Pulse

As I mentioned on Friday, I’m indebted to David for turning me onto this album by Date Palms. Quickly, it reminds me of a bunch of my favourite music - Alice Coltrane, Terry Riley, Pandit Pran Nath, Cluster, Sun Araw, Brightblack Morning Light, PG Six – while combining the influences into something relatively original.

Fans of The Fall are, as a rule, hardy beasts. Complaint may come naturally to them, but then so does loyalty. John Peel’s famous encomium, “They are always different, they are always the same,” is the perpetual excuse for their favourite band, which disregards a certain erosion of Mark E Smith’s charms.

Their breakthrough: platinum-coated rock’n’roll...

Welsh songstress excels – with the help of Albert Hammond and The Roots...

Another round-up today, following on from the Slow Previewing blogs I filed a week or two back. Again, a few records that I didn’t get round to writing about at time of release, but which definitely deserve flagging up.

Looks like we’re heading deep into 2011 releases now, and this latest by Arbouretum, slated for January, is a really good one. If you’ve not latched on to this distinctly underrated Baltimore band, there’s a bit of catching-up available here: a piece on their last album, “Song Of The Pearl”; a live review from 2009’s blinding Club Uncut show; and something about Dave Heumann’s recent side-project, Coil Sea.

Genius or show-off? This over-indulgent eighth shows evidence of both...

First album of new material in eight years offers tantalising glimpses of the old modernist...

The set-up of this piece is a bit out of date, since I wrote it a month ago for the current issue of Uncut. Nevertheless, worth running here I think, not least because I've subsequently discovered Forest Swords' "Dagger Paths" is getting a CD release in the UK on No Pain In Pop.

Sad news reached us last night of the death of Arthur Penn, aged 88. Penn, of course, was the director of many great films including Bonnie And Clyde, Night Moves and The Missouri Breaks. Here, by way of a tribute, I thought we'd run the transcript of an interview Damien Love did with Penn for Uncut. The interview took place in 2004, while Penn, then 81, was directing a Broadway revival of the play Sly Fox. Speaking in detail about his career, he shared his memories of working with Beatty, Brando, Newman and Hackman, as well as discussing the enduring legacy of his masterpiece, Bonnie And Clyde.