Features

Quickly today, because we’re finishing the next issue. Very much liking the Steve Hauschildt (from Emeralds) album at the moment.

Before we settled on the “Music That Made Bolan Boogie” CD to go with this month’s issue, we toyed with a compilation of new, glam-influenced music.

Pretty auspicious new arrival this morning, as you can see from Number 23 at the bottom of the list; sounding good, albeit 44 years too late.

Bit of a hack through the backlog today, beginning with a mild disappointment, Stephen Malkmus & The Jicks’ “Mirror Traffic”.

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”.