Soul-saturated, heart-tugging, Memphis-celebrating offering from Greg Cartwright’s latest line-up... Fourteen years into their career, Reigning Sound show no signs of getting over it. You could drop in any one of their records and find the same qualities: three-minute garage-soul songs about broken hearts, dreams, regret and loss. Shattered has a stack of these sad and lovely offerings, all the work of Greg Cartwright, an inspired songwriter and possessor of a weatherbeaten, vulnerable voice. If there’s one thing Cartwright knows, it’s how to write a sad song and sing it till it hurts. Reigning Sound’s stunningly assured fifth studio album features a newish new line-up recruited by keyboard player, Dave Amels, the sole survivor from 2009’s Love And Curses. Mike Catanese, Benny Trokan and Mikey Post play with Amels in Brooklyn soul group The Jay Vons, and Shattered subsequently has an excellent, measured, grasp of soul, R&B and country-soul. The band knows exactly what to leave out – and that’s important, as Shattered was recorded on eight-track, leaving little room for embellishment. There’s more space, more air, than on Love And Curses, itself a far cry from 2004’s Too Much Guitar, an atypically claustrophobic release that buried Cartwright’s marvellous voice in tinny, psychotic guitar and which sounded more like one of Cartwright’s (many) side projects, punk-rock party band the Oblivians. Shattered opens with the rat-a-tat drums of “North Cackalacky Girl”, garage rock, with rumbling guitar, jaunty organ and defiant lyrics. “Let’s get on with the show!” shouts Cartwright, addressing the first of many women who slip through these songs like ghosts. Our first encounter is with a temptress - “Don’t make my heart your toy” - who can get his heart racing just “by the way you touch my hand”. That impish promise is already spent by “Never Coming Home”, gorgeous, chugging guitar-pop with heart-tugging strings in which Cartwright shows he has no fear of playing on emotions, embracing that plaintive side of pop, manipulating the heart but elevating the soul with a beautiful melody that could come from any decade. Amels’ whirling organ, thumping percussion and a sense of optimism drive “Falling Rain”, before the perfect country-soul of “If You Gotta Leave” brings “broken hearts”, a “whole lot of pain” and a barrel load of tears-in-beers sadness (pedal steel is by John Whittemore, who used to be Cartwright’s dentist). “You Did Wrong”, a pointed Doors-y shuffle with psychy guitar line and billowing organ has Cartwright chastising a friend – “You did wrong and now she’s found somebody new”, while on the acoustic “Once More” he’s almost crooning, the delivery giving depth to lyrics about eyes that “sparkle and shine”. “I’ve never loved… a girl… like this before,” he purrs, and you want to believe him even if you’ve lost track of which particular girl he’s singing about now. “My My”, picks up the pace, a Southern Rock jive about cars, girls and rock and roll. “I don’t claim to be lucky in love,” is Cartwright’s throaty cry – and even when he’s having success with the ladies he’s unsure about it - before we return to the warm Motown glow of “Starting New”. The wicked Mod strut of “Baby It’s Too Late”, the sole cover version, gives way to the swinging statement of “In My Dreams”. Amels’ organ provides subtle texture but everything is in thrall to the vocal, a hymn of praise to a girl of his dreams. “Drink my coffee, wash my face, put my heart back in its place…” sings this fragile Casanova, before the gospel lament of “I’m Trying (To Be The Man You Need)” sees Cartwright down on one knee, striving to be a better man and admitting he’ll fail. “Got no money, fancy clothes, but a true, true heart, I’ve got one of those,” he insists, channelling his inner man-child, the one who knows exactly what a woman doesn’t want to hear and sings it so intensely her stomach does backflips anyway. Peter Watts Q&A Greg Cartwright What’s different to Love And Curses? The line-up. I did an EP with this line-up about two years ago and that marked a big change. These guys are total in-the-pocket R&B players and they hit all those changes an R&B band would. We recorded on eight track, and the limitations also changed how I made the record. You have to make decisions up front about what you are going to put on each song. Before I’d cut the basic song and then add piano or tambourine, basically do whatever I wanted. Is every song a love song? In some, the nature of the song is veiled. So one is actually about the loss of loved ones, the way that as you get older people start to die. It’s a different love and loss, not of a lover, but of a person who completed you as a friend. Loss has always been a deep thread in my music. Sometimes you are singing about loss, and sometimes you blame people for that loss and sometimes you forgive them – these are the recurring themes. Tell me about “Baby It’s Too Late”. That’s a cover of a song by Shadder And The King Lears, a Memphis garage band that did a couple of songs before Shadder became a pastor. On my records I try to incorporate some lost Memphis nugget that I grew up with and will connect me to the Memphis heritage of music that I am trying to relate to. This music had a great impact on me and the root of it all is Memphis music. INTERVIEW: PETER WATTS

