Subscribe
Home Blog Page 716

I NEED THAT RECORD!

Uncut
-
0
I NEED THAT RECORD!
Brendan Toller’s engaging essay-film is a direct response to an unexpected extinction event of the past decade: 3,000 independent record stores have closed down in the USA alone. By launching a two-pronged attack on the problem – meeting record store employees and customers in situ, and analysi...

Brendan Toller’s engaging essay-film is a direct response to an unexpected extinction event of the past decade: 3,000 independent record stores have closed down in the USA alone.

By launching a two-pronged attack on the problem – meeting record store employees and customers in situ, and analysing the backstory of the wholesale restructuring of the American music industry since the 1980s – he manages to provide a rounded and quietly impassioned elegy for the kind of self-supporting yet fragile communities which independent stores bring into being.

Along the way, Toller interviews various leftfield rock icons, including Fugazi/Dischord’s Ian Mackaye (brutally realistic), Thurston Moore and Chris Frantz (genially articulate), Mike Watt (incoherent), Legs McNeil (cynical) and Glenn Branca (cantankerous). Lenny Kaye explains how he actually met Patti Smith while they were both browsing in their local indie record booth, and there’s the unspoken reminder of how many groups have formed through in-store notices.

But the real heroes and heroines of the story are the store owners and staff, who are painted as tireless Canutes, embattled against an oceanic sea-change in the business of selling entertainment. He begins at Record Express, the Connecticut neighbourhood record emporium that Toller used to frequent. Owner Ian is clearing his racks and sweeping up, forced out due to rent hikes and dwindling business, as he explains over choked-back tears. Meanwhile, the charismatically combative Malcolm from another CT store, Danbury’s Trash American Style, explains how a local print-shop owner has just elbowed them out of a 20-year lease, while his customers mourn its passing: “It’s like when your best friend’s moved away to a far away land, and you can’t buy a plane ticket to go there,” says one. It’s more than just the closure of a record store, it’s the dismantling of an unofficial but tangible underground society. “A part of the culture,” insists Toller, “that can’t easily be regained.”

How did this come to pass? Toller’s argument begins with President Clinton’s deregulation of radio station ownership in 1996, which led to Clear Channel owning one in 10 radio stations in the US, blanketing them with homogenised playlists. Wal-Mart, he goes on to say, has become the US’s biggest record retailer, with one in every five CDs sold there.

Cumulative factors such as MTV, loss-leading CD prices by big-box retailers, even the legendary superciliousness of indie-shop staff are cited as factors, along with the inevitable role of the internet. Noting that ‘entrepre-nerd’ Michael Robertson only owned six CDs at the time he set up the controversial mp3.com, the film acutely observes the way download culture, with its defensive firewalls of legal protection and enforcement, has promoted a widespread antagonistic attitude to record labels rather than the kind of loyalty that might have characterised earlier generations of music lovers. With digital becoming the dominant delivery model, the prospects for future record collectors is, as Thurston Moore puts it, a “lonely and boring” experience rather than one involving community and fellowship. Theoretical heavyweight Noam Chomsky is roped in to point out the similarities with the way supermarkets sucked up the customer-base of small grocery stores. “The system is designed for isolating people,” he says.

Toller has worked hard to structure his film to maximise the impact of his story, and the analytical sections are seamlessly woven in among the talking heads. Matt Newman’s animations provide appropriately cut’n’paste counterpoints to the footage, and a post-punk soundtrack throbs throughout (the title track, by The Tweeds, is a celebratory slice of 1980 disc-junky power-pop).

The film’s subtitle is ‘The Death (Or Possible Survival) Of The Independent Record Store’. It might have been useful to have gleaned, from shops that are surviving, how to keep heads above water. As it is, I Need That Record! is about more than just the death of the record store. It laments the passing of a state of mind.

EXTRAS: Two hours of full-length musician interviews.

Rob Young

ALASDAIR ROBERTS & FRIENDS – TOO LONG IN THIS CONDITION

Uncut
-
0
ALASDAIR ROBERTS & FRIENDS – TOO LONG IN THIS CONDITION

“Stravaig with gravitas!”, yells the headline to Alasdair Roberts’ sleevenotes. ‘Stravaig’ is an old Scots word meaning to roam or wander without purpose. Doing it with gravitas suggests a rather po-faced mountain hiker; but it makes more sense when applied to Roberts’ journeys through folk music over the past 15 years. After leaving Appendix Out, the Americana-influenced indie outfit formed in the early ’90s, Roberts has wandered with care through Britain’s folk tradition, proving himself an idiosyncratic interpreter of the ballad canon, favouring the magical, murderous fare typical of the Child Ballads collection. But in parallel, he writes his own material in the same vein, haunted by spectres of folk’s mongrel history, and recasting contemporary dilemmas in arcane, even erudite linguistic verse, reaching a peak on last year’s Spoils and its accompanying “The Wyrd Meme” EP. For Too Long In This Condition, he’s tossed the bucket down into the wellhead of tradition again, and hauled up a 10-song collection of ‘Trad. Arrs’. Like so many of folk’s pathfinders in Britain, he’s approached the tradition crabwise, discovering the music tentatively at first, as an outsider – his father’s former career as a folk singer notwithstanding. His taut, peaty Scottish singing voice is as distinctive as past masters Robin Williamson and Archie Fisher. It’s not a trained voice; but it’s an arresting one, which strains and occasionally cracks over the high notes. He makes himself a vessel for these old songs to pass through – a larynx possessed by the spirit of an earlier age – and yet manages to mint them freshly, with the aid of hand-picked musicians, mostly from his adopted city of Glasgow, and including a cellist (Christine Hanson), lap steel player (Ben Reynolds), and fiddler (Alastair Caplin). Combining an encyclopaedic knowledge of Celtic folk stylings with a rangy taste in reading, Roberts has cultivated a strikingly antiquarian ear for the bleakest songs, conjuring the music of a Britain that’s truly ‘gone’. There’s a slightly ramshackle, live-in-your-living room feel to the proceedings; in fact several tunes here are unbelievably catchy. “The Two Sisters” is steeped in wood-smoke and toasted corn, as if sung from an Appalachian porch transposed to the shores of Loch Fyne. His take on “What Put The Blood On Your Right Shoulder” is beautifully judged, with Donald Lindsay’s pipes curling around Roberts’ nimble, high-fretboard skirls. Shane Connolly’s drumming needs singling out: a heavy, splashy attack that recalls the heft of Dave Mattacks. “The Golden Vanity” is the kind of odyssey-like ballad or journey song that feels peculiarly suited to Roberts’ discursive approach, plenty of incidental, surreal detail in its ship of fools narrative. At the other end of the scale, Roberts slips in “Kilmahog Saturday Afternoon”, a piece written by his father Alan, turned here into the kind of electric jig that Fairport mastered, with added Ozark harps. “Long Lankin” is almost inappropriately jaunty, given that it deals with the pricking of a baby, the knifing of a lady, a criminal hanging and a “false nurse” burnt alive. But the insouciant delivery only amplifies the cold brutality of the acts described. It’s a long time since balladry has sounded this vital and primordial, so soaked in ancient blood. Long may Roberts’ grave stravaiging continue. Rob Young Q&A “Stravaig with gravitas” – how do you apply that phrase to the music here? I suppose ‘gravitas’ applies in that the songs are all somehow concerned with themes of mortality. I think all in all it’s a more upbeat record than [2005’s] No Earthly Man. I don’t think ‘stravaig’, meaning ‘to wander aimlessly’, really applies to the work as it seems fairly focused and concise to me. Perhaps the record would be a good auditory accompaniment to a languorous stravaig in the Cuillin, the Burren or the Kentish Weald. The longest-lived ballads are most preoccupied with death, aren’t they? I think it’s an understandable preoccupation with what’s inescapable for us all. I have a recording of the “Long Lankin” ballad sung by an Irishman whose name escapes me… he’s singing this ballad about infanticide, occasionally laughing, at the same time as he’s nursing his own baby, who can be heard gurgling in the background. Still writing your own folk-not-folk songs? I’ve been slowly working on new non-traditional songs. At the moment I feel pretty happy with them, lyrically and melodically, I have about 18 or 20 completed pieces, and I’ve been thinking about the possibility of working with brass or woodwind, which I’ve never really done before. INTERVIEW: ROB YOUNG

“Stravaig with gravitas!”, yells the headline to Alasdair Roberts’ sleevenotes. ‘Stravaig’ is an old Scots word meaning to roam or wander without purpose. Doing it with gravitas suggests a rather po-faced mountain hiker; but it makes more sense when applied to Roberts’ journeys through folk music over the past 15 years.

After leaving Appendix Out, the Americana-influenced indie outfit formed in the early ’90s, Roberts has wandered with care through Britain’s folk tradition, proving himself an idiosyncratic interpreter of the ballad canon, favouring the magical, murderous fare typical of the Child Ballads collection. But in parallel, he writes his own material in the same vein, haunted by spectres of folk’s mongrel history, and recasting contemporary dilemmas in arcane, even erudite linguistic verse, reaching a peak on last year’s Spoils and its accompanying “The Wyrd Meme” EP. For Too Long In This Condition, he’s tossed the bucket down into the wellhead of tradition again, and hauled up a 10-song collection of ‘Trad. Arrs’.

