Another round-up today, following on from the Slow Previewing blogs I filed a week or two back. Again, a few records that I didn’t get round to writing about at time of release, but which definitely deserve flagging up.
Just to let you all know, we'll be announcing the winner of this year's Uncut Music Award a week today (Tuesday, November 30, that is). The eight shortlisted records being discussed by the judges are:
A couple of weeks ago, I spent a day trying to sort out the CDs at home; attempting to make some space on the shelves, really, for the piles of stuff that had accumulated over the last year or so. As I was weeding out a lot of mediocre post-rock from the late ‘90s, I kept coming across good things I hadn’t played in years, like Judy Henske & Jerry Yester’s “Farewell Aldebaran”.
Thanks for all your comments to last week’s purgative 2010 disappointments thread. Now we’ve got that our of our systems, this week’s playlist features plenty of 2011 releases, as you can see.
Among the many tales about Ariel Pink, there’s one, possibly apocryphal, about a live show where he came onstage and did nothing but intone the word “Xanax” for the duration of the gig. It’s slightly worrying, then, when he emerges out of the leftover Halloween dry ice at this Club Uncut show to solemnly pronounce “Carrots”, then disappears again.
Sitting on stage at London’s BFI Southbank, Bruce Springsteen is reflecting on events 33 years ago, when he and the E Street Band entered New York’s Record Plant studios to record the Darkness On The Edge Of Town album.