John Mulvey ...

John Mulvey

The First Uncut Playlist Of 2008

A surprising amount of good post was waiting for us at the office yesterday, which means a lot of stuff we've played thus far this year has been brand new. There are a handful of disappointments on the list which follows, but the undisputed favourite at the moment is the new Stephen Malkmus album. I'll try and write something more substantial about the Jicks' monumental jams in the next few days. In the meantime, here's the rundown:

Bruce Springsteen, Michael Rother, Mahmoud Ahmed and your 2007 favourites

Happy New Year, everyone, and many thanks for all your responses to the Bruce Springsteen and Favourite Albums Of The Year blogs I posted just before Christmas.

Bruce Springsteen live in London

It is, I guess, a quintessential Bruce moment. The house lights are on, and as I walk across the floor of the O2 Arena, everyone is bellowing along unself-consciously to “Born To Run”. For the best part of two and a half hours, the E Street Band have played with a thickness, a relentlessness, a charged virtuosity that is pretty astounding. Now, they’re peaking, and it seems conceivable that they could keep going all night.

My Favourite Albums Of The Year: Part Two

As promised on this Albums Of The Year blog, here are my favourite reissues and compilations of 2007. Again, feel free to add your own selections below.

My Favourite Albums Of The Year

As I get older, I find it harder and harder to do these charts - maybe because there are so many records I like, it seems churlish to organise them so crudely. Nevertheless, it's fun having a go - as, hopefully, you're discovering with our Best Of 2007 supplement with the new issue, and the Rate the albums of the year thing on www.uncut.co.uk. I'll try and post my favourite reissues and comps later, but please let me know your picks, too.

Today’s playlist

Some good stuff in the post today, notably the first four Michael Rother solo albums which, in an act of gross self-indulgence, I played back-to-back. And also the new Elbow album: track six, which I think is called "Weather To Fly", is one of those songs that's so fine and delicate it made me stop work and gaze poetically out of the window for its duration.

Nick Cave’s “Dig, Lazarus, Dig!!!”

A few weeks, maybe months ago, someone left a note after one of my blogs with some insider knowledge about the next Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds LP. It was, they suggested, the most direct pop album that Cave had ever made: after the Stoogesy ramalams of Grinderman and the meditative western soundtracks, here, apparently, was the workaholic Cave at his most focused and dynamic.

Thistletown and Gavin Bryars

A couple of things that have been hanging around for a few weeks now, and deserve some love here. One is “Rosemarie”, the debut album by an authentically fragrant Cornish band of Pre-Raphaelite damsels and dazed troubadours called Thistletown. Give me any excuse, and I’ll go into a comically apoplectic rant about the uselessness of most contemporary British bands who style themselves as acid-folk.

Neon Neon – that’s Gruff Rhys and Boom Bip – and “Stainless Style”

In spite of my morbid suspicions about any record which features Har Mar Superstar, I find myself quite taken with the first album by Neon Neon. It's called "Stainless Style", and maybe it's acting as a kind of antidote to all the manly Led Zeppelin love I've indulged in these past few days.

The Uncut Playlist

An office playlist today, since I've been putting the finishing touches to the next issue of Uncut and writing another - more coherent, hopefully - review of Led Zeppelin for the mag. John Robinson, our Reviews Ed, has mainly been at the controls this afternoon, running through a few new releases and currently dusting down The Beastie Boys' "Check Your Head", which is fine by me. Neon Neon, incidentally, is yet another new album from Gruff Rhys, this time a synthpop/hip hop/R&B concept album about John DeLorean, in collaboration with Boom Bip, a kind of substitute Danger Mouse. Sounds pretty good, anyway.
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