Page 63 – UNCUT

Uncut’s Best New Albums Of 2022

Uncut

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19th December 2022

50 DRIVE-BY TRUCKERS Welcome 2 Club XIII ATO Making a sharp detour from the band’s last two records, which were steeped in politics and protest, the Truckers’ 14th was named after an insalubrious Muscle Shoals bar where founding members Patterson Hood and Mike Cooley got their break. Wha...

50 DRIVE-BY TRUCKERS
Welcome 2 Club XIII
ATO

Making a sharp detour from the band’s last two records, which were steeped in politics and protest, the Truckers’ 14th was named after an insalubrious Muscle Shoals bar where founding members Patterson Hood and Mike Cooley got their break. What followed was a vivid acclamation of their 37 years together, from dive bars in nowhere towns, to drives through the South’s empty backroads, sung over characteristically walloping Southern rock.

49 BILL CALLAHAN
DRAG CITY

This album’s cast of boll weevils, coyotes and dead horses may have appeased Smog fans who’ve felt Bill’s been a bit too upbeat in recent years. But the likes of “First Bird” and “Natural Information” were still infused with a homely bliss, lifted by horns and harmonies; Callahan was just sagely pointing out that reality – or – is a business of extremes, for which his songs ensure we’re all better prepared.

48 CARSON McHONE
Still Life
LOOSE

A vivid presence on the Austin music scene for nearly a decade, McHone’s ambitious third album felt like a widening of her acoustic roots. Adding swishy R&B, some Southern soul, rockier moments and even strings to the mix, McHone’s unsentimental tales of emotional attachment and release proved remarkably resilient to the colourful embellishments she and producer (and now husband) Daniel Romano brought to them.

47 RICH RUTH
I Survived, It’s Over
THIRD MAN

A versatile Nashville player, Michael Rich Ruth can make Fripped–out ambience as well as the crunchy Southern rock he cranks out as touring guitarist for SG Goodman. Here he simply did both at once, before inviting a bunch of free-jazz musicians to exorcise their demons or summon their deities over the top. The result was a hugely satisfying album of deep, celestial jam-rock: never indulgent, always exhilarating.

46 BJÖRK
Fossora
ONE LITTLE INDEPENDENT

Following the heady bliss of 2017’s Utopia, Björk fell back to earth with a bang on her 10th album, returning to Reykjavik and confronting the loss of her mother, the joy of becoming a grandmother, and the strange, rhizomatic magic of mushrooms. Fossora was the sound of a sonic adventurer striking out into her own musical cosmos, composing for bass clarinets while raving through lockdown to the pulverising beats of Indonesian gabba.

45 ALDOUS HARDING
Warm Chris
4AD

The New Zealander has described herself as a “song actor” and her fourth album of elliptical art songs, produced once again by PJ Harvey mainmain John Parrish, found her taking on a starry array of new roles, notably Lou Reed on “Tick Tock”, Neil Young on “She’ll Be Coming Round The Mountain” and Vashti Bunyan on “Staring At Henry Moore”. But with distinctive poise she drew these disparate voices into her skewed, surreal, subtly subversive universe.

44 MAKAYA McCRAVEN
In These Times
INTERNATIONAL ANTHEM

Though renowned as an inventive jazz drummer, McCraven is also a talented composer, arranger and programmer. Those skills came to the fore on his sixth album, recorded piecemeal over the course of seven years with a cast of Chicago luminaries but always sounding like a unified work: the lush, sweeping visions of Charles Stepney or David Axelrod allied to the addictive lollop of J Dilla’s beats.

43 REVELATORS SOUND SYSTEM
Revelators 3
7d03d

MC Taylor is best known as the singer-songwriter with Hiss Golden Messenger, but Revelators Sound System – a collective formed with Spacebomb’s house bassist Cameron Ralston – paints from a very different sonic palette. Their four-track debut album came swathed in hypnotic modal grooves, astral jazz, expansive orchestral funk and dubby ambience; a meditative and joyfully unrestrained experience.

42 JANA HORN
Optimism
NO QUARTER

The Texas songwriter had originally recorded these 10 tracks in 2018, releasing them privately during lockdown, until No Quarter (Joan Shelley, Chris Forsyth) gave the music a wider release this year. While sleepy horns and electric pianos dominate, perhaps Optimism’s strongest resonance was with Joni Mitchell’s Song To A Seagull – another intrepid record that stripped out emotional clutter, spectrally aware that more profound forces might be at play.

41 ROLLING BLACKOUTS COASTAL FEVER
Endless Rooms
SUB POP

Over the last few years, this Melbourne quintet have built up a formidable reputation for their frenetic jangle, bringing additional heft to the uptight sound of The Feelies and early REM. Their third album found them slowing down (a little), stretching out, opening up their windows and considering the bigger picture on songs like “Tidal River” and “Blue Eyed Lake”. Not country-rock exactly, but compelling rock about the country.

40 TY SEGALL
“Hello, Hi”
DRAG CITY

Foregrounding the acoustic guitar, as opposed to the overdriven/synthy sounds of his previous few albums, the finely crafted arrangements of “Hello, Hi” had an almost courtly feel, as if Ty was a medieval troubadour traversing the land dispensing hard truths: “You can’t erase the pain again”, he sang on “Blue”. “It lives inside you”. The burst of duelling saxes on “Saturday, Pt 2” was another highlight.

39 VIEUX FARKA TOURÉ ET KHRUANGBIN
Ali
NIGHT TIME STORIES/DEAD OCEANS

Despite their cosmopolitan sound, Khruangbin are cautious collaborators, keen to retain an air of minimalist mystery. But Malian guitar scion Vieux Farka Touré smoked them out of their Texas barn with a proposal to cover some of his dad’s legendary desert blues. Other bands might have tried too hard to please, but Khruangbin simply set the controls to simmer and allowed the flavours to infuse. A collaboration of rare understanding and easygoing charm.

38 COURTNEY MARIE ANDREWS
Loose Future
FAT POSSUM

“Will I ever love again?” Andrews asked on 2020’s break-up document, Old Flowers – and subsequently, Loose Future found the Phoenix native exploring ideas of freedom and renewal. Andrews brought characteristic diary-entry candour and reflective qualities to this latest work, while producer Sam Evian (Big Thief, Cass McCombs) and guests such as Grizzly Bear’s Chris Bear and Bonnie Light Horseman’s Josh Kaufman kept the groove loose and open.

37 BITCHIN BAJAS
Bajascillators
DRAG CITY

An album that sounded a lot like an aural manifestation of its hypnotic cover image, depicting the interlocking cogs of some giant cosmic machine, revolving in stately harmony. Shedding the faintly pranksterish air of previous outings, Bitchin Bajas ascended to minimalist heaven on a luxurious carpet of vibraphone, woodwind, synths and soft motorik drums. Systems music for romantics.

36 SG GOODMAN
Teeth Marks
VERVE

Raised in a Southern Baptist crop-farming family in rural Kentucky, Shaina Goodman’s second album deftly highlighted the diversity of an oft-pigeonholed part of the USA. The songs – a potent mix of country-rock and soul-bearing ballads – were rich studies in smalltown complexities, including opioid addiction, religious hypocrisy, one-night stands and queer love. Such progressive subjects and Goodman’s ability to channel decades of Southern music confirmed her singular vision.

35 PANDA BEAR & SONIC BOOM
Reset
DOMINO

Everybody needs a reset once in a while, and Pete “Sonic Boom” Kember found his when rediscovering his collection of early rock’n’roll singles. Enlisting Lisbon neighbour Noah “Panda Bear” Lennox, they embarked on a fruitful new project, building new songs around loops culled from the likes of The Troggs and The Everly Brothers. The result was a kind of innocent pop psychedelia, eerie yet uplifting – a warm embrace from a friendly ghost.

34 DANIEL ROSSEN
You Belong There
WARP

With Grizzly Bear very much on hiatus, Rossen finally stepped out this year with his debut solo album, a sparkling chamber-folk triumph. To realise these 10 songs, driven by tangles of weightless melody, he rediscovered the double bass and taught himself all manner of woodwind instruments; at the core, though, were his fluid, fingerpicked 12-string and classical guitars and ageless voice. The result was as hallucinatory and elemental as the New Mexico desert Rossen now calls home.

33 SUDAN ARCHIVES
Natural Brown Prom Queen
STONES THROW

Imagine if Megan Thee Stallion played the violin, or if Erykah Badu started making trap beats on her laptop. Even that would barely begin to describe the strange and alluring world created by the inimitable Brittany Parks on her second album as Sudan Archives, fusing Afrocentric neo-soul with tough, confessional rap. It was at once both fiercely contemporary and strangely out-of-time, both ethereal and in-your-face, on memorable tunes like “Home Maker” and “Selfish Soul”.

32 HORACE ANDY
Midnight Rocker
ON-U SOUND

For decades one of the most distinctive and transporting voices in reggae, Horace Andy had arguably not made a truly essential solo album since his 1972 debut Skylarking… until he teamed up with the estimable Adrian Sherwood for this year’s Midnight Rocker. Like Andy’s voice itself, the album was both sugar-sweet and street tough, especially on an inspired reworking of “Safe From Harm” by his old muckers Massive Attack.

31 KEVIN MORBY
This Is A Photograph
DEAD OCEANS

Morby’s previous album, 2020’s Sundowner, saw him whittle his freewheeling folk-pop into scratchy, lo-fi musings. This swift follow-up was epic in sound and vision, a spirited record that tackled big themes: life, death, love and family (the album was inspired by his father’s heart attack, which he survived). Joined by a supporting cast including Erin Rae, Cassandra Jenkins and Makaya McCraven, Morby’s symphonic Americana felt like a valuable next step.

30 SPIRITUALIZED
Everything Was Beautiful
BELLA UNION

As Jason Pierce’s voice has grown audibly frailer, his music has become ever more emphatic. Recorded across 11 different studios with a teeming cast of musicians, singers and bell-ringers, Everything Was Beautiful is perhaps Spiritualized’s most straightforwardly joyful album to date. “I would be a unicorn for you”, croaked Pierce, amid a fusillade of strings and brass that suggested anything was possible.

29 JULIA JACKLIN
Pre Pleasure
TRANSGRESSIVE

Though Julia Jacklin’s third album of lucid confessionals featured production courtesy of The Weather Station’s Marcus Paquin and strings by Owen Pallett, it saw her striking her most personal note yet. Whether remembering a childhood as a Catholic schoolgirl “in a leotard and technicolour dream coat” or planning for a precarious future (“please stop smoking/I want your life to last a long time”) on “Be Careful With Yourself”, Pre Pleasure confirmed Jacklin as the most acute voice of her generation.

