I’ve always thought that the British music press’ reputation for ‘building them up and knocking them down’ is a bit erroneous, though it’s undoubtedly true that there’s a possibly obsessive fetishisation of the new that can sometimes bias against longer-serving bands. Maybe ‘build them up, get distracted by something else, then more or less forget they exist’ might be a truer reflection of what happens.
A quick look at the ever-reliable Wikipedia suggests it’s been seven years since the last Cornershop album was released; so long, in fact, that the Wiiija label still existed to release it. Around the time of “Handcream For A Generation”, I spent a night with Tjinder and Ben in Madrid, coming back to write a feature for Uncut that, if memory serves, basically argued that this album should do every bit as well as the “Brimful Of Asha”-driven “When I Was Born For The Seventh Time”.
A slightly weird list today, in that I was out of the office yesterday and didn’t actually hear the last few records here; I just cribbed them from the office playlist on our Twitter page that John Robinson posts.
I suspect I may have written more about Wild Beasts than any other British band in the two or so years Wild Mercury Sound has been running, doubtless to the bafflement and irritation of a good few regular readers.
Sad to report that David Carradine died yesterday. The star, of course, of Kung Fu, The Long Riders, Boxcar Bertha and Kill Bill, he was an old-school UNCUT hero.
As a tribute, here's some extracts from an interview Damien Love conducted with Carradine in December 2003, ahead of his appearance in Kill Bill Vol 2. It's great stuff - some yarns about teaching Dylan kung-fu, buying cars with Scorsese and an incident involving a dog and a very delicate body part...
Somewhat belatedly, I’ve just got round to reading Alex Ross’ fantastic book on 20th Century composition, The Rest Is Noise. A lot to talk about in there, but one quote stuck out yesterday. “Back in 1915,” Ross writes, “the critic Van Wyck Brooks had complained that America was caught in a false dichotomy between ‘highbrow’ and ‘lowbrow’, between ‘academic pedantry and pavement slang’. He called for a middle-ground culture that would fuse intellectual substance with communicative power.”
A bit of a Wilco binge in the last couple of days, since I’ve been trying to write a review of “Wilco (the album)” for the next issue of Uncut. Auspicious arrivals, too, from Wild Beasts and from Ben Reynolds, who’s the guitarist of Trembling Bells and who seems to have slotted rather gracefully into the space left by James Blackshaw on the Tompkins Square roster.
When I was grappling with the Dirty Projectors’ “Bitte Orca” a while back, I came to the fairly trite conclusion that I liked the band best when Angel Deradoorian or Amber Coffman took the lead, rather than David Longstreth.
Some talk on the last couple of blogs (Wavves and Playlist 20) about the Ducktails record and Matthew Mondanile’s various other products, so today seems a good time to tackle his stuff properly – not least because I think he may be playing London over the weekend.
The last time I saw Simone Felice anywhere near a London stage, he was hanging above it, wild-eyed and shirtless, from a monitor in the ceiling of the 100 Club, from which precarious position he was leading a boisterous crowd through a rowdy version of a song called “Ruby Mae” from the recently-released new album by The Felice Brothers, who were at the time roaring towards the climax of a typically rambunctious show.
