We were playing the new album by Fab Moretti and his other band, Little Joy, yesterday, when talk turned somewhat inevitably to The Strokes. The Reviews Ed was saying how much he liked the second Strokes album, and then we were trying to remember much about the third album: he recalled not rating it; I seemed to have fondish memories of about four tracks, but couldn’t remember a single title, let alone a tune.
A long time ago, one of my old NME colleagues described a pretty rackety record – approvingly, I should say – as sounding like “a flight of stairs falling down a flight of stairs.” That phrase came back to me this morning when I put on the debut Abe Vigoda album for the first time in a while.
As you may have heard, we've just launched the Uncut Music Award, to find the most inspiring and richly rewarding album of the last 12 months. We'll be posting all the latest news about the award here, but first we should explain the details.
A news story in my inbox the other day reminded me that I still hadn’t blogged on the El Guincho record, the one I’ve been alluding to on playlist blogs for a while now. I say “a while”, though in truth I was heinously late hitching up to this particular bandwagon, since most go-getting bloggers were onto “Alegranza” sometime last year, when it was first released in Spain.
Judging by the activity on the blog about “Golden Age”, there’s a fair amount of excitement about TV On The Radio’s “Dear Science”. And, now that I’ve heard the album properly a few times, I reckon it’s pretty justified: this is the best record the band have made by a mile.
I received an email a while back from an Uncut writer who’d just played “Acid Tongue” for the first time. “I can reveal that on this Jenny Lewis,” they wrote, “her father gets it in the neck, in the way her mother got it in the neck last time... pretty good.”
