Blogs

A vague New Year’s Resolution for 2010 – not a big one, admittedly – is to try and write about more African records in Wild Mercury Sound, after embarrassingly never getting round to blogging on the likes of Tinariwen last year (and on Toumani Diabaté’s “Mande Variations” the year before, come to that).

There’s a very interesting feature on Vampire Weekend in last week’s New Yorker, which includes a brilliantly ridiculous encounter while the band are on tour in California. With a documentary crew in tow, Vampire Weekend set about interviewing a bunch of allegedly notable Californian musicians, and fetch up at the operations centre of Blink 182’s Tom De Longe.

Some surprise, really, that Wolf People, a new London band just signed to Jagjaguwar, have decided to stick with their name, given the seemingly innumerable number of Wolf-related bands currently around.

First off, check this brand new Portishead track out today. It’s called “Chase The Tear”, it’s being released to support Amnesty International, and it’s right up there with anything on “Third”, if our first listens are anything to go by.

Jack White’s Third Man cottage industry has produced a bit of a mixed bag of releases in 2009, with the highlight thus far (of those I’ve heard, anyhow) being his own solo seven-inch, “Fly Farm Blues”. The whole disdain he seems to have for standard record company practise, the sense that decisions are made on a creative whim, is really admirable. But it can’t hide the fact that singles by, say, a local gospel group, Transit, haven’t been hugely compelling.

Awful news over the weekend: the wonderful guitarist, Jack Rose, died of a heart attack on Saturday. Of all the adventurous new American primitives who’ve emerged in the past decade, it’d be just to call Rose the most talented of them all; a warm, intuitive and truly inspired player who dissolved the lines between traditional and experimental music.

Because, as I have just had pointed out to me, I have foolishly mistakenly read their name as MegaFUN, when the three members of MegaFAUN hove into view, led by a large bearded man with a banjo and a big grin, I somewhat feared they would prove to be relentlessly hearty, the distressing musical equivalent of bouncy castles, red noses, playground japes, a particularly unwelcome wackiness. The kind of jollity, in other words, that makes you want to run screaming from its larkish presence.

Just had a quick read of the blog on Hot Chip’s “Made In The Dark”, to make sure I don’t repeat too many points on this one about “One Life Stand”; endless stuff about the paralysing insidiousness of many of their songs, and so on.

A note on last week’s playlist from Nick, praising the new Cluster album in the face of what he descibes as “kosmische-light” (lite? leit?). Quite tempted, actually, to use that as part of some self-sabotaging branding project. Wild Mercury Sound: Hyping Kosmische-Lite Since 2007.

When writing about The Necks, it’s easy to end up with more of a timetable than a review. Their pieces traditionally last for around an hour (“Silverwater” stretches to 67 minutes), and are slowly evolving improvisations where the Australian instrumental trio intuitively manoeuvre round each other, subtly adjusting their themes as they go.