Blogs

Nearly a year ago now, I posted a blog about Wooden Shjips live, when they played with Howlin Rain and The Meat Puppets in London. They were superb, and I’m pleased to say that their psychedelic dancehall schtick has been totally realised on “Dos”, their upcoming third album, which has burning itself onto my synapses these past ten days or so.

Not exactly an online exclusive today, since Raphael Saadiq’s third solo album has been out in the States since last autumn and has reaped plenty of Grammy noms and critical plaudits in the interim. Still, I guess late love is better than none at all, and “The Way I See It” is a lovely record.

Swedish duo First Aid Kit stand onstage - sleeves pulled over hands, hands behind their backs - like two awkward schoolgirls at a music recital.

According to someone nearby, Richard Swift’s band look like they’ve just come off a trawler – the sort of image I aspire to, obviously. They sound, however, quite different: at this point, uncannily like a soul harmony group, somewhere between The Miracles and The Stylistics.

I have a default rant about the parlous state of most modern British folk which I wheel out here every couple of months or so. Jim Moray and Seth Lakeman are unfailingly indicted, and Alasdair Roberts is held up as the excellent exception which proves the rule. It’s nice, then, to be presented with a new Alasdair Roberts album, “Spoils”, to justify my prejudices.

Thanks for all your suggestions regarding your favourite blogs. I’ve finally got around to putting together a list here - not 100 per cent sold on all of these, but they’re pretty good. Again, if you know any nice ones we’ve missed, please let us know in the comment box at the bottom of the blog.

“I’ve been thinking a lot about dying recently,” says Philip Seymour Hoffman’s neurotic theatre director Caden Cotard early on. And, certainly, you could be forgiven for thinking that the odds were stacked against him. Within the first half hour of Synecdoche, New York, there are enough portents of doom lurking around you’d think you were watching a tragedy, were it all not so funny.

Of course the practicalities of listening to music in the Uncut office shouldn’t concern you much, but it’s worth noting that for some weeks, possibly months now, we’ve been grappling with the new Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy album, “Beware”, widely proclaimed as one of his best ever and yet, round these parts at least, treacherously hard to hear properly.

Sad news this morning, inevitably overshadowed in the UK by all the Brits bullshit, that Touch & Go Records are to cease putting out new music (not sure where that leaves, say, the forthcoming Crystal Antlers album, for a start). A slight unhappy coincidence, in that this morning I was playing a new record which has distinct ties to the ‘80s post-hardcore from which Touch & Go emerged, allbeit closer ones to the SST sound of that time.

Next Tuesday (February 24), as I’ve probably mentioned before, we have Richard Swift playing Club Uncut, so it strikes me as professionally exigent to get to grips today with his new album, “The Atlantic Ocean”.