Shirley Collins has announce a series of live special events for 2017 – including London’s Barbican, Celtic Connections and Bristol’s Colston Hall – with more dates to be announced.
Collins – who releases her first album in 38 years, Lodestar, on November 4 – previously confirmed two intimate in store performances for next month.
Collins will now play:
November 4 – Union Music Store, Lewes
November 7 – Rough Trade East, London + Q&A
February 4 – Celtic Connections @ Town Hall, Glasgow
February 11 – Colston Hall, Bristol
February 18 – Barbican, London
April 23 – Safe As Milk Festival @ Pontins Prestatyn Holiday Park, Wales
May 6 – Arts Centre, Warwick
Abba are to reunite for a new digital entertainment project.
Four months after they performed together for the first time in over than 30 years – at a private gala event in Stockholm in June – the band are preparing for a “virtual and live experience”, details of which will be unveiled in 2017.
Said Benny Andersson: “We’re inspired by the limitless possibilities of what the future holds and are loving being a part of creating something new and dramatic here. A time machine that captures the essence of who we were. And are.”
Frida Lyngstad: “Our fans around the world are always asking us to reform and so I hope this new ABBA creation will excite them as much as it excites me!”
The project will be developed in collaboration with music manager, Simon Fuller.
“We are exploring a new technological world that will allow us to create new forms of entertainment and content we couldn’t have previously imagined,” Fuller said in a statement.
According to Rolling Stone, the record will be released on December 2 via Reprise. The 10 song set was recorded at Rick Rubin’s Shangri La Studios and features Jim Keltner on drums and Paul Bushnell on bass.
It has been produced by Young along with John Hanlon.
The album is available for pre-order through http://www.neilyoung.com and PONOMusic. Pre-orders will receive an instant download of the title track. Additional instant downloads will follow for those who pre-order Peace Trail.
Peace Trail features all new songs that Young wrote since the release of his album EARTH, and recorded within a short time span. The album is reportedly primarily acoustic.
Most recently Young previewed five songs from the album during his performances during the Desert Trip Festival, in Indio, CA.
Peace Trail will be released in several configurations: as a physical CD, digital download, and cassette. A vinyl edition will follow in January.
Meanwhile, Neil Young + Promise of the Real will tour Australia and New Zealand in April, Japan in May, and South America in the summer.
The track-listing for Peace Trail is as follows:
Peace Trail
Can’t Stop Workin’
Indian Givers
Show Me
Texas Rangers
Terrorist Suicide Hang Gliders
John Oaks
My Pledge
Glass Accident
My New Robot
The story of Syd Barrett’s decline and Pink Floyd’s desperate search for a single in 1967 is told in the latest issue of Uncut.
Pink Floyd’s new boxset, The Early Years 1965-1972, released on November 11, chronicles a mass of unreleased material from the group’s pre-Dark Side Of The Moon period, including Barrett songs “Vegetable Man” and “Scream Thy Last Scream”.
In the cover story of the new Uncut, band members, collaborators and associates recall the band’s journey from the Spalding Tulip Bulb Auction Hall to the soundstages of American TV shows.
“[Syd] was looking for enlightenment,” says Nick Mason, “and also for that LSD enlightenment, which was very prevalent at the time and taken very seriously. If you were going to trip, you’d do it with a guide; it wasn’t like, ‘Let’s do this and then go clubbing in Ibiza.’
“It was much more serious than that, and I think he reacted badly to the drug. But I think he then kept on because of what he wanted to get from it. He kept doing it when he probably should have just said, ‘This doesn’t work for me’. And I think that’s relevant to the story of why things continued to go badly.”
“The music business destroyed Syd, really,” says Andrew King, the group’s co-manager in 1967. “Everyone says he had some bad friends that played some nasty druggy trick on him with LSD and so on, but really it was the pressure. It’s the pressure of saying, ‘You’ve got to do something. Come on, Syd, give us our next single.’
“When you have a successful little group, like that – it wasn’t making gallons of money – then so many people are dependent on Syd writing another hit. Once a band gets going, there’s 30 or 40 people whose incomes depend on the band coming up with the goods. And the band were saying, ‘Come on, Syd, you’re the one who writes the hits.’ That’s what ‘Vegetable Man’ was all about.”
Read the full story in the new Uncut, dated December 2016 and out now.
Hope Sandoval & the Warm Inventions have shared a track from their forthcoming album, Until The Hunter.
“A Wonderful Seed” is a follow-up to “Let Me Get There”, a collaboration with Kurt Vile, which the band released in September.
The band’s third album, Until The Hunter will be released on their own Tendril Tales label via INgrooves on November 4.
Until the Hunter is Hope Sandoval and the Warm Inventions first album since 2009 and first release since Mazzy Star released their 2013 album Seasons Of Your Day.
The tracklisting is:
Into the Trees
The Peasant
A Wonderful Seed
Let Me Get There
Day Disguise
Treasure
Salt of the Sea
The Hiking Song
Isn’ t It True
I Took A Slip
Liquid Lady
The tracklisting for Keep Me Singing is: Let It Rhyme
Every Time I See A River
Keep Me Singing
Out In The Cold Again
Memory Lane
The Pen Is Mightier Than The Sword
Holy Guardian Angel
Share Your Love With Me
In Tiburon
Look Beyond The Hill
Going Down To Bangor
Too Late
Caledonia Swing
Van Morrison will play 7 live dates across the UK in October and November, beginning with a headline performance at Bluesfest 2016 at London’s O2 and culminating in a show at Manchester’s O2 Apollo.
