us there is another recent resurrection perhaps even more miraculous and just as unexpected, a comeback by The Replacements, who today release online the Songs For Slim EP, their first new recordings in more than 20 years.

The Columbia Albums Collection, the new 17-album boxset from Blue Öyster Cult, is reviewed in the new issue of Uncut, dated April 2013, and out now. The collection unsurprisingly includes the band’s signature hit, ‘(Don’t Fear) The Reaper’, and in this piece, originally published in Uncut’s November 2010 issue, the band discuss the writing and recording of their “trans-awesome” tune, perhaps the spookiest FM staple ever. “Nothing like The Byrds”, apparently… Words: Jaan Uhelszki