Features

In one of the best scenes in The Wrestler, Mickey Rourke's Randy and Marisa Tomei's Cassidy are propping up a bar, discussing the generally woeful state of modern music. They concur that Guns N' Roses, Motley Crue and Def Leppard set the bar astronomically high back in the day and, grumpy spoilsport that he was, "that Cobain pussy" pretty much ruined it all. The Nineties "sucked". And the Eighties? "Man, best shit ever!"

There’s a good line from James Petralli in the biog which accompanies “Fits”, the new White Denim album. “We set the tempos high,” he says, “and set off.”

Pretty weird mix this week, as I look down this list, not all of it fantastic. If I can break the usual protocols here, though, the Johnny Cash remix is really awful, and I speak as a Snoop Dogg fan. Given that “I Walk The Line” looked like the most interesting thing on the Cash remix album that turned up the other day, I suspect we might have found the worst record of 2009 already – though I must confess I don’t have the moral courage to check and make sure.

Maruga Booker turned up at Woodstock in 1970 as Tim Hardin’s bongo player. But at some point during the weekend, he wandered into a temporary ashram and came out converted by the Swami Satchidananda.

My favourite single track of 2009 thus far, as I mentioned in last week’s Boredoms “Super Roots 10” blog, is the Lindstrøm mix of that band’s “Ant 10”. Good news, then, that the Lindstrøm & Prins Thomas’ new album turned up a few days later.

Perhaps as a response to the American psych-folk scene, over the past few years there’ve been a handful of British bands who’ve sought to channel the late-‘60s/early-‘70s folk-rock scene. Most of them, unfortunately, have been more or less worthy but misfiring. Trembling Bells, though, are a big exception.

Hopefully, you’ve been following our updating playlist on the brand new Uncut Twitter. It seems to be working now so that, when I post a new blog, it automatically puts a link on Twitter. Quite handy, perhaps.

A few weeks ago, I received an email from America that mostly consisted of an encomium from Michael Gira on the subject of his newest signing to Young God, James Blackshaw. I’m more of an admirer than a fan of Gira’s music, and not all of the music on his label has worked for me; Akron/Family, for instance, after countless attempts remain mystifyingly unappealing.

That’s DOOM in capitals, by the way, as the necessarily didactic press release is keen to inform us. Before he was DOOM, though, he was merely MF DOOM, or Viktor Vaughn, or Zev Love X or, briefly and memorably, a three-headed alien dinosaur called King Geedorah.

A nice surprise, last week, when Julian Cope sent over his new double vinyl album, “Kiss My Sweet Apocalypse”. A surprise, because I thought I might have been blackballed after struggling with some of the attitudes that came to the surface on last year’s musically excellent “Black Sheep”.