28 THE COMET IS COMING
Hyper-Dimensional Expansion Beam
IMPULSE!

To be fair, their band name did warn us. So while the trio’s previous albums of synth/sax synergy allowed for a certain degree of cosmic reflection, this one felt like sitting astride an asteroid as it hurtled inexorably towards Earth. Often closer to big beat or techno than jazz, the likes of “Pyramids” and “Atomic Wave Dance” burned with a manic urgency, driven by Shabaka Hutchings’ increasingly possessed sax wails.

27 BLACK COUNTRY, NEW ROAD
Ants From Up There
NINJA TUNE

A big statement from a young band, pursuing a doomed internal monologue through a series of expanding musical adventures that veered from chamber-pop euphoria to post-rock desolation. It was hard to separate the album’s emotional intensity from the news that frontman Isaac Wood quit the band for the sake of his mental health in the week of its release. Hopefully, the acclaim it received provided him with some solace.

26 JOCKSTRAP
I Love You Jennifer B
ROUGH TRADE

After a string of stellar EPs, expectations were high for the Guildhall-schooled duo’s debut album, and they didn’t disappoint. On …Jennifer B they conjured a sumptuous pop multiverse, where songs glitch through genres, from dubstep to bhangra, torch song to trip-hop, often within the space of a single verse. Taylor Skye’s arrangements are dazzling, but it’s the emotional core of Georgia Ellery’s voice and furiously frank, funny songs that really hits home.

25 CASS McCOMBS
Heartmind
ANTI –

If all McCombs’ records contain fathoms to explore, Heartmind – his 10th – was one of the deepest. It was a departure from the glossy explorations of the American psychedelic rock tradition on 2016’s Mangy Love and 2019’s Tip Of The Sphere, returning to the lo-fi experimentation of his earlier records, but with a diverse stylistic brief that ranged from crunchy Crimson rock to electric folk, full-on cumbia and even McCombs’ own version of spiritual jazz.

24 DRY CLEANING
Stumpwork
4AD

A rapid evolution from Dry Cleaning’s startlingly spartan 2021 debut, expanding their sound in every direction while retaining a wired post-punk economy that best suited Florence Shaw’s everyday surrealism. Tortoises escaped and shoe organisers arrived, an imperfect distraction from the horrors of life in the 2020s. “Things are shit but they’re gonna be OK/And I’m gonna see the otters…”

23 ARCTIC MONKEYS
The Car
DOMINO

The Monkeys’ 2023 tour of British football stadia sold out within minutes. And then there was this: a luxuriously downbeat album of romantic yearning, high-life burnout and expensive regret, slathered in Scott Walker strings and exquisitely mannered ’70s guitar solos. Alex Turner’s unerring lyrics made the prospect of “Jet Skis On The Moat” and “anything goes on the marble stairs” sound fatally decadent.

22 HURRAY FOR THE RIFF RAFF
Life On Earth
NONESUCH

Locked down in New Orleans during the pandemic, Alynda Segarra looked to nature and psychedelic exploration for inspiration. As a consequence, Life On Earth felt wildcrafted from sources including Congolese activists, mystic ethnobotanical tomes and a local century-old tree turned art installation. Despite the heaviness of her subjects, Segarra brought a lightness of touch to her songs, giving the album a loose, even celebratory air.

21 BLACK MIDI
Hellfire
ROUGH TRADE

The London trio’s third album felt like the culmination of all their work to date, a quite astounding mix of heavy prog, hardcore fury and cabaret grotesques. There was a lot to explore in this loose concept album – war, brothels and central character Tristan Bongo often popping up in the maelstrom like fragments from a Pynchon novel – but it was all delivered with a healthy sense of irony and a charming awareness of its own ridiculousness.

20 KURT VILE
(Watch My Moves)
VERVE/VIRGIN

The switch-up to a major label prompted Vile’s sharpest set of tunes for a while, but without straitjacketing his digressive, let-it-all-hang-out charm. “Pain ricochetin’ in my brain”, he drawled with typically disarming candour, before listing all the things that make it better – baby red maples, Neil Young, feedback and inventing dances for his kids.

19 SHARON VAN ETTEN
We’ve Been Going About This All Wrong
JAGJAGUWAR

Ahead of her sublime sixth album, erstwhile Jersey Girl Van Etten relocated with her new family to California, but struggled to find domestic bliss. WBGATAW is a lockdown diary of darkness and doomscrolling, punctuated by eerie moments of early-morning calm (“Darkness Fades”) and spells of reckless, heady abandon (“Mistakes”). But on “Darkish” she found hard-won peace of mind with the thought: “It’s not dark, it’s just darkish, inside of me”.

18 GWENNO
Tresor
HEAVENLY

While not a tribute to the famous Berlin techno club – Tresor is also Cornish for treasure – Gwenno Saunders’ third made use of eldritch electronic textures and gently propulsive rhythms to enhance her bewitching folk songs. As with her choice to sing in her father’s native dialect, the music felt like it was drawing on ancient traditions to create a dreamy alternate future.

17 FONTAINES DC
Skinty Fia
PARTISAN

From valiant outsiders to rock’n’roll heroes, Fontaines DC have learned to be true to themselves. And never more so than on this, their third album, which found them relocating from Dublin to London and digging deep into their feelings of dislocation, as well as their complicated relationship with identity and their homeland. A rich stew; no wonder Skinty Fia – a Gaelic expression of exasperation – felt more measured and reflective than its predecessors.

16 RICHARD DAWSON
The Ruby Cord
WEIRD WORLD

Rounding off a vague trilogy begun by Peasant and 2020, the Newcastle songwriter looked to the distant future on this ambitious, complex epic. Across 80 minutes – half of which was taken up by one song, “The Hermit” – Dawson depicted a discomfiting VR world in songs as engrossing as an open-world video game. The emotional highlight was “Museum”, set a “dozen centuries since humans disappeared”, its guitar, harp and violin gradually subsumed under electronic synths and beats.

15 LAMBCHOP
The Bible
CITY SLANG

“Real trouble to exist”, murmured Kurt Wagner as gospel singers pled for “mercy”. The Bible found the Lambchop leader at a low ebb, piecing himself back together via wry fragments of memory and dreams – “I broke into Hank Williams’ casket” – amid a staggeringly rich, deconstructed musical landscape that touched on everything from old-time balladry to contemporary R&B. Their 16th album, and up there with their best.

14 BETH ORTON
Weather Alive
PARTISAN

It’s always a pleasure to hear from Norfolk’s queen of comedown folk, especially as she keeps such good company. Jazz-inclined musicians Alabaster DePlume, Shahzad Ismaily and The Smile’s Tom Skinner all played a crucial role here, without ever threatening to overwhelm fragile yet elemental songs that rolled in slowly like mist from the sea.

13 CATE LE BON
Pompeii
MEXICAN SUMMER

Cate Le Bon admitted that Pompeii was written and recorded in a “quagmire of unease” as she struggled to reconcile her artistic fantasies with the mundanity of day-to-day subsistence during lockdown in Cardiff. Yet despite the album’s rather glum, self-questioning outlook, Le Bon’s singular melodies kept things buoyant, against a refreshing palette of elastic bass, sax and Yamaha DX7.

12 THE WEATHER STATION
How Is It That I Should Look At The Stars
FAT POSSUM

Initially billed as a becalmed, piano-led companion to Ignorance – Uncut’s Album Of The Year for 2021 – the continued excellence of Tamara Lindeman’s songwriting, coupled with the startling vulnerability and compassion of her performance here, ensured that …Stars instantly became just as essential as its predecessor. Quiet music, but packing a hefty emotional punch.

11 THE DELINES
The Sea Drift
DÉCOR

The Delines’ latest batch of songs were set on the American Gold Coast; but with its tales of convenience store robberies gone awry, lovers arrested for unknown crimes and other such trouble, it was very much business as usual for Willy Vlautin and Amy Boone. Classic – and classy – Southern country-soul dominated the band’s third album, as economical and well-judged in arrangements and execution as they were in their lyrical content.

10 ELVIS COSTELLO & THE IMPOSTERS
The Boy Named If
EMI

Following two archival projects – a deluxe Armed Forces boxset and a Spanish-language reimagining of This Year’s Model – Costello reunited with The Imposters for this characteristically diverse album anchored by top-drawer rock’n’roll. Its songs involved stories of schoolteachers, imaginary friends, bereaved couples and scoundrels – a rich cast of colourful protagonists, in other words, to populate one of Costello’s very best 21st-century albums.

9 BRIAN ENO
ForeverAndEverNoMore
UMC

A thoughtful, candid contemplation of environmental catastrophe, Eno’s 22nd solo album presented the co-founder of the Long Now Foundation as a man caught up in the travails of the present. For every nostalgic reverie on “the last light from that old sun”, as Eno crooned in his luxuriously lugubrious baritone, “There isn’t time these days for microscopic worms”. Less hectoring warning and more bittersweet requiem, ForeverAndEverNoMore was personal, intimate and vital.

8 KENDRICK LAMAR
Mr Morale & The Big Steppers
PGLANG/TOP DAWG ENTERTAINMENT/AFTERMATH/INTERSCOPE

The Pulitzer Prize-winner stepped back from the limelight for this sprawling double album that tied personal pain to collective trauma. Many Kendricks emerged – he, too, contained multitudes, it seems – but perhaps the most potent was on “Mother I Sober”, about false accusations of sexual abuse that divided his family. It hinged on a lovely, deeply sympathetic chorus sung by Portishead’s Beth Gibbons, as Lamar told the story with forensic focus.

7 WET LEG
Wet Leg
DOMINO

Following the irresistible, inescapable and world-conquering “Chaise Longue”, Wet Leg’s debut album might have been an unnecessary afterthought, but the Isle of Wight duo proved they had more to offer. Wet Leg the album kept the antic wit and pop fizz fresh across 12 tracks that wryly chronicled twentysomething life in the 2020s, through dating, self-medication and hypermediation, like the riotous soundtrack of a UK version of Lena Dunham’s Girls.

6 WILCO
Cruel Country
dBpm

A characteristically strong year for Wilco, in which Jeff Tweedy and his co-conspirators moved with ease between the past (a prestigious Yankee Hotel Foxtrot reissue) and the present (their 12th studio album – a double at that). Country? Having spent 30 years actively resisting that label, here Wilco deployed acoustic guitars, pedal steel and dobro for an album of rootsy and mellow tones, tackling the state of the nation along the way.

5 BIG THIEF
Dragon New Warm Mountain I Believe in You
4AD

Powered by unprecedented levels of intra-band empathy, Big Thief ventured to four very different locations across America to record this generous and emotionally available double album. Accordingly, it gambolled happily from ecstatic indie-rock to dusty country stomps to chilly folk parables, with Adrianne Lenker’s songwriting approaching the clear-sighted precision of a Dylan or a Cohen.