The past, present and future intertwine on the veteran’s latest effort... For writer/artists of a certain age, the sands of time can be like quicksand, sucking them under as they grasp at their past achievements. John Hiatt is one of the handful of exceptions to this entropic pattern; at age 61, he’s as prolific, expressive and energetic as ever, demonstrating that a gifted songwriter who’s dialed into the process of aging can continue to find fertile subject matter.   Hiatt hasn’t allowed himself to be trapped in the shadow of his 1987 classic Bring The Family, his inspired collaboration with Ry Cooder, Nick Lowe and Jim Keltner, which could’ve been the hellhound on his tail if he’d succumbed to an ever more desperate need to try and match it, like so many of his contemporaries; instead, he’s kept plugging away as an indie artist, taking life as it comes. His postmillennial output – nine albums in 14 years, each one of them with its own distinct character and brace of memorable songs – has actually outpaced his rate of productivity on several major labels in the first quarter century of his career.   Hiatt’s recent work has yielded some particularly impressive LPs. 2003’s Beneath This Gruff Exterior, produced by the late, great Don Smith (Petty, Wilburys) finds Louisiana slide wizard Sonny Landreth letting rip. Master Of Disaster (2005), had roots legend Jim Dickinson at the console and the North Mississippi All Stars, featuring Dickinson’s sons, providing the shit-kicking vibe. On 2008’s self-produced Same Old Man, a burnished, elegiac song cycle focused on the ups and downs of a long-term relationship, leading to some of the veteran artist’s most emotionally authentic performances.   Although Hiatt has been clean since 1985, leading a quiet life with his wife and kids outside of Nashville, recollections of his wild years have continued to provide him with grist for the songwriting mill. “Mistakes are to be highlighted,” he noted in 2008. “You can’t have the light without the dark.” That duality permeates the new Terms Of My Surrender. Its songs are blues-based reflections recalling the sauntering grooves of J.J. Cale, the gritty swamp rock of Tony Joe White and Bob Dylan’s Modern Times throughout. Hiatt keeps things close to the bone, using his touring band, with guitarist Doug Lancio doubling as producer, and basing the predominantly understated performances around his lived-in voice, acoustic guitar and harmonica.   In the middle of opening track “Long Time Comin’” Lancio unleashes thunderbolts with a powerfully evocative guitar solo that emphatically amplifies the intensity of the lyric, evoking Daniel Lanois’ atmospheric eruptions on Emmylou Harris’s Wrecking Ball. Hiatt goes down to the crossroads on the 12-bar blues “Face of God” and treks to Cold Mountain on the refracted murder ballad “Wind Don’t Have to Worry”, haunted by backing vocalist Brandon Young’s androgynous soprano wail. “Baby’s Gonna Kick” stays low to the ground, set off by a smoldering Lancio solo, while Hiatt channels Howlin’ Wolf on “Nothin’ I Love”, whose dissolute narrator bemoans his weaknesses – “I drink too much, I take too many pills/Ain’t too long before my mind gets ill” – before delivering the album’s most resonant line: “Nothin’ I love is good for me but you”.   “Old People” starts out with a jokiness redolent of Randy Newman but then takes on a certain gravitas – it seems the song’s road-hogging senior citizens are in a big hurry to slow down time. The existential poignancy in the title song is palpable, as Hiatt acknowledges his failures and regrets. “When the moon is rising/And the night is still”, he sings in a world-weary baritone, “Some of my delusions have the power to kill/Scared I’ll get what I deserve/Or maybe scared I won’t”.   