First off, a brand new Brightblack Morning Light track, complete with visuals, has appeared, and it’s fantastic. The second Brightblack album – West Coast acid-folk-funk infused with gris-gris and a sort of horizontal, post-Spiritualized drone-funk, if any of that makes sense – was a huge hit here at Uncut during the ferociously sticky summer of 2006, and “Hologram Buffalo” is every bit as good.
Taking a well-earned break from the MP3s of new Oasis songs that seem to be whizzing around the Uncut and NME offices today, there are a couple of folkish new albums from British singers that I’ve been meaning to write about for a while.
If the internet is to be trusted, the guitarist Peter Walker has not played a gig in the UK since 1962. In the interim, he has befriended Karen Dalton, Sandy Bull and Janis Joplin, provided instrumental accompaniment for Dr Timothy Leary’s early LSD experiments, learned the art of raga from Ravi Shankar in the same class as George Harrison, and spent nearly four decades in a truck in Woodstock, chiefly practising flamenco guitar.
Barely off site, but here’s how it was. Stephen Malkmus And The Jicks just wound it up on the main stage with the new addition of Sleater Kinney’s Janet Weiss behind the drum kit, and with a few choice words to some of their UK friends: “We endorse The Cribs, but not fucking Kasabian”.
