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THE ACORN – NO GHOST

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THE ACORN – NO GHOST

Although they formed in Ottawa back in 2003, The Acorn only truly arrived with their last album, 2008’s Glory Hope Mountain. It took a few listens for the full scale of its ambition and beauty to really sink in, but when it did you realised that here was one of those rare bands that dealt exclusively in mystery, where everything was at once both familiar and oddly strange: like Talking Heads bumping into Fleet Foxes in dreamtime. The band gathered around the central pivot of Rolf Klausener, who wrote the songs and sung them up and out in a yearning, yelping voice that seemed to constantly be striving for something he couldn’t quite reach. Lyrically, Glory Hope Mountain was a moving account of the early life of Klausener’s mother, who barely survived her birth (“your rosy lungs were empty on the day that you were born”), almost drowned in a flood, ran away from an abusive father aged 12 and emigrated to Canada from Honduras without being able to speak either English or French. The music proved as compelling as the narrative. The Acorn displayed a knack for writing simple melodies stretched out over the bones of indie-folk, afrobeat, crooked rock and a hint of something more epic. It was never quite clear how the shapes fitted together or how the spell was cast, but there was no disputing the wondrous results. For anyone who fretted that Glory Hope Mountain might have been a beautiful fluke, No Ghost confirms The Acorn’s credentials, building thrillingly on the band’s ability to access a variety of moods and textures. It veers from plangent ballads via scrubby experimentation to conventional rock dynamics, and it’s not incidental that No Ghost was recorded in a cottage in the back of beyond in Quebec, the kind of place where phone signals peter out into static. On occasion the songs here are almost hypnotically hushed. At other times they’re both louder and more unhinged than ever before. There’s always been muscle in The Acorn’s music, now it’s simply more pronounced. It’s most evident on the abrasive “I Made The Law”, a minor-key march that unravels like a curse, and the title track, which kicks off like REM’s “Finest Worksong”, the crunchy riff dodging a maze of harmonics before breaking into a sun-dappled chorus. The preppy pop bounce of “Crossed Wires”, written and sung by bassist Jeff Debutte, is something new, but much of No Ghost contains echoes of Glory Hope Mountain. “On The Line” and “Kindling To Creation” convey the sense of weary reflection that follows some great storm, while the band’s propensity for zinging guitars and clacking rhythm lights up “Restoration” and “Bobcat Gold Wraith”, which starts as a burbling pot-boiler and builds to something almost anthemic, kicked forward by heavy bass and horns. “Slippery When Wet” – banish any thoughts of Bon Jovi – enters more fragile territory. It rolls along on a circular folk guitar pattern and gentle fiddle, as Klausener stands amid the fallen leaves and mournfully “counts the colours at my feet”. It’s almost unbearably lovely, but it’s the still simplicity of “Misplaced” that brings it all home. Small and perfectly formed, it’s a vindication of the band’s attitude. Heading towards greatness, but for all that, unassumingly so. Graeme Thomson Q&A Rolf Klausener Glory Hope Mountain was much loved; did you feel more pressure this time? I’d be a total liar if I said that stuff doesn’t linger in the back of your mind: ‘I wonder what reviewers will think of this song?’ The best thing to do is wait for moments where you feel really inspired and don’t have to second guess yourself. As a writer, you know when it works. How does this album differ from the last? This time we had no specific themes, no story, it was just about the song. It was interesting, liberating and terrifying all at the same time. We’d been on the road for 26 months without a real break, so we gave ourselves a holiday and rented a cottage in Quebec. There were no grand expectations, but in the first three days me and Pat [Johnson, percussionist] wrote the skeleton for about 15 songs. What was life like in the cottage? We were completely cut off. We didn’t even know that Michael Jackson had died. My favourite songs on No Ghost, “Cobbled in Dust” and “Misplaced”, were written there. They just kind of happened.

Although they formed in Ottawa back in 2003, The Acorn only truly arrived with their last album, 2008’s Glory Hope Mountain. It took a few listens for the full scale of its ambition and beauty to really sink in, but when it did you realised that here was one of those rare bands that dealt exclusively in mystery, where everything was at once both familiar and oddly strange: like Talking Heads bumping into Fleet Foxes in dreamtime.

The band gathered around the central pivot of Rolf Klausener, who wrote the songs and sung them up and out in a yearning, yelping voice that seemed to constantly be striving for something he couldn’t quite reach. Lyrically, Glory Hope Mountain was a moving account of the early life of Klausener’s mother, who barely survived her birth (“your rosy lungs were empty on the day that you were born”), almost drowned in a flood, ran away from an abusive father aged 12 and emigrated to Canada from Honduras without being able to speak either English or French.

The music proved as compelling as the narrative. The Acorn displayed a knack for writing simple melodies stretched out over the bones of indie-folk, afrobeat, crooked rock and a hint of something more epic. It was never quite clear how the shapes fitted together or how the spell was cast, but there was no disputing the wondrous results. For anyone who fretted that Glory Hope Mountain might have been a beautiful fluke, No Ghost confirms The Acorn’s credentials, building thrillingly on the band’s ability to access a variety of moods and textures. It veers from plangent ballads via scrubby experimentation to conventional rock dynamics, and it’s not incidental that No Ghost was recorded in a cottage in the back of beyond in Quebec, the kind of place where phone signals peter out into static. On occasion the songs here are almost hypnotically hushed. At other times they’re both louder and more unhinged than ever before. There’s always been muscle in The Acorn’s music, now it’s simply more pronounced. It’s most evident on the abrasive “I Made The Law”, a minor-key march that unravels like a curse, and the title track, which kicks off like REM’s “Finest Worksong”, the crunchy riff dodging a maze of harmonics before breaking into a sun-dappled chorus.

The preppy pop bounce of “Crossed Wires”, written and sung by bassist Jeff Debutte, is something new, but much of No Ghost contains echoes of Glory Hope Mountain. “On The Line” and “Kindling To Creation” convey the sense of weary reflection that follows some great storm, while the band’s propensity for zinging guitars and clacking rhythm lights up “Restoration” and “Bobcat Gold Wraith”, which starts as a burbling pot-boiler and builds to something almost anthemic, kicked forward by heavy bass and horns.

“Slippery When Wet” – banish any thoughts of Bon Jovi – enters more fragile territory. It rolls along on a circular folk guitar pattern and gentle fiddle, as Klausener stands amid the fallen leaves and mournfully “counts the colours at my feet”. It’s almost unbearably lovely, but it’s the still simplicity of “Misplaced” that brings it all home. Small and perfectly formed, it’s a vindication of the band’s attitude. Heading towards greatness, but for all that, unassumingly so.

Graeme Thomson

Q&A Rolf Klausener

Glory Hope Mountain was much loved; did you feel more pressure this time?

I’d be a total liar if I said that stuff doesn’t linger in the back of your mind: ‘I wonder what reviewers will think of this song?’ The best thing to do is wait for moments where you feel really inspired and don’t have to second guess yourself. As a writer, you know when it works.

How does this album differ from the last?

This time we had no specific themes, no story, it was just about the song. It was interesting, liberating and terrifying all at the same time. We’d been on the road for 26 months without a real break, so we gave ourselves a holiday and rented a cottage in Quebec. There were no grand expectations, but in the first three days me and Pat [Johnson, percussionist] wrote the skeleton for about 15 songs.

What was life like in the cottage?

We were completely cut off. We didn’t even know that Michael Jackson had died. My favourite songs on No Ghost, “Cobbled in Dust” and “Misplaced”, were written there. They just kind of happened.

Mount Carmel: “Mount Carmel”

John Mulvey
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0

A clusterfuck of heaviness in the past couple of days – Endless Boogie’s Primavera jam, the Groundhogs box set, finally hearing the bonus seven-inch tracks from Magic Lantern’s “Platoon”, news that Eternal Tapestry have signed to Thrill Jockey – reminded me to write about Mount Carmel’s self-titled on Siltbreeze. The whiff of denim on patchouli hangs heavy here, since this Columbus Ohio power trio seem to have mastered retro blues-rock with an accuracy that’s uncanny, as well as pretty crude. I know records are often described as sounding like they could’ve come out in 1971, or whatever. But “Mount Carmel” really, really sounds like it was made in 1971 – just after the group had finished a tour with the Edgar Broughton Band, maybe. Nothing wrong with that, and Mount Carmel certainly attack potential absurdities with vigour: what else should the penultimate track do but degenerate into an extended drum solo? It’s the songs that precede it, though – none better than the opening “Livin’ Like I Wanna” (and how’s that for a historically precise title?) – that really do the business, pitched partway between Blue Cheer and something dank and wasted in the corner of a provincial British student union, circa 1970. Not one, perhaps, for everyone, but bracing for those of us of a certain ideological hair length. It occurs to me, too, that Mount Carmel are one of those new psych-related bands who would’ve also fitted in with the stoner rock scene that flourished about a decade ago. Add a tad more Sabbath, tone down some of the noodle, and you’re not too far away from something that sounds like Nebula. Which, again, is fine by me. Here’s the Mount Carmel Myspace. Enjoy!

