I guess it’s become a cliché over the years that, when a Bristol band affiliated to trip-hop make a comeback, they should be somehow darker, and heavier, as if the magisterial doom that they all conjured up from the start somehow wasn’t enough.
I guess it’s become a cliché over the years that, when a Bristol band affiliated to trip-hop make a comeback, they should be somehow darker, and heavier, as if the magisterial doom that they all conjured up from the start somehow wasn’t enough.
This week's playlist, then. The Dennis Wilson record is a bootleg, incidentally - the expanded "Pacific Ocean Blue", with the first official release of those "Bambu" tracks, is due in the office any minute now. Tonight, I'm going to see Portishead, so I'll endeavour to report back first thing tomorrow morning.
Strangely, Animal Collective seemed to take a mild critical poke for "Strawberry Jam" last year, perhaps due in part to the extravagant blog love for the Panda Bear solo album, "Person Pitch", which preceded it by a few months.
After the sad news of Charlton Heston's death yesterday morning, I had hoped that the rest of my Sunday would pan out in a more genteel manner -- The Archers omnibus, a mooch round Borders, maybe a pint, that kind of thing. That was until an email from our web queen, Farah, pinged into my inbox.
A couple of weeks ago, I was writing here about the excellent new No Age album, and about indie orthodoxy masquerading as somehow adventurous in the world of shoegazing. Without going over the whole argument again, I think the gist was that early ‘90s shoegazing - which mainly sounds so bland now - acted as a gateway for me into a whole world of ambient, avant-garde music.
This morning's edition of Radio 4's Broadcasting House chose to mark the death of Charlton Heston with a montage of scenes from his three most iconic films: The Ten Commandments (1956), Ben-Hur (1959) and Planet Of The Apes (1967). These were huge films in every sense, made during the golden age of Hollywood and Charlton Heston was a monolithic presence at their centre -- competing in chariot races, or parting the Red Sea, or cursing humanity in front of what's left of the Statue of Liberty.
Excuse me for hijacking my own film blog to write about TV, but the first episode of Series 4 of the rebooted Doctor Who, "Partners In Crime", has just aired on BBC1.
A tremendous amount of proofreading this afternoon, and we haven't had much time to go through new releases, or write proper blogs. So here are the 36 songs that have just been played on John Robinson's bulging iPod. One of those shuffle sessions that turn out to work rather well, I reckon...