4 ANGEL OLSEN
Big Time
JAGJAGUWAR

“I can’t say that I’m sorry when I don’t feel so wrong any more”, Angel Olsen sang against the sigh of steel guitar and a murmur of horns at the start of her sixth album, which saw her ease into the classic country heartland her mighty, lovelorn voice had always hinted at. Written out of family loss and personal liberation, Big Time is a triumph of torch and twang, the sound of an artist hitting her prime and entering the major leagues.

3 MICHAEL HEAD & THE RED ELASTIC BAND
Dear Scott
MODERN SKY

After the redemption and rebirth of 2017’s Adiós Señor Pussycat, Dear Scott once again found Head documenting troubled lives, from the No 10 bus route in his native Liverpool to the Hollywood Hills. Produced by a simpático Bill Ryder-Jones, Dear Scott carried all the hallmarks of Head’s greatest moments: unfaltering melodies, a beautiful sense of forward motion, lyrics that conjure entire worlds.

2 JOAN SHELLEY
The Spur
NO QUARTER

Although released almost halfway through 2022, The Spur was recorded in spring 2021, a discombobulating period for Shelley encompassing both lockdown and new motherhood. Such extremes haunt The Spur – Shelley’s elegant seventh – which was caught between domestic hope and maternal joy, as she put down roots after a lifetime of touring. “Stalled in the driveway/ The way in or the way out?” she sang on “Home”, her position fluid. An exceptional set of songs; Shelley’s finest to date.

1 THE SMILE
A Light For Attracting Attention
XL

A mounting cost-of-living crisis. A war in Europe. A pandemic still nibbling at the edges. And leaders offering only cruelty and chaos. These are the scary times that Thom Yorke and Jonny Greenwood have warned us about for decades, so who better to help us through them? Not as Radiohead, though. Evidently a smaller, streamlined unit was required to dart more nimbly across the broken landscape.

The Smile began the year with a weekend of live-streamed gigs from London’s Magazine venue, performing ‘in the round’ so it felt like peeking into their rehearsal room, the trio swapping instruments with a calm fluidity reflected in the music. By the time of their UK tour in May, they were already trying out new songs to add to the 13 already featured on the album. This sense of gathering momentum was triggered by the music itself. There was a brisk, punky insouciance to “The Smoke” and “You Will Never Work In Television Again” (“he’s a fat fucking mist!”) that might not have been achievable with a five-piece band. But A Light For Attracting Attention also regularly recalled the peak Radiohead of In Rainbows with an additional cosmic ache, propelled in new directions by the stealth jazz drumming of Tom Skinner.

More surprisingly, amid the understandable rage, despair and desolation, was a distinct sense of hope. “Please – we are all the same”, insisted Yorke on the opening track, a heartfelt stand against the politics of division. And picking up where A Moon Shaped Pool’s “The Numbers” left off, “Safe In The Knowledge” was a spectral protest-folk song that promised better times ahead in a way that felt almost rousing. Perhaps that band name wasn’t so bitterly ironic after all.

Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers – Live at the Fillmore 1997

Andrew Mueller

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16th December 2022

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Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers – Live at the Fillmore 1997

From about the mid-1980s onwards, Tom Petty’s output was defined by a frequently infuriating contradiction. While Petty and his Heartbreakers were (obviously) as fine and fierce a rock’n’roll band as had ever been assembled, Petty seemed peculiarly insistent on making records from which you wo...

From about the mid-1980s onwards, Tom Petty’s output was defined by a frequently infuriating contradiction. While Petty and his Heartbreakers were (obviously) as fine and fierce a rock’n’roll band as had ever been assembled, Petty seemed peculiarly insistent on making records from which you wouldn’t necessarily know it. There was rarely much wrong with the songs, but the production grew increasingly glossy and decreasingly gritty. The Heartbreakers of their first three albums – that pugnacious, ferocious and glorious hybrid of the swaggering Southern swamp-boogie of Lynyrd Skynyrd and the fidgety, skittish, skinny-tied new wave of the Attractions – got harder and harder to hear.

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But as this Brobdingnagian boxset splendidly demonstrates, they never really went away. In 1997, between January 10 and February 7, Petty and the Heartbreakers played 20 shows at San Francisco’s Fillmore, legendary tabernacle of 1960s rock. The conceit was that they’d be a house band for a month, dishing up hits, favourites and requests, maybe wheeling in a few guests (a significant difference between the Heartbreakers and the band soundtracking the buffet at the Ramada in Mudville is that Petty was able to call Roger McGuinn and John Lee Hooker). All this they did, and clearly had a total blast in the process – at the end of the run, Petty described it in an interview as “maybe the best time of our lives, really”. But whether deliberately or not, Petty and the Heartbreakers also commandeered the Fillmore as a sort of lecture hall in which they delivered an expansive lesson in the history of rock’n’roll and their own, not inconsequential place in it.

There was, obviously, no shortage of material from which a monument such as this boxset could be assembled – of which varying amounts are available in proportion to outlay. There are 33 songs on the 2CD/3LP edition, 58 on the 4CD/6LP variant. Most tracks in both packages are cover versions, visiting all points JJ Cale to The Rolling Stones, Little Richard to Bob Dylan, The Kinks to Booker T & The MGs, Bo Diddley to the Grateful Dead, The Zombies to The Kingsmen, The Stanley Brothers to The Byrds. There’s even a Bondtheme (“Goldfinger”, rendered as a Shadows-style surf-rock instrumental).

The Heartbreakers were clearly determined to lean all the way into the idea of undertaking a residency – thanks for coming out, we’re here all month, try the veal, etcetera. The covers are served up with a complete absence of the self-conscious fussiness that was somewhat infesting Petty’s own albums by this point. The rowdier tunes, beginning with the boxset’s opening track, Chuck Berry’s “Around And Around”, radiate the giddy joy of a garage band plugging in what they got for Christmas (it’s possibly even more primal than that: Petty introduces “You Are My Sunshine”, co-written by former Louisiana governor Jimmie Davis in 1940, as “a song I learned at camp”).

The slower and more soulful numbers, including a show-stopping take on Bill Withers’ “Ain’t No Sunshine”, remind of the sensitivity that Petty and the Heartbreakers at their best were always able to bring to bear upon their own more downbeat material. The point is reinforced, and a debt is paid, by running straight out of “Ain’t No Sunshine” into a gorgeous performance of an extended “It’s Good To Be King” which doesn’t overstay its welcome even at near enough to 12 minutes.

And here is arguably the most compelling reason for the purchase of this artefact: the gleeful, irreverent liberties taken with Petty’s own material. “I Won’t Back Down” is stripped down almost all the way to its vocal harmonies, and sounds strangely more defiant for it. The similarly acoustic-led “Even The Losers” and “American Girl” reveal the soul beneath the snarl of the originals. Live At The Fillmore 1997 stands as both an outstanding document of a great rock’n’roll band at full throttle – and as good a live album as has been made by anybody.

Neil Young with Crazy Horse – World Record

Damien Love

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16th December 2022

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Neil Young with Crazy Horse – World Record

It seems an obvious thing to say, but you get the feeling Neil Young’s new record is important to him. In the old days – the days that press behind the simple, shaky, beguiling, bemusing, finally burning surfaces of these songs – your first impression of the album would have been its cover. An...

It seems an obvious thing to say, but you get the feeling Neil Young’s new record is important to him. In the old days – the days that press behind the simple, shaky, beguiling, bemusing, finally burning surfaces of these songs – your first impression of the album would have been its cover. And there, without fuss, he lays things bare.

ORDER NOW: Neil Young is on the cover of the latest issue of Uncut

Up front comes a photograph of his father, the writer Scott Young, caught striding down the street in suit and tie, raincoat over one arm. It could be the late-1950s, and he looks like a man with places to go and things to do there. You don’t have to recognise the face to know who he is: the image comes captioned, like a museum exhibit: father 4.14.18. Inside, drawn from other eras, but similarly tagged with their DOBs, come Neil’s brother, Bob, and his mother, Rassy, with Neil himself; the first family Young knew, until he was 12 and his parents went their separate ways.

The cover’s ’50s vibe echoes into the opener, “Love Earth”, a recording warm as a harvest evening. As Nils Lofgren’s lap steel flirts with Young’s piano, and rhythm section Billy Talbot and Ralph Molina set the Horse ambling, the melody calls up one of the biggest hits of Young’s childhood, “Sh-Boom (Life Could Be A Dream)”, as recorded in 1954 by Toronto boys The Crew Cuts. The lyrics, too, seem a reference, as Young undercuts his sketch of an idyllic remembered landscape with a bittersweet sigh, “We were living in a dream”.

Is this album about his family, his childhood? Well, no. There’s nothing here as nakedly autobiographical as 1973’s “Don’t Be Denied”, or on the nose as “Heading West” on last year’s Barn. Then again, yes. As ever, environmental concerns are uppermost, but here they come expressed as recollections of the world Young knew back then, unembellished evocations of blue skies and clear water that repeat across “Love Earth”, “Overhead” (a 12-bar speakeasy stomp that references Burt Lancaster and The Beatles), “This Old Planet” (“Human Highway”’s melody treated to the sound of After The Gold Rush) and the plainly gorgeous “Walkin’ On The Road”.

At the same time, he’s walking (walking being another recurring motif; wandering alone, marching together) through the world of the present – a sense of unfolding ecological catastrophe, war, plague in the air – and he’s candid about his place in it: that there’s more road behind him now than lies ahead. “I’m so grateful to have lived for all these years”, he declares on “I Walk With You”. “I’m beyond the time I had to know”, the thought continues on “The World (Is In Trouble Now)”.

Lest this sound too reflective and autumnal, it’s worth stating that the latter track is a riot, a standout example of how, this time, Crazy Horse often manage to sound like Crazy Horse while not sounding like Crazy Horse at all.

Following 2019’s Colorado, which introduced the latest configuration of the band as Lofgren returned following guitarist “Poncho” Sampedro’s retirement, and Barn, this is the third album Young has made in a row with the Horse, the first time that’s ever happened. Barn felt like a consolidation of Colorado as the lineup settled into the well-worn Horse groove. But with World Record, Young tosses things up in the air. For much of the album, he abandons guitar and with it the classic Horse sound, opting to lead on keyboard, mostly pump organ. On “The World (Is In Trouble Now)”, as he blares gleefully at a riff borrowed from Herbie Hancock’s “Watermelon Man”, and growls the chorus in a subsonic rumble, the glorious result is a kind of sloppy drunk organic funk which resurfaces on “The Wonder Won’t Wait”.