A clusterfuck of heaviness in the past couple of days – Endless Boogie’s Primavera jam, the Groundhogs box set, finally hearing the bonus seven-inch tracks from Magic Lantern’s “Platoon”, news that Eternal Tapestry have signed to Thrill Jockey – reminded me to write about Mount Carmel’s self-titled on Siltbreeze.

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TOM PETTY – MOJO

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TOM PETTY – MOJO

Nine tracks into Mojo, Tom Petty’s first album with The Heartbreakers for eight years, the band fire up a plodding blues groove, and Petty makes a confession: “I’m slowin’ down a little bit.” It’s an assertion which will, by this point, elicit little dispute from anybody who has been listening to Mojo from the top. Can this really be the same performer who fired up his career with the excellent Damn The Torpedoes, and that enduringly awesome eponymous 1976 debut? On paper, this sounded promising. Petty and his Heartbreakers recorded Mojo live in the studio, no overdubs, no re-takes. The no-frills approach should have suited them, allowing the Heartbreakers to bring 35 years of mutual familiarity to bear on the instinctive rapport that first established them, in the late ’70s, as an audacious and refreshing bridge between traditional Southern rock and skinny-tied New Wave (“American Girl” didn’t sound out of place as a minor UK hit in the Summer of Punk). Unfortunately, and rather ironically, Mojo is ultimately undone by the very virtuosity of its creators: the band stumbles repeatedly into that musicians’ trap of making music that sounds intended principally to impress other musicians, every note and beat buffed and synchronised with military fastidiousness. It’s never a good thing to find oneself thinking of a rock’n’roll album as decorous. It starts promisingly, at least. “Jefferson Jericho Blues” is an irresistible opener, a pugnacious choogle in the style of Dylan circa Highway 61 Revisited. It’s a bit more polished than that, inevitably, but not oppressively so. Sadly, it’s an anomaly. The second track, “First Flash Of Freedom”, proves a more accurate indicator of the overall tone – an interminable meander evocative of The Grateful Dead. There’s far, far too much of this sort of thing on Mojo: “Running Man’s Bible”, on which Benmont Tench’s luxuriant Booker T-ish keys don’t save another overlong cut from out-staying its welcome; “Pirate’s Cove”, which all but wheezes for the defibrillator; the dolorous “Lover’s Touch”, which prompts little but bewilderment that its inclusion was deemed necessary to a 15-track album; the inexplicable reggae pastiche “Don’t Pull Me Over”. It’s not just that the above are all dull, it’s that they sound so timid, as if the Heartbreakers played them all on very expensive instruments borrowed from extremely possessive and vindictive owners. The overwhelming seemliness of the exercise is even more frustrating on the cuts – and there are a few – which do sound potentially worthy of the Heartbreakers’ formidable canon. “Candy” is an orthodox but charming Creedence Clearwater Revival-ish chug that barely musters a saunter where it should swagger. “No Reason To Cry” is a judiciously lachrymose country lament in the manner of The Flying Burrito Brothers’ “Hot Burrito # 1” – and Petty’s unmistakeable snarl is, as ever, oddly affecting as a vehicle for balladry. “I Should Have Known It” possesses something of the Heartbreakers’ signature strut, and gets very nearly rocking towards the end – but it still, if measured against “I Need To Know” or “Even The Losers” or “Running Down A Dream” or whatever you’re having yourself, seems somewhat… domesticated. This is not the first time that Petty has prevented himself being all he can be by abasing himself on the altar of good taste (one of the major imperatives of the inventor of the time-travel machine must be to intercept Petty en route to his first meeting with Jeff Lynne). But it doesn’t feel coincidental that the truly great tracks on this album are the ones which are the least restrained: the distorted blues “US 41”, which sounds agreeably like it might have been laid down aboard a rattling boxcar; the fantastic “High In The Morning”, which purrs with idling menace and features great Mike Campbell guitar solos. One supposes one has to grant that Petty will be 60 this year, but there’s surely no reason why he has to sound it. Mojo, in this context, mostly feels less like a title and more like the heading of a “Lost” advertisement. Andrew Mueller

Nine tracks into Mojo, Tom Petty’s first album with The Heartbreakers for eight years, the band fire up a plodding blues groove, and Petty makes a confession: “I’m slowin’ down a little bit.” It’s an assertion which will, by this point, elicit little dispute from anybody who has been listening to Mojo from the top. Can this really be the same performer who fired up his career with the excellent Damn The Torpedoes, and that enduringly awesome eponymous 1976 debut?

On paper, this sounded promising. Petty and his Heartbreakers recorded Mojo live in the studio, no overdubs, no re-takes. The no-frills approach should have suited them, allowing the Heartbreakers to bring 35 years of mutual familiarity to bear on the instinctive rapport that first established them, in the late ’70s, as an audacious and refreshing bridge between traditional Southern rock and skinny-tied New Wave (“American Girl” didn’t sound out of place as a minor UK hit in the Summer of Punk).

Unfortunately, and rather ironically, Mojo is ultimately undone by the very virtuosity of its creators: the band stumbles repeatedly into that musicians’ trap of making music that sounds intended principally to impress other musicians, every note and beat buffed and synchronised with military fastidiousness. It’s never a good thing to find oneself thinking of a rock’n’roll album as decorous.

It starts promisingly, at least. “Jefferson Jericho Blues” is an irresistible opener, a pugnacious choogle in the style of Dylan circa Highway 61 Revisited. It’s a bit more polished than that, inevitably, but not oppressively so. Sadly, it’s an anomaly. The second track, “First Flash Of Freedom”, proves a more accurate indicator of the overall tone – an interminable meander evocative of The Grateful Dead.

There’s far, far too much of this sort of thing on Mojo: “Running Man’s Bible”, on which Benmont Tench’s luxuriant Booker T-ish keys don’t save another overlong cut from out-staying its welcome; “Pirate’s Cove”, which all but wheezes for the defibrillator; the dolorous “Lover’s Touch”, which prompts little but bewilderment that its inclusion was deemed necessary to a 15-track album; the inexplicable reggae pastiche “Don’t Pull Me Over”.

It’s not just that the above are all dull, it’s that they sound so timid, as if the Heartbreakers played them all on very expensive instruments borrowed from extremely possessive and vindictive owners. The overwhelming seemliness of the exercise is even more frustrating on the cuts – and there are a few – which do sound potentially worthy of the Heartbreakers’ formidable canon. “Candy” is an orthodox but charming Creedence Clearwater Revival-ish chug that barely musters a saunter where it should swagger. “No Reason To Cry” is a judiciously lachrymose country lament in the manner of The Flying Burrito Brothers’ “Hot Burrito # 1” – and Petty’s unmistakeable snarl is, as ever, oddly affecting as a vehicle for balladry. “I Should Have Known It” possesses something of the Heartbreakers’ signature strut, and gets very nearly rocking towards the end – but it still, if measured against “I Need To Know” or “Even The Losers” or “Running Down A Dream” or whatever you’re having yourself, seems somewhat… domesticated.

This is not the first time that Petty has prevented himself being all he can be by abasing himself on the altar of good taste (one of the major imperatives of the inventor of the time-travel machine must be to intercept Petty en route to his first meeting with Jeff Lynne). But it doesn’t feel coincidental that the truly great tracks on this album are the ones which are the least restrained: the distorted blues “US 41”, which sounds agreeably like it might have been laid down aboard a rattling boxcar; the fantastic “High In The Morning”, which purrs with idling menace and features great Mike Campbell guitar solos.

One supposes one has to grant that Petty will be 60 this year, but there’s surely no reason why he has to sound it. Mojo, in this context, mostly feels less like a title and more like the heading of a “Lost” advertisement.

Andrew Mueller

THE GASLIGHT ANTHEM – AMERICAN SLANG

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THE GASLIGHT ANTHEM – AMERICAN SLANG