Like so many of folk’s pathfinders in Britain, he’s approached the tradition crabwise, discovering the music tentatively at first, as an outsider – his father’s former career as a folk singer notwithstanding. His taut, peaty Scottish singing voice is as distinctive as past masters Robin Williamson and Archie Fisher. It’s not a trained voice; but it’s an arresting one, which strains and occasionally cracks over the high notes. He makes himself a vessel for these old songs to pass through – a larynx possessed by the spirit of an earlier age – and yet manages to mint them freshly, with the aid of hand-picked musicians, mostly from his adopted city of Glasgow, and including a cellist (Christine Hanson), lap steel player (Ben Reynolds), and fiddler (Alastair Caplin).

Combining an encyclopaedic knowledge of Celtic folk stylings with a rangy taste in reading, Roberts has cultivated a strikingly antiquarian ear for the bleakest songs, conjuring the music of a Britain that’s truly ‘gone’. There’s a slightly ramshackle, live-in-your-living room feel to the proceedings; in fact several tunes here are unbelievably catchy. “The Two Sisters” is steeped in wood-smoke and toasted corn, as if sung from an Appalachian porch transposed to the shores of Loch Fyne. His take on “What Put The Blood On Your Right Shoulder” is beautifully judged, with Donald Lindsay’s pipes curling around Roberts’ nimble, high-fretboard skirls. Shane Connolly’s drumming needs singling out: a heavy, splashy attack that recalls the heft of Dave Mattacks.

“The Golden Vanity” is the kind of odyssey-like ballad or journey song that feels peculiarly suited to Roberts’ discursive approach, plenty of incidental, surreal detail in its ship of fools narrative. At the other end of the scale, Roberts slips in “Kilmahog Saturday Afternoon”, a piece written by his father Alan, turned here into the kind of electric jig that Fairport mastered, with added Ozark harps.

“Long Lankin” is almost inappropriately jaunty, given that it deals with the pricking of a baby, the knifing of a lady, a criminal hanging and a “false nurse” burnt alive. But the insouciant delivery only amplifies the cold brutality of the acts described. It’s a long time since balladry has sounded this vital and primordial, so soaked in ancient blood. Long may Roberts’ grave stravaiging continue.

Rob Young

Q&A

“Stravaig with gravitas” – how do you apply that phrase to the music here?

I suppose ‘gravitas’ applies in that the songs are all somehow concerned with themes of mortality. I think all in all it’s a more upbeat record than [2005’s] No Earthly Man. I don’t think ‘stravaig’, meaning ‘to wander aimlessly’, really applies to the work as it seems fairly focused and concise to me. Perhaps the record would be a good auditory accompaniment to a languorous stravaig in the Cuillin, the Burren or the Kentish Weald.

The longest-lived ballads are most preoccupied with death, aren’t they?

I think it’s an understandable preoccupation with what’s inescapable for us all. I have a recording of the “Long Lankin” ballad sung by an Irishman whose name escapes me… he’s singing this ballad about infanticide, occasionally laughing, at the same time as he’s nursing his own baby, who can be heard gurgling in the background.

Still writing your own folk-not-folk songs?

I’ve been slowly working on new non-traditional songs. At the moment I feel pretty happy with them, lyrically and melodically, I have about 18 or 20 completed pieces, and I’ve been thinking about the possibility of working with brass or woodwind, which I’ve never really done before.

INTERVIEW: ROB YOUNG

ISOBEL CAMPBELL AND MARK LANEGAN – HAWK

Uncut
-
0
ISOBEL CAMPBELL AND MARK LANEGAN – HAWK

Much of the initial mileage in the collaboration between Isobel Campbell and Mark Lanegan derived from its sheer incongruity. Who wouldn’t be fascinated by the one-time cellist in the artfully arch Belle & Sebastian embarking on an archaeological retrieval of the ghosts of Americana with the drug-damaged dark star of Screaming Trees and Queens Of The Stone Age? Not only that, but the collaboration subverted the template of Lee and Nancy and Cave and Kylie, in that for once the female partner was the creative puppeteer. If nothing else, the unlikely backstory ensured we were all bound to sit up and pay attention. But though their first two albums, Ballad Of The Broken Seas and Sunday At Devil Dirt, had their sublime moments, just as often the pair seemed too content to play on their obvious contrasts (the innocent and the profane, the sweet and the sour, the whisper and the growl) rather than grabbing the material by the scruff of the neck and creating something that transcended its immediate context. In this respect, Hawk constitutes a breakthrough. Recorded in America, Denmark and Scotland, it’s less inclined to rely on atmosphere alone. Although the pairing remains essentially a contrived construct requiring some suspension of disbelief, after the tentative, dust-dry settings of Sunday At Devil Dirt, the songs here are stronger, the arrangements fuller and more ambitious, and as a consequence the music strikes a much more convincing note. Pleasingly, the reference points are scattered to the winds. The breakneck jump-blues of “Get Behind Me”, a bastard hybrid of Ryan Adams’ “To Be Young” and Dylan’s “Tombstone Blues”, folds into “Time Of The Season”, an emotional tour of duty encompassing King’s Cross, Birmingham and Amsterdam in which the sweeping Nashville strings and gentle finger-picking groove echo Glen Campbell’s “Gentle On My Mind”. Hawk is very much Campbell’s baby. As well as producing and arranging, she wrote all the songs apart from Townes Van Zandt’s “No Place To Fall”, cut here as a touching duet with “Oxygen” songwriter Willy Mason, its deathly stillness punctuated only by slivers of Appalachian fiddle. In contrast, Lanegan slipped into town for a few days to play the wasted, no-good boyfriend, cannily aligning himself to a woman who’s prepared to do all the hard work on his behalf. He may be a hired gun, but he’s a deadly one, and all the marquee moments belong to him. On the relentless “You Won’t Let Me Down Again” he’s like a murderous dog on a leash, shackled to a hellbound riff that never quite finds peace. His quiet desperation burns into the grooves of “Come Undone”, a moody, minor chord Southern soul ballad pitched between Nina Simone’s “Feeling Good” and “Come On Over (Turn Me On)” from Sunday At Devil Dirt, while he lends an unlikely tenderness to “Eyes Of Green”, a lilting campfire strum beamed in from another age. Lanegan sits out five of these 13 songs, with mixed results. Campbell brings a real intensity to “To Hell And Back Again”, its hazy wash of acoustic guitars and distant drums recalling the slo-mo fireworks of Mazzy Star’s “Fade Into You”, but she fails to ignite the slight “Sunrise”. The title track, meanwhile, is an unhinged blues instrumental that sounds like an outtake from Exile On Main St, and though it’s a throwaway you sometimes yearn for a similar lack of restraint in the vocal performances. Despite the fact that they’re both rather one-dimensional singers – she the eternal whisperer; he the drowsy wolf – Hawk feels like a triumph. Taking its musical cues from Dylan’s Pat Garrett And Billy The Kid, the closing “Lately” offers an embarrassment of riches. Over a rousing gospel backing and sweaty Hammond, Lanegan heralds the promise of wedding bells and his ship – finally – coming in. It’s a wonderfully uplifting finale to a finely conceived record, an eloquent testament to an unlikely partnership that’s only now delivering its full potential. Graeme Thomson Q&A - ISOBEL CAMPBELL How did the recording of Hawk come together? I wrote most of the songs in three months, locked away in a house in Arizona. I came back to Glasgow and in two weekends we threw down the bare bones, then I added more stuff in Denmark, Los Angeles, Dallas… It was an adventure – my hard-drive was a complete mess! Did you and Mark record together? After the Glasgow sessions I went off to the States to meet him. We mostly worked on his vocals, but I would often sing a guide vocal and sometimes I’d keep that. I was working on the record for about a year and a half, and he was in the studio for five days, then two other days. He said that he lets me do the heavy lifting. I thought, "Yeah, you do!" Why did you draft in Willy Mason? Mark said he didn’t want to sing “No Place To Fall” because he’d sung a Townes Van Zandt song on another record. I was like, “That backing track is really good, don’t do this to me…” One of my engineers works with Willy a lot and suggested I contact him, and finally I did. He emailed me a rough mix of the song the next day and I loved it. I’d like to work with Willy a bit more. INTERVIEW: GRAEME THOMSON

Much of the initial mileage in the collaboration between Isobel Campbell and Mark Lanegan derived from its sheer incongruity.

Who wouldn’t be fascinated by the one-time cellist in the artfully arch Belle & Sebastian embarking on an archaeological retrieval of the ghosts of Americana with the drug-damaged dark star of Screaming Trees and Queens Of The Stone Age?

Not only that, but the collaboration subverted the template of Lee and Nancy and Cave and Kylie, in that for once the female partner was the creative puppeteer. If nothing else, the unlikely backstory ensured we were all bound to sit up and pay attention. But though their first two albums, Ballad Of The Broken Seas and Sunday At Devil Dirt, had their sublime moments, just as often the pair seemed too content to play on their obvious contrasts (the innocent and the profane, the sweet and the sour, the whisper and the growl) rather than grabbing the material by the scruff of the neck and creating something that transcended its immediate context.

