One bright Sunday morning, MC Taylor is driving through his patch of North Carolina, past New Hope Creek and the Eno River, over the Chatham County Line and the James Taylor Bridge in Chapel Hill, near the Haw River and the valley that he has meditated upon in song these past few years. Through apparently endless forests, Taylor's destination is Saralyn, a kind of hippy settlement just outside of Pittsboro.
The War On Drugs’ new album, Lost In The Dream, is out on Monday (March 17). Here, in this feature from Uncut’s November 2011 issue (Take 174), Sam Richards joins Adam Granduciel’s friend and collaborator Kurt Vile on tour in California to uncover the blood ties between Vile’s Violators and The War On Drugs…
This week’s excuse for briskness is I have a longish review of Real Estate to write for the mag, but some good news in here: not least the appearance of a mighty stash of Fela Kuti albums on Bandcamp and some predictably weird mixtapes, compiled by John Fahey, fetching up on Soundcloud.
Of all the guitarists associated with the Takoma School, it’s hard to think of one who imbued folk music with quite as much mystical portent as Robbie Basho. 1978’s “Visions Of The Country”, his tenth album, is a fantastic case in point: “I would paint for you a portrait of North America as a beautiful woman,” he wrote in the original sleevenotes, “when she was young and untamed.”
