Among the multitude of underground micro-genres that have grown like bacilli these past few years, one of the most refined is ‘Modern Classical’. Ostensibly, much of the music that is sold under this pretext is a kind of evolved ambience, with compositional pretensions: a tidy hybrid of Gavin Bryars, Brian Eno and Erik Satie that is almost invariably pleasant, but which often seems to affect substance without actually delivering it.
I was reading the latest edition of Uncut last night, as I should, when I came across this quote from Kurt Vile, sat at the bottom of Louis Pattison’s review of “Smoke Ring For My Halo”. “It’s got this kind of wandering, mellow feel,” Vile says of his album. “We recorded a lot of rockers, but they just didn’t seem to fit.”
I posted this yesterday, but our blogs are misbehaving at the moment and it's seemed to have disappeared. So again: Bruce Springsteen, "Working On A Dream". Apologies for the day-old Obama stuff.
General mayhem here today: Uncut is moving office on Friday, so we're trying to finish the next issue while battalions of removal men swarm around us, emptying our cupboards and leaving great piles of magazines in their wake.
