Blogs

March 2013, Richmond, Virginia. Matthew E White's Big Inner album has become a minor word-of-mouth sensation: a country-soul fantasia, saturated with lavish horn and string arrangements, mostly recorded in the attic of his Richmond house (You can read my 2013 interview with Matthew E White here).

When Thom Yorke sneaked out his new solo album a few months back, I managed to hold out for 66 hours before writing a review of "Tomorrow's Modern Boxes". Since waking up early yesterday morning to a lot of very excited Americans on my Twitter timeline, I've been playing D'Angelo's "Black Messiah" many times: another rich and complex album that seems fundamentally ill-suited to any kind of snap judgment reviewing.

Tuesday night, I went to see the War On Drugs guy again. I mention this, in relation to Mark Kozelek and Sun Kil Moon's Hackney show, because Kozelek doesn't stop mentioning it himself for much of the two and a half hour show; a show which, by the by, is one of the very best and certainly most surprising I've ever seen him play.

A couple of press releases appeared in my inbox over the last few days, both announcing the surprising return of two increasingly elusive filmmakers.

The cosmology of Christopher Nolan's new film, Interstellar, offers an instructive analogy for the career of the director himself.

At the moment, I'm compiling our films of the 2014 for the end of year issue. By sheer coincidence, one of the films I'm most looking forward to for next year is Inherent Vice. In case you're not up to speed on it, this is Paul Thomas Anderson's adaptation of the Thomas Pynchon novel - a Seventies-set noir about a stoner Private Investigator, Larry "Doc" Sportello, who's investigating the disappearance of a former girlfriend.

Of the recent slew of rock biopics, this Jimi Hendrix film is the one that seems to get it just about right.

As is the brutal way with deadlines on monthly magazines, yesterday afternoon I had to send out a request to all of Uncut's writers for their albums of the year lists, so that we can start the long and meticulous process of compiling a Best Of 2014 chart.

I hadn't planned to write about the Necks show last night: plenty of other things to do; a review of Frazey Ford's album ready to publish; a sense that, after my previous reviews of The Necks, I didn't have much else to say.

At the conclusion of Se7en, his second film as director, David Fincher memorably gave us Gwyneth Paltrow’s severed head in a box. In many respects, he has been producing heads from boxes ever since.