That song gets to the essence of this quickly created album’s theme: seize the moment, or at least be aware of it. Producer Rick Rubin carefully captures a live sound, a spontaneous first-take feel exemplified by “Break The Chain”, one of the album’s two key guitar songs, a Crazy Horse thrasher in the unhinged lineage of “Welfare Mothers” and “Fuckin’ Up”, with added post-Covid anxiety.

Rather than his past, present, or future, World Record seems to be Neil Young singing about life as it just keeps happening, and never more than when he plugs Old Black in again for the epic closer, “Chevrolet”. A 15-minute Horse jam to rank with any, complete with the massed ragged Horse harmony, rather than a song about a car, it’s about different stages of Young’s life, roads he travelled, people he was with, mistakes he made. Eras blur and collide in the long instrumental breaks as he goes moving out after some mangled perfect melody that lies just beyond reach. Here, time doesn’t fade away; it burns and melts.

Siouxsie Sioux to headline Latitude Festival

News

Charlotte Krol

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15th December 2022

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Siouxsie Sioux to headline Latitude Festival

Siouxsie Sioux is booked to headline Latitude Festival‘s BBC Sounds Stage next year. Sioux will join other headliners, including Pulp, at the Suffolk festival from July 20 - 23, 2023. ORDER NOW: Neil Young is on the cover of the latest issue of Uncut Sioux last played live in 2013 for Y...

Siouxsie Sioux is booked to headline Latitude Festival‘s BBC Sounds Stage next year.

Sioux will join other headliners, including Pulp, at the Suffolk festival from July 20 – 23, 2023.

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Sioux last played live in 2013 for Yoko Ono’s Meltdown festival, which was held at London’s Royal Festival Hall. At the time, she performed an unprecedented two sold-out shows built around a full rendition of the Banshees’ 1980 album Kaleidoscope alongside hits including “Israel”, “Arabian Knights”, “Cities In Dust” and “Dear Prudence”.

You can read Uncut’s review from the Meltdown show here.

Latitude Festival Director Melvin Benn said: “What a privilege it is to welcome the iconic Siouxsie to the Latitude Festival. Siouxsie has been an enduring trailblazer and her impact across musical culture is colossal. Uncompromisingly defiant, Siouxsie’s powerful body of work is incomparable. There has never been a live performer like her and there probably never will be!”

Recently, Siouxsie curated a new Banshees’ compilation, All Souls – which brought together classic tracks and rarities into an Autumnal celebration.

Other acts joining Sioux and Pulp at Latitude 2023 include Paul Heaton & Jacqui Abbott, Black Midi, Lightning Seeds and Young Fathers.

We’re New Here – Park Jiha

John Robinson

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15th December 2022

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Korean adventurer Park Jiha on getting new sounds from traditional instruments – and from the air itself on her latest record, The Gleam, previously in our MAY 2022 issue of Uncut, available to buy here. For Park Jiha, a successful gig is literally all about the vibes in the room. This isn’t,...

Korean adventurer Park Jiha on getting new sounds from traditional instruments – and from the air itself on her latest record, The Gleam, previously in our MAY 2022 issue of Uncut, available to buy here.

For Park Jiha, a successful gig is literally all about the vibes in the room. This isn’t, in this instance, a kind of woolly shorthand for explaining the subtle relationship between performer and audience. It’s more a technical requirement for Jiha’s music – an entrancing and longform spell of melodies and long tones presented on traditional instruments like the piri (double reed flute), yanggeum (hammered dulcimer) and saenghwang (mouth organ).

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“We have a lot of trouble,” Park explains through her husband and interpreter Curtis Cambou, a French DJ and label owner in Seoul. “The instruments are very hard to mic up. The sound is very weak so they need to be amplified, but you get a lot of feedback. Unless you’re playing in a room with reverb it doesn’t sound right. They were supposed to be played in small traditional Korean houses with wooden floors and ceilings.”

Park and her instruments have come a long way. A student of Korean music since she was 13, she has always been interested in extending the boundaries of tradition. After college, she formed a duo called 숨[suːm] with fellow musician Jungmin Seo, and their technical blend of traditional instruments and Park’s songs became a feature of exchange programmes and festivals.

After nine years, Park went solo, sticking with her instrumentation, but drawing inspiration from some of the expansive moods she found in post-classical composers like Nils Frahm and Ólafur Arnalds. “My direction became clearer the further on I went,” she says. Finding the most suitable environment to play and record has since been one of the more demanding features of her work. “I did one concert in an old oil tank. The reverb was something like 6.5 seconds. A real special occasion – you get the imprint of that space.”

By her second LP, 2019’s excellent Philos, in which ambient street noise becomes a feature of the recording, Park had decided to make the arrangement more formal. “I felt it would be more fun if the instruments were recorded in a certain environment, which becomes part of the vibe, the atmosphere of the space it was recorded in.” The music itself, Park says, arrives by a process of intuition, “improvising melodies, textures and details” and is “mostly just pure feelings, finding beautiful sonorities which fit together.” If she feels a track is going somewhere, she “might try and play a bit weirdly with it. I have a lot of unusual techniques. They can bring special elements to some tracks.”

An occasional guest star in Park’s work is the voice. On Philos, she imagined one piece having words, but “a floating vocal, more like an instrument”. This turned into “Easy”, a collaboration with the Lebanese artist Dima El Sayed, in which Park’s serene instrumental composition is juxtaposed with El Sayed’s polemic. The serendipity of the collaboration has encouraged more work with voice: on March 29, she plays in London with writer and performance artist Roy Claire Potter, with whom she was originally paired for a spot on Radio 3’s Late Junction in 2020. Cambou recalls the pair’s original creative meeting. “I was expecting a mess,” he laughs as he recalls trying to understand Potter’s accent, “but it was mind-blowing. Her music is delicate, but they were matching twists and transitions. It was beautiful.”

The success of the meeting was all the more gratifying, since the pair had never previously met. “They were meant to have a rehearsal, but Skype wasn’t working so they didn’t.” Sometimes technology will let you down in ways that music won’t.

Park Jiha’s The Gleam is out now on Tak:Til/Glitterbeat.

Album Previews for 2023

Features

Uncut

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14th December 2022

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Please be upstanding for our annual Albums Preview, which this year truffles out many of the goodies you can expect to hear in the coming 12 months. In the latest issue of Uncut - now in UK shops and available to buy from our online store - you'll find news of new albums by the likes of Lucinda Will...

Please be upstanding for our annual Albums Preview, which this year truffles out many of the goodies you can expect to hear in the coming 12 months. In the latest issue of Uncut – now in UK shops and available to buy from our online store – you’ll find news of new albums by the likes of Lucinda Williams, The Damned, Natalie Merchant, The Cure, Graham Nash, the Rolling Stones and more.

Below, you’ll find forthcoming albums from Peter Gabriel, Margo Cilker and Elvis Costello. Call it a preview of our Preview, if you like…

PETER GABRIEL
TITLE: i/o
LABEL: Real World
RELEASE DATE: 2023
At last! Two decades in the planning, the rightful heir to 2002’s Up

Speaking to Uncut in 2020, Peter Gabriel suggested that new music may not be too far away. “Although I’ve been writing a lot, I’ve had various other distractions and other projects, so I’m very slow in actually finishing things,” he admitted. “There’s a big backlog of ideas that are unfinished but I’m now getting enough lyrics done, which is often where I slow down. I’m looking forward to getting an album out.”

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Gabriel had been dropping hints about his activities for some time, usually via his social media channels. As far back as 2002, not long before the release of Up, Gabriel announced that another album of fresh songs – tentatively titled I/O – would be released within 18 months. A covers album, various tours, collaborative projects and reissue campaigns have eaten into his schedule since, leaving I/O as unfinished business.

In April 2019, he provided an update to BBC 6 Music. Gabriel explained that he’d taken time off owing to his wife being ill, but was excited to be back making music now that she’d fully recovered. Asked what we might expect in terms of new material, he was careful not to give too much away: “There’s a wide bunch [of songs] in there… I’m also trying to do some simple piano versions of things, which I don’t know is enough to make a whole record or not, but that’s something I’m looking at.”

In 2021, Gabriel revealed he’d recently spent 10 days in the studio with his trusted lineup of Tony Levin, Manu Katché and David Rhodes, during which time they had recorded 17 new songs. Fast forward to summer 2022 when Gabriel disclosed that a final recording session was slated for September.

November 2022 saw a major tour announcement, stating that Gabriel will be playing throughout Europe in the spring of 2023, following by a Stateside trek in the late summer and autumn. Named after the new album, now stylised to i/o, Gabriel declared: “It’s been a while and I am now surrounded by a whole lot of new songs and am excited to be taking them out on the road for a spin. Look forward to seeing you out there.”

While we await news of i/o’s actual content at the time of going to press, various online message boards have been rife with speculation. Gabriel’s most recent studio singles (2016’s “I’m Amazing” and “The Veil”) may or may not make the final cut, but among the other tracks mooted as potential candidates for inclusion are “Silver Screen”, “Just Add Water”, “Funk Bone”, “Lost And Found”, “Chinese Whisper” and the much-bootlegged “Baby Man”.

Whatever the final tracklisting, it will be fascinating to trace the evolution of Gabriel’s songwriting on what amounts to his first studio album of originals in 20 years. “I think you learn all the time if you listen, so I hope I’ve matured as a songwriter,” he told Uncut in 2020. “The actual art of my songwriting is improving… Sometimes the intersection with popular culture may be over when you’re in your mature years, but there can still be lots of interesting material. I see that all the time with other artists, so I hope to have that in my own work.”

MARGO CILKER
TITLE: Unconfirmed
LABEL: Loose
RELEASE DATE: Autumn 2023
Pacific Northwest singer-songwriter builds on 2021’s ravishing Pohorylle

MARGO CILKER: We went back into the studio with a very similar cast of characters to the last one. Sera Cahoone was at the helm again and pulled in some fresh players to spice it up. She had a good idea of who she thought would be a good fit. We kind of streamlined everything that we learned during the making of Pohorylle. We knew what worked, then we went back in with the same approach, with a fresh batch of songs. There’s a couple of new instrumentations, so it’s a little different, but not a huge departure. We wanted to keep the momentum going. There’s some songs that people will recognise, because they’ve been in my live set in the last year as I’ve been touring the UK and throughout the States. So if you’ve been hearing me play solo, you’ll hear these songs with a fleshed-out full band and lush accompaniments. I’ve been playing “Keep It On A Burner”, for example, at every show since I wrote it.

