The arrival this week of a new live album from Mark Kozelek, “Lost Verses – Live”, has prompted me to go on something of a Red House Painters/Sun Kil Moon binge (a contrast, for sure, to that concurrent Funkadelic trip; thanks, incidentally, for the recommendations – must check that Eddie Hazel solo album out).
Plenty of discussion on last week’s Neil Young blog, and also, more fractiously, over at Thrasher’s Wheat, about the value/usefulness/etc of “Archives”.
This month's Club Uncut openers, Sparrow And The Workshop, are an interesting beast - a Scottish folk trio on mainly acoustic instruments, there's a real violent attack to their sound.
It says something, though I’m not sure what, about the strange place Evan Dando occupies in the culture, that the new Lemonheads album seems to actively involve both Gibby Haynes and Kate Moss, as well as Liv Tyler and John Perry from The Only Ones.
I was making some notes on the new Sonic Youth album, “The Eternal”, this morning, when it occurred to me that writing “pop” down again and again was pretty absurd – one of those delusional fallacies that people who don’t listen to too much actual pop have, I guess, when a rock band starts working in a notionally punchy way.
There’s a telling clip buried somewhere in “Archives Volume One”, where Neil Young is poring over a tableful of photographs and clippings with Joel Bernstein. Here, it seems, everything is ready for this release. Young talks enthusiastically about the recording of the Massey Hall show he’s been listening to – and then you notice the date of the footage. It is 1997. Not only has Young been talking up this project for decades, he also seems to have had most of the material sorted and to hand for most of that time.
After a couple of weeks away, there was quite a selection of stuff waiting for me when I returned to Uncut on Tuesday, as this playlist hopefully shows. A situation compounded yesterday by the arrival of Neil Young’s fabled first volume of “Archives”.
Four or five listens in, I figured it might be useful to postpone the new playlist for a day and blog some preliminary thoughts on the new Wilco album, “Wilco (The Album)” (not crazy about the title). Jeff Tweedy has already been talking it up as something of a return to more “experimental” terrain which, at this point, seems to be a bit of a stretch.
