Not strictly an office playlist this week, since I haven’t actually been near the Uncut office for the past week and a half. Instead, here’s what I’ve been listening to at home, out and about in the sun, and so on.
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.
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.
Hopefully, you’ve been following our updating playlist on the brand new Uncut Twitter. It seems to be working now so that, when I post a new blog, it automatically puts a link on Twitter. Quite handy, perhaps.
Not quite as long a playlist as usual this week, chiefly because Number Nine here – The Grateful Dead live at “Winterland 1973” – is a box set of nine CDs, and we played the first three, comprising the entire set from November 9, straight through yesterday. November 10 and 11 to come in the next couple of days, if my colleagues will let me get away with it, then there’s a 3CD set from around the time of “Terrapin Station” to have a go at, too.
A lot of records on the playlist this week, I think, probably due to the fact that I’ve kept a note of what we’ve been playing for three full days. I guess the big one here is “Veckatimest”, the new Grizzly Bear album, which we now have a copy of. Incredible record, which I’ll be writing about soon, possibly tomorrow.
Quite busy here with, as you can see, a bunch of new stuff again this week: right now the new Jason Lytle album has just started up and doesn't appear to be a huge departure from what he was up to in Grandaddy.
Biggish news this week, with the arrival of Neil Young’s new album, “Fork In The Road”, Neil’s collaboration with Booker T and The Drive-By Truckers, and the second solo joint by ex-Trucker Jason Isbell, which makes me feel like I’ve been moving in ever decreasing circles for the past couple of days.
It’s beginning to look as if, in certain online circles, there’s going to be quite a fuss around the new Grizzly Bear album, “Veckatimest” – comparable perhaps to the heat around the Animal Collective record at the end of last year. Security’s comparably tight around “Veckatimest” – ironic considering it was Grizzly Bear themselves who benignly leaked a couple of “Merriweather Post Pavilion” tracks – but we did manage to sneak one listen yesterday.