“I’m pretty nervous tonight,” Nancy Wallace confesses to a packed Borderline. “I can see the whites of your eyes,” she tells the people in front of her, all of them staring in her direction, rapt as ecstatics, transported, hanging on her every word.
Some pretty big names in the mix this week, including a small rush of survivors from the American ‘80s underground: shame the Lemonheads’ covers album hasn’t arrived in time to complete the set.
There was allegedly a leak of the new Dirty Projectors album a couple of days ago, which means that yet again my dithering has robbed me of blogging exclusivity. The thing is, as I’ve mentioned a few times over the past month, I’ve been finding “Bitte Orca”, like its predecessors, somewhat intriguing and uncrackable. Today, I think I’m getting closer to understanding it.
When I was writing about the Lindstrom & Prins Thomas album a while back, I mentioned there was more Scandinavian electronic goodness forthcoming from The Field. “Yesterday And Today” is Axel Willner’s second album in this guise and, risking one of those winsome climatic references, it works great walking to work on a bright spring morning like this one.
In one of the best scenes in The Wrestler, Mickey Rourke's Randy and Marisa Tomei's Cassidy are propping up a bar, discussing the generally woeful state of modern music. They concur that Guns N' Roses, Motley Crue and Def Leppard set the bar astronomically high back in the day and, grumpy spoilsport that he was, "that Cobain pussy" pretty much ruined it all. The Nineties "sucked". And the Eighties? "Man, best shit ever!"
There’s a good line from James Petralli in the biog which accompanies “Fits”, the new White Denim album. “We set the tempos high,” he says, “and set off.”
Pretty weird mix this week, as I look down this list, not all of it fantastic. If I can break the usual protocols here, though, the Johnny Cash remix is really awful, and I speak as a Snoop Dogg fan. Given that “I Walk The Line” looked like the most interesting thing on the Cash remix album that turned up the other day, I suspect we might have found the worst record of 2009 already – though I must confess I don’t have the moral courage to check and make sure.