There’s a passage in “Long Time Comin’” that crystallizes the album and Hiatt’s latter-day body of work as a whole: “I’ve sang these songs a thousand times, ever since I was young/It’s a long time comin’ and the drummer keeps drummin’, your work is never done”. This is one old timer who’s still in his prime, doing his damnedest to keep it going till it’s all used up. Bud Scoppa  Q&A John Hiatt To what do you attribute your longevity and your undiminished productivity? You hit a point where you start to feel that time’s running out and getting more precious, and I want to do the best work I can and as much as I can before I kick the bucket. That’s pretty much what it is. If you hang around and you don’t embarrass yourself, you’re in pretty good shape. You can even embarrass yourself, actually; I’ve done that. You’ve mixed things up from album to album in recent years, but there’s a consistent thematic thread running through all of them. It’s about the adventure, and the constant is me and what I do. It’s not the idea. Fuck the idea – I got a million of them. I like trying new things, and I like good music. I don’t have a notion other than let’s put some players together with somebody who knows their way around a studio and some arrangements, and we might make some great music. Your songs, and especially your love songs, are quite different from what a young man would write, and they seem as genuine as anything you’ve ever done. It’s the endurance of love, and also how broken it gets, and how broken we are – how broken I am, anyway – and how it just seems never-ending; the pieces breaking apart and being put back together somehow. INTERVIEW: BUD SCOPPA

The '80s angst classic reissued as a vinyl boxset... Visitors to this year’s Chelsea Flower Show may have encountered an unusual specimen stirring in the Carnivorous Plants section. Sarracenia ‘Matt Johnson’, a new hybrid plant named after the founder of The The, made its public debut last month at RHS Wisley with Johnson present. Johnson’s appearance amid the brightness and colour of Chelsea, posing for photographers with his botanical namesake, might have come as a surprise to those who remember him best as the earnest young mastermind behind his band’s early masterpiece, 1983’s Soul Mining. In fact, Johnson had already written four albums by the time he came to Soul Mining. While other boys his age skulked in their teenage bedrooms, Johnson refined his songwriting: there were two unreleased albums (See Without Being Seen and Spirits) before he finally released his bona fide debut album, Burning Blue Soul, on 4AD. His intended follow-up was called The Pornography Of Despair, which should give you an idea where his head was at. Instead he made Soul Mining. Released between post-punk and synth pop, and reflecting both, Soul Mining thrums with ideas, tension, and dread. Johnson’s enduring lyrical concerns – social alienation, political disillusionment and troubles of the heart – are all present and correct, but unlike the industrial/psychedelic adventuring of Burning Blue Soul, they are here given a glossier sheen. Johnson signed to CBS on the strength of early demos he recorded in New York – including a version of future single, “Uncertain Smile” – which suggested major-label confidence in Johnson’s growing abilities as a songwriter. Certainly, for an album of heavy themes, Soul Mining is musically surprisingly light. Despite its gloomy lyrical disposition (“My aspirations have shrivelled in the sun”, he tells us on the album’s opening track, “I’ve Been Waitin’ For Tomorrow (All My Life)”), the songs themselves are lush and cinematic, dressed in richly textured arrangements. Johnson’s key influences around this time were Cabaret Voltaire, Wire and This Heat; but he had been raised on John Lennon and Tim Buckley. Johnson’s vision for Soul Mining was to recast these classic, enduring antecedents in a new and experimental framework. The songs themselves oscillate between the political and the personal. Despite its surprisingly jaunty backing, “The Sinking Feeling” bristles with social injustice – “I’m just a symptom of the moral decay/That’s gnawing at the heart of the country”. Elsewhere, against keyboard stabs, “The Twilight Hour” pushes into relationship paranoia: “It’s now way past the hour she usually phones”. A welcome balance is provided by “This Is The Day” and “Uncertain Smile”, an uplifting number worth the price of admission alone: here a loveless, late-night brooding is disguised by a crisp guitar melody and gilded by Jools Holland’s sparkling piano solo. Although at this point, The The was essentially a one-man show, Johnson roped in several accomplices to help bring his vision to life: Holland, Orange Juice’s Zeke Manyika, synth pioneer Thomas Leer and Foetus’ JG Thirlwell (credited here as Frank Wants). Manyika’s African polyrhythms dominate “Giant”, but arguably the most critical collaborators here are Leer and Thirlwell, whose