What's American Slang? On the one hand, you could say it’s the poetry of hope, the nation’s real voice, the hardy truth unsullied by spin, the language of people let down by the American Dream, and the hot air of the politicians peddling it, salesmen practised in the grammar of deceit and dubious promise. There’s merit also in the notion of American Slang as a reference to the diverse colloquialism of American music, the myriad vernaculars of the blues, folk, gospel, country, jazz, rock’n’roll, pop, soul, punk and rap and the single tongue in which they speak to the disenfranchised many, words and music at this point combining to lift embattled spirits, rally the troops. American Slang is also, of course, the title of the third album by New Jersey’s Gaslight Anthem, the follow-up therefore to 2008’s The ’59 Sound, which reached out to fans of Bruce Springsteen in the same way as The Hold Steady, whose unshakeable belief in rock music as a rowdy salvation Brian Fallon’s band unswervingly share. Because they are reckoned to owe so much to Springsteen, who famously put in an appearance with them last year at Glastonbury and was on stage with them again a few days later when he headlined Hyde Park, there has been a perhaps inevitable suggestion that American Slang will be The Gaslight Anthem’s Born To Run. The record, in other words, that will carry them into the mainstream after years of making-do and scuffling, playing anywhere that would have them and in earlier days less hospitable places, all the hard work about to pay off now in a possibly big way. It remains to be seen, of course, where American Slang will take them, but they certainly sound here like a band going places in a hurry. American Slang is one of the most exciting rock’n’roll records since global warming hit the headlines. It’s an album of electrifying rapture, massive riffs, songs with verses that sound like choruses and choruses that sound, yes, like anthems, meant to be sung by multitudes. Listening to it, you can almost hear the stadium roar that played live these songs will likely inspire. The ’59 Sound wasn’t exactly short of similarly communal moments, as audience sing-a-longs to many of its songs last year so noisily attested, particularly when the band played the NME Stage at Reading in front of a word-perfect crowd who were perfectly happy to sing most of their songs for them. Neither, it should be said, was their debut album, Sink Or Swim, which was likewise brimful of tracks that crude as they sometimes were still made you want to wave a flag or set fire to something and dance around it, possibly whooping. American Slang delivers spectacularly on all expected fronts. Everything that was great about The ’59 Sound is here, but the sound is even bigger, epic without getting blustery. And there have been great leaps forward in production and the musical arrangements, which have greater depth, atmosphere and texture. Brian Fallon’s writing has moved on, too. Previously, he’s written descriptive vignettes, tales of teenage trauma, frustration and heartbreak, narratives about the lives of others. There’s a great example of that here, a celebratory song about not forgetting where you’re from called “The Diamond Church Street Choir”, whose soulful, finger-clicking swagger owes much to the Van Morrison of “Wild Night” and “Domino” and a little to Mink De Ville, too. By and large, though, Fallon’s new songs are more personal than ever, in many respects the most autobiographical he’s written. In a general sense, they are about being who you want to be, not who you’re told you are. Songs like “Orphans”, “Boxer”, Stay Lucky” and “Bring It On” are about standing your ground, being true to yourself and what you believe in, sacrifice and hard work, a determination to make something of yourself that you may have been told you’d never be. They rail against the definition of self by others, the idea of knowing your place and staying there. They’re a call therefore to a certain kind of insurrection – “Look what you started! I seem to be coming out of my skin,” he roars on the title track, which opens the album with the declamatory knell of “London Calling”. In many ways, they are about Fallon’s own sense of ambition, his career to date an example of where self-belief can take you, Fallon offering himself as an inspiration to others, as Springsteen and Strummer were an inspiration to him. And a consolation, too, when times were tough. “Only I can heal your wounds when you can’t go on, when you can’t go on anymore,” he sings on “The Spirit Of Jazz”, assuming a paternal role quite new to him. “Give me the children you don’t want to raise,” he sings on “Bring It On”. Nothing irks Fallon more than the wasting of opportunity, the settling for easy options. “The Queen Of Lower Chelsea”, which has the strut of The Pretenders’ “Brass In Pocket” and quotes also from the Stones’ “Some Girls” castigates the somewhat easy target of a rich young girl who squanders her life – “Did you grow up a good girl, your Daddy’s pride? Did you make all the right moves, take all the right drugs, right on time?” – but Fallon’s full wrath is exposed on the staggering “Old Haunts”. He clearly has no patience with rueful reflection, and is similarly impatient with the solace some people find in nostalgia for a time before life got tough, a yen for the safety of an usually imagined gilded past. “Don’t sing me your songs about the good times, those times are gone and you should just let them go,” Fallon fairly rages. “And God help the man who says, ‘You shoulda known me when’. . .Shame, shame, shame, shame on you, you sold your youth away.” At the time of writing, a broadsheet has just published a 2010 festival guide, which includes a witty feature on what bands will provide “the definitive fists-in-the-air anthem” this summer. They list U2, Guns N’Roses, AC/DC, Muse and The Libertines. But when at whatever festival they fetch up at in the months to come The Gaslight Anthem close out their set, as they surely will, with “We Did It When We Were Young”, whose haunted atmosphere, so redolent of The Clash’s “Straight To Hell”, also brings American Slang to a dramatic climax, everyone else might as well run for cover. This is the song everyone will be singing, in a language everyone will understand. Allan Jones

What’s American Slang? On the one hand, you could say it’s the poetry of hope, the nation’s real voice, the hardy truth unsullied by spin, the language of people let down by the American Dream, and the hot air of the politicians peddling it, salesmen practised in the grammar of deceit and dubious promise.

There’s merit also in the notion of American Slang as a reference to the diverse colloquialism of American music, the myriad vernaculars of the blues, folk, gospel, country, jazz, rock’n’roll, pop, soul, punk and rap and the single tongue in which they speak to the disenfranchised many, words and music at this point combining to lift embattled spirits, rally the troops.

American Slang is also, of course, the title of the third album by New Jersey’s Gaslight Anthem, the follow-up therefore to 2008’s The ’59 Sound, which reached out to fans of Bruce Springsteen in the same way as The Hold Steady, whose unshakeable belief in rock music as a rowdy salvation Brian Fallon’s band unswervingly share.

Because they are reckoned to owe so much to Springsteen, who famously put in an appearance with them last year at Glastonbury and was on stage with them again a few days later when he headlined Hyde Park, there has been a perhaps inevitable suggestion that American Slang will be The Gaslight Anthem’s Born To Run. The record, in other words, that will carry them into the mainstream after years of making-do and scuffling, playing anywhere that would have them and in earlier days less hospitable places, all the hard work about to pay off now in a possibly big way.

It remains to be seen, of course, where American Slang will take them, but they certainly sound here like a band going places in a hurry. American Slang is one of the most exciting rock’n’roll records since global warming hit the headlines. It’s an album of electrifying rapture, massive riffs, songs with verses that sound like choruses and choruses that sound, yes, like anthems, meant to be sung by multitudes. Listening to it, you can almost hear the stadium roar that played live these songs will likely inspire.

The ’59 Sound wasn’t exactly short of similarly communal moments, as audience sing-a-longs to many of its songs last year so noisily attested, particularly when the band played the NME Stage at Reading in front of a word-perfect crowd who were perfectly happy to sing most of their songs for them. Neither, it should be said, was their debut album, Sink Or Swim, which was likewise brimful of tracks that crude as they sometimes were still made you want to wave a flag or set fire to something and dance around it, possibly whooping.

American Slang delivers spectacularly on all expected fronts. Everything that was great about The ’59 Sound is here, but the sound is even bigger, epic without getting blustery. And there have been great leaps forward in production and the musical arrangements, which have greater depth, atmosphere and texture. Brian Fallon’s writing has moved on, too. Previously, he’s written descriptive vignettes, tales of teenage trauma, frustration and heartbreak, narratives about the lives of others.

There’s a great example of that here, a celebratory song about not forgetting where you’re from called “The Diamond Church Street Choir”, whose soulful, finger-clicking swagger owes much to the Van Morrison of “Wild Night” and “Domino” and a little to Mink De Ville, too. By and large, though, Fallon’s new songs are more personal than ever, in many respects the most autobiographical he’s written. In a general sense, they are about being who you want to be, not who you’re told you are. Songs like “Orphans”, “Boxer”, Stay Lucky” and “Bring It On” are about standing your ground, being true to yourself and what you believe in, sacrifice and hard work, a determination to make something of yourself that you may have been told you’d never be. They rail against the definition of self by others, the idea of knowing your place and staying there.

They’re a call therefore to a certain kind of insurrection – “Look what you started! I seem to be coming out of my skin,” he roars on the title track, which opens the album with the declamatory knell of “London Calling”. In many ways, they are about Fallon’s own sense of ambition, his career to date an example of where self-belief can take you, Fallon offering himself as an inspiration to others, as Springsteen and Strummer were an inspiration to him. And a consolation, too, when times were tough. “Only I can heal your wounds when you can’t go on, when you can’t go on anymore,” he sings on “The Spirit Of Jazz”, assuming a paternal role quite new to him. “Give me the children you don’t want to raise,” he sings on “Bring It On”.

Nothing irks Fallon more than the wasting of opportunity, the settling for easy options. “The Queen Of Lower Chelsea”, which has the strut of The Pretenders’ “Brass In Pocket” and quotes also from the Stones’ “Some Girls” castigates the somewhat easy target of a rich young girl who squanders her life – “Did you grow up a good girl, your Daddy’s pride? Did you make all the right moves, take all the right drugs, right on time?” – but Fallon’s full wrath is exposed on the staggering “Old Haunts”. He clearly has no patience with rueful reflection, and is similarly impatient with the solace some people find in nostalgia for a time before life got tough, a yen for the safety of an usually imagined gilded past.

“Don’t sing me your songs about the good times, those times are gone and you should just let them go,” Fallon fairly rages. “And God help the man who says, ‘You shoulda known me when’. . .Shame, shame, shame, shame on you, you sold your youth away.”

At the time of writing, a broadsheet has just published a 2010 festival guide, which includes a witty feature on what bands will provide “the definitive fists-in-the-air anthem” this summer. They list U2, Guns N’Roses, AC/DC, Muse and The Libertines. But when at whatever festival they fetch up at in the months to come The Gaslight Anthem close out their set, as they surely will, with “We Did It When We Were Young”, whose haunted atmosphere, so redolent of The Clash’s “Straight To Hell”, also brings American Slang to a dramatic climax, everyone else might as well run for cover. This is the song everyone will be singing, in a language everyone will understand.