In this respect, Hawk constitutes a breakthrough. Recorded in America, Denmark and Scotland, it’s less inclined to rely on atmosphere alone. Although the pairing remains essentially a contrived construct requiring some suspension of disbelief, after the tentative, dust-dry settings of Sunday At Devil Dirt, the songs here are stronger, the arrangements fuller and more ambitious, and as a consequence the music strikes a much more convincing note.

Pleasingly, the reference points are scattered to the winds. The breakneck jump-blues of “Get Behind Me”, a bastard hybrid of Ryan Adams’ “To Be Young” and Dylan’s “Tombstone Blues”, folds into “Time Of The Season”, an emotional tour of duty encompassing King’s Cross, Birmingham and Amsterdam in which the sweeping Nashville strings and gentle finger-picking groove echo Glen Campbell’s “Gentle On My Mind”.

Hawk is very much Campbell’s baby. As well as producing and arranging, she wrote all the songs apart from Townes Van Zandt’s “No Place To Fall”, cut here as a touching duet with “Oxygen” songwriter Willy Mason, its deathly stillness punctuated only by slivers of Appalachian fiddle. In contrast, Lanegan slipped into town for a few days to play the wasted, no-good boyfriend, cannily aligning himself to a woman who’s prepared to do all the hard work on his behalf.

He may be a hired gun, but he’s a deadly one, and all the marquee moments belong to him. On the relentless “You Won’t Let Me Down Again” he’s like a murderous dog on a leash, shackled to a hellbound riff that never quite finds peace. His quiet desperation burns into the grooves of “Come Undone”, a moody, minor chord Southern soul ballad pitched between Nina Simone’s “Feeling Good” and “Come On Over (Turn Me On)” from Sunday At Devil Dirt, while he lends an unlikely tenderness to “Eyes Of Green”, a lilting campfire strum beamed in from another age.

Lanegan sits out five of these 13 songs, with mixed results. Campbell brings a real intensity to “To Hell And Back Again”, its hazy wash of acoustic guitars and distant drums recalling the slo-mo fireworks of Mazzy Star’s “Fade Into You”, but she fails to ignite the slight “Sunrise”. The title track, meanwhile, is an unhinged blues instrumental that sounds like an outtake from Exile On Main St, and though it’s a throwaway you sometimes yearn for a similar lack of restraint in the vocal performances. Despite the fact that they’re both rather one-dimensional singers – she the eternal whisperer; he the drowsy wolf – Hawk feels like a triumph. Taking its musical cues from Dylan’s Pat Garrett And Billy The Kid, the closing “Lately” offers an embarrassment of riches. Over a rousing gospel backing and sweaty Hammond, Lanegan heralds the promise of wedding bells and his ship – finally – coming in. It’s a wonderfully uplifting finale to a finely conceived record, an eloquent testament to an unlikely partnership that’s only now delivering its full potential.

Graeme Thomson

Q&A – ISOBEL CAMPBELL

How did the recording of Hawk come together?

I wrote most of the songs in three months, locked away in a house in Arizona. I came back to Glasgow and in two weekends we threw down the bare bones, then I added more stuff in Denmark, Los Angeles, Dallas… It was an adventure – my hard-drive was a complete mess!

Did you and Mark record together?

After the Glasgow sessions I went off to the States to meet him. We mostly worked on his vocals, but I would often sing a guide vocal and sometimes I’d keep that. I was working on the record for about a year and a half, and he was in the studio for five days, then two other days. He said that he lets me do the heavy lifting. I thought, “Yeah, you do!”

Why did you draft in Willy Mason?

Mark said he didn’t want to sing “No Place To Fall” because he’d sung a Townes Van Zandt song on another record. I was like, “That backing track is really good, don’t do this to me…” One of my engineers works with Willy a lot and suggested I contact him, and finally I did. He emailed me a rough mix of the song the next day and I loved it. I’d like to work with Willy a bit more.

INTERVIEW: GRAEME THOMSON

Grinderman: “Grinderman 2”

John Mulvey
-
0

The arrival yesterday of a remix of “Heathen Child”, with added Robert Fripp, reminded me that I’d somehow neglected to write anything about “Grinderman 2”, even with Nick Cave on the cover of the current Uncut. These past few months, I’ve actually had some fairly fluctuating responses to Cave’s records: a bunch of reissues of albums I’d long loved sounded oddly unsatisfying, and what you could pejoratively term the panto aspect of Cave’s schtick (and, actually, his attitudes, however 'literary', to women) seemed harder than usual to ignore. Something similar happened the first time I listened to this second album by the Grinderman project. Two things happened, though. One: an awareness that Cave’s music, more than most at the moment, appears to be vulnerable to my moods. And two: an understanding, repeatedly drilled into us, that Grinderman are a band that just happen to feature Nick Cave, rather than a Nick Cave project. It’s a delicate nuance, but in that context “Grinderman 2” starts sounding rather differently; as, perhaps, a terrific new project from the guy from The Dirty Three. Consequently, it’s Warren Ellis who starts to dominate these nine immensely rackety and entertaining songs. Cave told David Quantick in the Uncut interview that “Half the time we don’t know what they [the sounds] are,” but it’s likely that a fair few of them are generated by Ellis’ electric bouzouki, a weapon of considerable aggression and potential for distortion. Presumably, it’s that which makes the noise loosely comparable to Ron Asheton wrestling a Hoover on “Heathen Child”. Cave is plenty audible here, backed as he is by a great Martyn Casey bassline and the blokey call-and-response harmonies of his bandmates (on “Palaces Of Montezuma”, incidentally, they attain an elevated sort of rugby club soulfulness). Often, though, he uncharacteristically sinks into the mix, as if the democracy-in-action spirit of Grinderman is being muscularly asserted over the mixing desk. When he’s foregrounded on “Palaces Of Montezuma”, a grand, droll and verbose rumination on the dimensions of love that’d fit neatly on the last couple of Bad Seeds albums, it’s quite a shock. That said, “Palaces Of Montezuma” is the not the only song to recall The Bad Seeds. “Grinderman 2” is a substantially more wide-ranging effort than its predecessor. At its centre sits a looming marvel called “When My Baby Comes”, which has a similar fluttering anxiety, as Ellis’ violin loops and loops, to “Moonland” on “Dig, Lazarus, Dig!!!” (Just checked the title of “Moonland”, incidentally, and noticed that its songwriting credit is Cave/Ellis/Casey/Sclavunos – Grinderman, in other words). About halfway through, “When My Baby Comes” explodes into a cycle of bigger and bigger riffs. Quoting Cave again from the Uncut interview, he says, “Jason Spaceman came into the studio and we played him ‘Worm Tamer’. He Said, ‘Are you guys aware of just how fucked up this sounds?’” Spaceman had a point about the excellent “Worm Tamer” (Bo Diddley beat, wave after wave of noise, sexually-charged reference to the Loch Ness Monster). If he’d been commenting on “When My Baby Comes”, however, he’d perhaps be less disconcerted: that long passage of crescendos is not a million miles away from the sound of peak Spiritualized. And while “Evil” is a fervid throwback to the first Grinderman album, “What I Know” is something else again: parched and vulnerable near-ambience which again emphasises the ambitions of Warren Ellis in the post-Mick Harvey era, evidently keen on using the studio as an instrument rather than relying on the unsullied sounds of these very bad men and their instruments. Finally, there’s “Bellringer Blues”, conceivably the best track on “Grinderman 2”, which begins with a flare of backwards psych, and maintains a reverse Ellis riff throughout, over an intensely groovy organ vamp. Grinderman are currently playing an interesting game with their own reputations – the daft dressing-up game of the “Heathen Child” clip being a case in point – but on “Bellringer Blues”, the brilliance of the band really comes to the fore: the incipient menace doesn’t come from Cave, but from the trippy, claustrophobic funk conjured up by his accomplices.

The arrival yesterday of a remix of “Heathen Child”, with added Robert Fripp, reminded me that I’d somehow neglected to write anything about “Grinderman 2”, even with Nick Cave on the cover of the current Uncut.

Continue

Carl Barat confirms solo album details

Uncut
-
0
Carl Barat confirms solo album details
Carl Barât has announced the release details of his self-titled debut solo album. The Libertines man will release the album on October 4, alongside a book about his experiences in bands, Three Penny Memoir. The album features collaborations with Miike Snow's Andrew Wyatt and The Divine Comedy's ...

Carl Barât has announced the release details of his self-titled debut solo album.

The Libertines man will release the album on October 4, alongside a book about his experiences in bands, Three Penny Memoir.

The album features collaborations with Miike Snow‘s Andrew Wyatt and The Divine Comedy‘s Neil Hannon. A single, ‘Run With The Boys’, will be out on the same day as the album.

The tracklisting of Carl Barât‘s solo album is:

‘The Magus’

‘Je Regrette, Je Regrette’

‘She’s Something’

‘Carve My Name’

‘Run With The Boys’

‘The Fall’

‘So Long, My Lover’

‘What Have I Done’

‘Shadows Fall’

‘Ode To A Girl’

Latest music and film news on Uncut.co.uk.

Uncut have teamed up with Sonic Editions to curate a number of limited-edition framed iconic rock photographs, featuring the likes of Pink Floyd, Bob Dylan and The Clash. View the full collection here.

