Björk, Nas, the French House music scene and a beguiling tribute to the work of Alan Lomax are among the highlights of this year's BFI London Film Festival. Watch the trailers below.
Among my post last week, I received a nice care package from Ace Records that included one quite weird Duke Ellington album ("My People"); Volume 3 of their "Where Country Meets Soul" series (I cannot recommend Ralph ''Soul'' Jackson's version of ''Jambalaya'' highly enough); and, maybe best of all, "Cracking The Cosimo Code", a collection of extraordinary music originating from Cosimo Matassa's New Orleans studio in the 1960s.
Thanks for all the nice feedback about the Liam Hayes/Plush piece I wrote earlier in the week. Lots of other good new arrivals in the list here, and you could do worse than start off by listening to the Cool Ghouls from San Francisco, especially if you're interested in the Allah-Las, the Ty Segall axis, Nuggets ad nauseam and so on.
This week, Thurston Moore announced further details of his new solo album, The Best Day, featuring former Sonic Youth drummer Steve Shelley and My Bloody Valentine’s Debbie Googe. To whet your appetite for the new tracks, here’s a piece from Uncut’s December 2006 issue (Take 115) – judging by this, perhaps The Best Day will sound like a cross between John Coltrane, the Ramones and Yes…
After last week’s Best Albums Of 2014 roundup/provocation, here’s the first proper playlist of the year; with, as you’ll see, a few auspicious new arrivals.
To get to the Clyde Auditorium - the 3,000-seat venue crouched on the riverbank beside the SECC, which Glaswegians only ever refer to as The Armadillo - you have to traverse a long, wormy, weather-beaten covered walkway that bridges a motorway.
As you may have seen, this week’s NME features the 2013 edition of their 500 Greatest Albums Of All Time. For this one, they also accepted votes from a bunch of the mag’s alumni, including me, so I thought it’d be an easy, albeit self-indulgent, blog to reproduce my Top 50 albums here.
Seeing as how Matthew E White and his band are on tour in the UK this week (I’m seeing him play in London tomorrow), it seemed a good time to post the feature about my visit to Richmond a couple of months ago. I’ve put a few links to stuff in here, too, so you can get a taste of the really interesting music coming out of the scene that revolves around White. Long read, this one…
