Features

I don’t mean to suggest “Let England Shake” is anything other than excellent, but I can’t help thinking that one supplementary reason why PJ Harvey’s latest album has had such laudatory reviews (better, mostly, than the equally good “White Chalk”) is that offers journalists so much to write about. “Let England Shake” is so full of imagery, content, allusion, it offers up boundless possibilities of meaning. Reductively, it has been called a protest album. Expansively, you can parse (or, maybe, project on) it for all manner of ideas about war and nationality.

I was hoping to include the new Wild Beasts album, “Smother”, in this week’s rundown, but it doesn’t seem to have turned up yet. Today, hopefully.

About ten years ago, I saw a terrific show at the Whitechapel Gallery in London by an artist called Janet Cardiff. The centrepiece of the exhibition, as I remember it, was a room in which were placed a large ring of speakers, playing Thomas Tallis’ choral piece, “Spem In Alium”, in such a way that each singer’s voice emanated from a separate point.

A few years ago, Cornershop’s somewhat capricious practices threw up a single called “Topknot”, fronted by a singer, Bubbley Kaur, who Tjinder Singh claimed that he’d discovered singing in a laundrette. A sort of hugely enjoyable bubblegum Punjabi folk song, it was trailed as the first track from a whole album of Cornershop/Bubbley Kaur collaborations.

A weekend after Radiohead's “The King Of Limbs” came out, it occurs to me that there’s an interesting experiment to be done sometime about how our responses change to a record over time. Maybe we should do a real-time live blog run-through of the album every Friday for the next six months and see how opinions evolve?

OK we're downloading "King Of Limbs" now, and I think we're going to have a go at liveblogging it as we go. Join in,won't you?

Really seems churlish not to join in with today's shenanigans. Judging by this, looking like justifiable use of hype.

Yet another period of quietness to apologise for, though I do have the excuse this week of having been away working in the States. More about that later, and, hopefully, some more proper blogs next week. Maybe we should start with Radiohead and “King Of Limbs”, do you think?

Hiss Golden Messenger Slaughtered Lamb, London “I’ll do my best to put you in a trance here,” says Michael Taylor, aka Hiss Golden Messenger, as he tweaks and tunes his guitar at the start of tonight’s Club Uncut show. This is Taylor’s third London show in a week, including an in-store performance at Rough Trade on Saturday. Clearly, he’s on a roll.

Finishing the issue, so have to be quick today. It all goes a bit early ‘90s towards the bottom of the list this week. Nice to dig out the Suntanama records from about a decade ago, though, prompted by the discovery that Dave Shuford/D Charles Speer figured in their lineup.