Allan Jones

Radiohead’s Thom Yorke predicts the demise of the mainstream music industry

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Radiohead’s Thom Yorke predicts the demise of the mainstream music industry
Radiohead frontman Thom Yorke has revealed that he thinks it's "only a matter of months" until the collapse of the mainstream music business. Speaking in an interview for new high school textbook The Rax Active Citizen Toolkit Yorke says that the music industry is dying, reports ThisIsLondon.co.uk....

Radiohead frontman Thom Yorke has revealed that he thinks it’s “only a matter of months” until the collapse of the mainstream music business.

Speaking in an interview for new high school textbook The Rax Active Citizen Toolkit Yorke says that the music industry is dying, reports ThisIsLondon.co.uk.

“[It’ll be] only a matter of time,” Yorke says. “Months rather than years before the music business establishment completely folds.”

Advising aspiring musicians not to tie themselves to such a “sinking ship”, Yorke added that the fall of the music business will be “no great loss to the world”.

The textbook is due out on July 1 and also features interviews with Ms Dynamite and broadcaster Jon Snow. It is aimed at helping 15 and 16-year-olds become more politically literate.

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

U2 producer Daniel Lanois in intensive care after motorcycle crash

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U2 producer Daniel Lanois in intensive care after motorcycle crash
Daniel Lanois has been placed in intensive care following a motorcycle crash. The Quebec-born musician/producer, who is known for his production work on U2's 1987 album 'The Joshua Tree', suffered the accident recently in Los Angeles. As a result, his London show with the Daniel Lanois Black Dub c...

Daniel Lanois has been placed in intensive care following a motorcycle crash.

The Quebec-born musician/producer, who is known for his production work on U2‘s 1987 album ‘The Joshua Tree’, suffered the accident recently in Los Angeles.

As a result, his London show with the Daniel Lanois Black Dub collective, which had been set for the Jazz Café venue on July 27, has been cancelled. Ticket holders can get refunds from points of purchase.

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The Strokes make UK live return in surprise London gig

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The Strokes make UK live return in surprise London gig
The Strokes played their first gig since October 2006 last night (June 9), performing a secret show under the alias Venison at London's Dingwalls venue. The New York five-piece had flown into the UK capital to prepare for headline slots at the Isle Of Wight Festival on Saturday (June 12) and RockNe...

The Strokes played their first gig since October 2006 last night (June 9), performing a secret show under the alias Venison at London‘s Dingwalls venue.

The New York five-piece had flown into the UK capital to prepare for headline slots at the Isle Of Wight Festival on Saturday (June 12) and RockNess on Sunday. They announced the London gig yesterday, with the show selling out almost instantly last night, reports Uncut‘s sister-title [url=http://www.nme.com/news/the-strokes/51445]NME[/url].

Frontman Julian Casablancas wore sunglasses and a studded leather jacket throughout the set, while guitarist Nick Valensi wore a garish orange jacket with a tiger design. Guitarist Albert Hammond Jr had grown his hair since recently shaving it and wore a smart suit blazer.

The frontman was slight on between-song chat, though he did note the large number of people who had piled to the front for the best views. “You guys alright there?” he asked the front row, joking: “There’s a dead guy there… but it’s cool, keep going.”

The band’s set included the likes of ‘You Only Live Once’, ‘Last Nite’, ‘Take It Or Leave It’ and New York City Cops.

The Strokes played:

‘New York City Cops’

‘The Modern Age’

‘Hard To Explain’

‘Reptilia’

‘What Ever Happened?’

‘You Only Live Once’

‘Soma’

‘Vision Of Division’

‘I Can’t Win’

‘Is This It’

‘Someday’

‘Red Light’

‘Last Nite’

‘Under Control’

’12:51′

‘Juicebox’

‘Heart In A Cage’

‘Take It Or Leave It’

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

Darker My Love: “Alive As You Are”

John Mulvey
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A couple of months ago here, I raved some about a self-titled album on Woodsist by White Fence, who turned out to be a guy from LA called Tim Presley with some kind of connection to The Strange Boys. I neglected to mention, however, that Presley was also the leader of another band, Darker My Love, who I’d never really heard, to be honest. I suspect the gothic implications of the name put me off. The third album by Darker My Love, “Alive As You Are”, very much shows what a mistake I was making. If Presley uses his White Fence alias to assail rock classicism with an arsenal of lo-fi warp, it seems Darker My Love is where he fleshes out his jangling fantasies. Much in the vein of Blitzen Trapper’s “Destroyer Of The Void”, “Alive As You Are” is a beautifully-realised evocation of the psychedelic, country-tinged fringes of ‘60s pop, with particular reference to The Byrds (“The Notorious Byrd Brothers” especially) and The Beatles. Hardly audacious new territory for a rock band, of course, and you can follow a trail of kindred spirits to Darker My Love back through the excellent Kelley Stoltz, to LA indie antecedents like The Beechwood Sparks and The Tyde, who always seemed a bit smug and underachieving to me (one of The Beechwood Sparks is in Ariel Pink’s Haunted Graffiti these days, incidentally). No such problems with Darker My Love, though. Basically, “Alive As You Are” manages to be at once languid and punchy, a swift and bracing collection of insidious melodies that are blessed with an uncanny familiarity. Sometimes that nagging sense of knowing the songs from a previous life becomes crystallised: “18th Street Shuffle” bears at the very least a working knowledge of “Within You Without You”, while the outstanding “Split Minute” sounds, as someone here noted, like The Byrds playing “Outdoor Miner”. Many of the other songs, though, are harder to be specific about, and no less strong. Try “Dear Author” at Myspace, and let me know what you think.

A couple of months ago here, I raved some about a self-titled album on Woodsist by White Fence, who turned out to be a guy from LA called Tim Presley with some kind of connection to The Strange Boys. I neglected to mention, however, that Presley was also the leader of another band, Darker My Love, who I’d never really heard, to be honest. I suspect the gothic implications of the name put me off.

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The 23rd Uncut Playlist Of 2010

John Mulvey
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Business as usual today after yesterday’s somewhat neurotic post. Many thanks to Dave C for hooking us up with a killer Endless Boogie jam from Primavera, which I’m in the thick of as I type. Good stuff elsewhere this week, with only two or three out of this lot that I’m lukewarm on. Anyone who digs Blitzen Trapper should especially look out for Darker My Love, who appear to feature the White Fence guy, Tim Presley. 1 Dylan LeBlanc – Paupers Fields (Rough Trade) 2 Dion – Wonder Where I’m Bound (Now Sounds) 3 Los Lobos – Tin Can Trust (Proper) 4 Dr John – Tribal (Proper) 5 The Groundhogs – Thank Christ For The Groundhogs: The Liberty Years 1968-1972 (Liberty) 6 James Blackshaw – All Is Falling (Young God) 7 Darker My Love – Alive As You Are (Dangerbird) 8 Avi Buffalo – Avi Buffalo (Sub Pop) 9 Various Artists – The Ace (USA) Story: Volume One (Ace) 10 Arcade Fire – The Suburbs (Mercury) 11 Prince Rama – Aeolian Divine (www.myspace.com/princeramaofayodhya) 12 Various Artists – We Are All One In The Sun: A Tribute To Robbie Basho (Important) 13 The Coral – The Butterfly House (Deltasonic) 14 Various Artists – Unheard Ofs & Forgotten Abouts: Rare And Unheralded Gramophone Recordings From Around The World 1916-1964 (Pawn/Tompkins Square) 15 REM – Fables Of The Reconstruction: Deluxe Edition (Capitol) 16 !!! – Strange Weather, Isn’t It? (Warp) 17 Allez-Allez - Hideous Racket (RVNG) 18 Drivan – Disko (Smalltown Supersound) 19 Endless Boogie – Live At Primavera, May 29 2010 (www.braincrushingreverberations.blogspot.com) Get Uncut on your iPad, laptop or home computer

Business as usual today after yesterday’s somewhat neurotic post. Many thanks to Dave C for hooking us up with a killer Endless Boogie jam from Primavera, which I’m in the thick of as I type.

