Features

Sad news this morning, with the announcement of Dory Previn’s death at the age of 86. The first thing I came across this morning at home was a useful comp from a few years back, “The Art Of Dory Previn”, which works well as a primer to this eccentric, wise and mostly undervalued singer-songwriter.

After spending last weekend catching up with what seems like a veritable deluge of great new music, I had a yen for some old favourites this weekend, among them two albums by the cult singer-songwriter, Paul Siebel, Woodsmoke & Oranges and Jack-Knife Gypsy.

A quick video to carry us through the weekend. I've been playing the new Starving Weirdos album, "Land Lines", for a few weeks now.

I was playing a new record the other day that was, to all intensive purposes, mediocre American indie-rock; maybe with a touch of mediocre American post-rock. Uneventful enough, you might imagine, except for the fact that a constant barrage of overcomplicated arrangements – shooting for some kind of avant-garde audacity, I guess - made it actively annoying rather than merely nondescript.

Trying hard to disregard the fact that one record here has possibly irritated me more than anything I’ve played for a while, another nice list this week. Second Jack White track out is another keeper, and the Ililta! 12, especially, is really growing on me.

A little over a month into 2012 and great new albums seem to be a-popping up all over the shop, something arriving in the post every day almost that either thrills or beguiles, demanding our attention and more often than not handsomely rewarding it. Leonard Cohen’s Old Ideas was rightly applauded in last month's Uncut, and in the current issue similar praise is lavished on Lambchop’s Mr M, which reminds us why we have loved them for so long and also what it was in the first place that got us so excited about Kurt Wagner’s Nashville country-soul collective.

A strange night at St Giles-In-The-Fields with Tim Hecker, which turned out to be something more like a real-time sound installation rather than a concert. This, I guess, is not a new problem with organ recitals: Hecker is sat in the organ loft, playing the church’s venerable instrument while the audience sit below, with their backs to him, in complete darkness, looking at the altar, and the silhouettes of two large speaker stacks.

For the past couple of years, I’ve been writing a Wild Mercury Sound column in the print edition of Uncut; a slightly awkward thing that I’m genuinely happy to be done with.

"We came to symbolise the start of a whole new way of thinking…"

A bit of a misunderstanding with regard to this album from Hush Arbors and Arbouretum, “Aureola”, which at first looked to be a collaboration between two acts I’ve written a fair amount about over the years.