30th October – Bluesfest 2016, The O2, London
8th November – Philharmonic Hall, Liverpool
9th November – Philharmonic Hall, Liverpool
13th November – Playhouse, Edinburgh
14th November – Royal Concert Hall, Glasgow
28th November – Royal Concert Hall, Nottingham
29th November – O2 Apollo, Manchester
It’s probably a good job Christmas is approaching, given the valuable investments showcased in the new issue of Uncut, out today. Two gigantic boxsets provide a motherlode of long-awaited music: a 36CD set compiling Dylan’s all known live recordings from 1966; and Pink Floyd’s relatively abstemious The Early Years 1965-72, weighing in at a mere 27 discs. Together they represent a potentially shelf-breaking addition to your collection, and a significant moment in musical history, as era-defining recordings are moved out of the black economy, bootlegs of legend finally transformed into key parts of the authorised catalogue.
For Pink Floyd, in particular, it seems an auspicious month. Our cover story, constructed with the help of Nick Mason and many Floyd intimates, focuses on the unveiling of those fabled Syd-era songs that have languished for so long – officially, at least – in the band’s archive. “This boxset is a complete sea change, really,” Mason tells Tom Pinnock, “from the days when we were very careful about what we would release, to actually digging about to find old things.”
The influence of those songs is manifest elsewhere in the issue: in his piece about the British indie uprising of 30 years ago, John Robinson cites the Jesus & Mary Chain’s version of “Vegetable Man” as a critical moment in how the C86 generation repurposed psychedelia to their own ends. And later Floyd conceits are revealed to have an unlikely impact on 2016’s major players, as Rob Mitchum reviews Kanye West in Chicago, and finds “the high concept architecture of West’s show echoes The Wall for perfectly capturing an idiosyncratic artist with a complicated relationship with fame.”
Meanwhile in London, David Gilmour played a run of shows – his last, rumours persist – at the Royal Albert Hall, freighted with all kinds of poignancy: the last time he booked a season at the same venue, in 2006, Rick Wright figured in the band, and David Bowie made his last UK appearance onstage. And deep in the California wilderness, along with the most illustrious rock grandees at the first Desert Trip festival, Roger Waters proved how potent the music of Pink Floyd could still be. The flying pig from Animals might be in storage at the Victoria & Albert Museum, in readiness for next year’s Floyd exhibition, but Waters has a new one to launch: blessed with the face of Donald Trump, and inscribed with the words, “Ignorant, lying, racist, sexist pig.”
“If there was a sense of pessimism to the set,” Stephen Deusner observes in his terrific review of Desert Trip, “it might be due to the fact that Waters finds his music horrifically prescient in 2016, as England and America flirt with the kind of totalitarianism he lambasted on The Wall. It almost sounds like he’d rather his songs sound dated, consigned to the history books.”
Also this issue, you can find Wyndham Wallace’s in-depth look at the new classical movement (or whatever we decide to call it) with Nils Frahm, Max Richter, Bryce Dessner, Ólafur Arnalds, Dustin O’Halloran; Peter Watts’ somewhat less salubrious caper through the history of The Damned; an audience with Julia Holter; album by album with David Pajo; Nathaniel Rateliff & The Night Sweats; Norah Jones; the trials of Midlake; Curtis Mayfield remembered by his son; Harvey Mandel; Morphine and more.
For my own part, I’ve spent a good part of the last few weeks deep in Lambchop’s world, writing about their audacious new FLOTUS – our album of the month – and working with Kurt Wagner, who has curated the free CD that comes attached to the front of the new issue. FLOTUS is one of the most interesting records that Wagner and his shape-shifting ensemble have ever made: a gentle fusion of the band’s foundational country-soul with a very discreet brand of electronica. It finds, too, Wagner adjusting his voice with a variety of digital tools, which modernise the band’s sound without detracting from their signature grace.
FLOTUS is a project, then, which reconciles old ways with new ones. And, given how closely that chimes with Uncut’s ongoing mission, we thought it would be a nice idea to hand over curation of this month’s CD to Kurt, so that he could flesh out his eclectic vision. “It’s quite a journey,” says Kurt of his mix. Needless to say, he did us proud…
The 1967 Floyd are on the cover, and inside, band members, collaborators and associates take Uncut from Spalding’s Tulip Bulb Auction Hall to the sound stages of American TV shows, as we explore the mercurial brilliance of Syd Barrett and chronicle the band’s fitful attempts to take their experimental creative impulses into the mainstream.
The results were songs such as “Vegetable Man”, “Scream Thy Last Scream” and “In The Beechwoods” – all canned and only now set for release in new boxset The Early Years 1965-1972. But why? And was Syd as ‘mad’ as some have since claimed?
“We didn’t recognise what was going on,” says Nick Mason. “We were all so focused on wanting the band to be a success.”
40 years after the release of the first punk single, “New Rose”, The Damned‘s original lineup recall their lurid tales, from the toilets of Croydon to the stage of the Royal Albert Hall.
“Most of the wild stories are true,” says Dave Vanian, “and the worst ones have never been told.”
Lambchop‘s new album, FLOTUS, is Uncut‘s album of the month – Kurt Wagner describes the creation of it in an extensive Q&A, and also curates The Hustle, this issue’s free CD, with some of his favourite tracks including Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds, Sleaford Mods, Yo La Tengo, Can and more.
Julia Holter answers your questions, recalling her first gig (Crosby, Stills & Nash aged nine), working with Jean Michel Jarre and discussing why her boyfriend’s dog is “an intellectual… he’s really relatable”.