I felt I needed to capture this moment in my career. If anything, I was trying to kind of stay close to where I was when I wrote and recorded my first record. A lot of the songs were written during the pandemic and during the shutdown, after I’d recorded Pohorylle but hadn’t even released it. We recorded the record this spring, when it seemed we were all still feeling the pandemic, when we were all still broken and still not touring as much as we needed or wanted to be, I guess. I was getting back on the road, but the industry has been suffering so much. Because I had the songs, we just decided to go for it. The whole
thing was done in a week. There’s definitely moments where you’ll feel this space of a time where I was grounded and couldn’t go anywhere. So there’s a lot of reminiscing and reflecting on that period, this season of being totally, absolutely, bewilderingly stuck.

Lyrically, I’m still kind of capturing a little of the place I’m living in, exploring those kinds
of things. I don’t know what’s down the road for me, but this is definitely a second go around. We’re looking to release it next fall if everything goes according to plan. I don’t know if I want to show my cards too much at this stage, because I don’t want people to set up expectations. But I think what’s cool about this record is it’s a continuation. It’s really neat that, even though my life got kind of crazier, we were still able to just get in there and do some more of what we did the first time. I think the result is great.

ELVIS COSTELLO
TITLE: Songs Of Bacharach And Costello
LABEL: Unconfirmed
RELEASE DATE: 2023
Four-album set that revisits a favourite collaborator

ELVIS COSTELLO: “It’s Painted From Memory” [1998] and “Taken From Life”, which is a collection of songs that Burt and I wrote over the last 15 years for a proposed Painted From Memory musical. So you’ll hear other people singing a couple of those original songs, but also a bunch of songs that have never been heard before. We’ve compiled them with a couple of the songs from Look Now [2018] and some recordings that were piano/voice explorations of what the songs would sound like if they were sung by other people. We’ve put them all together to create an impression of what it would have been like to have that score.

There’s another disc of live performances of Painted From Memory songs, mostly with Steve Nieve and myself, a couple of them orchestral. Finally, a whole album of Bacharach/David songs, which I thought would be fun to include. This is a love letter to Burt. We went into the studio last September and recorded two songs with Vince Mendoza conducting a 30-piece orchestra. So the bookends for this Taken From Life record are newly recorded. The Imposters and I recorded a third song, in Capitol Studios with an orchestra. It was a few years since we’d worked together, but it didn’t take very long before I’m in the booth and he was on the call-back saying, “Elvis, you’re not singing the right melody.” So I had to be on top of it!

PICK UP THE NEW ISSUE OF UNCUT TO READ THE FULL STORY

We’re New Here – Jeremy Ivey

Stephen Deusner

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13th December 2022

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The Midwest farmer’s daughter’s husband steps into the spotlight – Jeremy Ivey talks about his latest solo effort, Invisible Pictures previously in our APRIL 2022 issue of Uncut, available to buy here. A little jealousy can be good for a marriage, especially one between two songwriters. Jer...

The Midwest farmer’s daughter’s husband steps into the spotlight – Jeremy Ivey talks about his latest solo effort, Invisible Pictures previously in our APRIL 2022 issue of Uncut, available to buy here.

A little jealousy can be good for a marriage, especially one between two songwriters. Jeremy Ivey and his wife are always bouncing ideas off each other, always workshopping their latest compositions. “One of us will have a song that needs something, or we’ll have an idea that needs a little help developing, and the other person will chime in,” says the Nashville-based musician. “If something’s really good, the other person will get a little upset… They’ll want to help, because that means they own it, too. I’ve found that to be a constant feature of our collaboration, that little bit of creative jealousy.”

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Ivey’s wife, of course, is Margo Price – and they’ve been writing together for more than a decade, longer than either of them have been solo artists. “It’s a lofty idea,” he says, “but we always wanted to be known as a songwriting team,” like Lennon–McCartney or Jagger–Richards. That collaboration shines on “Keep Me High”, a ’70s-styled standout on his new album, Invisible Pictures. All Ivey had was a chorus inspired by their new baby (“I got a new love that lasts forever”). “But I couldn’t think of a second verse, so Margo says, ‘Gimme a crack at that’. She wrote a few lines about someone named Becky who goes down to Florida with her undercover lawyer. Sometimes a song ends up not being about anything, really. Maybe there’s one line in there that’s the whole reason you wrote it. But it has to be interesting.”

After learning to play guitar from a Beatles chord book, Ivey first tried his hand at lyrics when he was 15 years old. “The first song I ever wrote was about Columbine. I read about this student who was killed, and I wrote a song called “Little Mary” from her point of view. It was a topical song, but it was horrible! Still, it made me want to express something about the world.”

That lesson continues to inform his songwriting. After moving to Nashville, he played in a series of local bands, which is how he met Price. Since then, they’ve co-written for all of their solo albums – three apiece, although they’re currently finishing up Price’s fourth. She produced his 2020 album Waiting Out The Storm, which was full of songs about the world their children would inherit. “I have two sides. One is that I want to say something about what’s going on in the world, I want to get people thinking about it. And the other side is that I want people to escape from it. Those two sides are always battling each other.”

By contrast, Invisible Pictures is Ivey’s most introverted collection – but also his most adventurous. Most of these songs came to him during lockdown, after he had spent months fighting off an especially harsh bout of Covid. “I’m borderline diabetic, so I’m super susceptible. It was intense. But I woke up one day and felt better. It was very freeing.” The whole experience redirected his songwriting. “There’s a specific reason why this record is more about myself. I’ve been shut off. I’m not really seeing the world except through a computer screen.”

Eschewing the country-rock that defined his previous records, Invisible Pictures evokes the oddball singer-songwriters of ’70s LA, particularly Randy Newman. The result is perhaps his most revealing statement as a solo artist, even if he admits, “I’m not 100 per cent comfortable in that role. I enjoy it and I always get excited when shows are coming up. But I like writing and recording – those are the two things that always get me going.”

Invisible Pictures is due out on March 11 via Anti-

Composer Angelo Badalamenti, who scored Twin Peaks, Blue Velvet and more, dead at 85

News

Alex Gallagher

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13th December 2022

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Composer Angelo Badalamenti, who scored Twin Peaks, Blue Velvet and more, dead at 85

Angelo Badalamenti, whose compositions considerably shaped the mood of David Lynch films and series including Twin Peaks, Blue Velvet and Mulholland Drive, has died at the age of 85. Badalamenti's death was confirmed by multiple relatives of the famed composer, with his niece Frances Badalament...

Angelo Badalamenti, whose compositions considerably shaped the mood of David Lynch films and series including Twin Peaks, Blue Velvet and Mulholland Drive, has died at the age of 85.

Badalamenti’s death was confirmed by multiple relatives of the famed composer, with his niece Frances Badalamenti telling The Hollywood Reporter he died of natural causes on Sunday (December 11) surrounded by family, at his home in New Jersey.

Born in Brooklyn, New York in 1937, Badalamenti began taking piano lessons at a young age, and received his bachelor’s and master’s degree from the Manhattan School of Music. His early film scoring work included writing music for 1973’s Gordon’s War and 1974’s Law And Disorder, but his major break came when he composed the score and supervised the soundtrack for David Lynch’s 1986 film Blue Velvet.

The film was the first in a career spent collaborating with Lynch on various other projects, along with frequent Lynch collaborator, singer Julee Cruise. Badalamenti is perhaps best known for working with Lynch on Twin Peaks (and the film Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me), helping define the surreal, otherworldly feel of the mystery series.

While working on the series’ score, Lynch would often describe to Badalamenti the moods and feelings he wanted to create. The series’ signature theme, the “Love Theme From Twin Peaks”, was written in 20 minutes, with Lynch telling Badalamenti: “You just wrote 75 per cent of the score. It’s the mood of the whole piece. It is Twin Peaks.”

In 1991, Badalamenti won the Grammy Award for Best Pop Instrumental Performance for the Twin Peaks theme. He would go on to score Twin Peaks’ 2017 revival, featuring new compositions and material from the original series.

Other collaborations with Lynch included 1990’s Wild At Heart, 1997’s Lost Highway, 1999’s The Straight Story and 2001’s Mulholland Drive. He made small appearances onscreen in a handful of the Lynch films he worked on, including Blue Velvet and Mulholland Drive.

Outside of his work with Lynch, Badalamenti also worked on the soundtracks for films such as A Nightmare On Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors, National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation and The Wicker Man, and collaborated with a range of other musicians. Artists he worked with over the years include David Bowie, Marianne Faithfull, James’ Tim Booth, Orbital, The Cranberries’ Dolores O’Riordan, Pet Shop Boys and Anthrax.

“Tonight I will raise my glass to my beautiful friend, the Bad Angel, Angelo Badalamenti,” Booth wrote on Twitter, remembering his collaborator. “He taught me many things but primarily how to enjoy the recording process. We laughed from the beginning to the end of the record we made together, never had a disagreement. I love him.”

The Smile announce new live album recorded at Montreux Jazz Festival

News

Alex Gallagher

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13th December 2022

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The Smile announce new live album recorded at Montreux Jazz Festival

The Smile will release a live album recorded during the band's set at this year's Montreux Jazz Festival in Switzerland. ORDER NOW: Neil Young is on the cover of the latest issue of Uncut READ MORE: The Smile on their album A Light For Attracting Attention: “Everything moved very fast” ...

The Smile will release a live album recorded during the band’s set at this year’s Montreux Jazz Festival in Switzerland.

ORDER NOW: Neil Young is on the cover of the latest issue of Uncut
READ MORE: The Smile on their album A Light For Attracting Attention: “Everything moved very fast”

The Smile At Montreux Jazz Festival captures the trio playing songs from debut album A Light For Attracting Attention, including “You Will Never Work In Television Again”, “The Smoke”, “Pana-vision”, “Free In The Knowledge” and more. The festival took place in July, with the live album featuring eight songs from their set.

The digital-only release will arrive on streaming platforms this Wednesday (December 14), while a concert film of the performed tracks will broadcast on the band’s YouTube channel on Tuesday (December 13) at 8pm GMT/3pm EST. It will be available for just 48 hours, and will also feature footage of the first-ever public performance of new song “Bending Hectic”, written the same day it was debuted.

The Smile – comprised of Radiohead’s Thom Yorke and Jonny Greenwood along with Sons of Kemet’s Tom Skinner – made their debut with a performance for Glastonbury’s Live at Worthy Farm concert video, which streamed in May 2021.

The band’s debut single, “You Will Never Work In Television Again”, was released in January this year. The same month, the band played their first public shows, a trio of gigs at Magazine in London.

After a string of singles including “The Smoke”, “Skrting On The Surface” and “Pana-vision”, The Smile released A Light For Attracting Attention in May of this year.

Since A Light For Attracting Attention arrived, The Smile have debuted numerous new tracks live. In addition to “Hectic Bending” at Montreux, the band also played a song called “Friend Of A Friend” at a gig in Croatia and “Bodies Laughing” during a Berlin show, both in May.

