After a slight lull last week, another clutch of good new 2010 things here, overshadowed slightly by the news at the Durtro website that Bill Fay’s new album – and featuring his first released recordings from the past three decades, more or less – is just about ready to go.
The new issue of Uncut should be out any day now, featuring our thoroughly extensive Best Of 2009 coverage: the Top 50 albums of the year, best reissues, best comps/boxsets, films, DVDs, books and so on.
Joe Pug? No, I hadn’t heard of him either, before he opened tonight for The Low Anthem. Count me as a fan now, though. Pug’s a potentially major song-writing talent, as evidenced on his Nation Of Heat EP, available online and really quite brilliant. But who exactly is he?
Citay’s first self-titled album, from 2006, posited Ezra Feinberg’s Bay Area collective as a fractionally heavier wing of the acid-folk movement, filled as it was with a kind of mellow, medieval-tinged rock that seemed indebted to the acoustic dalliances of Led Zeppelin and Black Sabbath.
Here are links to the judges discussing all eight of the albums shortlisted for the prize. Let us know what you think of their final verdict, maybe? The right decision?
From being a fairly obsessive fan of Devendra Banhart, I’ve found myself lacking much to say about “What Will We Be” in the months since it first turned up in the office. It’s far from a bad record, but the few times I played it, it felt oddly weary, even uncharismatic, compared with its predecessors; “Smokey Rolls Down Thunder Canyon” is often identified as the jump-off point for a lot of Banhart former fans, but I still think that one stands up as a terrifically spirited album, full of life.
