Features

Reading the odd review of BBC’s Electric Proms the other week, and the default concept of chucking in orchestra/choir to create an “event”, I started wondering whether the pairing of Grizzly Bear with the London Symphony Orchestra was such a good idea. After all, the songs on “Veckatimest”, even the ones with strings, are so airy and lacking in bombast. Sometimes, I find myself barely noticing the instrumentation, with the focus so intently on those ornate vocal melodies.

It perhaps says much about John Lennon – the callow 16-year old version, that is – that he’s really only a supporting character in his own biopic. This Lennon has yet to develop into the sardonic, quick-witted Beatle we know from interviews and newsreel footage. He’s not even quite the Lennon we saw in Ian Softley’s Backbeat, despite the events of that film taking place soon after Nowhere Boy finishes.

Guy Garvey's songwriting partner speaks to Uncut about the reissue Asleep In The Back

A quick heads-up on the next free Uncut CD today, which Allan has compiled (with a few suggestions from me) to go with the new issue’s Velvet Underground cover story.

Some stuff to mop up today, beginning with the excellent Glass Rock album on Ecstatic Peace! that’s been cropping up in a few of our playlists recently.

“Uncut never ceases to find ways to analyze music by dumping on anything American,” notes a correspondent on the still-entertaining Bob Dylan Christmas thread, which isn’t one of the more typical criticisms we hear levelled at the magazine. He also accuses me of using the word “Americana” “as if it’s a swear”. Wow.

Following our announcement that Mountains would be playing Club Uncut on November 5, we received an email the other day from a duo called Pausal who, to be honest, none of us had ever heard of.

One track today: the debut solo single by Chris Taylor from Grizzly Bear, which comes out on his own new label, Terrible, under the name of Cant. I’ve begun to assemble my albums of the year lists for the mag over the past week, and my personal favourite is looking likely to be “Veckatimest”, sad indie cliché that such a choice may make me.

A while ago, I wrote about Ducktails, one of the projects of Matthew Mondanile from New Jersey. Now, Woodsist is putting out the debut album by a band he plays guitar in, Real Estate, that might be if anything even better.

I can’t pretend that we’ve been playing the Bob Dylan album that much, but a bit of interesting Dylan news did surface this week; that a previously unreleased song from the “Bringing It All Back Home” sessions called “California” is set to appear, with characteristic weirdness, on something entitled “NCIS: The Official TV Soundtrack – Vol. 2”.