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Avi Buffalo: “Avi Buffalo”

John Mulvey
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Funny how some records take a while to bed in, no matter how much you play them, nor how often people you trust tell you how good they are. I’ve had something of an uncharacteristic writer’s block for the past week or so (hence the shortage of blogs; sorry about that), but when we had another go at the Avi Buffalo album yesterday, a few thoughts crystallised. I’m not sure why, in spite of fairly regular plays over the past few months, the charms of Avi Buffalo have been only partially apparent to me. Perhaps I got so taken with the penultimate track, “Remember Last Time”, and the way Avi Zahner-Isenberg gutsily channels Nels Cline in his extended solo, that I was distracted from the merits of the other songs. Maybe the band’s affectations – quirky, twee, a little over-wrought, more than a little self-conscious – and their evident regard for Built To Spill made me keep my distance. It’d be over-optimistic to suggest that those caveats have now completely disappeared: “Summer Cum” still sounds like a formative band trying much too hard, to my ears at least. But this week, plenty of Avi Buffalo’s other caprices have felt much more endearing. The prevailing air of diffidence may well be contrived, but there’s still something pretty engaging about the way a song – and a strong song, at that – like “Truth Sets In” gradually falls into place, is handled so airily, and is then deconstructed in such an artfully dazed fashion. To many of you who woke up to this one before me, of course, none of this is news. More or less the point of this blog is to provide advance previews of albums, not the odd belated mea culpa about a record that’s already reasonably successful. But there’s still something interesting about how records don’t always impact on you in predictable ways –catchy and melodic ones, like “Avi Buffalo”, can sometimes take a long time to hit home, while obtuse, discreet ones can be unexpectedly direct. Music journalism, necessarily, doesn’t encourage this sort of candid uncertainty. But, while I’ll try not to make too much of a habit of this – next week: wow, Jimi Hendrix! Who knew? – I do think it can be quite useful to use a blog as a way of plotting evolving critical decisions as well as snap ones. I’ve spent a frankly ridiculous amount of time this year wondering whether or not to write about Teenage Fanclub’s “Shadows”, for instance, working my way from an initial feeling of mild disappointment, through a gradual appreciation of the songs, to an ultimate frustration with a record that seems to me too wan – too depressing, oddly - for my taste. At some point, Teenage Fanclub chose to concentrate on being an indie band rather than a rock band, and it strikes me as rock’s loss, really. Maybe I should’ve documented that more. But I digress. If you’ve somehow failed to hear Avi Buffalo, and especially if you’ve been increasingly dismayed by the bearded Snow Patrol direction that Band Of Horses insist on – admittedly lucratively – pursuing, a better-late-than-never recommendation for “Avi Buffalo”. And if you like this one, wait ‘til you hear Dylan LeBlanc. I’ll do my best to write about “Paupers Field”, by LeBlanc, a little more promptly, I promise… Get Uncut on your iPad, laptop or home computer

Funny how some records take a while to bed in, no matter how much you play them, nor how often people you trust tell you how good they are. I’ve had something of an uncharacteristic writer’s block for the past week or so (hence the shortage of blogs; sorry about that), but when we had another go at the Avi Buffalo album yesterday, a few thoughts crystallised.

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THE KILLER INSIDE ME

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THE KILLER INSIDE ME
Directed by Michael Winterbottom Starring Casey Affleck, Jessica Alba, Kate Hudson Stanley Kubrick once described Jim Thompson’s 1952 pulp novel as “probably the most chilling and believable first person story of a criminally warped mind I have ever encountered.” Certainly, Michael Winterbo...

Directed by Michael Winterbottom

Starring Casey Affleck, Jessica Alba, Kate Hudson

Stanley Kubrick once described Jim Thompson’s 1952 pulp novel as “probably the most chilling and believable first person story of a criminally warped mind I have ever encountered.”

Certainly, Michael Winterbottom’s adaptation of The Killer Inside Me doesn’t pull any punches. Featuring two scenes of graphic violence against women, it’s a strange, queasy film, in equal parts compulsive and repulsive. If Winterbottom’s most engaging work – Jude, Butterfly Kiss, 24 Hour Party People – has been about bringing a fresh take to over-familiar genres, The Killer Inside Me similarly strives to find a new way to present film noir, but falls disappointingly short.

There have been gripping Thompson adaptations before (notably Sam Peckinpah’s The Getaway and Stephen Frears’ The Grifters), yet also several failures, including a previous adaptation of The Killer Inside Me from 1975, with Stacy Keach in the lead.

Here, Casey Affleck is Lou Ford, the deputy sheriff of a West Texas small town. Most locals find him charming, except the winos he bullies by extinguishing cigars on their hands. He begins a relationship with a prostitute, Joyce (Jessica Alba). Then their sado-masochistic sex games take a sinister turn. Amy (Kate Hudson), his girfriend, is also hooked on Lou, but he projects his self-loathing onto her. Although all three members of this love/lust/violence triangle are complex and contradictory, Lou is clearly the cracker in the pack. The murder count stacks up, as Lou uses his badge to contort truth and fabricate alibis. His pursuers pick up his scent and much of the narrative finds Lou trying to find ways we can keep ahead of the law – particularly District Attourney Howard Hendricks, who seems to be the only person who suspects Lou is capable of murder.

Winterbottom has said that movie violence shouldn’t be pretty. And, clearly, he’s got a point. It’s a pity then, given the director’s bravado, that his film’s flaws are basic. Holes appear in the plot two-thirds of the way in, and the final twists are poorly dramatised. Character development seems arbitrary. There are nudges that Lou is motivated by childhood trauma, but these are vague. Neither Jessica Alba nor Kate Hudson lacks commitment, but given their irrational choices to fall in with Lou, we can’t fathom their motives. Then there’s the problem of Affleck, an actor many admire, but whose weedy voice and sly demeanour fail to convince as a tormented thug.

Chris Roberts

GREENBERG

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GREENBERG
Directed by Noah Baumbach Starring Ben Stiller, Greta Gerwig, Rhys Ifans An air of remorse hangs over Greenberg, Noah Baumbach’s sort of comedy about mid-life Generation Xers trying to grow up in the suburbs of Los Angeles. These, principally, are men and women who’re struggling uncomfortably ...

Directed by Noah Baumbach

Starring Ben Stiller, Greta Gerwig, Rhys Ifans

An air of remorse hangs over Greenberg, Noah Baumbach’s sort of comedy about mid-life Generation Xers trying to grow up in the suburbs of Los Angeles. These, principally, are men and women who’re struggling uncomfortably to come to terms with genuine responsibilities – raising children, full-time jobs – and sinking incrementally into rehab, anxiety and divorce. “Youth is wasted on the young,” says one character, quoting Oscar Wilde. “I’d go further,” says Ben Stiller’s Roger Greenberg in reply. “Life is wasted on… people.”

In his twenties, Roger had been in a rock band, but blew his chance at landing a recording contract. He walked out, abandoning his bandmates, and fled LA for New York, where he became a carpenter. Things have not gone well for him, though. There was an unspecified mental breakdown and a period spent in an institution. As the film opens, he returns to LA for the first time in 15 years to house sit for his successful elder brother – “I think he’s in Vietnam opening a hotel, or something” – and look after the family’s pet German shepherd.

Roger, we soon discover, is sulky, neurotic and self-obsessed. He spends much of his time firing off letters of complaint to, variously, the Hollywood Pet Taxi Company, American Airlines, the Mayor of Los Angeles and Starbucks. But what else has he got to occupy him? “I was a carpenter, you know, for money,” he tells ex-girlfriend Beth (Jennifer Jason Leigh, who also co-wrote the screenplay with her husband, Baumbach). “Right now I’m trying to do nothing,” he explains. “That’s brave at our age,” she observes.

Along the way, Roger tries to reconnect with his old bandmates, Brit ex-pat Ivan (Rhys Ifans) and Eric (Mark Duplass), but he doesn’t register that they’re still bitter that he walked out on them. In turn, Ivan, who becomes a foil to Roger as the film develops, is struggling with his own problems: the chasm between his twenty-something dreams and fortysomething reality. “It’s huge,” Ivan tells Roger. “The life you never planned on.”

With all this swirling around, Roger starts an affair with his brother’s PA, Florence (Greta Gerwig). She’s a college graduate, drifting through her early twenties, no particular destination in mind. She’s just come out of a relationship and is as damaged as Roger.

“I don’t want to go from just having sex to sex to sex,” she says. “Who’s the third ‘sex’?” asks Roger. “You,” she replies.

Roger, though, lashes out at her. “Hurt people hurt people,” Florence comments – which you can take to be the key theme for this movie about dysfunctional characters and their relationships.

This is familiar territory for writer-director Noah Baumbach, whose previous films The Squid And The Whale and Margot At The Wedding similarly centred on wounded, often insufferable protagonists. Baumbach’s great achievement with those films – and which he repeats here – is to engage us with a parade of difficult characters. We stay with Roger perhaps in the hope that, by the movie’s close, he’ll have learned something.

Ben Stiller, of course, has a formidable track record in playing unlikeable characters in comedies, yet he rarely gets the chance to do “proper”, grown-up acting. But as his performances in both Reality Bites (which he also directed) and the little-seen Permanent Midnight suggested, Stiller is capable of more than just delivering the laughs. In fact, Greenberg is a groundbreaking performance for Stiller who’s unafraid, it seems, to risk alienating fans of his more mainstream movies like Meet The Fockers. Certainly, Stiller’s Roger is a credible addition to a list of hard-to-like movie leads – up there with pretty much anyone in a Wes Anderson film (Baumbach co-wrote Anderson’s 2004’s movie The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou). In one brilliant scene towards the end of the movie, Roger rants to a group of teenagers about the difference between the Twitter and Generation X generation – how blithe they are – while taking all their coke. It’s both tremendously funny and deeply excruciating to watch.