In June, during The Smile’s set at Primavera Sound in Barcelona – which The Strokes’ Julian Casablancas called “the best show I’ve seen in years” – the band performed a new song called “Colours Fly”.

We’re New Here – caroline

Sharon O'Connell

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12th December 2022

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Post-rock meets choral folk from the obsessive London-based octet caroline talk about their self-titled release, previously in our MARCH 2022 issue of Uncut, available to buy here. caroline are a band defined by their difference. As teenagers in East Sussex, vocalist and multi-instrumentalist Jas...

Post-rock meets choral folk from the obsessive London-based octet caroline talk about their self-titled release, previously in our MARCH 2022 issue of Uncut, available to buy here.

caroline are a band defined by their difference. As teenagers in East Sussex, vocalist and multi-instrumentalist Jasper Llewellyn and guitarist Mike O’Malley were an Appalachian folk covers duo; fast-forward several years and Llewellyn was playing rhythmic post-punk in London with university friend Casper Hughes, when the realisation that they were in a creative cul-de-sac led them to invite O’Malley onboard. They kept expanding, adding various other childhood and uni friends on bass, trumpet, violins, saxophone, flute and clarinet until they became a unique, eight-piece proposition.

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Despite evolving in parallel to the south London punk/DIY scene that has produced the likes of Goat Girl and Black Midi, Llewellyn claims that caroline weren’t really aware of it. Instead they focused inward, making a virtue of Hughes’ technical limitations on the guitar. “Casper’s not having a musical background in conventional song structure meant that the containers we were making music inside weren’t verse-chorus,” Llewellyn explains. “Because of that, the parameters were never there. From the start, it set things off down a path of us deciding what we wanted the form to be, and the form became the interesting thing. It was like, if we’re not going to do verse and chorus, then what do we want to do? We can create a different order of priorities.”

caroline’s upcoming eponymous debut – a set of longform compositions rather than conventional songs – is built with almost architectural precision and has a post-rock spareness, making boldly unusual use of space and silence. Their prioritising of tone over melody or the interplay of distance and closeness in their music is especially striking on the oddly poignant cacophony of “Engine (Eavesdropping)” and “Skydiving Onto The Library Roof”, an epic exercise in slow build that suggests Richard Dawson fronting a minimalist chamber orchestra. All the tracks on the album are carefully considered, and Hughes admits that making them takes “a really long time – it’s about finding things we all love and are happy with”.

Most of the songs on caroline were recorded at London’s Total Refreshment Centre and mixed via marathon Zoom sessions with Lankum producer John Murphy. “It just went on and on,” laughs Hughes. “We’d be like, ‘Can you move it up one or two dB?’ Then that would ruin the balance and we’d have to go back. It’s fun – it’s intense problem solving, but we take it to its extreme, I think.”

“We are total perfectionists,” admits Llewellyn. Even before the core trio have taken their songs to the rest of the band, they have been extensively workshopped. “We do a lot of talking – as much as we do playing.” This dedication and obsessive attention to detail is what you might reasonably expect of a band whose members variously work for a political campaigning organisation, teach music in schools, design instruments for players with limited mobility or are studying “the role of improvisation within the ongoing happening of social worlds”. On top of that, Llewellyn makes performance art with an improv element and quite a few of caroline have their own bands and/or play in other friends’ projects.

This paints a picture of an ensemble in all-consuming pursuit of their art, but Hughes says there is no grand plan and their aims, for now at least, are modest: “We just want to keep trying stuff out, pushing our more recent experiments with recording techniques and different sound environments. We don’t have any particular intentions apart from to just carry on being open to the new ideas that come up when we play music together.”

caroline is released by Rough Trade on February 25.

Flaming Lips to perform Yoshimi Battles The Pink Robots in full on UK tour

News

Alex Gallagher

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12th December 2022

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Flaming Lips to perform Yoshimi Battles The Pink Robots in full on UK tour

The Flaming Lips have added two more UK shows to their 2023 tour, where the US psych-rock band will play their seminal 2002 album Yoshimi Battles The Pink Robots in full to celebrate its 20th anniversary. ORDER NOW: Neil Young is on the cover of the latest issue of Uncut READ MORE: The Flam...

The Flaming Lips have added two more UK shows to their 2023 tour, where the US psych-rock band will play their seminal 2002 album Yoshimi Battles The Pink Robots in full to celebrate its 20th anniversary.

ORDER NOW: Neil Young is on the cover of the latest issue of Uncut
READ MORE: The Flaming Lips’ Wayne Coyne: “We don’t care if 20 year olds on acid liked it or not”

Along with their previously announced, sold-out show at London’s Eventim Apollo on April 28, the band will perform at London’s Troxy on April 25, as well as the O2 Apollo in Manchester on April 29. Tickets are on sale now here.

✨JUST ANNOUNCED✨ https://t.co/IaT1H8e355

— The Flaming Lips (@theflaminglips) December 7, 2022

In addition to their UK dates, The Flaming Lips will be playing Yoshimi Battles The Pink Robots at North American headline dates in Chicago and Washington in May, as well as their appearance at the Shaky Knees Festival in Atlanta, Georgia.

Last month, the band released a 20th anniversary reissue of Yoshimi Battles The Pink Robots. Released digitally and a six-CD box set, that version includes 50 previously unreleased tracks, the Ego Tripping At The Gates Of Hell and Flight Test EPs, plus B-sides, demos, remixes, live versions of tracks, and hard-to-find covers of Pink Floyd, Radiohead and Kylie Minogue songs.

Last year, the band released a Nick Cave covers album titled Where The Viaduct Looms in collaboration with young Canadian musician Nell Smith, performing “Red Right Hand” together on Colbert earlier this year.

Line-up revealed for UK Americana Awards 2023

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Michael Bonner

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9th December 2022

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Line-up revealed for UK Americana Awards 2023

The line-up have been revealed for next year's UK Americana Awards, which take place on January 26 at London's Hackney Empire. ORDER NOW: Neil Young is on the cover of the latest issue of Uncut Confirmed performers including Allison Russell, Passenger, Nickel Creek, Lady Nade, The Hanging St...

The line-up have been revealed for next year’s UK Americana Awards, which take place on January 26 at London’s Hackney Empire.

ORDER NOW: Neil Young is on the cover of the latest issue of Uncut

Confirmed performers including Allison Russell, Passenger, Nickel Creek, Lady Nade, The Hanging Stars, The Heavy Heavy, Ferris and Sylvester, Simeon Hammond Dallas, Elles Bailey and Miko Marks join previously announced artists, Judy Collins and Mike Scott.

In addition, the Awards show will honour Loretta Lynn in a multi-artist tribute.

Meanwhile, Allison Russell will deliver The Keynote Speech at UK Americana Music Week Conference, which takes place between January 23 – 26 in Hackney.

Awards only tickets are available here.

Delegate passes and showcase wristbands are available here.

See a full list of nominees below for the awards show at Hackney Empire.

UK Album of the Year
• Birds That Flew and Ships That Sailed by Passenger (Produced by Mike Rosenberg and Chris Vallejo)
• Blue Hours by Bear’s Den (Produced by Ian Grimble)
• Shining In The Half Light by Elles Bailey (Produced by Dan Weller)
• Superhuman by Ferris and Sylvester (Produced by Ryan Hadlock and Michael Rendall)

International Album Of The Year
• In These Silent Days by Brandi Carlile (produced by Dave Cobb and Shooter Jennings)
• Pohorylle by Margo Cilker (produced by Sera Cahoone)
• Raise The Roof by Robert Plant and Alison Krauss (produced by T Bone Burnett)
• The Man From Waco by Charley Crockett (produced by Bruce Robison)

UK Song Of The Year
• Car Crash by Hannah White (Written by Hannah White)
• Grace by Marcus Mumford (Written by Blake Mills and Marcus Mumford)
• Make It Romantic by Simeon Hammond Dallas (Written by Simeon Hammond Dallas)
• The Right Place by Danny George Wilson (written by Danny Wilson)

International Song Of The Year
• I Don’t Really Care for You by CMAT (Written by Ciara Mary-Alice Thompson)
• Something in the Orange by Zach Bryan (Written by Zachary Lane Bryan)
• Take It Like A Man by Amanda Shires (Written by Amanda Shires and Lawrence Rothman)
• You’re Not Alone by Allison Russell feat. Brandi Carlile (Written by Allison Russell)

UK Artist Of The Year
• Bear’s Den
• Elles Bailey
• Ferris and Sylvester
• Lady Nade

International Artist of the Year
• Allison Russell
• Brandi Carlile
• Margo Cilker
• The Dead South

UK Instrumentalist of the Year
• Holly Carter
• Joe Coombs
• Joe Wilkins
• Mark Lewis

UK Live Act of the Year
• Beans On Toast
• Elles Bailey
• Ferris & Sylvester
• Holy Moly & The Crackers
• Noble Jacks
• The Heavy, Heavy

Bruce Springsteen – Only the Strong Survive (Covers Vol 1)

Richard Williams

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9th December 2022

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Bruce Springsteen – Only the Strong Survive (Covers Vol 1)

Listening to Walter Orange and JD Nicholas sing “Nightshift” can still make you cry, 37 years after they recorded the song with their group, the Commodores. The two lead singers each take a verse. Orange begins with the one about Marvin Gaye. Nicholas takes the one about Jackie Wilson. It’s a ...

Listening to Walter Orange and JD Nicholas sing “Nightshift” can still make you cry, 37 years after they recorded the song with their group, the Commodores. The two lead singers each take a verse. Orange begins with the one about Marvin Gaye. Nicholas takes the one about Jackie Wilson. It’s a hymn to a pair of recently departed heroes, quoting from their best-known songs, but it’s not a pastiche. The rich synth textures and the finely detailed percussion are a reminder that this was made in 1985, not 1965. The voices are filled with love and loss. When Orange begins with “Marvin, he was a friend of mine”, it’s more than just a reference to Gaye’s hit version of “Abraham, Martin And John”. It’s a statement of cultural kinship, of brotherhood.

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By making “Nightshift” one of the 15 old soul songs he tackles on his new album, Bruce Springsteen is setting himself quite a challenge. In strictly musical terms, he does a decent job of reproducing the original. The rhythm track is convincing, he sings with passion, and there’s a flourish of B3 on the fade that Dennis Lambert, the Commodores’ producer, might wish he’d thought of. But what does such a thing mean in 2022, all those decades after first Elvis recorded Arthur Crudup’s “That’s All Right Mama” and The Beatles covered Barrett Strong’s “Money”? They were appropriating black music in order to build a platform for their own world-changing means of expression. Does it still work – is it still right – for a famous white singer to present us with his version of black music in quite so straightforwardly imitative a form?

