A welcome return to the playlist this week for Howlin' Rain, whose "Magnificent Fiend" has finally got a UK release date in April. I know I've been promising to blog on this for over six months, but I'll get there in the next few days; it still sounds great, fortunately.
I found myself in the centre of a mild media hurricane yesterday, thanks to the musical map of Britain published in this month's Uncut becoming something of a hot topic. If you heard me trying to explain the principle of beats per minute on a local radio station, or trying to convince all of Scotland that they only listened to Runrig, I can only apologise.
A fair number of reissues in this one, that I've compiled over the past day or so. But there's also a couple of auspicious new releases just in, that I'll be writing more about in the next few days.
With the next issue out of the way, we had a fairly constructive bash through a backlog of new releases today, hence not much here has figured on previous playlists. As usual, please let me know what you've been listening to: further to the Cave Singers tip I mentioned the other day, I've been quite taken with Health, who cropped up in one of your posts the other day.
A fairly fractious mix over the past day and a half, at least one of which made (for good reason, I must admit) our production editor evacuate the Uncut office at speed. A load of Kraftwerk bootlegs are currently in circulation, following the 1971 session I recommended the other day, and this one from Croydon, 1975, is tremendous.
A surprising amount of good post was waiting for us at the office yesterday, which means a lot of stuff we've played thus far this year has been brand new. There are a handful of disappointments on the list which follows, but the undisputed favourite at the moment is the new Stephen Malkmus album. I'll try and write something more substantial about the Jicks' monumental jams in the next few days. In the meantime, here's the rundown:
Some good stuff in the post today, notably the first four Michael Rother solo albums which, in an act of gross self-indulgence, I played back-to-back. And also the new Elbow album: track six, which I think is called "Weather To Fly", is one of those songs that's so fine and delicate it made me stop work and gaze poetically out of the window for its duration.
An office playlist today, since I've been putting the finishing touches to the next issue of Uncut and writing another - more coherent, hopefully - review of Led Zeppelin for the mag. John Robinson, our Reviews Ed, has mainly been at the controls this afternoon, running through a few new releases and currently dusting down The Beastie Boys' "Check Your Head", which is fine by me. Neon Neon, incidentally, is yet another new album from Gruff Rhys, this time a synthpop/hip hop/R&B concept album about John DeLorean, in collaboration with Boom Bip, a kind of substitute Danger Mouse. Sounds pretty good, anyway.
Not much time to post today, so here's an office playlist for your delectation. Thanks to everyone who posted their playlists last week - we can definitely do that again here if you're in the mood. I should also mention a few things I'll try and blog about before Christmas, if only in a fairly unsavoury attempt to book some return visits from you over the next couple of weeks.