Elsewhere, Uncut revisits C86 with help from Primal Scream, The Wedding Present, Talulah Gosh and more. “Something was happening,” remembers David Gedge. “We seemed to be part of a group of like-minded people: putting on concerts, fanzine flourishing.”
We head to the Californian wilderness to report on the Desert Trip festival, featuring The Rolling Stones, Bob Dylan, Neil Young, Paul McCartney, The Who and Roger Waters, and also delve deep into ‘new classical’ to discover how a tide of artists – from Nils Frahm to Bryce Dessner – are transforming a genre.
Midlake take us through the making of “Roscoe”, the opener from their classic The Trials Of Van Occupanther album, David Pajo recalls his greatest albums, from his solo work to stellar records with Slint and Tortoise, and Norah Jones lets us in on the albums that soundtrack her life (and cooking).
Our extensive reviews section features new albums from Lambchop, David Bowie and the cast of Lazarus, the Pretenders, Jim James, Hope Sandoval and more, and archival releases from the likes of Tim Buckley, Yoko Ono & John Lennon, REM and Bob Dylan. We also examine film and DVD releases involving Iggy Pop, Tom Ford and Jim Jarmusch, and catch Kanye West and Björk live.
As if all that wasn’t enough, our Instant Karma section features Robert Johnson, Curtis Mayfield, Harvey Mandel, Morphine and Nathaniel Rateliff.
Pink Floyd, The Damned, Lambchop and Julia Holter all feature in the new issue of Uncut, dated December 2016 and out now.
The 1967 Floyd are on the cover, and inside, band members, collaborators and associates take Uncut from Spalding’s Tulip Bulb Auction Hall to the sound stages of American TV shows, as we explore the mercurial brilliance of Syd Barrett and chronicle the band’s fitful attempts to take their experimental creative impulses into the mainstream.
The results were songs such as “Vegetable Man”, “Scream Thy Last Scream” and “In The Beechwoods” – all canned and only now set for release in new boxset The Early Years 1965-1972. But why? And was Syd as ‘mad’ as some have since claimed?
“We didn’t recognise what was going on,” says Nick Mason. “We were all so focused on wanting the band to be a success.”
40 years after the release of the first punk single, “New Rose”, The Damned‘s original lineup recall their lurid tales, from the toilets of Croydon to the stage of the Royal Albert Hall.
“Most of the wild stories are true,” says Dave Vanian, “and the worst ones have never been told.”
Lambchop‘s new album, FLOTUS, is Uncut‘s album of the month – Kurt Wagner describes the creation of it in an extensive Q&A, and also curates The Hustle, this issue’s free CD, with some of his favourite tracks including Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds, Sleaford Mods, Yo La Tengo, Can and more.
Julia Holter answers your questions, recalling her first gig (Crosby, Stills & Nash aged nine), working with Jean Michel Jarre and discussing why her boyfriend’s dog is “an intellectual… he’s really relatable”.
Elsewhere, Uncut revisits C86 with help from Primal Scream, The Wedding Present, Talulah Gosh and more. “Something was happening,” remembers David Gedge. “We seemed to be part of a group of like-minded people: putting on concerts, fanzine flourishing.”
We head to the Californian wilderness to report on the Desert Trip festival, featuring The Rolling Stones, Bob Dylan, Neil Young, Paul McCartney, The Who and Roger Waters, and also delve deep into ‘new classical’ to discover how a tide of artists – from Nils Frahm to Bryce Dessner – are transforming a genre.
Midlake take us through the making of “Roscoe”, the opener from their classic The Trials Of Van Occupanther album, David Pajo recalls his greatest albums, from his solo work to stellar records with Slint and Tortoise, and Norah Jones lets us in on the albums that soundtrack her life (and cooking).
Our extensive reviews section features new albums from Lambchop, David Bowie and the cast of Lazarus, the Pretenders, Jim James, Hope Sandoval and more, and archival releases from the likes of Tim Buckley, Yoko Ono & John Lennon, REM and Bob Dylan. We also examine film and DVD releases involving Iggy Pop, Tom Ford and Jim Jarmusch, and catch Kanye West and Björk live.
As if all that wasn’t enough, our Instant Karma section features Robert Johnson, Curtis Mayfield, Harvey Mandel, Morphine and Nathaniel Rateliff.
Neil Young, Roger Waters and My Morning Jacket performed a cover of Bob Dylan’s “Forever Young” at this year’s Bridge School Benefit concert on Saturday night [Oct 22].
Waters had previously played with My Morning Jacket at the 2015 Newport Folk Festival, where they also closed their set with the Dylan cover, reports Rolling Stone. This time, they were joined by Young.
Young also performed with Metallica on the same night, joining them for a cover of Buffalo Springfield’s “Mr Soul”, which you can watch below. Metallica also covered The Clash’s “Clampdown” during their set.
Young also sat in with Nils Lofgren (“Believe”), My Morning Jacket (“Helpless”) and Norah Jones (“Don’t Be Denied” before performed with Promise of The Real at the benefit.
They played:
Peace Trail
Human Highway
Indian Givers
Texas Rangers
Western Hero
John Oaks
Piece Of Crap
Are There Any More Real Cowboys?
On The Road Again
Rockin’ In The Free World
Shirley Collins discusses her new album, Lodestar, and her 38 years away from making music in the new issue of Uncut, dated November 2016 and out now.
Collins made a series of landmark records with the likes of Davy Graham, her sister Dolly Collins and the Albion Country Band before retiring from music with dysphonia, which left her unable to sing. Now, she’s returned to the studio with Lodestar.
