Some correspondence over the past week or so regarding The Alps, whose new album I must admit I’m yet to hear: the last one was pretty cool, something like a kind of psychedelicised Air, if I remember right.
Possibly there may be other matters preoccupying English readers today (and some American ones, come to that), and I can’t pretend that all the records here – the new MIA album, for instance – might be suitable for taking the potential pain away.
Among the many highlights of Robert Plant & Alison Krauss’ “Raising Sand”, I kept coming back to their take on Gene Clark’s “Polly Come Home”. Had they, and I guess their producer T-Bone Burnett, captured the uncanny gravity of Low on purpose, or by some equally uncanny accident?
In some circles, it’ll be construed as heretical behaviour: James Blackshaw not touching an acoustic guitar for the duration of an entire album, favouring instead a 12-string electric. For someone who’s been proclaimed, not infrequently here, as some kind of saviour of folk guitar or whatever, it’s something of a shock.
First up, thanks for the fantastic response to the Best Of 2010: Halftime Report. Please keep your own charts coming, and I’ll try and collate them into some kind of masterlist in the next few days.
A bit of anal-retentive listmaking today: my favourite 30 albums of the year so far (though I imagine I’ve forgotten one or two, and there’ll be a bunch more good ones that I haven’t heard as yet).
A clusterfuck of heaviness in the past couple of days – Endless Boogie’s Primavera jam, the Groundhogs box set, finally hearing the bonus seven-inch tracks from Magic Lantern’s “Platoon”, news that Eternal Tapestry have signed to Thrill Jockey – reminded me to write about Mount Carmel’s self-titled on Siltbreeze.