White Denim, as their frenetic live shows would suggest, are not a band much given to idling. Last summer, while the master tapes of their scintillating third album D were withering on the reel, awaiting record company approval of a reworked song that the band never wanted on the album in the first place, the Texan crack shots decided to use their downtime productively.
“I’m tired,” Josh T. Pearson says. “It’s been a long life. I don’t even know what day of the week it is...” Someone in the crowd tells him the day and the date. “Friday the 13th?” he wryly muses, as if his life has been full of nothing but such days of potential reckoning in the ten long years since his band Lift To Experience released their fearsome album, The Texas-Jerusalem Crossroads, and soon after blew apart. That record imagined humanity making its last stand in Texas during the apocalypse. Pearson’s eventual follow-up Last Of The Country Gentlemen considers a recent relationship in similar terms. There’s the rare sense tonight of every bitter, funny, helpless word mattering, because they’re being pulled up from a harrowing place and being relived on stage.
This year's London Film Festival kicks off next Wednesday (October 14) for 2 weeks. As usual, there's a ton of UNCUT friendly films screening, plus a particularly strong selection of music documentaries. So, for those of you umming and ahhing about what you might go and see, let us make some suggestions...
Bit of a catch-up, today. These are a bunch of records that’ve figured in a good few Uncut playlists, and that I’ve been meaning to write about for weeks – in some cases months – but haven’t managed to tackle properly. In a bid to tidy up a little, here’s a fast round-up of some worthwhile stuff.
