Pulse

A strange one, this. Nick Cave has been workaholically juggling multiple projects over the past couple of years: The Bad Seeds, of course; his comparatively pensive soundtrack work with Warren Ellis; and the rambunctious, Stoogesy garage rock of Grinderman. A betting man or woman might have put money on him turning up at Latitude in the company of the Bad Seeds, on the back of their superb “Dig, Lazarus, Dig!!!” album from earlier this year.

Thoughtful, twisting, talent-heavy thriller of child abduction...from Ben Affleck?

Turn on, tune in, play loud

I got an email from someone the other day about a new band helmed by Richard Fearless, the sometime leader of Death In Vegas. Of Black Acid, they said, “Half of it sounds like a Japanese sixth form band doing Mary Chain covers. Half of it sounds like Bobby Gillespie telling you about records he likes while trying to play them. The first song is ten minutes of backwards noise.”

A few years ago, I spent a good while being evangelical about something that was excruciatingly, and probably briefly, labelled ‘folktronica’. Before a bunch of rather insipid bands like Tunng seemed to take up that banner in earnest, I wrote a lot about the solo work of Kieran Hebden, who as Four Tet had moved through an electronic reconfiguring of ecstatic, cosmic jazz and was (circa 2001) building new music out of his computer and a bunch of arcane folk records.

The Rock Against Racism manifesto at the time of the second of 1978's major anti-fascist festivals, held in September in Brockwell Park and featuring Elvis Costello and Aswad, called for: "Rebel music, street music. Music that breaks down people's fear of one another. Now music. Music that knows who the real enemy is. Rock against racism. Love music. Hate racism."

20th anniversary reissue of oft-maligned masterpiece

First time on DVD for ’93’s stripped-down acoustic set

Just spent most of the afternoon in some kind of company blogging seminar (conclusion: I think I may be doing it wrong), to find the new Black Mountain album waiting for me. We're now trying to play it for the third time without it jumping. But in the meantime, here are the day's other selections: a couple of vague dogs in this lot, if memory serves.

Grape’s five-album Columbia catalog mercifully returned to print, spiced with 28 bonus tracks