“It’s still got an integrity and an intensity,” she tells Uncut, discussing her voice, “and I think more about the words now – perhaps they’ve just been in my head for a long time.
“Having listened all my life to field recordings, I feel these people behind me. I’m responsible for those songs. I’m a conduit in a way. I just think I understand this music better than anybody else.”
On Lodestar, as with her earlier albums, Collins has concentrated purely on traditional material.
“English folk music says everything I need to say and in the most glorious way. I don’t listen to newly written stuff. There are people who call themselves folk singers and they write half their own stuff, and I think, why? When you’ve got thousands of songs from hundreds of years behind you which is real folk music, why are you writing something yourself?”
After 10 years of “not being able to really connect with anything,” Thom Yorke has guided his bandmates into radical new territory. As Kid A arrives, however, JAMES OLDHAM discovers how Radiohead’s reinvention was critical to the band’s survival. Are all the bandmembers delighted with the change of direction? “I don’t really know anything about the Aphex Twin,” claims Colin Greenwood…
“You have no-one to blame but yourselves and you know it.”
Message on the sleeve of Kid A
Having already been uniformly heralded as the most important record of its generation, OK Computer was released on June 16, 1997. It took just six days for Thom Yorke to become disillusioned with it. On Saturday, June 21, Radiohead played their biggest gig to date in front of 40,000 people at the RDS in Dublin, and it sent Yorke tumbling into an abyss of loathing and self-doubt.
There’s a song on the forthcoming Radiohead album called “How To Disappear Completely” that documents these emotions. Its key lines – “I’m not here/This isn’t happening” – capture his mental state at that point, as well as offering a clue as to what happened as the rest of the promotional schedule unfolded. Yorke may claim now that all the plaudits didn’t “mean a fucking thing”, but clearly there was a price to pay.
“I had this thing for a while,” he reveals, from the confines of a café on Oxford’s Cowley Road, “where I was falling through trap doors all the time into oblivion – like acid flashbacks. I’d be talking to someone and then I’d be falling through the earth. It went on for months and months, and it was really weird. It was all happening towards the end of OK Computer… the end of the ‘promotional period’.”
Were you unhappy?
“That sounds like an MTV question,” he laughs. “I was a complete fucking mess when OK Computer finished! I mean, really, really ill.”
Do you know why?
“It was just going a certain way for a long, long, long time and not being able to stop or look back or consider where I was, at all. This was for, like, 10 years – not being able to really connect with anything. I was basically just becoming unhinged… completely unhinged.”
By the end of 1998, Yorke was close to collapse. Suffering from writer’s block, he got “the horrors” whenever he picked up a guitar. The band, aware that something had to change, decided that from then on, the way they wrote, recorded and promoted their music had to change. They had to start again from scratch.
Next week, you’ll be able to hear for yourself what that entailed. Three years on from OK Computer, Kid A is the sound of a band struggling to surpass a record with a critical and cultural importance that is unmatched in recent memory. Recorded in four studios and three countries over a 12-month period rife with false starts and inter-band friction, the very least you can say about it is that it represents a complete and definite break from the past.
It trades the ambitious, heavily treated guitar sounds of its predecessor for a skeletal electronic framework of meandering ambient clouds and fractured, subsumed vocals. Supported by brittle drum patterns and keening static, the songs drift by with minimal human input, utterly at odds with their live counterparts. If OK Computer vividly articulated Yorke’s anxieties, then Kid A shrouds them in sonic fluff. It’s almost as if Yorke has chosen to erase himself from the group completely.
A few tracks stand out – and it’s no surprise they’re the ones that are more propulsive and conventional in tone. The fuzz-bass and free-jazz histrionics of “The National Anthem” recall the excesses of Primal Scream’s XTRMNTR, while the warped acoustics of “Optimistic” push towards the sound of Isn’t Anything-era My Bloody Valentine, but these are exceptions within the general electronic haze. It might be the record Radiohead had to make, but it won’t necessarily be a record you’ll want to listen to. Although the rest of the band dispute it, Kid A is very much the sound of Thom Yorke working through his own neuroses. For better or worse, it’s his record.
Our new issue of Uncut should be arriving for subscribers over the weekend, and in UK shops by Tuesday. You can look forward to: 1 A genuinely new Pink Floyd story by Tom Pinnock. 2. A radical free CD compiled by Lambchop. 3. The definitive review of Desert Trip by Stephen Deusner, featuring Bob Dylan, Paul McCartney, The Rolling Stones, Neil Young, Roger Waters and The Who. 4. Wyndham Wallace’s in-depth look at the new classical movement (or whatever we decide to call it)with Nils Frahm, Max Richter, Bryce Dessner, Ólafur Arnalds, Dustin O’Halloran etc. 5. Very fine pieces by John Robinson on C86 and Peter Watts on The Damned. Plus Julia Holter ,David Pajo, Nathaniel Rateliff & The Night Sweats, Norah Jones and, as ever, much more.