In all this, Greta Gerwig’s Florence offers some kind of hope. You’d imagine her being played by Diane Keaton in another era; she’s airy, light and, despite her own set of problems, is broadly optimistic for the life stretching out in front of her. Rhys Ifans, too, is excellent. Ivan is a good-natured man who’s managed to get his life, and family, back on track after losing it. For the most part, he is prepared to try to help Roger if he can, but even he finally loses patience with his friend: “We never talk about good things,” he yells in a show-stopping final argument.

One last nugget of information for you: the film comes with a fine soundtrack from LCD Soundsystem’s James Murphy. The key, I think, is a beautiful piano ballad, “Photographs”, that seems to find Murphy’s narrator mourning long-gone relationships and happier, more youthful days, captured on film. It’s striking how appropriate this is to Roger’s own situation. Roger’s great tragedy, after all, is his inability to shake off the disappointment of his own wasted youth.

Michael Bonner

JACKSON BROWNE & DAVID LINDLEY – LOVE IS STRANGE

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JACKSON BROWNE & DAVID LINDLEY – LOVE IS STRANGE

Jackson Browne’s self-titled first album introduced a 23-year-old artist whose sensibility was already so advanced that he was immediately singled out as the quintessential singer/songwriter of the Laurel Canyon school. The LP came out in January 1972 to a chorus of critical hosannas, including my own gushing review in Rolling Stone. “It’s not often that a single album is sufficient to place a new performer among the first rank of recording artists,” I wrote – accurately, as it turned out. Touring solo behind the album, the fledgling performer, as boyish as his image on the album cover, sang with disarming sincerity, deriving in no small part from the courage it took for him to stand in front of a room full of people and share his intensely private songs. The next time he hit the road, Jackson brought protection in the elfin form of David Lindley, a former member of eclectic LA folk-rock group Kaleidoscope, whose playing on a variety of stringed instruments proved to be the perfect complement to Browne’s voice and songs. On stage together, they enlivened the material in a way Jackson hadn’t been able to do by himself, and Lindley’s song-serving virtuosity deepened the impact of the captivating follow-up album, 1973’s For Everyman. Browne and Lindley’s shared history makes the former collaborators’ reunion on a 2006 tour of Spain a big deal for discerning fans. What’s more, several of the songs Browne chose to revisit are from records on which Lindley didn’t appear, enabling the onetime partners to see what they could bring to the more recent material in tandem. The resulting performances are less renderings than transformations – including a bittersweet “I’m Alive” from the 1993 LP of the same name, a gossamer “For Taking The Trouble” from 2002’s The Naked Ride Home and a Kaleidoscope-like exotic spin on 1996 message song “Looking East” featuring Lindley on oud. Theirs is a symbiotic partnership. In its time, that has encompassed the gorgeous and gut-wrenching breakup album Late For The Sky (’74) the expansive commercial breakthrough The Pretender (’76) and the laid-back yet wired live document Running On Empty (’77). Lindley’s presence throughout the 17-song selection of material here restores an organic liveliness not heard in Browne’s music since Running… Working primarily as a three-piece with percussionist Tino de Geraldo, they generate high-octane grooves (Lindley’s fleet violin transforming “Take It Easy” into a sort of Tex-Mex reel) and palpable moods (a liquid “Call It A Loan” from Hold Out, a sublimely sad “Late For The Sky”), and ramping up anticipation for the duo’s UK tour. The tour documented here is an exercise in bilingual social networking, as Browne brings a number of guest artists on stage to play and sing. Lindley is also provided with ample opportunity to exhibit his jocular and not at all introspective stage persona, barrelling through “Mercury Blues” from his Browne-produced 1981 LP, El Rayo-X, followed by the title tune. Toward the end of Disc 2, he does a delightful doo-wop falsetto vocal in a duet with Jackson on a medley of the Mickey & Sylvia chestnut “Love Is Strange” and Maurice Williams’ “Stay”, the latter of which ended Running On Empty. On his two-volume ‘Solo Acoustic’ series, Browne reminded us of the undiminished eloquence and beauty of the music he made in his twenties. Here, on Love Is Strange, with a crucial assist from Lindley, he fluidly unifies his entire body of work. The LP enables the veteran singer/songwriter to take care of some long-unfinished business, to get things lined up properly. This is what closure sounds like. Bud Scoppa

Jackson Browne’s self-titled first album introduced a 23-year-old artist whose sensibility was already so advanced that he was immediately singled out as the quintessential singer/songwriter of the Laurel Canyon school. The LP came out in January 1972 to a chorus of critical hosannas, including my own gushing review in Rolling Stone. “It’s not often that a single album is sufficient to place a new performer among the first rank of recording artists,” I wrote – accurately, as it turned out.

Touring solo behind the album, the fledgling performer, as boyish as his image on the album cover, sang with disarming sincerity, deriving in no small part from the courage it took for him to stand in front of a room full of people and share his intensely private songs. The next time he hit the road, Jackson brought protection in the elfin form of David Lindley, a former member of eclectic LA folk-rock group Kaleidoscope, whose playing on a variety of stringed instruments proved to be the perfect complement to Browne’s voice and songs. On stage together, they enlivened the material in a way Jackson hadn’t been able to do by himself, and Lindley’s song-serving virtuosity deepened the impact of the captivating follow-up album, 1973’s For Everyman.

Browne and Lindley’s shared history makes the former collaborators’ reunion on a 2006 tour of Spain a big deal for discerning fans. What’s more, several of the songs Browne chose to revisit are from records on which Lindley didn’t appear, enabling the onetime partners to see what they could bring to the more recent material in tandem. The resulting performances are less renderings than transformations – including a bittersweet “I’m Alive” from the 1993 LP of the same name, a gossamer “For Taking The Trouble” from 2002’s The Naked Ride Home and a Kaleidoscope-like exotic spin on 1996 message song “Looking East” featuring Lindley on oud.

Theirs is a symbiotic partnership. In its time, that has encompassed the gorgeous and gut-wrenching breakup album Late For The Sky (’74) the expansive commercial breakthrough The Pretender (’76) and the laid-back yet wired live document Running On Empty (’77). Lindley’s presence throughout the 17-song selection of material here restores an organic liveliness not heard in Browne’s music since Running… Working primarily as a three-piece with percussionist Tino de Geraldo, they generate high-octane grooves (Lindley’s fleet violin transforming “Take It Easy” into a sort of Tex-Mex reel) and palpable moods (a liquid “Call It A Loan” from Hold Out, a sublimely sad “Late For The Sky”), and ramping up anticipation for the duo’s UK tour.

The tour documented here is an exercise in bilingual social networking, as Browne brings a number of guest artists on stage to play and sing. Lindley is also provided with ample opportunity to exhibit his jocular and not at all introspective stage persona, barrelling through “Mercury Blues” from his Browne-produced 1981 LP, El Rayo-X, followed by the title tune. Toward the end of Disc 2, he does a delightful doo-wop falsetto vocal in a duet with Jackson on a medley of the Mickey & Sylvia chestnut “Love Is Strange” and Maurice Williams’ “Stay”, the latter of which ended Running On Empty.

On his two-volume ‘Solo Acoustic’ series, Browne reminded us of the undiminished eloquence and beauty of the music he made in his twenties. Here, on Love Is Strange, with a crucial assist from Lindley, he fluidly unifies his entire body of work. The LP enables the veteran singer/songwriter to take care of some long-unfinished business, to get things lined up properly. This is what closure sounds like.

