Features

When Ryan Sambol, who frankly looks like he hasn’t slept since beds were invented, asks if we want to hear another new song the only people in a packed Borderline who perhaps aren’t sure they do at this particular point are his band, Austin’s The Strange Boys.

This week’s new issue of Uncut features another 50 Great Lost Albums – those that are unavailable new or as legal downloads right now – chosen by the mag’s readers. Consequently, I thought it’d be useful to put our original Top 50 online, as they appeared in issue 156 of Uncut (Neil Young was on the cover, narrowing it down a little).

Previously: 50-35

Previously: 50-35, 34-17

Some correspondence over the past week or so regarding The Alps, whose new album I must admit I’m yet to hear: the last one was pretty cool, something like a kind of psychedelicised Air, if I remember right.

Possibly there may be other matters preoccupying English readers today (and some American ones, come to that), and I can’t pretend that all the records here – the new MIA album, for instance – might be suitable for taking the potential pain away.

Among the many highlights of Robert Plant & Alison Krauss’ “Raising Sand”, I kept coming back to their take on Gene Clark’s “Polly Come Home”. Had they, and I guess their producer T-Bone Burnett, captured the uncanny gravity of Low on purpose, or by some equally uncanny accident?

I’ve just had a look at all your suggestions on the Best Of 2010 blog from last week, and managed to crunch them all into a chart of sorts.

In one of those funny little coincidences that come along every now and then, I’ve just finished reading the film pages in the next issue. Among them is a very fine review of Francis Ford Coppola’s latest, Tetro. And now, I’ve just watched the trailer for Somewhere, the forthcoming film from Sofia Coppola.

In some circles, it’ll be construed as heretical behaviour: James Blackshaw not touching an acoustic guitar for the duration of an entire album, favouring instead a 12-string electric. For someone who’s been proclaimed, not infrequently here, as some kind of saviour of folk guitar or whatever, it’s something of a shock.