Moving on this week’s playlist: much love for these Merl Saunders & Jerry Garcia jams, and the new CRB EP, among the new arrivals. Also please check out the footage of Pharaoh Sanders from 1982, and Kaia Kater, a new name to me, who sounds great…
Follow me on Twitter @JohnRMulvey
1 Merl Saunders & Jerry Garcia – Keystone Companions: The Complete 1973 Fantasy Recordings (Fantasy)
2 Oren Ambarchi – Hubris (Editions Mego)
3 Leonard Cohen – You Want It Darker (Columbia)
4 Michael Chapman – 50 (Paradise Of Bachelors)
5 Gillian Welch – Boots No 1: The Official Revival Bootleg (Acony)
6 Jim James – Eternally Even (ATO/Capitol)
7 Solange – A Seat At The Table (RCA)
8 Various Artists – Extra Added Soul: Crossover, Modern And Funky Soul (J &D)
9 Chris Robinson Brotherhood – If You Lived Here, You Would Be Home By Now (Silver Arrow)
Interviewed alongside William Burroughs in 1973 for Rolling Stone, David Bowie unveiled his ambitious plans for two new projects, both musicals. One, for television, was to be based on his Ziggy Stardust album while the other was an adaptation of George Orwell’s novel, 1984. For the latter, Bowie envisioned a full-blown West End spectacular, where he would not only write the songs but also play the beleaguered protagonist, Winston Smith. Alas, Bowie would have to wait over 40 years until he finally got his wish to mount a musical. As it transpires, it was also the final work he completed before his death earlier this year: Lazarus.
Inevitably, the Lazarus cast recording comes freighted with a sense of pathos. Recording began on January 11 – the day after Bowie died – at The Magic Shop, the New York studio where he had laboured fruitfully on his last two studio albums, and then at Avatar Studios, formerly The Power Station, where, decades previously, Bowie cut Scary Monsters (And Super Creeps) and Let’s Dance. Lazarus represents an unlikely coda to Bowie’s career. Its songs – sailors fighting in the dance hall, no more free steps to heaven – are familiar. They are chosen and sequenced by Bowie himself from the full span of his catalogue, but performed by others. They are accompanied by the last three songs he ever finished: “No Plan”, “Killing A Little Time” and “When I Met You”, which also appear in Lazarus. Originating from the same sessions as his ★ album – and also anchored by saxophonist Donny McCaslin’s watertight jazz ensemble – these three songs inevitably share some stylistic and textural flourishes, although they feel more like friendly cousins than long lost siblings.
Certainly, compared to the melodic wizardry evident on ★, “No Plan” is relatively traditional; closer perhaps to ★’s closing tracks, “Dollar Days” or “I Can’t Give Anything Away”. A reflective, melancholic song, its melody is carried by McCaslin’s sax line and Jason Lindner’s gentle synth bursts, underpinned by Mark Guiliana’s shuffling drum beat. It feels strangely unassuming – more about creating atmosphere than breaking new ground, sonically speaking. Then Bowie’s voice kicks in, soaring above McCaslin’s sax in a high-flying moment of grand theatricality – perfect, you might think, for an off-Broadway production. But it is reminiscent, too, of vintage Bowie: the warm, soulful tones recall “Word On A Wing” or even the vocal sweep of “Loving The Alien”. “There’s no music here, I’m lost in streams of sound,” he croons, beautifully.
“Killing A Little Time”, meanwhile, feels akin to the harmonic instability of “Sue (In A Season Of Crime)”. Led by a chunky guitar riff – the kind of thing Earl Slick might have ground out for The Next Day – it pushes deeper and deeper towards chromatic hinterlands. Built from dense, arrhythmic layers – from which McCaslin’s malevolent skronking is often the only discernible instrument – it underscores the solid collaborative work accomplished between Bowie and McCaslin’s ensemble and the questing nature of Bowie’s own compositional ambition. “I’ve got a handful of songs to sing, to sting your soul, to fuck you over,” he exclaims haughtily.
Although Tim Lefebvre’s walking bass-line on “When I Met You” offers a more convivial rhythmic foundation, things soon change. Bowie multi-tracks himself, singing a melody in counterpoint; there are processed drums, synth washes, with Bowie himself on guitar and a furious, foot-stomping chorus. This tumultuous backing is matched by his increasingly deranged vocal performance. “The marks and stains could not exist when I met you,” Bowie sings, “Now it’s all the same, now it’s all the same, the sun is gone, it’s all the same”. And then he, too, is gone.
Perhaps because they exist to fulfil a different creative purpose, these three songs don’t feel quite as layered or allusive as their ★ counterparts. Rather, these songs were always intended for Lazarus: a different entity altogether from ★, where ambient-prog-electronic-soul marathons or inscrutable lyrics are not necessarily the order of the day. Impressively, Bowie juggled these two wildly different projects simultaneously: by day working with McCaslin’s ensemble on some of the most far-reaching and experimental music of his career and by night working with arranger Henry Hey – a compatriot of McCaslin – retooling old hits for a jukebox musical.
What, then, are we to make of the Lazarus album? Historically, Bowie has always made his best music with his eyes fixed straight ahead, yet here he is looking back – to old songs and an old character, Thomas Jerome Newton, the man who fell to Earth. Admittedly, without seeing the play – which officially opens in London on November 8 – the soundtrack feels an incomplete experience. At its most successful, Lazarus finds new ways of presenting well-known songs; an unenviable task for Hey and his seven-piece band. A minimalist take on “The Man Who Sold The World” is rendered in lithe bass strokes and ambient synths, while “This Is Not America” is bathed in delicate, autumnal tones. There are some surprises, too: a pleasingly light-footed “Absolute Beginners” emphasizes the original’s upbeat qualities, “All The Young Dudes” has a loose, greasy vibe while “Always Crashing In The Same Car” feels pleasingly strange and imperious.
Sometimes it doesn’t work. “Changes” starts off as a ghastly piano ballad – think John Lewis Christmas ad – before bursting into an all-singing, all-dancing chorus line number. Elsewhere, “Lazarus”, “It’s No Game (No 1)” and “Where Are We Now?” are played with a straight bat, faithful to their studio originals (although it takes two guitarists, Chris McQueen and JJ Appleton, to replicate Robert Fripp’s demon runs on “It’s No Game”).
