Dolorous Nashville sextet deliver bright(ish) sixth album

The Modfather talks indepth about Noel, Bobby and Aziz

Since I wrote about My Morning Jacket’s “Evil Urges” a few weeks back (comparing it unfavourably to the Fleet Foxes debut), I’ve been thinking about the band and the record a lot. Picking up Billboard this morning (not a regular habit, rest assured), I found them staring awkwardly out of the cover. Jim James could barely be spotted in the accompanying feature, overwhelmed by laudatory quotes from a great swathe of on-message, optimum-strategising execs and some head-spinning stats suggesting that, yes, they were set to break into the biggish league in America sometime later in the summer.

Film captures the band on tour last year

Grab a chance to see Franz Ferdinand, Sigur Ros, Interpol and more for free!

WIN! TICKETS FOR LATITUDE 2008! Latitude is now only a matter of weeks away. And as our comrades at the summer’s best festival put the finishing touches to the bill, it seems a good time to offer you the chance to win a pair of tickets for the four-day event, held – in case you’ve forgotten – at Henham Park, Southwold, Suffolk between July 17 and 20.

The band announce shows for the end of the year

It’s not immediately clear quite where Sydney Pollack fits into the scheme of things. As one of the generation of film-makers who flourished in the Sixties and Seventies, there’s nothing on his CV as canonical as, say, Taxi Driver or The Godfather, no real sense of him breaking the same kind of ground as his peers. Even the Evening Standard’s film critic Derek Malcolm, interviewed this morning on Radio 4’s Today programme, admitted the movies which most people would associate with Pollack – Out Of Africa and Tootsie – were ultimately rather “bland”.

Pete Greenwood also confirmed for our fourth London live night

I was writing, not for the first time, about Howlin Rain the other week, and admitted that my preoccupation with the band had a certain stalkerish intensity. As I begin yet another blog about James Blackshaw, a London-based guitarist and so on, it strikes me that my prosletyzing on his behalf might be somehow detrimental to his career: a random google of his name would probably bring up this great weight of waffle from me, so hyperbolic that some might suspect we must be related.