Bud Scoppa

ROKY ERICKSON WITH OKKERVIL RIVER – TRUE LOVE CAST OUT ALL EVIL

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ROKY ERICKSON WITH OKKERVIL RIVER – TRUE LOVE CAST OUT ALL EVIL

Roky Erickson’s turbulent life journey from teen-pop idol in the Thirteenth Floor Elevators to electroshock patient, from lysergic seer to godfather of punk, might best be described as chaotic. As substantial a masterpiece as was 1967’s Easter Everywhere, by the 1980s, Erickson was living an isolated life in the projects of Austin, Texas, having traversed the crazy highs and excruciating lows that generally portend an early demise. Twenty years ago, few would have predicted Erickson would be alive in 2010, much less maintaining a busy touring schedule and recording True Love Cast Out All Evil, an astonishing highlight of his tragically stunted career. Evidently, there’ll be no muted, Syd Barrett-style demise for Roger Kynard Erickson. Ably aided by fellow Austinites Okkervil River and producer Will Sheff – the latter entrusted with sorting through scores of old compositions to arrive at the dozen presented here – Erickson pours his heart into song after touching song on True Love, guilelessly weaving strands of autobiography, myth, childlike wonder, and pleas for universal love into a work that is a marvel on multiple levels. Erickson enthusiasts will recognise some of these songs, which have appeared in primitive form – home recordings, bootlegs, small-label projects – over the years. But not in this guise. Okkervil’s shimmering, sixth-sense backing, and Roky’s disarming, straight-from-the-heart singing, casts True Love… as an unlikely autumnal classic – think Dylan’s Time Out Of Mind – and a kind of taking stock, refracted through his spooked, terrifying life story. Never has Erickson been this direct. Sheff’s role as editor has been to peel away the outlandishness. He frames True Love with a pair of brittle lo-fi demos laid down in the early ’70s, during Roky’s captivity at the Rusk State Hospital For The Criminally Insane. Here, Erickson is at his most vulnerable and lonely, replete with ambient noise and string overdubs and thereby suggests his post-Elevators life as True Love’s over-arcing narrative. It’s a legitimate device, thematically above reproach, though the tapes are so ragged as to distract from the LP’s cumulative punch. Given the strength of the Okkervil River sessions, it might have been better to have Roky tackle the songs anew. Still, it’s clear Sheff coaxed some of Roky’s best studio performances ever. “Be And Bring Me Home” is cataclysmic. Written during his darkest days of incarceration, it’s a majestic creation, a plea for peace and freedom, its smouldering R’n’B groove complementing Roky’s vocal – pitting immense weariness at the inanities of the world against the joys and comforts of music, family and connectedness. Mirroring its cosmopolitan production, True Love’s arrangements are all over the place: “Bring Back The Past” is chiming, Rickenbacker-styled powerpop, surprisingly effective; “Please Judge”, shorn of its old, Buddy Holly-ish arrangement, is sombre torch song set against a tangle of electronic noise. And then there’s “Goodbye Sweet Dreams”. A spare, haunted acoustic take of this song provides a ghostly parting image in the 2007 biopic, You’re Gonna Miss Me. Okkervil River, though, raining down sheets of electric guitar amid an icy, kaleidoscopic arrangement, transform it into a hypnotic psych-folk juggernaut. Erickson’s superb vocal, draping the song’s pulsing rhythms with loss and melancholy, is as authoritative in its way as the Elevators’ ageless “You’re Gonna Miss Me”. The mere existence of True Love… carries the weight of a miracle. That it so compellingly rescues a cache of unforgettable songs, and signals the unlikeliest of artistic revivals, must rank it among rock’s most transcendent tales. Luke Torn

Roky Erickson’s turbulent life journey from teen-pop idol in the Thirteenth Floor Elevators to electroshock patient, from lysergic seer to godfather of punk, might best be described as chaotic. As substantial a masterpiece as was 1967’s Easter Everywhere, by the 1980s, Erickson was living an isolated life in the projects of Austin, Texas, having traversed the crazy highs and excruciating lows that generally portend an early demise.

Twenty years ago, few would have predicted Erickson would be alive in 2010, much less maintaining a busy touring schedule and recording True Love Cast Out All Evil, an astonishing highlight of his tragically stunted career. Evidently, there’ll be no muted, Syd Barrett-style demise for Roger Kynard Erickson.

Ably aided by fellow Austinites Okkervil River and producer Will Sheff – the latter entrusted with sorting through scores of old compositions to arrive at the dozen presented here – Erickson pours his heart into song after touching song on True Love, guilelessly weaving strands of autobiography, myth, childlike wonder, and pleas for universal love into a work that is a marvel on multiple levels.

Erickson enthusiasts will recognise some of these songs, which have appeared in primitive form – home recordings, bootlegs, small-label projects – over the years. But not in this guise. Okkervil’s shimmering, sixth-sense backing, and Roky’s disarming, straight-from-the-heart singing, casts True Love… as an unlikely autumnal classic – think Dylan’s Time Out Of Mind – and a kind of taking stock, refracted through his spooked, terrifying life story.

Never has Erickson been this direct.

Sheff’s role as editor has been to peel away the outlandishness. He frames True Love with a pair of brittle lo-fi demos laid down in the early ’70s, during Roky’s captivity at the Rusk State Hospital For The Criminally Insane. Here, Erickson is at his most vulnerable and lonely, replete with ambient noise and string overdubs and thereby suggests his post-Elevators life as True Love’s over-arcing narrative. It’s a legitimate device, thematically above reproach, though the tapes are so ragged as to distract from the LP’s cumulative punch. Given the strength of the Okkervil River sessions, it might have been better to have Roky tackle the songs anew.

Still, it’s clear Sheff coaxed some of Roky’s best studio performances ever. “Be And Bring Me Home” is cataclysmic. Written during his darkest days of incarceration, it’s a majestic creation, a plea for peace and freedom, its smouldering R’n’B groove complementing Roky’s vocal – pitting immense weariness at the inanities of the world against the joys and comforts of music, family and connectedness.

Mirroring its cosmopolitan production, True Love’s arrangements are all over the place: “Bring Back The Past” is chiming, Rickenbacker-styled powerpop, surprisingly effective; “Please Judge”, shorn of its old, Buddy Holly-ish arrangement, is sombre torch song set against a tangle of electronic noise. And then there’s “Goodbye Sweet Dreams”. A spare, haunted acoustic take of this song provides a ghostly parting image in the 2007 biopic, You’re Gonna Miss Me. Okkervil River, though, raining down sheets of electric guitar amid an icy, kaleidoscopic arrangement, transform it into a hypnotic psych-folk juggernaut. Erickson’s superb vocal, draping the song’s pulsing rhythms with loss and melancholy, is as authoritative in its way as the Elevators’ ageless “You’re Gonna Miss Me”. The mere existence of True Love… carries the weight of a miracle. That it so compellingly rescues a cache of unforgettable songs, and signals the unlikeliest of artistic revivals, must rank it among rock’s most transcendent tales.

Luke Torn

ARIEL PINK’S HAUNTED GRAFFITI – BEFORE TODAY

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ARIEL PINK’S HAUNTED GRAFFITI – BEFORE TODAY

Genuine indie eccentrics are thin on the ground these days. The class of 2010 all seem so well-adjusted or self-conscious that it’s hard to know where we’re going to find a Mark E Smith or Will Oldham, petulantly pursuing a cryptic muse with total disregard for the expectations of their own followers. But it finally looks like we’ve got ourselves a new contender. Ariel Pink is already a lo-fi legend: a prolific crafter of damaged pop songs delivered in a perplexing array of styles and accents, with the underfed appearance of a teenage runaway and the sincere belief that he’s “halfway between male and female”. Since the late ’90s, while living in an apartment next door to his parents’ house in Pico-Robertson, LA, Pink has spewed over 500 songs into an 8-track using little more than a cheap keyboard, a bass and a three-stringed guitar. Three albums’ worth of his home-recorded material have appeared on Animal Collective’s Paw Tracks label, though much more exists on CD-Rs that Pink used to routinely press into the palms of strangers. Before Today is the first album from Ariel Pink’s Haunted Graffiti the band, a crew of LA freak-sceners who’ve rallied behind Pink’s singular vision. Impressively, it achieves the feat of enhancing Pink’s legend without puncturing his mystique. The ghostly pop sound of Pink’s previous output has proved curiously influential on the current generation of bedroom producers such as Ducktails and Toro Y Moi who’ve been corralled under the semi-sarcastic banner of chillwave. But whereas as most chillwave employs ’80s cues to evoke fuzzy nostalgia, Pink’s relationship with the pop music of his childhood seems altogether more complex. “Round And Round”, with its fidelity to the sound of drivetime radio circa ’83 – think Hall & Oates, Rick Springfield, Naked Eyes – goes far beyond nod-wink irony; as “Can’t Hear My Eyes” fades out, you expect a husky DJ to lean into the mic and dedicate it “to all you night owls out there”. At the same time there’s something distinctly queer about the production, an audio equivalent of Vaseline on the lens that lends these songs a time-and-space-warping effect, making them actually sound as if they’re playing from the cassette deck of a Mitsubishi Starion. Before Today isn’t strictly just an ’80s trip, though. “Bright Lit Blue Skies” is a terrific psych-pop nugget, a cover of a song by the relatively obscure New England garage band Rockin’ Ramrods, showing off the extent of Pink’s vinyl collection. “L’estat (acc. To The Widow’s Maid” mines the same vein of obscure arcane post-punk psychedelia that MGMT mainlined for “Congratulations”. “Butt-House Blondies” staggers between proto hair metal and a kind of fairground psychobilly, with Pink slipping – apparently unconsciously – into an English accent that only becomes sillier throughout the barely-hinged Bowie tribute/impersonation “Little Wig”. The band understandably appear to be having a blast, and the simian whoops at the end of “Beverly Kills” seem like an entirely appropriate response to the previous three minutes of delicious, sunbaked white funk. But then there are the downer jams. The “Public Image”-esque “Revolution’s A Lie” sounds like the curdled ranting of a man who’s been sold a false dream one too many times, while “Menopause Man” – a prime example of Pink’s disorientating Hollywood gothic vibe, in which the brittle, Cure-like guitars of the verse establish a strange frisson with the Mirage-era Fleetwood Mac harmonies on the chorus – is a rather extreme resolution to see things from a female point of view: “Castrate me, make me gay/ Lady, I’m a lady from today” he sings, quite sweetly as it happens, which only makes it more unsettling. Of course, it’s also the stuff of which cult dreams are made. Ariel Pink is probably the best weirdo pop savant to emerge from the American underground since Beck. Let’s hope the Scientologists don’t get to him. Sam Richards

Genuine indie eccentrics are thin on the ground these days. The class of 2010 all seem so well-adjusted or self-conscious that it’s hard to know where we’re going to find a Mark E Smith or Will Oldham, petulantly pursuing a cryptic muse with total disregard for the expectations of their own followers.

