The press release that comes with Tarwater’s “Inside The Ships” reveals that this is the duo’s 11th album – a slightly alarming number, which suggests I’ve rather lost touch with the band over the past few years. “Inside The Ships”, however, has an instantly and satisfyingly familiar sound, not too different from Tarwater in 1998, when their “Silur” album seemed to be part of a small glut of German records (by The Notwist, To Rococo Rot, Kreidler, Mouse On Mars, Pluramon and so on) that sat in an appealing space halfway between electronica and post-rock.
Looking back at my blog on “Smoke Ring For My Halo”, I started with an Uncut quote from Kurt Vile that is salient here, too. “We recorded a lot of rockers,” he said of “Smoke Ring”, “but they just didn’t seem to fit.”
It is hard not to be nostalgic on nights like this. About an NME night when Pulp were on the bottom of a bill headlined, I think, by Kingmaker. About the party for “OU” at the Leadmill, with a problematic balloon launch and a large papier mache head, and the party for “Do You Remember The First Time” at the ICA.
In the second week of May, Gillian Welch and David Rawlings drove from Los Angeles to Nashvillle. The journey took 31 hours, and Welch filmed a small portion of it on her iPhone. The clip is framed by an open car window, and outside you can see the flooded Mississippi stretching away from the edge of the road to the horizon: a new inland sea for the beleaguered American South.
As has probably been pointed out ad nauseam, Jeff Tweedy seems to take a constant pleasure in wrongfooting Wilco fans. So it is with the start of “The Whole Love”, the band’s eighth studio album. “Art Of Almost” begins with a burst of staticky guitar and pulses along, mixing orchestral stabs, a plausibly funky bassline, a motorik core akin to “Spiders” and “Bull Black Nova”, and a distracted melody from Tweedy.