The most theatrical song here is “Life On Mars?” – coincidentally, the current Legacy compilation includes a new mix of the song by producer Ken Scott, which removes the drums and guitars and makes explicit its suitability as a future showtune. The closing track “Heroes” is understated and melancholic, driven by a typically modest vocal performance from Michael C Hall, playing Newton. Hall shares vocal duties with several other key cast members – principally Cristin Milioti and the 15 year-old Sophia Anne Caruso – although Hall cleaves closest to Bowie’s baritone: not an impersonation, but he captures Bowie’s inflections and phrasing.
If Nic Roeg’s film The Man Who Fell To Earth featured Bowie but none of his songs, Lazarus has the tunes while the man himself is absent. In some respects, it’s an appropriate exit: the body of work endures beyond its creator. Back in 1973, a suitably appreciative William Burroughs listened as Bowie outlined his thrilling new ventures. Backs were slapped, a mutual appreciation was born. It was a catalytic encounter that launched Bowie into a new set of creative arrangements that saw him become more disengaged, more alien: a trajectory eventually captured in The Man Who Fell To Earth. Recognising in Burroughs a kindred spirit who saw the world much as he did, Bowie exclaimed: “Maybe we are the Rogers and Hammerstein of the Seventies, Bill!” Imagine that.
According to Will Sheff, the songs on Away tell a kind of “death story”. Since he wrote them, he presumably knows what he’s talking about. But even if two of its finest songs are about the perishing end of things, including Will’s own band on misty requiem, “Okkervil River RIP”, Away isn’t an album about death in the manner of dark and fatalistic early OR albums like Don’t Fall In Love With Everyone You Meet (2002) and Rivers Of Golden Dreams (2003) with their gory murder ballads and songs about dead dogs. Nor is it eventually much in the morbid cast of 2005’s Black Sheep Boy, Sheff’s gloomy suite of songs about self-destructive ’60s singer-songwriter Tim Hardin.
Better to think of Away, really, as an album about letting go – of the past, people and places you’ve known and loved, the career that hasn’t taken you as far as you thought it would, the someone you thought by now you’d become and have not – as a prelude to rebirth and renewal, sometimes euphoric. It may be OR’s best album yet, even if it doesn’t much sound like the albums immediately preceding it. I Am Very Far (2011) and The Silver Gymnasium (2013) were big, bold rock records that bored into musical seams reminiscent of Bowie and Springsteen, Sheff on parts of The Silver Gymnasium finding the place where “Young Americans” meets “Born To Run”.
Recorded in three days with musicians culled from New York’s jazz and avant-garde music scenes, with orchestral arrangements by composer Nathan Thatcher, played by the yMusic classical ensemble, Away is more decoratively subdued. The album visits unhappy places, but its reflective musical poise puts it closer to On The Beach, say, than Tonight’s The Night, whose “horrible sloppy wrongness” and harrowing urgencies were such an influence on the Hardin song-cycle. The lovely, introspective drift and implorations of songs like “Call Yourself Renee”, “She Would Look For Me” and “Mary On A Wave” recall the slow unfoldings and ruminative narrative shifts of “Motion Pictures” and “Ambulance Blues”, songs written by Neil Young at a time of similar grave personal and professional reassessment. The skittering “Days Spent Floating (In The Halfbetween)”, meanwhile, may make you think of Tim Buckley’s “Love From Room 109 At The Islander (On Pacific Coast Highway)” or the nomadic extemporisations of San Francisco poet-minstrel, Dino Valenti.
Jonathan Wilson’s sonic signature is all over these tracks, enhancing a sense of brilliant discovery as Sheff finds new ways of writing and making music. His songs are still spectacularly wordy – “Mary On A Wave” finds him trying to fit all the words in the world into a Scrabble sack – but the looser, more spontaneous song structures allow his melodic gifts to flourish. Not that the album’s dynamic range is limited to acoustic guitars, upright bass, mellow brass, strings and brushed drums. “Judey On a Street” is a tremendous mix of The Modern Lovers’ “Roadrunner” and throbbing motorik pulses, while “Frontman In Heaven” reaches a rhapsodic crescendo reminiscent of “Rock’N’Roll Suicide”, Sheff all but imploring anyone listening to give him their hands.
The Stand-Ins (2007) and The Stage Names (2008) were darkly sardonic meta-fictions about fame and what the famous do when fame is taken from them, full of arch conceits, Okkervil River cast as the stars they did not in fact become. Here Sheff confronts the reality of the band’s slow disintegration on the wry, heartfelt “Okkervil River RIP”, basically the sound of a dream evaporating. “The Industry” is Will’s “Idiot Wind”, a recriminatory broadside aimed at everyone who let the band down, including themselves, full of gathering desperation. Unconditional tenderness replaces sour rancour on regal album highlight, “Comes Indiana Through The Smoke”, a song about his grandfather, Will’s hero, TH “Bud” Moore. When he was dying in a New Hampshire hospice that Sheff attended daily, the old man’s thoughts turned often to his wartime service on the American battleship, the USS Indiana, which saw action at Tarawa, Guadalcanal, Iwo Jima and Okinawa. The song is a hugely moving hymn to both, richly imaginative, powerfully evocative, unbearably poignant, a vanishing point.
When Sheff started Away, beset by various confusions, he wasn’t sure if it would come out as an Okkervil River album, but now it’s apparently his favourite Okkervil River album. Mine, too.
