Features

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.

This is the second part of a lengthy piece I wrote for Uncut earlier this summer. The first part is here.

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.

Been away for a while, so as you might imagine there are a lot of new things in here. Particularly liking The Field, Feist and James Blackshaw at this early stage.

Few notes about this lot. The Mark Fry album is brand new, though sounds rather compellingly as if it was recorded in 1971, while the Modeselektor album features Thom Yorke on a couple of tracks and works in places as a neat Berlin companion piece to “The King Of Limbs”.

About five years ago, one of those serendipitous quirks of the music business made it seem, fleetingly, as if a bunch of underground folk musicians might find their way into the mainstream.

Still much taken with the Mikal Cronin, Hiss Golden Messenger and Meg Baird records, but some nice new additions this week, from Real Estate, Plaid and Wild Flag (I have the full album now), among others.

A few to flag up this week: Hiss Golden Messenger of course, Mikal Cronin (produced by Ty Segall; kind of kin to the first Ganglians record maybe), Meg Baird, Wild Flag.

A bunch of Roy Harper reissues seem to be dominating this rundown, justifiably I guess, but hopefully you can spot some other interesting stuff in here…