Features

A lot on today, so I’ll have to be swift. But as you can see, a lot of exciting new things on the playlist this week, especially near the start. The Hans Chew track, incidentally, is a free download, and is hugely recommended.

A few weeks shy of a year ago, I was at the 12 Bar Club in London’s Denmark Street, the Tin Pan Alley of pop legend, to see a young Los Angeles-based band called Dawes. They’d been brought to my attention by an Uncut reader, who couldn’t recommend them highly enough. As an example of what they did in his opinion better than anyone he’d recently heard, he sent me a track called “When My Time Comes”, a rousing country rock thing that I hadn’t been able to stop playing.

The new April issue of Uncut, out now, features a fascinating look at the history of Sam Phillips’ Sun Studio, which brought the world Howlin’ Wolf, Jerry Lee Lewis, Roy Orbison and others. Elvis Presley was one future star who cut his debut recordings at the Memphis studio – and in this archive piece from the fourth ever issue of Uncut (September 1997), comedian Frank Skinner talks about the King’s early years and the huge impact the Sun recordings had on him.

Thanks to Damien Love for reminding me to blog about this. It's been on my radar for a couple of weeks, but it's only since Damien emailed me a Youtube link to a trailer earlier today that I've finally got something to write about.

They start with the tropical strum of “Buenos Aires Beach”, from their debut album Wagonwheel Blues, whose balmy unfolding might strike you as an inappropriate opener for a chilly night in Camden, far from the sun-kissed climes the song so breezily evokes.

Up to our necks in it here, finishing the first Uncut Ultimate Music Guide of 2012. Hopefully a good few of you will have now seen our relaunched new issue with Bowie on the cover: please let me know what you think, either in the Facebook Comments below or via Twitter - www.twitter.com/JohnRMulvey.

The writer of No Country For Old Men and The Road is back, but not quite as you might expect...

Some stats: it has been 27 years since the last Dexys album, and nine since they released two new songs ("Manhood" and "My Life in England") on a compilation album that coincided with their reunion tour.

One of those mornings walking to work when, in spite of 18,000 or whatever songs on my iPod, I couldn’t figure out what to play. It’s at that point I realised Joni Mitchell’s “Hejira” had become my last resort record; not my favourite, exactly (although I could make a stern case for it, for sure), but the one I can always rely on, whatever my mood or the circumstances.

First things first: you can grab this one for free right now, by heading over to http://natchmusic.tumblr.com. As you’ll see there from the Tumblr’s subtitle, this marvellous Steve Gunn/Black Twig Pickers session is the first in a series of “collaborative recordings from Black Dirt Studio”; Black Dirt being a facility in upstate New York that’s birthed a bunch of superb records in the past few years.