involvement explicitly connected Johnson’s songwriting craft to more leftfield sonic explorations. Although Soul Mining only peaked at 27 in the charts, the album nevertheless marked the start of a prolific period for The The. 1986’s follow-up, Infected, found Johnson further exploring a more leftfield musical agenda; it wasn’t until subsequent albums that he began to loosen up a little. He even formed a proper band with Johnny Marr for 1989’s Mind Bomb and Dusk (1992) and found himself, briefly, in the unlikely position of enjoying a Top 20 hit single. But Soul Mining is arguably Johnson’s defining work: ambitious, strange, exciting. And, 30-odd years on, remarkably fresh. Michael Bonner EXTRAS: Accompanied by Johnson’s sleeve notes and a remastered pressing of the album, the boxset also includes a second 12” of alternative versions and remixes. Of most interest are the original ‘New York’ mixes from the Mike Thorne sessions: “Uncertain Smile” is chunkier than the album version and features a sax solo rather than Holland’s piano, not forgetting “Perfect”, featuring David Johansen on harmonica. It’s rounded off by 12” remixes of “This Is The Day”, “Perfect” and “I’ve Been Waitin’ For Tomorrow (All Of My Life)”. "Somewhere between pure euphoria and terrible insecurity": An interview with The The's Matt Johnson

One of the many privileges and occasional disorientations of working for a monthly music mag is that we hear some music so far ahead of release that it can be easy to forget when the albums actually come out. So while the world of Ty Segall-related projects might have moved on here to the monstrous Wand album (out on Segall's God imprint in late August), it's instructive to remember that Segall's own "Manipulator", which we've had for a while, isn't out 'til then, either. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SPzVmgTaAS0 "Manipulator" is a sprawling, though never lethargic or indulgent, round-up of sorts, breathlessly cycling through Segall's various garage/glam/psych/grunge/Lennonish/hard rock modes. The more records he makes, though, the more I start to suspect that his hook-up with White Fence, "Hair" (which I wrote about here), might be his best, or at least my personal favourite. To wander back to my original point, a new White Fence album, "To The Recently Found Innocent", actually came out yesterday. A potent LA psych maven, Tim Presley is also one of the few musicians to have passed through The Fall and sustained a visible career afterwards. Recording at home as White Fence, Presley’s ad hoc, lo-fi approach has produced seven albums in the past four years, plus "Hair". Segall produces this time, in what constitutes the most hi-fidelity recording Presley has made since his time fronting Darker My Love, a terrific and slightly more orthodox bunch of janglers whose 2010 album, "Alive As You Are", I can especially recommend. Compared with those previous White Fence albums, there's a degree less fuzz, but Presley’s grasp of Nuggets beat, Paisley jangle and English psych arcana remains staggering - a reference to a “powdered wig” in “Sandra” is typically whimsical, and his remit now focuses more on early Who (“Like That”) and Kinks (“Arrow Man”). A risk of pastiche is never far away, but Presley staves it off with energy, songcraft, cunning and a renewed, relatively streamlined focus. Here's "Like That"… While I'm here today, another album I've liked a lot this summer has been the seventh joyous set from OOIOO. Ten years on from the Dionysian frenzy of their last proper album, "Seadrum/House Of Sun", the recording future of Japanese psych overlords the Boredoms remains unclear. And five years after OOIOO’s most recent release, it had started looking like drummer Yoshimi P-We’s side project was dormant, too. "Gamel", though, is an ecstatic return; a ritual jam in which the band’s post-punk angles take second place to their trance imperative. The ringing intensity of Javanese gamelan underpins Yoshimi’s manoeuvres this time out, though the nimbleness with which her band flit from one hypno-musical state to another – fleetingly, “Gamel Uma Umo” resembles Konono No 1 – is more impressive than ever. Their best, perhaps, since 2000’s "Gold And Green". A quick reminder at this point that the new issue of Uncut is out a week today, with a world exclusive cover story. More on that any day now, but inside I've written about Jack White, The Aphex Twin, Bitchin Bajas, Richard Thompson, The Grateful Dead & John Oswald, David Kilgour & The Heavy Eights, Noura Mint Seymali, Plastikman, Wolfgang Voigt, Girma Yifrashewa, Michael Chapman and Louis Armstrong. Busy… Follow me on Twitter: www.twitter.com/JohnRMulvey