Thanks for all your responses to the Favourites Of 2009 flam I posted last Friday; I’ve posted some further thoughts there, which’ll doubtless inflame the Decemberists and Felice Brothers fans (more or less on my own here in my apathy to the latter, incidentally; check this for Allan’s eloquent alternate take).
A slightly weird list today, in that I was out of the office yesterday and didn’t actually hear the last few records here; I just cribbed them from the office playlist on our Twitter page that John Robinson posts.
I suspect I may have written more about Wild Beasts than any other British band in the two or so years Wild Mercury Sound has been running, doubtless to the bafflement and irritation of a good few regular readers.
Sad to report that David Carradine died yesterday. The star, of course, of Kung Fu, The Long Riders, Boxcar Bertha and Kill Bill, he was an old-school UNCUT hero.
As a tribute, here's some extracts from an interview Damien Love conducted with Carradine in December 2003, ahead of his appearance in Kill Bill Vol 2. It's great stuff - some yarns about teaching Dylan kung-fu, buying cars with Scorsese and an incident involving a dog and a very delicate body part...
Somewhat belatedly, I’ve just got round to reading Alex Ross’ fantastic book on 20th Century composition, The Rest Is Noise. A lot to talk about in there, but one quote stuck out yesterday. “Back in 1915,” Ross writes, “the critic Van Wyck Brooks had complained that America was caught in a false dichotomy between ‘highbrow’ and ‘lowbrow’, between ‘academic pedantry and pavement slang’. He called for a middle-ground culture that would fuse intellectual substance with communicative power.”
