Features

Just remembered today that I should post this: my column from the last issue of the mag, devoted to Wooden Shjips and Ripley's awesome spin-off, Moon Duo. The new issue of Uncut is out this week, though my column on Sir Richard Bishop was necessarily spiked to make room for the Alex Chilton tribute; I'll run that here in the next day or two.

Very much enjoying the Blues Explosion comp and the Trembling Bells second, which I’ll endeavour to write about early next week, Also, yes, the Ariel Pink stuff is great in a generally unnerving way: one track I have reminds me powerfully of, well, Christopher Cross.

From the lofty vantage point of SE1, I haven’t heard much buzz from South By Southwest this year, or at least very little in the way of real surprises and completely new discoveries (If you know different, of course, please share).

Around the release of his last studio album, "Beware", Will Oldham embarked on a small project. According to the writer Kelefa Sanneh, in a New Yorker profile published in January 2009, Oldham intended, “To promote the album with singles, a photo shoot, and a handful of interviews, if only to prove that record promotion doesn’t really work, at least not for him.”

A funny year for music so far, personally speaking. It seems that, despite the many albums I’ve liked, there have been a good few that’ve been, one way or another, kind of disappointing: albums I’ve looked forward to very much, then neurotically restrained myself from writing about, due to my self-imposed rule about negative criticism generally wasting time and space. There’s still too much stuff to enthuse about, after all.

Apologies for the spotty service here recently: deadlines, deaths and a mildly debilitating virus have meant there hasn’t been much time to look after the blog in the past week or so.

Quite a good run for the Kranky label of late, with a bunch of albums I’ve enjoyed a lot from Ken Camden, Jonas Reinhardt and Disappears. For the past week or so, though, I’ve been really taken with “Endless Falls” by Loscil, discreetly asserting itself as maybe the pick of the bunch.

Quite a lot of major action in the playlist this week, but before we get there, a quick plug for two Club Uncut shows in London we’ve just had confirmed.

A couple of neat psych-ish things today that I’ve been meaning to write about for a while. First up, Coconuts, an Australian group relocated to New York, whose scouring dirges make them one of the more incongruously-named I’ve come across recently.

I’m sure most of you have heard the grim news about Mark Linkous in the past few days. I can’t really add much to the memorials that have accumulated about him and his music; on the odd occasion when I met him – all well over a decade ago now – he always came across as a gentle and reserved man, who told harrowing personal stories but at the same time didn’t seem to give that much away about what he was actually like. I have, though, dug out this Sparklehorse piece I wrote for NME in 1996. As is so often the way of these things, it’s hard not to see an awful poignancy in his last couple of quotes.