Arcade Fire storm the US and UK charts

Uncut
-
0
Arcade Fire storm the US and UK charts
Arcade Fire have gone straight to the top of the US album charts with their new album 'The Suburbs'. Win Butler's band went straight in at the top spot yesterday (August 11), reports Billboard. The album sold around 156,000 copies in its first week. Taylor Swift's 'Mine' topped the US songs chart,...

Arcade Fire have gone straight to the top of the US album charts with their new album ‘The Suburbs’.

Win Butler‘s band went straight in at the top spot yesterday (August 11), reports Billboard. The album sold around 156,000 copies in its first week.

Taylor Swift‘s ‘Mine’ topped the US songs chart, clocking up around 297,000 downloads.

Arcade Fire are also Number One in the UK albums chart – although [url=http://www.nme.com/news/the-saturdays/52437]Eminem looks set to return to the top spot with ‘Recovery’ on Sunday[/url], according to the official mid-week update.

Latest music and film news on Uncut.co.uk.

Uncut have teamed up with Sonic Editions to curate a number of limited-edition framed iconic rock photographs, featuring the likes of Pink Floyd, Bob Dylan and The Clash. View the full collection here.

First Look – The Girl Who Played With Fire

Michael Bonner
-
0

Ok, first things first, there’s some spoilers ahead. So, unless you’re one of the three people left on the planet who’s not read Swedish author Stieg Larsson’s sequence of books on which these movies are based, you might want to turn away now. One of the most contested roles in Hollywood right now is Lisbeth Salander, the Gothy, tattooed computer hacker at the centre of Larsson’s books. Troubled, harassed and vengeful, she’s the natural successor to The Terminator’s Sarah Connor, Ripley from the Alien films and The Bride in Kill Bill. To any actress, she’s the kind of hefty female character that, sadly, doesn’t come around very often in movies. So, if your name is Carey Mulligan, Ellen Page, Kristen Stewart or even Emma Watson, chances are you have already started beating a path to the door of David Fincher, who’s signed to direct the American remake. For now, though, there is Noomi Rapace, who plays Lisbeth in all three of the original Swedish movies. Rapace, who looks like a cross between Tamsin Grieg and Justine Frischmann, is electrifying in both The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo and its sequel, The Girl Who Played With Fire. She brings a strong, wounded dignity to Lisbeth, shifting convincingly between sullen, feral and vulnerable. The pairing of Rapace with hangdog Michael Nyqvist, as investigative magazine publisher Mikael Blomkvist, made for a great visual odd couple in The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo. That Daniel Craig is slated to play Blomkvist in Fincher’s film perhaps signals a shift towards a more glamorous, Hollywoodised central pairing. The Girl Who Played With Fire opens a year after The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo and picks up several outstanding plot threads. There’s the small matter, for instance, of Lisbeth’s abusive guardian Nils Bjurman. Bjurman raped Lisbeth several times during the first film; she retaliated by secretly filming one encounter and then tattooing across his chest the words, I AM A SADISTIC PIG A PERVERT AND A RAPIST. As The Girl Who Played With Fire opens, Bjurman wants Lisbeth’s film back, and employs some nasty dudes to find it. Meanwhile, Blomkvist has just taken on a new freelancer who is working on an expose of sex trafficking that will incriminate a number of high-ranking officials. These two storylines converge in a way that feels, eventually, contrived; though the circuitous route they take on their way there, and the incidental plot additions, twists and auxiliary characters that come and go give the feeling of plot heft. Larssen himself is pretty guilty of plundering many genre tropes and plot staples. The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, after all, concerned itself with Nazis, corruption, incest and serial murder; surely, we're been here before? At least, I guess, The Girl Who Played With Fire tries to find wriggle-room within its pulp conventions, and the film's grand conspiracy turns out to lead in an unexpected direction. Astonishingly, for this he seems to draw on Star Wars, and particularly the third act revelations in The Empire Strikes Back. But these serve less as resolutions, more as a way of setting up the third film, The Girl Who Kicked The Hornet’s Nest. Really, one thing The Girl Who Played With Fire lacks is a self-contained narrative arc; something to give the film its own satisfactory ending. It’s also a pretty grim film. However strong and empowered a character Lisbeth is, there’s part of me that feels uncomfortable with the way she’s treated in both these films. The degrees of abuse she undergoes, particularly, remind me in places of the Seventies horror exploitation cycle. In the final act, she’s buried alive outside a backwoods compound by a deformed maniac and his monstrous henchman. Axes are involved. You might call it the Swedish Chainsaw Massacre, it so closely resembles the kind of tortures meted out by Leatherface to poor Sally in Tobe Hooper’s movie. Incoming director Daniel Alfredson (whose brother Tomas directed Let The Right One In) maintains the look of the first film; a muted colour palette prevails (one, now I think about it, that’s pretty suited to David Fincher, who likes a bit of murk). Certainly, some of the freshness and originality of The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo is absent here. It’s true, too, by keeping Lisbeth and Blomkvist separate for nearly the entire film, Alfredson deprives us of the dynamic between the two that worked so well in the first film. There’s an unambitious efficiency, too, to the film. It feels like a TV film, and while at its heart these books are largely police procedurals, they lack the qualities of, say, Prime Suspect. The Girl Who Played With Fire opens in the UK on August 27

Ok, first things first, there’s some spoilers ahead. So, unless you’re one of the three people left on the planet who’s not read Swedish author Stieg Larsson’s sequence of books on which these movies are based, you might want to turn away now.

One of the most contested roles in Hollywood right now is Lisbeth Salander, the Gothy, tattooed computer hacker at the centre of Larsson’s books.

Continue

Kemialliset Ystävät: “Ullakkopalo”

John Mulvey
-
0

As yesterday’s playlist indicated, the Avey Tare solo album has arrived, and I’ll do my best to write something about it in the next day or two. In the meantime, though, those of you attracted to the wilder shores of the Animal Collective might be interested in this one, the latest effort by a shadowy but productive band from Finland called Kemialliset Ystävät (“Chemical Friends”, I am informed). Kemialliset Ystävät, if you’ve never come across them before, are part of a pretty lively Finnish psych scene, which I always mean to dig into in earnest. I have one or two Avarus and Kiila albums, but the vast expanses of Kemialliset’s discography – 40-odd strong, I believe - remain largely beyond me, unfortunately: maybe one of you could give us some clues as to where to start properly? Anyhow, the beautifully-packaged “Ullakkopalo” is great, being a crotchety forest jam, all rustle and sprung rattle, which harbours some of the same kindergarten freakout sensibilities of the Animal Collective’s earlier work, albeit pushed much, much further out. Like AC, there’s a certain whimsical infantilism here that might jar with some listeners. But the way Kemialliset Ystävät’s hypnotic little melodies (“Ystävälliset Miekat” being a great case in point) emerge from the improvised thicket, and the way everything is played, notwithstanding the density, with such brightness and clarity, is really genuinely charming. Other things that come to mind when listening to the frictional chaos of “Ullakkopalo” are Kraut commune jams like Amon Duul, plus some of the most untethered outriders of the free folk scene, notably Matt Valentine and co’s Tower Recordings, whose impressionistic, collagist way of grafting disparate snippets of sound together is a decent analogue. Much of Kemialliset Ystävät’s pipes, strums, squeaks and glitches sounds like it was processed through a laptop, while retaining its organic vibes. As the album goes on, though, some skinny but intense fuzz guitar soloing cuts a swathe through the found-sound rituals. On “Maksaruohoja” or “Mestari Ei Väsy”, to take two, the thought occurs that there are some similarities to the playful, uncanny tapestry of last year’s Broadcast And The Focus Group album – if, that is, the collective had expanded to include guest spots from Ben Chasny.

As yesterday’s playlist indicated, the Avey Tare solo album has arrived, and I’ll do my best to write something about it in the next day or two. In the meantime, though, those of you attracted to the wilder shores of the Animal Collective might be interested in this one, the latest effort by a shadowy but productive band from Finland called Kemialliset Ystävät (“Chemical Friends”, I am informed).

Continue

Jimi Hendrix photographer Gered Mankovitz reveals all about 1960s sessions

Uncut
-
0
Jimi Hendrix photographer Gered Mankovitz reveals all about 1960s sessions
Jimi Hendrix photographer Gered Mankovitz has spoken about studio photo sessions with the guitar legend in the 1960s in a new video for Uncut's sister-publication [url=http://www.nme.com/news/jimi-hendrix--2/52435]NME[/url]. In the video Mankovitz revealed that Hendrix and his band struggled to app...

Jimi Hendrix photographer Gered Mankovitz has spoken about studio photo sessions with the guitar legend in the 1960s in a new video for Uncut‘s sister-publication [url=http://www.nme.com/news/jimi-hendrix–2/52435]NME[/url].

In the video Mankovitz revealed that Hendrix and his band struggled to appear enigmatic in photos and were actually prone to giggling fits.

“There was a lot of laughing and giggling,” he said of a studio photo session that took place shortly after the guitarist landed in London in 1966. “Every bloke [in the 1960s] wanted to be moody and sexy and yet there was endless laughter.”

