As I get older, I find it harder and harder to do these charts - maybe because there are so many records I like, it seems churlish to organise them so crudely. Nevertheless, it's fun having a go - as, hopefully, you're discovering with our Best Of 2007 supplement with the new issue, and the Rate the albums of the year thing on www.uncut.co.uk. I'll try and post my favourite reissues and comps later, but please let me know your picks, too.
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.
A few weeks, maybe months ago, someone left a note after one of my blogs with some insider knowledge about the next Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds LP. It was, they suggested, the most direct pop album that Cave had ever made: after the Stoogesy ramalams of Grinderman and the meditative western soundtracks, here, apparently, was the workaholic Cave at his most focused and dynamic.
A couple of things that have been hanging around for a few weeks now, and deserve some love here. One is “Rosemarie”, the debut album by an authentically fragrant Cornish band of Pre-Raphaelite damsels and dazed troubadours called Thistletown. Give me any excuse, and I’ll go into a comically apoplectic rant about the uselessness of most contemporary British bands who style themselves as acid-folk.
