Wonder stuff

Surrealist, subversive take on Lewis Carroll’s classic...

X MEN: FIRST CLASS HHH DIRECTED BY Matthew Vaughn STARRING James McAvoy, Michael Fassbinder OPENS JUNE 1 // CERT 12A // 131 MINS As evangelists, millenarians and scholars have learned to their disappointment, predicting the apocalypse has never been an entirely accurate business.

When I have to talk to interns about live reviewing, I often advise against reviewing crowds, unless something really unusual happens. It’s hardly unusual for a crowd to be excited and passionate – they’ve just paid ten, 20, 30 pounds to see one of their favourite artists, it’s what they expect to do.

Believe the hype! The simple tale of a legendary label...

A revealing piece from Duluth, February 2011

Apologies for not posting much new stuff over the past few days; we’ve been wrapping up the next issue of Uncut. One thing I have written, though, is this piece about, sort of, Raphael Saadiq, which was destined to be my Wild Mercury Sound column in the mag until various advertising movements rendered it, perhaps fortunately, surplus to requirements. A pretty convoluted path to “Stone Rollin’”, but just about worth posting, I think…

I’ve never played guitar, so may not be the best person to judge, and I’m generally averse to wild comparatives and superlatives in music reviews. Watching Arbouretum last night, though – it was somewhere in the last quarter of “Song Of The Nile”, to be specific – I started to think that, just maybe, Dave Heumann might be one of the best guitarists I’ve seen play in years.

The Northumbrian five-piece shatter folk’s borders, as this expansive yet austere fourth proves...

New York’s finest finally get back to work, with excellent results...

I have a good few mysterious records in my collection, as you can probably imagine. Among the more obtuse are a bunch by a shadowy New York collective called The No-Neck Blues Band. It’s not always easy to read these albums, since the band have an apparent disdain for even the most fundamental marketing expediencies. Often, their name is nowhere to be found on the package, replaced by a kind of glyph that, decoded, reads NNCK.