He added: “Especially Mitch [Mitchell, drummer]…when he tried to look moody and cool he just broke everybody up. But they managed to do it enough times to make the shoot look viable and worthwhile.”

The new issue of [url=http://www.nme.com]NME[/url] (out nationwide from August 11) features more about Hendrix, including the story of the last week of his life, as well as tributes and pictures. [url=http://www.nme.com]NME[/url] is on UK newsstands, or available digitally worldwide right now.

Latest music and film news on Uncut.co.uk.

Uncut have teamed up with Sonic Editions to curate a number of limited-edition framed iconic rock photographs, featuring the likes of Pink Floyd, Bob Dylan and The Clash. View the full collection here.

Funk legend Phelps ‘Catfish’ Collins dies aged 66

Uncut
-
0
Funk legend Phelps ‘Catfish’ Collins dies aged 66
Parliament and Funkadelic guitarist Phelps 'Catfish' Collins has passed away following a battle with cancer. He was 66. The Cincinnati guitarist was a key part of the funk scene in the late '60s and early '70s, playing with James Brown before joining Parliament and Funkadelic. With Funkadelic, Cat...

Parliament and Funkadelic guitarist Phelps ‘Catfish’ Collins has passed away following a battle with cancer. He was 66.

The Cincinnati guitarist was a key part of the funk scene in the late ’60s and early ’70s, playing with James Brown before joining Parliament and Funkadelic.

With Funkadelic, Catfish played on albums including ‘America Eats Its Young’ (1972) and tracks like James Brown‘s ‘Get Up (I Feel Like Being A) Sex Machine’ (1970).

His younger brother and fellow musician Bootsy Collins hailed him as the “happiest fellow I ever met on this planet” following the news of his death, reports Rollingstone.com. He added that his world “will never be the same” now that he has died.

Collins‘ death comes less than two months after Funkadelic‘s guitarist Gary Shider, who passed away from cancer on June 16.

Latest music and film news on Uncut.co.uk.

Uncut have teamed up with Sonic Editions to curate a number of limited-edition framed iconic rock photographs, featuring the likes of Pink Floyd, Bob Dylan and The Clash. View the full collection here.

The Bees announce live return and new album

Uncut
-
0
The Bees announce live return and new album
Isle Of Wight band The Bees are set to release their fourth album later this year. 'Every Step's A Yes' is out on October 11. The band have also announced their first headline UK gig in three years – set to take place on September 15 at London's Bush Hall. The tracklisting of 'Every Step's A Ye...

Isle Of Wight band The Bees are set to release their fourth album later this year.

‘Every Step’s A Yes’ is out on October 11.

The band have also announced their first headline UK gig in three years – set to take place on September 15 at London‘s Bush Hall.

The tracklisting of ‘Every Step’s A Yes’ is:

‘I Really Need Love’

‘Winter Rose’

‘Silver Line’

‘No More Excuses’

‘Tired Of Loving’

‘Change Can Happen’

‘Island Love Letter’

‘Skill Of The Man’

‘Pressure Makes Me Lazy’

‘Gaia’

Tickets to the London show go on sale tomorrow (August 11).

Latest music and film news on Uncut.co.uk.

Uncut have teamed up with Sonic Editions to curate a number of limited-edition framed iconic rock photographs, featuring the likes of Pink Floyd, Bob Dylan and The Clash. View the full collection here.

The 31st Uncut Playlist Of 2010

John Mulvey
-
0

After last week’s kind of dutiful list, some better things on this one, I think. Headline news, I guess, is the arrival of the Avey Tare album, though I’m also very taken with the new single from Forest Swords, and of course the much-needed official reissue of Peter Walker’s debut. 1 Peter Walker – Rainy Day Raga (Ace) 2 The Coil Sea – The Coil Sea (Thrill Jockey) 3 Avey Tare – Down There (Paw Tracks) 4 Miles Davis – Miles In The Movies (Giant Steps) 5 Trembling Bells – Memories Of Heaven (Tour EP) 6 Dustin Wong – Infinite Love (Thrill Jockey) 7 Blackberry Smoke – Little Piece Of Dixie (Bamajam) 8 Syl Johnson – Complete Mythology (Numero Group) 9 DJ Nate – Da Trak Genious (Planet Mu) 10 Robert Wyatt, Ros Stephen, Gilad Atzmon – The Ghosts Within (Domino) 11 Zola Jesus –S tridulum II (Souterrain Transmissions) 12 Asmara All-Stars – Eritrea’s Got Soul (Out Here) 13 Deerhunter – Halcyon Digest (4AD) 14 Aloe Blacc – Good Things (Stones Throw) 15 The Psychedelic Aliens – Pyscho African Beat (Academy LPs) 16 Forest Swords – Dagger Paths (Olde English Spelling Bee) 17 Forest Swords – Rattling Cage/Hjurt (No Pain In Pop) 18 Dexy’s Midnight Runners – Searching For The Young Soul Rebels: 30th Anniversary Edition (EMI)

After last week’s kind of dutiful list, some better things on this one, I think. Headline news, I guess, is the arrival of the Avey Tare album, though I’m also very taken with the new single from Forest Swords, and of course the much-needed official reissue of Peter Walker’s debut.

Continue

Johnny Marr writes theme music for new sitcom

Uncut
-
0
Johnny Marr writes theme music for new sitcom
Johnny Marr has written and recorded the theme song for the forthcoming Channel 4 sitcom The Increasingly Poor Decisions Of Todd Margaret. The former Smiths guitarist, who now plays with The Cribs, has named his song 'Life Is Sweet'. It will air when the show debuts in the UK on October 1 at 10pm (...

Johnny Marr has written and recorded the theme song for the forthcoming Channel 4 sitcom The Increasingly Poor Decisions Of Todd Margaret.

The former Smiths guitarist, who now plays with The Cribs, has named his song ‘Life Is Sweet’. It will air when the show debuts in the UK on October 1 at 10pm (BST).

The show follows the plight of an office temp, played by American comedian David Cross, in a London office, and will run for six episodes.

Marr contributed music to the soundtrack of recent Leonard DiCaprio film Inception, and has composed the score for forthcoming Antonio Banderas movie The Big Bang.

Latest music and film news on Uncut.co.uk.

Uncut have teamed up with Sonic Editions to curate a number of limited-edition framed iconic rock photographs, featuring the likes of Pink Floyd, Bob Dylan and The Clash. View the full collection here.

The Mighty Boosh to pay tribute to Frank Zappa

Uncut
-
0
The Mighty Boosh to pay tribute to Frank Zappa

Comedy troupe The Mighty Boosh are set to take part in a tribute event for Frank Zappa this November. Frank Zappa At The Roundhouse is set to take place from November 5-7 at London's Roundhouse venue. The Mighty Boosh Band, featuring Noel Fielding and Julian Barratt, will perform their own take on Zappa songs on November 6. Musical performances from the late musician's son, Dweezil Zappa, members of the London Contemporary Orchestra, members of his touring band plus talks, films and exhibitions will also take place over the three days. Gail Zappa, Frank's wife, will also make an appearance. See Roundhouse.org.uk for the full event listings and more information. Zappa died aged 52 in 1993 from prostate cancer. Tickets are on sale now. Latest music and film news on Uncut.co.uk. Uncut have teamed up with Sonic Editions to curate a number of limited-edition framed iconic rock photographs, featuring the likes of Pink Floyd, Bob Dylan and The Clash. View the full collection here.

Comedy troupe The Mighty Boosh are set to take part in a tribute event for Frank Zappa this November.

Frank Zappa At The Roundhouse is set to take place from November 5-7 at London‘s Roundhouse venue. The Mighty Boosh Band, featuring Noel Fielding and Julian Barratt, will perform their own take on Zappa songs on November 6.

Musical performances from the late musician’s son, Dweezil Zappa, members of the London Contemporary Orchestra, members of his touring band plus talks, films and exhibitions will also take place over the three days. Gail Zappa, Frank‘s wife, will also make an appearance.

See Roundhouse.org.uk for the full event listings and more information.

Zappa died aged 52 in 1993 from prostate cancer.

Tickets are on sale now.

Latest music and film news on Uncut.co.uk.

Uncut have teamed up with Sonic Editions to curate a number of limited-edition framed iconic rock photographs, featuring the likes of Pink Floyd, Bob Dylan and The Clash. View the full collection here.

U2 premiere three new songs at comeback gig following Bono’s back injury

Uncut
-
0
U2 premiere three new songs at comeback gig following Bono’s back injury
U2 debuted three new songs at their comeback gig in Turin on Friday night (August 6) - performing for the first time since Bono injured his back in May. Among the new tracks was a song called 'Glastonbury'. Before Bono's injury, U2 had been due to headline the Somerset festival. They were replaced ...

U2 debuted three new songs at their comeback gig in Turin on Friday night (August 6) – performing for the first time since Bono injured his back in May.

Among the new tracks was a song called ‘Glastonbury’. Before Bono‘s injury, U2 had been due to headline the Somerset festival. They were replaced by Gorillaz, although festival organiser Michael Eavis has confirmed that he has asked the Irish band to headline next year’s event.

Other new songs aired by U2 at the Stadio Olimpico venue included acoustic ballad ‘North Star’ and a live intro called ‘Return Of The Stingray Guitar’.

