Features

The past few days I’ve been reading, on Rob Young’s recommendation, Alexandra Harris’ Romantic Moderns, an excellent survey of how British artists and writers in the mid-20th Century tried to reconcile a modernist impulse with the residual lure of English cultural traditions.

Apologies for the lengthy radio silence: a lot of hassle distracting me from blogs last week, not least the small matter of Uncut upping sticks and relocating to the Ninth Floor of the Blue Fin Building. Amidst all the crates, though, some pretty significant new records have turned up. Take a look at this lot…

Spent the past few hours hoping against hope that the unconfirmed stories weren't true... [youtube]Zw5ztuhEat4[/youtube] ...

Some biggish 2011 releases rolling in now, including one which I may draw a discreet veil over. I’m trying, too, to check out a few of your recommendations, following the Date Palms revelation.

As I mentioned on Friday, I’m indebted to David for turning me onto this album by Date Palms. Quickly, it reminds me of a bunch of my favourite music - Alice Coltrane, Terry Riley, Pandit Pran Nath, Cluster, Sun Araw, Brightblack Morning Light, PG Six – while combining the influences into something relatively original.

Fans of The Fall are, as a rule, hardy beasts. Complaint may come naturally to them, but then so does loyalty. John Peel’s famous encomium, “They are always different, they are always the same,” is the perpetual excuse for their favourite band, which disregards a certain erosion of Mark E Smith’s charms.

Lots of goodness to start the year today, not least the new Low and Eternal Tapestry albums. Thanks, too, to David M, who tipped me off yesterday about an Oakland duo called Date Palms. Playing their Myspace right now and feeling it very much indeed.

Thanks, once again, to all of you who submitted your Top Tens of 2010 to the blog at the end of the year. I’ve now applied the dark mathematics and come up with a Top 50 from them, which provides an interesting - healthy, to be honest - contrast to my own list. The winner was ahead of the pack by a mile, incidentally…

Happy new year: I trust everyone had some kind of decent break. I read Robert Byron on Tibet (for climatic context, possibly), watched Robinson In Ruins, played a fair bit of Pharoah Sanders and The Watersons, and rediscovered that a body clock wrecked by parenthood can be very useful during an Ashes series.

Last blog of the year, I suspect, so I thought it’d be useful to post my whole hundred in one place: apologies for the half-arsed obligation to get extra traffic which compelled me to post it in chunks, at least initially.