I don’t have any tattoos, for many reasons, but one of the best I can think of is that I don’t trust my aesthetic tastes to remain constant. I don’t feel confident that the art I like now will all, necessarily, be the same things that I like a few years down the line.

Quentin Tarantino came to a crossroads in his career when he made Jackie Brown in 1997. Coming after the lary carnage of Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction, his third film, adapted from Elmore Leonard's novel Rum Punch, was an unexpectedly poignant and subtle account of middle-aged people doing whatever they have to do to survive. The guns, double-crosses and gangsters were there, of course - but there were other things, too: warmth, character and nuance.

If you’re feeling withdrawal symptoms after the glut of end-of-year charts last month, I cooked this up for the latest edition of Uncut…

At the end of November 2012, Low released a short video trailer for their forthcoming tenth full album, “The Invisible Way”. There is some static, and Mimi Parker talking about some “exceptional peaches”, then a cascading piano line fades in. After 44 seconds, and before the clip has revealed much of a shape as a song, the clip ends.

Could be wrong about this, but I think the track I posted and tweeted most often last year was “Sunshine, No Shoes” by the Philadelphia band, Spacin’: I’m going to add it again after the jump. Spacin’, to recap - though you can follow this link to a blog about them - are a project fronted by Jason Killinger, a spin-off from a longish-established Philly psych band called Birds Of Maya; BOM’s amazing “Ready To Howl” album got a belated UK release last year on Agitated.

Following on from my blog about Quentin Tarantino's favourite records, I thought I'd post another QT-related titbit, from 1994. In a previous life, as film editor at Melody Maker, I commissioned Jarvis Cocker to review Pulp Fiction for us. Here, then, is Jarvis on Tarantino's early masterpiece...

Here we are at the end of another year, finishing off our first issue of 2013 and looking forward to the Christmas break, which starts for us on Friday. We’re off then until January 2, when we will no doubt return refreshed to face the New Year. This is therefore the last newsletter for a couple of weeks, so I’ll take the opportunity now to thank you for all your support and enthusiasm over the last 12 months, which has been much appreciated by everyone at Uncut. We hope all our readers enjoy their own Christmas holidays and wish you all the best for the coming year.

The Allah-Las make their UK debut in the back room of a north London pub on a freezing December night, the inhospitable weather not something familiar to in their native Los Angeles, where it probably only gets this cold in disaster movies, palm trees turning brittle with frost, the ocean becoming ice, CGI snow drifts on Sunset Strip and Denis Quaid in a parka and Bermuda shorts standing square-jawed and wrinkled-kneed against the elements.

In May 2011, Jonathan Demme filmed Neil Young on the three hour drive from the singer’s hometown of Omemee to Toronto’s Massey Hall, where he was scheduled to play the final shows of his Le Noise tour.

On my way home last week from The Rolling Stones at the O2, still a-buzz with excitement, I ended up chatting to a group of similarly exhilarated fans, who between them didn’t have enough fingers to count the number of Stones shows they’d been to, Brian Jones still a Stone the first time a couple of them had seen them.