Older songs included ‘Miss Sarajevo’, originally released by the band’s alter-ego act Passengers, and 1995 single ‘Hold Me, Thrill Me, Kiss Me, Kill Me’ which they have not performed live since 1998.

As well as their Glastonbury appearance, U2 postponed their entire North American tour due to the injury.

The band are now set to play Frankfurt‘s Commerzbank Arena on Tuesday (August 10).

U2 played:

‘Return Of The Stingray Guitar’

‘Beautiful Day’

‘Magnificent’

‘Get On Your Boots’

‘Mysterious Ways’/’My Sweet Lord’

‘Happy Birthday’

‘I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For’

‘North Star’

‘Glastonbury’

‘Elevation’

‘In A Little While’

‘Miss Sarajevo’

‘Until The End Of The World’

‘The Unforgettable Fire’

‘City Of Blinding Lights’

‘Vertigo’

‘I’ll Go Crazy If I Don’t Go Crazy Tonight’/’Discothèque’

‘Sunday Bloody Sunday’

‘MLK’

‘Walk On’/’You’ll Never Walk Alone’

‘One’

‘Amazing Grace’/’Where The Streets Have No Name’

‘Hold Me, Thrill Me, Kiss Me, Kill Me’

‘With Or Without You’

‘Moment Of Surrender’

Latest music and film news on Uncut.co.uk.

Uncut have teamed up with Sonic Editions to curate a number of limited-edition framed iconic rock photographs, featuring the likes of Pink Floyd, Bob Dylan and The Clash. View the full collection here.

Arcade Fire announce UK tour and ticket details

Uncut
-
0
Arcade Fire announce UK tour and ticket details
Arcade Fire have announced details of a new UK arena tour this December. The band, who's new album 'The Suburbs' is currently at Number One in the UK albums chart, will play five dates on the tour, starting at the O2 Arena in London on December 1. Arcade Fire play: London O2 Arena (December 1) B...

Arcade Fire have announced details of a new UK arena tour this December.

The band, who’s new album ‘The Suburbs’ is currently at Number One in the UK albums chart, will play five dates on the tour, starting at the O2 Arena in London on December 1.

Arcade Fire play:

London O2 Arena (December 1)

Birmingham LG Arena (8)

Cardiff International Arena (9)

Manchester Central (11)

Glasgow SECC (12)

Tickets go on sale at 9am (BST) on Friday (August 13).

Before the shows, Arcade Fire headline the Reading And Leeds Festivals on the weekend of August 27-29.

Latest music and film news on Uncut.co.uk.

Uncut have teamed up with Sonic Editions to curate a number of limited-edition framed iconic rock photographs, featuring the likes of Pink Floyd, Bob Dylan and The Clash. View the full collection here.

The Coil Sea: “The Coil Sea”

John Mulvey
-
0

In spite of being a big fan of the last couple of Arbouretum albums – and also happily aware of Dave Heumann’s jobbing work in the past with Will Oldham and so on – I’ve been inexplicably useless at checking out one or two of his sidelines. Notably, that is, the band Human Bell he steers with one of the guys from Lungfish (not Daniel Higgs, I should say). I’m not, however, sleeping on Heumann’s latest project, The Coil Sea; a pretty free-flowing jamming unit set up with a bunch of other Baltimore musicians in the wake of Arbouretum’s 2009 tour. A satisfyingly meandering four-tracker, “The Coil Sea” begins in the vicinity of where Arbouretum left off. “Abyssinia” is serpentine, torpid psych with Heumann providing frictional improvisations over a staunch Crazy Horse plod. From thereon in, though, things get distinctly looser, and while the formal, folkish songwriting style of Arbouretum disappears, Heumann’s impressive grasp of technique and atmosphere remains. “Dolphins In The Coil Sea” – at 11 and a half minutes, the longest jam here by a nose – was conceived as a “homage” to Sonny Sharrock, signposted by the clarion call of Heumann’s first riff. If there’s a more contemporary reference for the gripping, jazzy exploration that follows, though, it’s probably Nels Cline, who definitely shares a fondness for a certain high-end, needling freestyling. It’s a terrific display of invention, virtuosity and stamina, made even better by the way Heumann’s ad hoc bandmates (especially Michael Lowry and/or Michael Kuhl, the drummers on the sessions) track him so artfully. If, on Arbouretum’s “Song Of The Pearl”, there was an occasional feel of Television, “Revert To Dirt” feels more like something from a Tom Verlaine solo album (perhaps something from that instrumental one from a few years back? It’s been a good while since I played it, so apologies if I’m off the mark). Finally, it rolls into “Waking The Naga”, with the pace picking up into some blocky, almost martial “lange gerade”. Another firm foundation for Heumann’s explorations, at once languid and intense, liberated and yet unfailingly precise in their tone and clarity.

In spite of being a big fan of the last couple of Arbouretum albums – and also happily aware of Dave Heumann’s jobbing work in the past with Will Oldham and so on – I’ve been inexplicably useless at checking out one or two of his sidelines. Notably, that is, the band Human Bell he steers with one of the guys from Lungfish (not Daniel Higgs, I should say).

Continue

THE SECRET IN THEIR EYES

Uncut
-
0
THE SECRET IN THEIR EYES
Directed by Juan José Campanella Starring Ricardo Darín, Soledad Villamil, Javier Godino The Secret In Their Eyes won this year’s Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film – and that can be cause for suspicion. The prize is sometimes considered the safe option for conservative Academy voters when...

Directed by Juan José Campanella

Starring Ricardo Darín, Soledad Villamil, Javier Godino

The Secret In Their Eyes won this year’s Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film – and that can be cause for suspicion. The prize is sometimes considered the safe option for conservative Academy voters when there’s tougher material in the running. Could Juan José Campanella’s genre piece – a very approachable thriller with a touch of middle-aged romance – really be worthy of beating heavyweight contenders The Prophet and The White Ribbon? Certainly, the Jacques Audiard and Michael Haneke films come across as the equivalent of hefty literary novels, where Campanella’s is more an upmarket genre beach read.

This ingenious police-procedural drama is elegantly crafted and more than watchable: it’s also a finely observed character study that, in its second hour, proves more politically charged than you might at first expect.

The story starts in Buenos Aires in 2000, where retired court investigator Benjamin (Ricardo Darín, likeably careworn) returns to his old office to see Irene (Soledad Villamil), a judge he hasn’t seen for decades. Benjamin can’t stop thinking about a rape and murder case they worked on in 1974. He has turned the episode into a novel, and would like Irene’s opinion, but all the evidence – in the two lawyers’ eyes, as the title says – suggests that what has inspired Benjamin is not the rape and murder, but the unresolved romantic tension between the duo.

Flashback to the much younger pair investigating an obsessive admirer of the dead woman. The suspect is tracked down, in an elaborately choreographed chase around a football stadium, the dazzling centrepiece of an otherwise quiet, largely interior-bound piece. Then Argentinian history itself plays a hand and we realise that, even in an ostensibly straight genre exercise, the horrors of the dictatorship years aren’t easily forgotten.

The drama leads – a touch laboriously in its final stretch – to a grim exposition of the way that private justice works itself out in the wake of political trauma. Meanwhile, the film is held together by the warm, somewhat spiky interaction of Darín and Villamil, seen at two different ages (the make-up, especially when making Darín a younger man, requires a leap of faith). One of Latin America’s few internationally recognised stars, Darín – best known here for con-game thriller Nine Queens – faintly recalls Al Pacino with a quizzical, impish streak, and he’s on arresting form here, perfectly matched by the razor-sharp Villamil.

Much of the film’s pleasure lies in this old-fashioned slow-burning romance between two maturely attractive, somewhat cerebral characters. The Secret In Their Eyes is one of those more-than-solid middle-brow foreign-language thrillers, like Tell No-One, that manage to combine genre thrills and upmarket mainstream pleasures to satisfying, if hardly ground-breaking effect.

