Blogs

A nice surprise, last week, when Julian Cope sent over his new double vinyl album, “Kiss My Sweet Apocalypse”. A surprise, because I thought I might have been blackballed after struggling with some of the attitudes that came to the surface on last year’s musically excellent “Black Sheep”.

When I went off on my annual start-of-year rant about hotly-tipped new bands in January (and Lord, I’ve been forced to rethink my opinions about Florence And The Machine after seeing her shocking performance with Glasvegas at the NME Awards), I mentioned that, in the midst of so much electropop, “Maybe even Peaches might get a bit more love as the result of all this, which would be great.”

Some news that, we hope, will put a bounce in your Wednesday afternoon.

Been a while since we had some Boredoms activity to write about here – since, perhaps, “Super Roots 9”, their live recording plus choir, came out on Thrill Jockey.

A quick caveat first. I only have seven tracks of this new Jarvis Cocker album, “Further Complications”. According to the lengthy note from Jarvis which accompanies them, the other eight aren’t “in a fit state to be listened to at the present time.”

In my ignorance, the last time I blogged about the Flower-Corsano Duo, I wrote some stuff about Mick Flower’s instrument, the shahi baaja, and described it, as per the press-release, as a "Japanese electric dulcimer/autoharp".

Some very satisfying words in album titles this week, if you’ll forgive the fairly tangential way of starting a blog: “Veckatimest”, “Bitte Orca”, and today, “Balf”. “Balf Quarry” is the new album from the Magik Markers – according to the sleevenotes, “A stone quarry in Hartford, CT which has mined traprock since the earliest days of the city.”

We now know that the new Bob Dylan album, which unexpectedly will be with us on April 27, is called Together Through Life. We know also that it was written and recorded quickly.

Weird prompt, but a TV ad last night for the forthcoming Formula One coverage reminded me that I’d been sat on Pocahaunted a bit too long. Specifically, it was the snatch of the BBC’s old theme tune, Fleetwood Mac’s “The Chain”, which Pocahaunted covered to mesmeric effect on their “Chains” album last year.

The first Monday morning of spring seems a good time to finally tackle the new Grizzly Bear album, “Veckatimest”, which I know I’ve been promising for a while. Without getting into some blog hype thing in the tradition of the Animal Collective (it was Grizzly Bear who reputedly leaked a couple of AC tracks and caused a lot of the fuss, if I remember right), “Veckatimest” is looking from here like the best album of this bit of 2009, at the very least.