Like many of his contemporaries, Springsteen began his career performing covers, playing black or black-derived songs for a young white audience. A generation was borrowing the syntax and grammar of the music, and the best used it to mould a language of their own. In the bones of almost every song Springsteen ever wrote is the DNA of R&B and soul music, and in a sense it’s honourable of him to want to acknowledge the debt so explicitly. But will the hundreds of thousands who buy his covers album bother to delve back and listen to the 1968 recording of Jerry Butler singing the title song, or William Bell singing “I Forgot To Be Your Lover” that same year? Some might, just as Long John Baldry’s version of “Hoochie Coochie Man”, the Stones’ “Honest I Do” or The Animals’ “I’m Mad Again” certainly led many to the work of Muddy Waters, Jimmy Reed and John Lee Hooker in the early ’60s. But we live in a world in which there are still people who can seriously express a preference for Rod Stewart’s perfectly decent cover of “(I Know) I’m Losing You” over the Temptations’ sublime original, suggesting that we might not have come as far as we thought.

The specific motives that led him to record Only The Strong Survive are understandable and legitimate. He wanted to see how his voice worked on this material, detached from the meaning of the songs he writes himself, and to measure himself against a generation of great singers, such as Ben E King (“Don’t Play That Song”), Tyrone Davis (“Turn Back The Hands Of Time”) and the Four Tops’ Levi Stubbs (“7 Rooms Of Gloom”). The homage would be implicit. In the process he might also rediscover the sense of mingled joy and pain that great soul music contains, and with which he infused crowd-stirring songs of his own, so effectively in something like “Hungry Heart”.

Covers were always a feature of his live act, from “When You Walk In The Room” and “Pretty Flamingo”, choices that exposed the roots of his own songwriting in the early touring days, to “Dream Baby Dream” and “Friday On My Mind” – and, of course, the ecstatic encores: “Twist And Shout”, “Quarter To Three” and the Mitch Ryder medley. The new studio album, however, is a sustained exercise in interpretation, a test both for himself and for his audience, who are invited to enjoy the sound of him stepping outside his own myth.

For a certain kind of listener, this is also an invitation to play amateur A&R man, questioning his choices. Why did he select two songs – “Only The Strong Survive” and “Hey Western Union Man” – from the same Jerry Butler album (The Iceman Cometh)? Perhaps he could have been more adventurous: why two songs from William Bell and none from, say, Frederick Knight, Philip Mitchell or Sam Dees? Or Curtis Mayfield, whose “Gypsy Woman” he covered on a tribute album in 1994?

What Springsteen doesn’t do is produce a caricature of soul music. It may be hard for somebody of his level of fame to affect the modesty that characterised many (not all) great soul singers, but for this he can rely on our knowledge of his own personality, in which a frontman’s natural extroversion has never shaded into brashness. If he can’t reproduce the sense Tyrone Davis brought to a song of being a country boy landed in the big city, then he can treat his “Turn Back The Hands Of Time” with proper respect; if he wasn’t raised in the black church, then he can bring restraint and finesse to the pathos of Bell’s “I Forgot To Be Your Lover”.

There are several shades of soul music on show here. “The Sun Ain’t Gonna Shine Anymore”, sung by Frankie Valli before the Walker Brothers, is New Jersey’s version of Brill Building orchestral pop-soul. The Supremes’ “Someday We’ll Be Together” is Motown at its sweetest. Both the Butler songs echo the gliding Philly Sound invented by their producers and co-composers, Kenny Gamble and Leon Huff. Adding the responses of the veteran Sam Moore (of Sam and Dave) to “I Forgot To Be Your Lover” and Dobie Gray’s “Soul Days” is a nice touch, evoking and saluting the voices of the past.

Sometimes enthusiasm is not enough. “7 Rooms…” is taken a hair too fast and Stubbs’ majestic agony is beyond Springsteen’s reach. “When She Was My Girl”, the Four Tops’ first hit after leaving Motown, simply isn’t worth the trouble. Over the long fade of “What Becomes Of The Brokenhearted”, Springsteen repeats “I’m gonna find my way” as if this were “Backstreets”, making you want to reach for Jimmy Ruffin, who was decidedly less sure about whether he’d ever escape his existential woe. And there are times when, while applauding Springsteen’s attempts to stay faithful to the originals, you wish he’d taken more chances; listening to the rawness of the bluesman Bobby Rush’s 1979 cover of “Hey Western Union Man” might have sent him off in more surprising directions.

But that was not his intention, and it becomes hard to carp when he brings off something as triumphantly as his note-perfect version of Frank Wilson’s “Do I Love You (Indeed I Do)”, the zenith of northern soul, a surviving copy of which famously fetched £25,742 at auction in 2009. Singing as though he knows exactly how it felt to be among the dancers at Wigan Casino or Blackpool Mecca, he doesn’t just capture the details – the vibes, the baritone sax, the four-to-the-bar snare drum, the choir – of the recording conjured up in a Los Angeles studio by the producers Hal Davis and Marc Gordon in 1965: he inhabits its spirit.

The Welcome Wagon – Esther

Rob Hughes

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9th December 2022

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Monique Aiuto and her husband, Presbyterian pastor Vito Aiuto, tend to operate by their own clock. Since 2008’s Welcome To…, their arresting debut as The Welcome Wagon, produced by Sufjan Stevens on his own Asthmatic Kitty label, the pair have released just two albums, suggesting that artistic ...

Monique Aiuto and her husband, Presbyterian pastor Vito Aiuto, tend to operate by their own clock. Since 2008’s Welcome To…, their arresting debut as The Welcome Wagon, produced by Sufjan Stevens on his own Asthmatic Kitty label, the pair have released
just two albums, suggesting that artistic inspiration can be a fickle companion.

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Much of the impetus for their latest came from Monique’s decision to take up painting again after a decade of inactivity. The collage materials she used were taken from the collection of her late grandmother, Esther, whose readings from the Bible (home-recorded onto cassette during the ’90s) kept her company. As Vito’s tentative new songs gathered shape, with Monique’s accompanying artwork, it became apparent that home, family and faith were the three interlocking themes of what became Esther.

Simplicity is key to the Welcome Wagon sound. Vito’s guitar is gentle and politic, allowing for their voices – either trading leads or paired in intimate harmony – to carry the soft weight of these devotional songs. A winding acoustic pattern forms the basis of “Isaiah, California”, a missive to both their son and the importance of belonging. “In the morning / By the fire / We’re going home”, sings Monique in an almost confidential hush.

Occasional samples of Esther’s voice provide a kind of narrative thread, linking Vito’s originals to sacred hymnals like “Noble Tree” and “Bethlehem, A Noble City”, while “Nunc Dimittis” is a canticle from the Gospel of Luke in traditional Latin. With subtle embellishments of brass, strings and piano, Esther sometimes resembles the work of The Innocence Mission or Stevens himself: charming, understated and often very beautiful. And while a couple of these songs tend to merely drift by, the more muscular “Matthew 7:7” mirrors the unshakeable faith of its central message – essentially, seek and you will find.

Similarly, the sterling “Lebanon” addresses memory and transfiguration via shifting bursts of electric guitar and a resolute drum pulse, sounding not unlike Joy Zipper, another New York-based duo prone to going to ground.

New Order share classic Haçienda performance of “Sunrise”

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Tom Skinner

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9th December 2022

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New Order share classic Haçienda performance of “Sunrise”

New Order have shared a live performance of "Sunrise" from The Haçienda in 1985. ORDER NOW: Neil Young is on the cover of the latest issue of Uncut The song appeared on the Manchester band's third studio album Low-Life, which is set to be repackaged and reissued as a special expanded box-se...

New Order have shared a live performance of “Sunrise” from The Haçienda in 1985.

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The song appeared on the Manchester band’s third studio album Low-Life, which is set to be repackaged and reissued as a special expanded box-set on January 27, 2023 (pre-order/pre-save here).

Multiple versions of “Sunrise” will feature in the upcoming collection, including a “writing session recording” and a rough instrumental mix.

There’ll also be live airings of the song from Low-Life-era concerts in Tokyo, Rotterdam, Toronto and Manchester.

The latter performance came as part of a-BBC filmed Whistle Test session at the legendary Haçienda venue. On December 8, New Order released a video of that outing on their official YouTube channel – see it here:

The new Low-Life reissue is due to arrive in LP, 2CD and 2DVD formats, along with a special book.

Also being released are a number of 12-inch singles, including “Shellshock”, “Sub-Culture” and “The Perfect Kiss”. Those limited edition records are available to order now here.

New Order released a special boxset for their seminal second album Power Corruption & Lies in 2020. The 1983 record features the tracks “Blue Monday”, “Age Of Consent” and “Your Silent Face”.

This summer saw New Order embark on a joint North American headline tour with Pet Shop Boys.

The Stranglers drummer Jet Black has died

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Damian Jones

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9th December 2022

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The Stranglers drummer Jet Black has died, aged 84. The sticksman, who was born Brian Duffy, was a founding member of the Guildford band and performed with them until 2015. He announced his retirement a few years later due to ill health. ORDER NOW: Neil Young is on the cover of the latest is...

The Stranglers drummer Jet Black has died, aged 84.

The sticksman, who was born Brian Duffy, was a founding member of the Guildford band and performed with them until 2015. He announced his retirement a few years later due to ill health.

ORDER NOW: Neil Young is on the cover of the latest issue of Uncut

He passed away at his home on Tuesday (December 6) at his country home in Wales. He leaves behind his wife Ava, and his two children Charlotte and Anthony.

Announcing his death on Twitter, the band said: “It is with heavy hearts we announce the passing of our dear friend, colleague and band elder statesman Jet Black. Jet died peacefully at home surrounded by his family. Fond adieu, fly straight JB.”

It is with heavy hearts we announce the passing of our dear friend, colleague and band elder statesman Jet Black. Jet died peacefully at home surrounded by his family. Fond adieu, fly straight JB.x
Read more: https://t.co/vz0RJDme7X pic.twitter.com/XLrcgoCkxr

— The Stranglers (Official) (@StranglersSite) December 8, 2022

Bassist and co-frontman JJ Burnel added: “The welcoming committee has doubled. After years of ill health Jet has finally been released. He was a force of nature. An inspiration. The Stranglers would not have been if it wasn’t for him. The most erudite of men. A rebel with many causes. Say hi to [late keyboard player] Dave [Greenfield] for me.”

Baz Warne, the band’s guitarist and co-frontman also expressed his sadness.

He said: “I loved Jet. He took me under his wing over two decades ago and I never really came out from under it. I’m so very sad he’s gone. He hadn’t been too well for a while, but when I spoke to him most recently, three weeks ago, he was laughing and wanting to hear all the news…still interested and involved. It’s been my privilege to have known and worked with him, and to have called him a friend, and I’ll miss him until the end of my days. Rest in peace big man.”