Q&A
Will Sheff
You’ve described Away as a ‘death story’, which sounds a bit cheerless.
I guess I don’t really think of death as cheerless. I don’t think I’m very often talking in these songs about literal death. I’m talking about allowing some way you’re living to die, so that you can figure out a new way to live. I think a lot of the ways I was living had become unsustainable or had just stopped yielding any kind of reward. I realised a lot of my illusions, bad habits, hang ups, assumptions and goals had to be let go of.
And that included what Okkervil River had become?
Okkervil River had stopped feeling, to me, like “me”. It became this outside idea that almost seemed to belong to other people. But I just wrote these songs and recorded them quickly with an improvised group of musicians and I found myself feeling more free than I’d felt in decades. When I tried to remember the last time I’d felt this good, I recalled the earliest days of Okkervil River, when I’d moved to Texas and thrown myself head-first into a band nobody had heard of and that was all I cared about. I realised I was basically the last man standing from that band, after so many lineups and reiterations had risen and died, and that it was time to die again so what was meaningful about the band, to me, could rise again.
INTERVEW: ALLAN JONES
Radiohead are the first confirmed headline act for Glastonbury 2017.
The band will top the bill on the Pyramid Stage on Friday, June 23.
This will be the band’s third time headlining the Pyramid Stage following previous appearances in 1997 and 2003.
Thom Yorke and Jonny Greenwood played a surprise set at the festival in 2010, and the band themselves also played a ‘secret set’ on Glastonbury’s small, outlying Park Stage in 2011.
Speculation that the band were to play Glastonbury 2017 grew after the band’s logo appeared as a “crop circle” in front of the Pyramid stage earlier this week.
Weyes Blood’s Natalie Mering is no stranger to remote, secluded places. The daughter of musicians – her father briefly had a deal with Asylum/Elektra in the late ‘70s before becoming a pastor – Mering travelled extensively as a child and has continued this nomadic lifestyle into adulthood. Six years ago, she found herself living in a tent in the New Mexico desert. For several months, she wildcrafted plants for a tincture company, using her knowledge of herbal medicine acquired while working on a farmstead in rural Kentucky. During a stint living in Portland she toured with Jackie O Motherfucker; in Philadelphia, she became involved with the city’s improvisatory noise rock scene, self-releasing Strange Chalices Of Seeing, an 11-track CD-R, under the name Weyes Bluhd in 2007. Since then, her music has continued to develop from the ghostly drones of her debut and its witchy follow-up, 2011’s The Outside Room, gradually revealing Mering’s striking gift for otherworldly folk, lysergic experimentation and baroque melodicism.
Inspired by her restless, peripatetic spirit, she recorded part of 2014’s album The Innocents in a Pennsylvania farmhouse while last year’s Cardamom Times EP was captured on reel-to-reel in her own basement apartment in Far Rockaway, NY. Between February and April this year, she worked on Front Row Seat To Earth in a garage studio in Lincoln Heights. Although the Los Angeles suburbs might seem disappointingly innocuous compared to her previous wonderings, nevertheless her eerie, forlorn songs remain reassuringly intact. This latest collection is still tinged with the melancholia familiar from her early recordings, but here they are surrounded by sympathetic arrangements that manage to be both time-honoured and contemporary.
It transpires that the knotty tensions between the old and the new are the defining qualities in Mering’s work. The sounds of traditional instruments – piano, guitar, flutes, horns – are often accompanied by bubbling electronic undercurrents. Mering plays most of these instruments herself, joined occasionally by collaborators including fellow travellers from Ariel Pink’s Haunted Graffiti (Mering guested on Mature Themes): bassist Kenneth Gilmore, keyboard player Shags Chamberlain and Front Row Seat To Earth co-producer, Chris Cohen.
The album’s opening track, “Diary”, begins quietly, with Mering accompanied only by a piano, rising to a melodious crescendo of synth washes and harp arpeggios before finally fading out in a blur of distortion. The strange, stuttering breakdown in the middle of “Do You Need My Love” sounds like Portishead (in fact, Beth Gibbons and Rustin Man’s Out Of Season album is another good reference point for Front Row Seat To Earth). The affecting acoustic refrain of “Generation Why” is discretely dusted with electric organ motifs and soft, sussurating vocal samples.
More radically, “Can’t Go Home” finds Mering’s vocals pillowed by harmonies consisting of her own voice, sampled, multi-tracked and treated: a 21st century chorale, if you like, that demonstrates Mering’s love of early music. “Can’t Go Home” also showcases Mering’s remarkable alto – part Judy Collins, part Nico – that lies somewhere between folk and torch singing. There is a dignity and otherness at work here: her voice sweeps robustly over swelling horns on “Used To Be” while on “Seven Words” finds her delivery softer and more intimate. The album closes, meanwhile, with “Front Row Seat”, a musique concrete style sound collage that invokes Mering’s heady, improvisatory sound trips in Philadelphia.
Thematically, much of Front Row Seat To Earth concerns the business of the heart. “Seven Words” finds her candidly revealing, “I want you mostly / In the morning / When my soul / Is weak / From dreaming”. On “Be Free”, Mering laments: “How do I get through to you / Tried to do / The best I could / Loved you just like a girl should”. But for all the introspective, confessional qualities in these songs, most come loaded with an exhilaratingly dramatic sensibility – as in “Can’t Go Home”, where Mering declares grandly, “Fighter / Do the right thing / Can you suffer more / Let the world / Carve at you heart”. Elsewhere, resolve is delivered with husky resignation, as on the crystalline 60s folk of “Away Above” where Mering confides, “Somethings you / Just gotta run away from / But that doesn’t change us”.
