Last year, I spent a fair amount of time listening to a mighty blown-out Philadelphia band called Purling Hiss, whose mainman Mike Pollize was sprung from another excellent local band called the Birds Of Maya.
Business somewhat overshadowed this morning by the awful news about Levon Helm. Over the past couple of days though, these are the records we’ve been playing in the Uncut office.
BBC4’s fine night of Southern Rock programming was still on my mind yesterday morning when I arrived back at Uncut, and a bit of chat about the shows at my Twitter feed eventually lead to a crowdsourced Southern Rock Playlist.
Dodgy list last week, really good one this. A few things to flag up, not least the Jimmy Page “Lucifer Rising” soundtrack which has been distracting us from finishing the issue this morning.
After last week’s notable arrival of Neil Young & Crazy Horse’s “Americana”, Playlist 14 is somewhat sketchier. Harder than usual for me to get behind a fair bit of this list, as a consequence – though as you can see, there’s still at least one very interesting new entry…
It begins as you might imagine, with a guitarist who seems about to play a sputtering solo rather than start a song, a drummer trying to work out what time to keep and, gradually, a band lunging towards a tune: “Oh Susannah”.
Hopefully those of you who subscribe to Uncut will be starting to receive your copies of the new issue this morning (For the rest of you, it should be on sale tomorrow).