Another follow-up on a request this morning: a grapple with the great reverberant sprawl of “RTZ”, two CDs of Six Organs Of Admittance’s early work and marginalia.
With blogging, of course, you publish and be damned, then, once damned, you publish again. So it is with the Top 75 I unleashed on an unsuspecting world on Tuesday, only to soon realise that it was, basically, a bit of a cock-up.
80 per cent lame, idiotic or just pretentious music! That’s us, and a heartwarmingly lively response to yesterday’s blog on the Animal Collective’s new album, which I’m now starting to think is their best album. Someone on the blog wondered when this excellent band would make their definitive album: I think, with “Merriweather Post Pavilion”, they just have.
To the Vortex at midnight. Considering it’s still only March, I’ve seen some pretty remarkable gigs this year: Portishead, Vampire Weekend and the mighty Raconteurs last week; Peter Walker’s flamenco/raga masterclass; Neil Young soloing endlessly into the full glare of a Klieg light, and so on.
To the Vortex at midnight. Considering it’s still only May, I’ve seen some pretty remarkable gigs this year: Portishead, Vampire Weekend and the mighty Raconteurs last week; Peter Walker’s flamenco/raga masterclass; Neil Young soloing endlessly into the full glare of a Klieg light, and so on.
Out of London for a couple of days, and I'm welcomed back by a bunch of new records, including a new Sonic Youth EP which features their extensive - and terribly-received by most of the crowd except me, if memory serves - jam at All Tomorrow's Parties in 2000. It sounds terrific, happily.
I'm just playing an old record by the great folk/psych/raga guitarist Peter Walker, who has recently returned to action after nearly 40 years of, as far as I can tell from a quick circuit round the internet, practising flamenco guitar. Amazingly, Walker - one of the few survivors of John Fahey's generation of American primitives, and the man who provided musical accompaniment to Timothy Leary's early experiments - is playing just down the road from me in Dalston, North-East London tonight.
One of those professional obligation sessions in the Uncut office right now: we’re on Track Eight of the Panic At The Disco album, “Pretty. Odd”. Interest piqued by some frothing and slightly dubious suggestions that “Pretty. Odd” is a landmark of WEIRD! and AMBITIOUS! rock music, imagine our surprise when it seems to sound a bit like The Feeling and those shabby Beatles pastiches that Tears For Fears came up with in the ‘80s. We do, however, have new records by Paul Weller, Peter Walker and James Blackshaw.