As with most of the songs on this album, there’s a thrill to “Away Above” in hearing Mering both uphold and subvert the conventions of folk music. Where does her voice end and where does some studio manipulation imperceptibly come in to play? It is this methodical exploration of the ancient and modern that makes Weyes Blood such a seductive proposition and the ambitious Front Row Seat To Earth – intimate and enveloping, romantic and psychedelic – marks a significant progression in Mering’s increasingly impressive career.
Q&A
Natalie Mering
How did the title come about?
The long explanation:
The title came about while I was trying to describe whats going on with our perspectives in this day and age.. especially my perspective, in a first world country, theoretically on the forefront of modernity… it’s like I’m witnessing the theater of our planet on a stage, detached from the experience.. not from any fault of our own, it’s just how our mind works. It seems like the changes that are about to take place are catastrophic, insane–the more I thought about our detachment from the environmental realities of our planet, the more I saw it as a symbol for the human experience. We anthropomorphize the world around us, as a stage, a theater, this is the way we understand cataclysmic change, until its immediately in front of us, affecting us… then it’s just sublime violence.
Because the issues at hand seem so insurmountable I think its important as a person to pay respect to the microcosm of their personal experience of the world, to see its relationship to the macro as well– we all fall in love with each other, what happened if we fell in love with the world? We all need to leave each other, to say sorry, to change.. what if we could leave, say sorry, and change our world? The songs on the record are personal, but also pay respect to the bigger theater in which this is all taking place, our planet, humanity.. the colossal world we have more information about than ever before, but still can’t quite seem to grasp outside of our subjective anthropomorphic reality.
Heady stuff…
In what ways do you think this album is a step on for Weyes Blood from The Innocents?
The Innocents I worked with some producers/ mixing engineers that had very strong ideas about my music that I gently acquiesced to–for FRSTE I didn’t have anybody on board like that. I just worked with friends, produced the record myself with the help of Chris Cohen, who has a very similar philosophy as me, and spent a lot of time keeping things within this personal range. The Innocents was made slowly over the course of three years in a variety of different head spaces, FRSTE was made in three months in a small vault of a studio– both records in comparison are very polar, which is nice.
I’ve gotten to sing so much more in the last year then I ever had in my life, touring nine months out of the year traveling minstrel style–I think this really helped me hone in on my voice in a way that I haven’t before. Felt good to produce my own voice in a small room, versus recording in a bigger studio. The songs are ones that I’ve been waiting to record for a long time, lots of experiences to sing about.
Conceptually FRSTE is the departure from youth–this realization that the entire world is around you, in front of you and you must interact or understand the symbolism of your inability to interact–you can no longer be the victim of innocence.
You recorded Cardamom Times on a reel-to-reel in your home in Rockaway NY. Tell us a little about the recording process for Front Row Seat To Earth. Whereabouts did you record it, what time of day, and what was the view from the window like?
Chris Cohen engineered this record–he had a small garage studio in the back of a couple’s house in Lincoln Heights, Los Angeles. The couple were very fond of cats and fed a lot of strays in the neighborhood so there were always lots of strange cats around. Lincoln heights is a very hilly neighborhood too– lots of paths and views of the city. We had no windows, though. We were locked in a vault basically in that garage, you couldn’t tell what time of day it was at all, and the air would get very thick in there. Usually we’d work everyday starting around noon till the evening, only stopping to eat.
You’ve worked with Jackie O Motherfucker, Ariel Pink and Nautical Almanac. How have these experiences shaped Weyes Blood music?
I am, truly, deep down, a fan of music. Especially the fringes– the parts that are more taboo, less accessible. Playing with/in those bands was always an elated experience for me but didn’t really shape my own musical practice. I’ve always had my own thing and have played with others for fun if I am asked. Nepotism doesn’t get you anywhere, anytime I perform with a band it is about them, the music of the moment.. JOMF and Nautical were both so improvisatory…it was free music. Ariel is a legend, singing with him was about tuning into what resonates about us together.
The experiences that have shaped Weyes Blood music the most are more personal events of my life that have forced me into focus. After focusing in specifically on songs and singing, I definitely miss the more experimental/ free aspects of those times when CDRs ruled and Jackie O Motherfucker made up a new set every night…I haven’t peacefully reconciled all of my musical fantasies into one record and my deepest dream is to do so someday in a way that gracefully deceives its audience into thinking it is…beautiful!
…and who knows, there’s still a chance I’ll go rogue and switch back to improvisatory noise music. I daydream about it a lot. But songs are addicting.
Phil Chess, the co-founder of Chess Records, has died aged 95.
Chess’ nephew Craig Glicken confirmed his uncle’s death to the Chicago Sun-Times.
Born Fiszel Czyż, he and his family emigrated to America from Poland in 1928. After a stint in the army, Phil joined his brother Leonard at Aristocrat Records, which they eventually renamed Chess.
Chess Records signings included Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf, Bo Diddley, Chuck Berry, Sonny Boy Williamson, Etta James, John Lee Hooker, Elmore James and Buddy Guy.
Speaking to the Sun-Times, Buddy Guy said, “Phil and Leonard Chess were cuttin’ the type of music nobody else was paying attention to – Muddy, Howlin’ Wolf, Little Walter, Sonny Boy, Jimmy Rogers, I could go on and on – and now you can take a walk down State Street today and see a portrait of Muddy that’s 10 stories tall. The Chess Brothers had a lot to do with that. They started Chess Records and made Chicago what it is today, the Blues capital of the world. I’ll always be grateful for that.”