Former frontman Hugh Cornwall who left the band in 1990, also posted a statement on Twitter.

A statement from Hugh Cornwell regarding the passing of Jet Black: https://t.co/NALk4hdqVE

— Hugh Cornwell (@HughCornwell) December 8, 2022

He wrote: “It is with great sadness I have learnt that Jet Black has passed away. We shared a special period of our lives when we strived to become professional musicians. The Stranglers success was founded on his determination and drive. His timing was faultless. All power to him and his legacy.”

When The Stranglers formed in west Surrey in 1974, Black owned a fleet of ice cream vans which the band used as a tour bus during one of their early tours. They also used his shop as their headquarters.

In 2007, the band announced that Black was suffering with heart issues and he took a step back from performing, being temporarily replaced by his drum technician.

He resumed his duties full-time for the band’s tours in 2010 and 2011, but the following year he was taken to hospital after falling ill just before he was due on stage in Oxford. He finally retired after he stopped performing in 2015.

RIP Jet Black x pic.twitter.com/K307U1L6xp

— Paul Arthurs. (@BoneheadsPage) December 8, 2022

Black’s death came over two years keyboardist Dave Greenfield died at the age of 71 after testing positive for COVID-19.

Lana Del Rey announces new album and single “Did You Know That There’s A Tunnel Under Ocean Blvd”

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Damian Jones

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8th December 2022

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Lana Del Rey announces new album and single “Did You Know That There’s A Tunnel Under Ocean Blvd”

Lana Del Rey has announced her new album Did You Know That There's A Tunnel Under Ocean Blvd and shared the record's title track. ORDER NOW: Neil Young is on the cover of the latest issue of Uncut It comes after the singer-songwriter recently teased her new ninth studio album last week. In ...

Lana Del Rey has announced her new album Did You Know That There’s A Tunnel Under Ocean Blvd and shared the record’s title track.

ORDER NOW: Neil Young is on the cover of the latest issue of Uncut

It comes after the singer-songwriter recently teased her new ninth studio album last week. In a snippet of an interview with HOLA TV, the singer said: “I won’t tell you when it’s coming out, but I can tell you I’m making an announcement about it on the seventh, so what do we have, a week? Seven days? I’m very excited.”

Now, details of her new album have arrived with Del Rey sharing the artwork for the record, which you can view below, and the release of March 10, 2023. Fans can pre-order for Did You Know That There’s A Tunnel Under Ocean Blvd here.

The singer-songwriter has also shared the title track, which was written by herself and Mike Hermosa. It was produced by Del Rey, Jack Antonoff, Drew Erickson and Zach Dawes.

The singer’s last album Blue Banisters was released in October last year. It followed her March 2021 album, Chemtrails Over The Country Club.

Mostly recently, the singer featured on Taylor Swift’s “Snow On The Beach” from the latter’s new album Midnights, which was released last month. Del Rey also covered Father John Misty’s “Buddy’s Rendezvous” in June this year.

We’re New Here – Eve Adams

Stephen Dalton

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8th December 2022

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LA-based noir songwriter Eve Adams talks about “making something beautiful out of something tragic” on her album Metal Bird, previously in our FEBRUARY 2022 issue of Uncut, available to buy here. For as long as she can remember, Eve Adams has been drawn to the darkness on the edge of town. In...

LA-based noir songwriter Eve Adams talks about “making something beautiful out of something tragic” on her album Metal Bird, previously in our FEBRUARY 2022 issue of Uncut, available to buy here.

For as long as she can remember, Eve Adams has been drawn to the darkness on the edge of town. In her tender torch songs and fatalistic folk-noir ballads, the singer-songwriter inhabits an intoxicating twilight zone of romantic ruin and dreamy despair. Love is tortuous and fleeting, bluesy heartache just around the corner, and death forever lurking in the shadows.

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Growing up between her mother’s family farm in Oklahoma and her father’s LA base, Adams came to music young. “I’ve always loved to sing, since I was a little girl,” she says. “The first song I wrote was when I was around 12 and it was called “I’ve Seen It All”, which I find pretty funny. It’s so incredibly sad and I don’t know where the hell it came from! At that point I hadn’t experienced anything traumatic, I had a great childhood. But even then I was fascinated by the darkness.”

On her latest album, Metal Bird, Adams is processing real grief and loss rather than macabre juvenile yearnings. The title was inspired by the frequent plane journeys the singer undertook during the LP’s gestation, travelling from her then-home in Montreal to deal with a family tragedy in LA. Flying for her came to symbolise the liminal state between life and death. “There is something heart-wrenching about flying,” she offers. “You’re participating in this long history and mythology of mankind’s dream to take to the sky, to overcome the gravity of the earth, to be as free as a bird. That resonated with me at a difficult time.”

Adopting a knowingly retro aesthetic that recalls Lana Del Rey or Julee Cruise at times, Adams conjures up swooning, love-damaged narrators in her songs, who could have stepped out of a vintage film noir. Indeed, she cites Marlene Dietrich’s elusive temptress Concha Pérez in The Devil Is A Woman (1935) and Isabella Rossellini’s tormented femme fatale Dorothy Vallens in Blue Velvet (1986) as key inspirations. “Sometimes I feel like I don’t really belong in this era. I’m sure a lot of people feel that way nowadays, though – these are hard times.”

This cinematic mood also extends to lustrous monochrome videos and stylish sleeve artwork for Metal Bird, designed by Adams herself. “My music is inspired by visual art and my visual art is inspired by music, so it’s a nice little ouroborus.”

Metal Bird nudges Adams deeper into classic country-folk Americana than her lightly experimental early albums, In Hell (2017) and Candy Colored Doom (2019). “I wrote most of In Hell while I was 18 and 19, and I feel like it was coming from a much darker and sparser place,” she explains. “As I’ve grown and stepped into womanhood, the music has changed with me.”

Long before the family trauma that inspired Metal Bird, Adams was writing songs filled with darkness. Accepting that loss and grief are universal experiences, she says, is strangely consoling. “Death is universal and I have never wanted to shy away from it. I remember when I got my driver’s licence, I started to photograph roadkill. I’d see a dead skunk or deer and have to pull over to take a picture. I’d have this initial feeling of grief, then I’d transform that into an act of remembrance, making something beautiful out of something tragic. People thought I was a freak, ha! Music is the same kind of process for me. It starts with a feeling and becomes a need to turn it into something else, like an alchemist.”

Metal Bird is released digitally by Basin Rock now.

St. Vincent launches new podcast about history of rock music

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Charlotte Krol

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7th December 2022

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St. Vincent launches new podcast about history of rock music

St. Vincent is hosting a new podcast about the history of rock music called History Listen Rock. ORDER NOW: Neil Young is on the cover of the latest issue of Uncut READ MORE: St Vincent – Daddy’s Home review It marks the second time that the musician – real name Annie Clark – has ...

St. Vincent is hosting a new podcast about the history of rock music called History Listen Rock.

ORDER NOW: Neil Young is on the cover of the latest issue of Uncut
READ MORE: St Vincent – Daddy’s Home review

It marks the second time that the musician – real name Annie Clark – has hosted a podcast, following on from 2020’s St. Vincent: Words + Music.

The podcast is produced by Audible Inc. and Double Elvis and launches on January 12, 2023.

It aims to explore the history of rock music by spotlighting specific moments within the genre’s evolution.

In a statement [via Clash] Clark said: “It’s been so fun going back through rock history and revisiting some of my favourite artists and songs, including a bunch that don’t get the recognition they should.

“When you put it all together, you can see how history repeats and echoes through generations, how music links the past to the present, artist-to-artist. And some of these stories are absolutely wild.”

Listeners will be treated to deep-dives including the Sex Pistols’ doomed US tour and the moment that Jimi Hendrix and Patti Smith met. Check out a preview below.

Co-Founder of Double Elvis Brady Sadler said: “At Double Elvis, we tell stories about music to entertain and provoke audiences to think differently.

“History Listen will do both of these things by taking listeners on a journey through the historical and cultural progression of music, and we couldn’t be more excited to collaborate with Audible on this groundbreaking series given their history as a true pioneer in spoken-word audio.”

Listen to previously unreleased Sparklehorse song “It Will Never Stop”

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Damian Jones

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7th December 2022

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Listen to previously unreleased Sparklehorse song “It Will Never Stop”

A previously unreleased Sparklehorse song has been shared by the brother of late frontman Mark Linkous. ORDER NOW: Neil Young is on the cover of the latest issue of Uncut The track, "It Will Never Stop", was unearthed by Matt Linkous while overseeing his brother's estate and archiving his re...

A previously unreleased Sparklehorse song has been shared by the brother of late frontman Mark Linkous.

ORDER NOW: Neil Young is on the cover of the latest issue of Uncut

The track, “It Will Never Stop”, was unearthed by Matt Linkous while overseeing his brother’s estate and archiving his recordings. The Sparklehorse frontman died by suicide in 2010, at the age of 47.

“Great care has been taken to archive and preserve Mark’s music,” Matt said. “We are very thankful for Mark and the beauty he brought to this world.” You can listen to the track below.

Since Linkous’ passing, unreleased and new tracks have been shared in tribute to the late frontman.

In 2018, PJ Harvey and John Parish shared the song “Sorry For Your Loss” in tribute to Linkous.

Linkous formed Sparklehorse in 1995, and would later collaborate with Harvey and Parish on the 2001 album It’s A Wonderful Life.

A year later, Danger Mouse shared an unreleased track from his project with the late Sparklehorse frontman – 2010’s Dark Night Of The Soul.

The pair worked on the track “Ninjarous” in 2009 alongside rapper MF Doom and The Black Keys‘ Patrick Carney.

“Mark [Linkous] and I worked on a lot of music together,” Danger Mouse previously said. “But it was the song that he and I wrote and recorded with MF DOOM that really resonated with him. It was one of his favourites, so I’m happy to have this opportunity to pay tribute to him by getting it out there.”

Dark Night Of The Soul also featured contributions from the likes of Julian Casablancas, Iggy Pop, and The Flaming Lips. Its visuals were provided by David Lynch.

Meanwhile, a feature-length documentary about Linkous, titled This Is Sparklehorse, was released in October. It was made by UK filmmakers Alex Crowton and Bobby Dass of Bo-Ho Films, and featured Lynch along with Grandaddy’s Jason Lytle and Portishead’s Adrian Utley.

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The Stranglers drummer Jet Black has died

Lana Del Rey announces new album and single “Did You Know That There’s A Tunnel Under Ocean Blvd”

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Listen to previously unreleased Sparklehorse song “It Will Never Stop”

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