But it finally looks like we’ve got ourselves a new contender. Ariel Pink is already a lo-fi legend: a prolific crafter of damaged pop songs delivered in a perplexing array of styles and accents, with the underfed appearance of a teenage runaway and the sincere belief that he’s “halfway between male and female”.

Since the late ’90s, while living in an apartment next door to his parents’ house in Pico-Robertson, LA, Pink has spewed over 500 songs into an 8-track using little more than a cheap keyboard, a bass and a three-stringed guitar. Three albums’ worth of his home-recorded material have appeared on Animal Collective’s Paw Tracks label, though much more exists on CD-Rs that Pink used to routinely press into the palms of strangers.

Before Today is the first album from Ariel Pink’s Haunted Graffiti the band, a crew of LA freak-sceners who’ve rallied behind Pink’s singular vision. Impressively, it achieves the feat of enhancing Pink’s legend without puncturing his mystique.

The ghostly pop sound of Pink’s previous output has proved curiously influential on the current generation of bedroom producers such as Ducktails and Toro Y Moi who’ve been corralled under the semi-sarcastic banner of chillwave. But whereas as most chillwave employs ’80s cues to evoke fuzzy nostalgia, Pink’s relationship with the pop music of his childhood seems altogether more complex.

“Round And Round”, with its fidelity to the sound of drivetime radio circa ’83 – think Hall & Oates, Rick Springfield, Naked Eyes – goes far beyond nod-wink irony; as “Can’t Hear My Eyes” fades out, you expect a husky DJ to lean into the mic and dedicate it “to all you night owls out there”. At the same time there’s something distinctly queer about the production, an audio equivalent of Vaseline on the lens that lends these songs a time-and-space-warping effect, making them actually sound as if they’re playing from the cassette deck of a Mitsubishi Starion.

Before Today isn’t strictly just an ’80s trip, though. “Bright Lit Blue Skies” is a terrific psych-pop nugget, a cover of a song by the relatively obscure New England garage band Rockin’ Ramrods, showing off the extent of Pink’s vinyl collection. “L’estat (acc. To The Widow’s Maid” mines the same vein of obscure arcane post-punk psychedelia that MGMT mainlined for “Congratulations”. “Butt-House Blondies” staggers between proto hair metal and a kind of fairground psychobilly, with Pink slipping – apparently unconsciously – into an English accent that only becomes sillier throughout the barely-hinged Bowie tribute/impersonation “Little Wig”. The band understandably appear to be having a blast, and the simian whoops at the end of “Beverly Kills” seem like an entirely appropriate response to the previous three minutes of delicious, sunbaked white funk.

But then there are the downer jams. The “Public Image”-esque “Revolution’s A Lie” sounds like the curdled ranting of a man who’s been sold a false dream one too many times, while “Menopause Man” – a prime example of Pink’s disorientating Hollywood gothic vibe, in which the brittle, Cure-like guitars of the verse establish a strange frisson with the Mirage-era Fleetwood Mac harmonies on the chorus – is a rather extreme resolution to see things from a female point of view: “Castrate me, make me gay/ Lady, I’m a lady from today” he sings, quite sweetly as it happens, which only makes it more unsettling.

Of course, it’s also the stuff of which cult dreams are made. Ariel Pink is probably the best weirdo pop savant to emerge from the American underground since Beck. Let’s hope the Scientologists don’t get to him.

Sam Richards

U2 to have Glastonbury 2011 return?

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U2 to have Glastonbury 2011 return?
U2 look likely to play at the Glastonbury festival next year after having cancelled their June 25 headline slot for this year, a spokesperson for the event has said. Gorillaz have been announced as U2's replacements on the bill after Bono had emergency back surgery last month. Now, a spokesperson f...

U2 look likely to play at the Glastonbury festival next year after having cancelled their June 25 headline slot for this year, a spokesperson for the event has said.

Gorillaz have been announced as U2‘s replacements on the bill after Bono had emergency back surgery last month. Now, a spokesperson for the festival has told the Irish Post that U2 could return in the future.

“They’ve never played here before and we’re very disappointed they can’t perform,” the spokesperson explained, “but they could well be back next year.”

Muse and Stevie Wonder are set to play headline slots at the sold-out Somerset event, as well as Gorillaz.

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

Faces’ Ronnie Wood: ‘We haven’t ruled Rod Stewart out of reunion’

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Faces’ Ronnie Wood: ‘We haven’t ruled Rod Stewart out of reunion’
Faces guitarist Ronnie Wood says the reunited band "haven't ruled out" getting original frontman Rod Stewart to play with them again. The band are confirmed to play the Sussex Vintage At Goodwood festival (August 13-15), but have recruited Simply Red's Mick Hucknall as a replacement for Stewart. S...

Faces guitarist Ronnie Wood says the reunited band “haven’t ruled out” getting original frontman Rod Stewart to play with them again.

The band are confirmed to play the Sussex Vintage At Goodwood festival (August 13-15), but have recruited Simply Red’s Mick Hucknall as a replacement for Stewart.

Speaking to Uncut’s sister publication [url= http://www.nme.com/news/u2/51360]NME[/url] about Hucknall, Wood said Stewart wasn’t on board because of schedule clashes. He also claimed they were on good terms and he may join them in the future.

“We haven’t ruled Rod out,” he said. “It’s just that his schedule is totally crossing over exactly when we wanted him. We’ve got Mick Hucknall because his voice is just like Rod‘s was in the ’70s.”

He added: “The door’s not closed to Rod, but we’re carrying on because it’s worth it.”

Wood said that the band may tour in January and hoped to play Glastonbury and other festivals in 2011.

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

Radiohead’s Phil Selway to release solo album

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Radiohead’s Phil Selway to release solo album
Radiohead drummer Phil Selway has announced details of his debut solo album, to be released later this year. Called 'Familial', the album is out on August 30. It has been produced by Ian Davenport, who works at Radiohead's Oxfordshire base, Courtyard Studios. A number of guests feature on the recor...

Radiohead drummer Phil Selway has announced details of his debut solo album, to be released later this year.

Called ‘Familial’, the album is out on August 30. It has been produced by Ian Davenport, who works at Radiohead‘s Oxfordshire base, Courtyard Studios. A number of guests feature on the record, including singer/songwriter Lisa Germano, former Soul Coughing bassist Sebastian Steinberg, Wilco drummer Glenn Kotche and multi-instrumentalist Patrick Sansone.

Selway has been performing solo for some time now, first taking to the stage in 2001 as part of the ‘7 Worlds Collide’ charity project.

Meanwhile, Radiohead are currently working on their new album in Los Angeles. It will be the follow-up to 2007’s ‘In Rainbows’.

The tracklisting for ‘Familial’ is:

‘By Some Miracle’

‘Beyond Reason’

‘A Simple Life’

‘All Eyes On You’

‘The Ties That Bind Us’

‘Patron Saint’

‘Falling’

‘Broken Promises’

‘Don’t Look Down’

‘The Witching Hour’

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

Paul McCartney honoured by President Obama at the White House

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Paul McCartney honoured by President Obama at the White House
Paul McCartney serenaded Michelle and Barack Obama in the White House in Washington, DC yesterday (June 2), as he accepted the third Gershwin Prize For Popular Song award. Playing a gig in the home of the US President, McCartney serenaded the first lady by playing The Beatles' song 'Michelle' and d...

Paul McCartney serenaded Michelle and Barack Obama in the White House in Washington, DC yesterday (June 2), as he accepted the third Gershwin Prize For Popular Song award.

Playing a gig in the home of the US President, McCartney serenaded the first lady by playing The Beatles‘ song ‘Michelle’ and directing the lyrics at her, reports The Guardian.

Barack Obama praised the singer and bassist for helping “to lay the soundtrack for an entire generation”, while McCartney added: “I don’t think there could be anything more special than to play here.”

Other acts who paid tribute to him at the show included Jack White, Elvis Costello, Emmylou Harris, Dave Grohl, The Jonas Brothers and Faith Hill.

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

Public Image Ltd announce new UK tour and ticket details

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Public Image Ltd announce new UK tour and ticket details
Public Image Ltd are to tour the UK this July. The band reunited in 2009, and their forthcoming tour will again feature John Lydon (vocals), Lu Edmonds (guitar), Bruce Smith (drums) and Scott Firth (bass). Public Image Ltd play: London O2 Shepherd's Bush Empire (July 19) Bristol O2 Academy (20) ...

Public Image Ltd are to tour the UK this July.

The band reunited in 2009, and their forthcoming tour will again feature John Lydon (vocals), Lu Edmonds (guitar), Bruce Smith (drums) and Scott Firth (bass).

Public Image Ltd play:

London O2 Shepherd’s Bush Empire (July 19)

Bristol O2 Academy (20)

Oxford O2 Academy (21)

Leeds O2 Academy (23)

Liverpool O2 Academy (24)

Glasgow O2 ABC (26)

Tickets go on this Friday (June 4) at 9am (BST).

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

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