Jonathan Romney

QUEENS OF THE STONE AGE – RATED R

Uncut
-
0
QUEENS OF THE STONE AGE – RATED R

At times, sifting through a modern record collection, it can feel as if all roads lead eventually to Josh Homme. Entryist indie bands like the Arctic Monkeys employ him for extra rock muscle. Establishment figures of various generations – Dave Grohl and John Paul Jones, say, in Them Crooked Vultures – form bands with him, and end up being overwhelmed by his musical aesthetic. A historically difficult marginwalker like Mark Lanegan can be reinvented, through Homme’s intercessions, as a maverick voice-for-hire. Side projects, extended families, hairy myths proliferate. Homme’s ubiquity in 2010 would be remarkable even if his trademark sound was less distinctive; a blocky, progressive crunch that draws on Neu! and Devo as much as Sabbath and Zeppelin. Ten years ago, however, many perceived Homme as one more Californian desert boy on the enjoyably parochial stoner rock scene. Homme, of course, had helped to define that scene in the ’90s as part of Kyuss, before the band disbanded and he marked time as an auxiliary guitarist with Lanegan’s Screaming Trees. The first, self-titled Queens Of The Stone Age album, a mix of psychedelic heavy rock and motorik rhythms, had been released in 1998, to only subcultural acclaim. Homme, though, possessed hitherto disguised levels of ambition and resolve. In one of many subsequent Queens reshuffles, he brought in his old Kyuss bassist, an orc-like berserker called Nick Oliveri, scored a deal with Interscope, and began to reconfigure his music for the mainstream. On its release in 2000, Rated R was already being fussed over in NME as “The best, most important rock album for years.” It did not, though, make Queens Of The Stone Age into the biggest band in America, as many had anticipated. Homme’s influence, it transpired, would be more covert and insidious: as the stern dictator of a musical cohort which everyone from PJ Harvey to ZZ Top would want to be associated with. The work of a man who talked a lot about guilt-free excess, Rated R still comes across as incredibly disciplined. From the opening student boast of “Nicotine valium vicodin marijuana ecstacy and alcohol… Co-co-co-co-co-cocaine,” delivered in such an absurdly authoritarian tone, there’s a sense of hedonism given a new, military imperative. Often on Rated R – and throughout his subsequent career – Homme sounds, in the best possible way, like a control freak. There’s an almost mathematical precision to the freak-outs like “Better Living Through Chemistry”. “The Lost Art Of Keeping A Secret” has the kind of groovy insouciance that’s usually reached by rigorous drilling. Even the ‘free jazz’ blowing at the end of “I Think I Lost My Headache” – clearly designed to produce one – is methodically orchestrated. Two songs from Oliveri, “Tension Head” and “Quick And To The Pointless”, are comparatively unhinged, gleeful punk tantrums played out at Motörhead speed. Even these, though, feel calculated; as if General Homme letting his sidekick go crazy was an integral part of the grand design. As, no doubt, is the ongoing evolution of the live Queens. Judging by the Reading Festival show that features on CD2, the 2000 lineup was fractionally more ragged than those which followed: perhaps significantly, three linear, Tarmac-pounding jams from the debut (“Avon”, “Regular John” and “You Can’t Quit Me, Baby”) stand out. There are no unreleased tracks on this ‘deluxe’ reissue; two discs seem relatively parsimonious in the face of, say, the imminent 5CD expansion of Bowie’s Station To Station. A clutch of b-sides, though, flaunt rather iconoclastic influences for a hard rock band – covers of The Kinks and San Franciscan new wavers Romeo Void – and, in “You’re So Vague”, there’s a glimpse of the blasted, melodramatic terrain that Homme would visit, two years later, on the next and best Queens album, Songs For The Deaf. Rated R now sounds oddly like a pop record, notwithstanding its finely tooled clanks, Lanegan and Rob Halford cameos and Oliveri screams. With hindsight it’s easy – perhaps too easy – to see Homme’s career as a series of fiendish manoeuvres. As part of that plan, Rated R sits as the relatively concise, punchy album that bought him commercial clout, and a licence to stretch out. An LA album, before he headed back into the Californian desert, an endless band of acolytes trailing in his dust. John Mulvey

At times, sifting through a modern record collection, it can feel as if all roads lead eventually to Josh Homme. Entryist indie bands like the Arctic Monkeys employ him for extra rock muscle. Establishment figures of various generations – Dave Grohl and John Paul Jones, say, in Them Crooked Vultures – form bands with him, and end up being overwhelmed by his musical aesthetic. A historically difficult marginwalker like Mark Lanegan can be reinvented, through Homme’s intercessions, as a maverick voice-for-hire. Side projects, extended families, hairy myths proliferate. Homme’s ubiquity in 2010 would be remarkable even if his trademark sound was less distinctive; a blocky, progressive crunch that draws on Neu! and Devo as much as Sabbath and Zeppelin.

Ten years ago, however, many perceived Homme as one more Californian desert boy on the enjoyably parochial stoner rock scene. Homme, of course, had helped to define that scene in the ’90s as part of Kyuss, before the band disbanded and he marked time as an auxiliary guitarist with Lanegan’s Screaming Trees. The first, self-titled Queens Of The Stone Age album, a mix of psychedelic heavy rock and motorik rhythms, had been released in 1998, to only subcultural acclaim.

Homme, though, possessed hitherto disguised levels of ambition and resolve. In one of many subsequent Queens reshuffles, he brought in his old Kyuss bassist, an orc-like berserker called Nick Oliveri, scored a deal with Interscope, and began to reconfigure his music for the mainstream.

On its release in 2000, Rated R was already being fussed over in NME as “The best, most important rock album for years.” It did not, though, make Queens Of The Stone Age into the biggest band in America, as many had anticipated. Homme’s influence, it transpired, would be more covert and insidious: as the stern dictator of a musical cohort which everyone from PJ Harvey to ZZ Top would want to be associated with.

The work of a man who talked a lot about guilt-free excess, Rated R still comes across as incredibly disciplined. From the opening student boast of “Nicotine valium vicodin marijuana ecstacy and alcohol… Co-co-co-co-co-cocaine,” delivered in such an absurdly authoritarian tone, there’s a sense of hedonism given a new, military imperative.

Often on Rated R – and throughout his subsequent career – Homme sounds, in the best possible way, like a control freak. There’s an almost mathematical precision to the freak-outs like “Better Living Through Chemistry”. “The Lost Art Of Keeping A Secret” has the kind of groovy insouciance that’s usually reached by rigorous drilling. Even the ‘free jazz’ blowing at the end of “I Think I Lost My Headache” – clearly designed to produce one – is methodically orchestrated. Two songs from Oliveri, “Tension Head” and “Quick And To The Pointless”, are comparatively unhinged, gleeful punk tantrums played out at Motörhead speed. Even these, though, feel calculated; as if General Homme letting his sidekick go crazy was an integral part of the grand design.

As, no doubt, is the ongoing evolution of the live Queens. Judging by the Reading Festival show that features on CD2, the 2000 lineup was fractionally more ragged than those which followed: perhaps significantly, three linear, Tarmac-pounding jams from the debut (“Avon”, “Regular John” and “You Can’t Quit Me, Baby”) stand out. There are no unreleased tracks on this ‘deluxe’ reissue; two discs seem relatively parsimonious in the face of, say, the imminent 5CD expansion of Bowie’s Station To Station. A clutch of b-sides, though, flaunt rather iconoclastic influences for a hard rock band – covers of The Kinks and San Franciscan new wavers Romeo Void – and, in “You’re So Vague”, there’s a glimpse of the blasted, melodramatic terrain that Homme would visit, two years later, on the next and best Queens album, Songs For The Deaf.

Rated R now sounds oddly like a pop record, notwithstanding its finely tooled clanks, Lanegan and Rob Halford cameos and Oliveri screams. With hindsight it’s easy – perhaps too easy – to see Homme’s career as a series of fiendish manoeuvres. As part of that plan, Rated R sits as the relatively concise, punchy album that bought him commercial clout, and a licence to stretch out. An LA album, before he headed back into the Californian desert, an endless band of acolytes trailing in his dust.

