I wasn’t able in the end to go to see The National at Shepherd’s Bush Empire last night, but Chris Robert’s nobly came off the sub’s bench to file this report.
I've been gently kicking myself for the past few days after discovering The Necks were playing a couple of shows just down the road from me in Dalston. By the time I tried to get tickets on Sunday afternoon, they'd long sold out. Their new album, "Townsville", is compensation of a kind, but it also makes me regret missing them more than ever.
I've been keeping a list of the records we've played for the past couple of days. Kept away from American Music Club's "Golden Age" after some heavy rotation last week, and I'm contemplating having another go at its predecessor, "Lovesongs For Patriots", after some insinuated reprimands on the blog.
We've just been playing the excellent forthcoming Kelley Stoltz album to start the week (I'll write about it soon), which reminded me of another Sub Pop album I've liked in the past few weeks.
Some interesting things turned up from you this week, not least a couple of impassioneddefences of the Robert Plant & Alison Krauss album, which seemed to be getting a rough ride from some unreconstructed old Led Zep fans.
Forgive me for recycling press releases, but there’s an interesting line in this one which accompanies the new album by American Music Club. “Dark music is for people who are healthy enough to take it,” it reads, “And AMC want to appeal to all people – including the sick.”
The new Cat Power album just arrived - or at least a stream of it arrived onto my computer - so that's playing as I write this morning. Sounds pretty good, with a remarkable version of "New York New York" to kick things off, but I'll blog about it properly in the next few days.
A couple of weeks ago or so, I used the online appearance of a new Wu-Tang Clan tune to complain – from a dilettante-ish position, I admit – that 2007 has been a thin year for hip-hop. It now looks like the Wu album may have been put on hold for a while, though apparently there is the substantial compensation of a new Ghostface Killah album instead.
Sometime last week, we had some kind of half-assed straw poll in the office about our best gigs of 2007. You can probably guess a lot of the stuff that came up: The White Stripes, The Hold Steady, Arctic Monkeys, Dylan, Wilco, Lou Reed’s "Berlin". Good gigs. I held off submitting any suggestions, though, not least because I suspected I’d see my favourite gig of the year on Friday night.
