From a British music biz perspective, it’s hard to imagine anything else going on this week beyond the small matter of that Coldplay record. This morning, though, a sobering corrective arrived in my inbox. In America, the email announced, “Lil Wayne has broken Mariah Carey’s record for the highest opening album sales of the year. He has sold in one day what Mariah sold in her entire week.” That’s 420,000 sales, incidentally; something for Chris Martin, Guy Hands and their competitive chums to aim for, I guess.
I know this is going to sound a bit churlish, but is it wrong to expect a very good band to really extend themselves? I ask because, for the past week or so, I've been playing the new Super Furry Animals album most days. It's lovely, without a doubt. But for some reason, it leaves me fractionally disappointed - as if them coming up with another 11 fine songs is somehow not quite good enough.
I've been promising to write about this Robert Wyatt album for quite a while now, I'm aware. But it's been hard to blog about this one. Not because of any problems with the music - it's wonderful, actually. The problem I'm finding is that listening to "Comicopera" is a kind of immersive experience, so much so that it's hard to come out of it with a critical angle.
I won’t be seeing Dylan on his UK tour until Sunday at Wembley Arena, so I asked Damien Love to be a guest blogger and review the show for us. Damien is a veteran Uncut contributor, the author of a great biography of Robert Mitchum and a longstanding Dylan fan.
I'm just getting my head around the new Elliott Smith compilation, and there's a lot to take in. "New Moon" features 24 songs stretched over two CDs, dating from the mid '90s. Ostensibly, I guess they're demos; mostly Smith plus acoustic guitar recorded without fuss at a variety of basements in the Portland area. But the clarity and quality is obviously stronger. Like everything Smith released in his lifetime, these are stealthy, insidious songs that are worth living with.