John Mulvey

REM – FABLES OF THE RECONSTRUCTION

Uncut
-
0
REM – FABLES OF THE RECONSTRUCTION

“Over the years a certain misapp-rehension about Fables Of The Reconstruction has built up,” Peter Buck writes in his sleeve notes for the two-CD anniversary edition of REM’s third album. “For some reason,” he continues, “people have the impression that the members of REM don’t like the record. Nothing,” he hastens to add, “could be further from the truth.” This might well be the case and the album may indeed be the personal favourite Buck now claims it to be. It nevertheless still occupies a curious place in REM’s storied history, forever overshadowed by the two landmark albums that preceded it and many of the records that followed, that great run of albums that climaxed with Automatic For The People in 1992. A certain dismay, it seems to me, has always somehow been attached to Fables Of The Reconstruction, a feeling that something different had been tried and not quite pulled off, a view encouraged, despite Buck’s surely disingenuous bafflement, by the band’s own subsequently dour opinion of it. Of all their records, it’s sometimes seemed, this is the one they’d like to keep in the attic, like a troubled relative given to dribbling and public masturbation. It’s perhaps as much as anything else the apparently unhappy circumstances of its making that shaped the group’s somewhat jaundiced view of it. Michael Stipe’s first choice as producer was Van Dyke Parks, he told me when I spent four days with REM in Athens just before Fables’ release in June 1985. The year before, Parks had released Jump, an album based on the Uncle Remus folk tales popular in the post-Reconstruction Southern American states. Stipe thought Parks would be therefore sympathetic to the new songs he’d been writing, most of which were emerging as evocative vignettes drawing on the story-telling traditions of the Deep South, a palpable air about them of rural fable. He’d been listening, he told me, to a lot of Appalachian folk songs, field recordings, become fascinated by the oral tradition of legends being passed down from generation to generation. This notion would form the conceptual hub of the record REM would eventually record. But in the meantime, they passed on Parks. Elliot Mazer, who’d produced Neil Young’s Harvest, was briefly considered, as was Hugh Padgham, best known for his work with Phil Collins, The Police and Genesis. According to Bill Berry, Elvis Costello was desperate to produce them and was a serious contender before long-running friction between his manager Jake Riviera and REM’s then-label boss Miles Copeland ruled him out. The gig eventually went to Joe Boyd, the choice of Peter Buck, a long-time fan of the producer’s work with Nick Drake, Fairport Convention and Richard Thompson, one of Buck’s great musical heroes. Buck, when we spoke in 1985, remembered Boyd arriving in Athens on a Monday, attending a session on the Tuesday where in four hours at Jim Hawkins’ Boulevard Garage Studio they recorded – live, with minimal overdubs – 14 of their new songs. They included the 11 that made the final cut, plus a version of “Hyena”, which would turn up on their fourth album, Life's Rich Pageant, and two additional tracks, “Bandwagon” and “Throw Those Trolls Away”, all of which are officially released for the first time as The Athens Demos, the second CD of the new deluxe edition. The following day, Wednesday, Boyd was confirmed as producer. By the Friday, at the producer’s suggestion, REM were on their way to London to record Fables Of The Reconstruction at Boyd’s north London studio. As they have reminded us regularly since, they had a grim time. It was winter, they had a long daily commute from their Mayfair digs to Wood Green and the weather was lousy. “It rained every day it wasn’t snowing,” Buck told me in 1985 and is still moaning about it in the sleevenotes here. Boyd recently recalled in Uncut that he found the band grumpy going on miserable throughout the sessions and there was further tension between him and the group about his painstaking approach. They’d been used to a more freewheeling studio atmosphere when they worked with Mitch Easter and Don Dixon on Murmur and Reckoning. Stipe admitted to me a particular frustration with Boyd’s meticulous perfectionism, the hours he spent mixing and re-mixing, which militated against the raw spontaneity he had originally envisaged for the album. In popular opinion, the band’s original intentions for the record were thus compromised by a producer they liked but weren’t happy with and the grim English weather, a mix that is somehow thought to have infused this album with an atmosphere of unanswerable gloom. Buck himself now describes it as “a doomy, psycho record, dense and atmospheric”. It’s a point of view, I guess. But Fables Of The Reconstruction doesn’t to any great respect sound to me doom-laden, fatally overcast or especially glum. There are fraught moments like the hallucinatory “Feeling Gravity’s Pull”, slightly sinister “Old Man Kensey” and piercing “Auctioneer (Another Engine)” and there are hymns to a vanishing America like impressionistic travelogue “Driver 8” and the noble “Wendell Gee” that are not without a certain sadness. But elsewhere Fables’ contains some of REM’s most gorgeous and uplifting music, including “Maps And Legends” (which with added mandolin could have been the hit “Losing My Religion” became) and the gorgeous “Green Grow The Rushes” (which hints at the increased politicisation of Stipe’s songwriting on Document). “Life And How To Live It” and the horn-laden “Can’t Get There From Here”, meanwhile, are among the hardest-driving songs in their expansive repertoire, wholly exuberant. It’s fascinating, too, listening to these songs as they were demoed at Boulevard Garage Studios. Buck claims that after Murmur and Reckoning, REM had run out of songs and with the recording deadline looming had only written “Driver 8” and “Old Man Kensey”. He suggests, remarkably, that virtually the whole of the record was written and rehearsed in three weeks. It’s further remarkable how fully formed the songs were at the demo stage. Boyd seems to have altered very little about them in the final recording process, adding strings to “Feeling Gravity’s Pull” and horns to “Can’t Get There From Here”, but otherwise not messing with them at all. Things you thought must have been cooked up during the sessions in London with Boyd – Buck’s guitar intro to “Feeling Gravity’s Pull”, for instance, and all manner of felicitous instrumental touches and vocal harmonies – are already in place, waiting only for the amber glow Boyd would bring to them. Allan Jones

“Over the years a certain misapp-rehension about Fables Of The Reconstruction has built up,” Peter Buck writes in his sleeve notes for the two-CD anniversary edition of REM’s third album. “For some reason,” he continues, “people have the impression that the members of REM don’t like the record. Nothing,” he hastens to add, “could be further from the truth.”

This might well be the case and the album may indeed be the personal favourite Buck now claims it to be. It nevertheless still occupies a curious place in REM’s storied history, forever overshadowed by the two landmark albums that preceded it and many of the records that followed, that great run of albums that climaxed with Automatic For The People in 1992.

A certain dismay, it seems to me, has always somehow been attached to Fables Of The Reconstruction, a feeling that something different had been tried and not quite pulled off, a view encouraged, despite Buck’s surely disingenuous bafflement, by the band’s own subsequently dour opinion of it. Of all their records, it’s sometimes seemed, this is the one they’d like to keep in the attic, like a troubled relative given to dribbling and public masturbation.

It’s perhaps as much as anything else the apparently unhappy circumstances of its making that shaped the group’s somewhat jaundiced view of it. Michael Stipe’s first choice as producer was Van Dyke Parks, he told me when I spent four days with REM in Athens just before Fables’ release in June 1985. The year before, Parks had released Jump, an album based on the Uncle Remus folk tales popular in the post-Reconstruction Southern American states. Stipe thought Parks would be therefore sympathetic to the new songs he’d been writing, most of which were emerging as evocative vignettes drawing on the story-telling traditions of the Deep South, a palpable air about them of rural fable. He’d been listening, he told me, to a lot of Appalachian folk songs, field recordings, become fascinated by the oral tradition of legends being passed down from generation to generation.

This notion would form the conceptual hub of the record REM would eventually record. But in the meantime, they passed on Parks. Elliot Mazer, who’d produced Neil Young’s Harvest, was briefly considered, as was Hugh Padgham, best known for his work with Phil Collins, The Police and Genesis. According to Bill Berry, Elvis Costello was desperate to produce them and was a serious contender before long-running friction between his manager Jake Riviera and REM’s then-label boss Miles Copeland ruled him out.

The gig eventually went to Joe Boyd, the choice of Peter Buck, a long-time fan of the producer’s work with Nick Drake, Fairport Convention and Richard Thompson, one of Buck’s great musical heroes. Buck, when we spoke in 1985, remembered Boyd arriving in Athens on a Monday, attending a session on the Tuesday where in four hours at Jim Hawkins’ Boulevard Garage Studio they recorded – live, with minimal overdubs – 14 of their new songs. They included the 11 that made the final cut, plus a version of “Hyena”, which would turn up on their fourth album, Life’s Rich Pageant, and two additional tracks, “Bandwagon” and “Throw Those Trolls Away”, all of which are officially released for the first time as The Athens Demos, the second CD of the new deluxe edition. The following day, Wednesday, Boyd was confirmed as producer. By the Friday, at the producer’s suggestion, REM were on their way to London to record Fables Of The Reconstruction at Boyd’s north London studio.

As they have reminded us regularly since, they had a grim time. It was winter, they had a long daily commute from their Mayfair digs to Wood Green and the weather was lousy. “It rained every day it wasn’t snowing,” Buck told me in 1985 and is still moaning about it in the sleevenotes here. Boyd recently recalled in Uncut that he found the band grumpy going on miserable throughout the sessions and there was further tension between him and the group about his painstaking approach. They’d been used to a more freewheeling studio atmosphere when they worked with Mitch Easter and Don Dixon on Murmur and Reckoning. Stipe admitted to me a particular frustration with Boyd’s meticulous perfectionism, the hours he spent mixing and re-mixing, which militated against the raw spontaneity he had originally envisaged for the album.

In popular opinion, the band’s original intentions for the record were thus compromised by a producer they liked but weren’t happy with and the grim English weather, a mix that is somehow thought to have infused this album with an atmosphere of unanswerable gloom. Buck himself now describes it as “a doomy, psycho record, dense and atmospheric”. It’s a point of view, I guess. But Fables Of The Reconstruction doesn’t to any great respect sound to me doom-laden, fatally overcast or especially glum. There are fraught moments like the hallucinatory “Feeling Gravity’s Pull”, slightly sinister “Old Man Kensey” and piercing “Auctioneer (Another Engine)” and there are hymns to a vanishing America like impressionistic travelogue “Driver 8” and the noble “Wendell Gee” that are not without a certain sadness. But elsewhere Fables’ contains some of REM’s most gorgeous and uplifting music, including “Maps And Legends” (which with added mandolin could have been the hit “Losing My Religion” became) and the gorgeous “Green Grow The Rushes” (which hints at the increased politicisation of Stipe’s songwriting on Document). “Life And How To Live It” and the horn-laden “Can’t Get There From Here”, meanwhile, are among the hardest-driving songs in their expansive repertoire, wholly exuberant.

It’s fascinating, too, listening to these songs as they were demoed at Boulevard Garage Studios. Buck claims that after Murmur and Reckoning, REM had run out of songs and with the recording deadline looming had only written “Driver 8” and “Old Man Kensey”. He suggests, remarkably, that virtually the whole of the record was written and rehearsed in three weeks. It’s further remarkable how fully formed the songs were at the demo stage.

Boyd seems to have altered very little about them in the final recording process, adding strings to “Feeling Gravity’s Pull” and horns to “Can’t Get There From Here”, but otherwise not messing with them at all. Things you thought must have been cooked up during the sessions in London with Boyd – Buck’s guitar intro to “Feeling Gravity’s Pull”, for instance, and all manner of felicitous instrumental touches and vocal harmonies – are already in place, waiting only for the amber glow Boyd would bring to them.

Allan Jones

1...715716717...1,271Page 716 of 1,271

SHOP UNCUT