Saturday evening at the last and finest mini-festival of late summer, and Minnesota’s most rock’n’roll Mormons can no longer turn the other cheek. Grinding to a halt between glacially slow riffs, LOW guitarist Alan Sparhawk makes an extraordinary appeal for audience sympathy.
There are a few records around the Uncut office at the moment that I think I could responsibly class as disappointing, not least the new Mercury Rev album, which ambitiously finds them trying to reinvent themselves as whimsical cosmic ravers.
A few years ago, I spent a good while being evangelical about something that was excruciatingly, and probably briefly, labelled ‘folktronica’. Before a bunch of rather insipid bands like Tunng seemed to take up that banner in earnest, I wrote a lot about the solo work of Kieran Hebden, who as Four Tet had moved through an electronic reconfiguring of ecstatic, cosmic jazz and was (circa 2001) building new music out of his computer and a bunch of arcane folk records.
The prospect of a new My Morning Jacket album in June is pretty tantalising (though I hope it's better than the fractionally disappointing "Z"). In the meantime, though, an excellent band from Seattle seem to be providing a very useful diversion.
