After Wilco departed the stage, Yo La Tengo signed off on their set with another cover, “Yellow Sarong” by The Scene Is Now. Earlier in their set, the band covered Wilco’s “If I Ever Was A Child”.
Check out their covers below:
At an earlier stop on their current US tour this month, Yo La Tengo made headlines by playing a show in Nashville, Tennessee in drag to protest the state’s restrictive new drag law.
Earlier this month, Tennessee became the first US state to sign a law banning “adult cabaret” on public property or anywhere it could be seen by children, including “male or female impersonators who provide entertainment that appeals to a prurient interest, or similar entertainers”.
The statute – which means a ban on drag performances in public spaces, set to take effect on April 1 – and similar laws, are reportedly being pushed in other Republic-run states.
The band made no direct mention of the new law, but said in a statement (via Pitchfork): “What we did last night couldn’t have been clearer, and requires no further comment.”
The band released a new album, This Stupid World, in February. They will be coming to the UK and Europe on tour next month – you can see the band’s upcoming tour dates below and find tickets here.
April
10 – 3Olympia, Dublin
12 – New Century Hall, Manchester
13 – SWX, Bristol
14 – The London Palladium, London
16 – Ancienne Belgique, Brussels, Belgium
18 – Paradiso, Amsterdam, Netherlands
19 – LantarenVenster, Rotterdam, Netherlands
20 – Uebel & Gefaehrlich, Hamburg, Germany
21 – Bremen Teater, Copenhagen, Denmark
23 – Gloria Theatre, Cologne, Germany
24 – MEETFACTORY, Prague, Czech Republic
25 – Festaal Kreuzberg, Berlin, Germany
27 – La Cigale, Paris, France
29 – Sala Apolo, Barcelona, Spain
30 – WARM UP Festival, Murcia, Spain
May
2 – Warner Music the Music Station Príncipe Pío, Madrid, Spain
3 – Santana 27, Bilbao, Spain
She appeared, unbilled, as support for the Fleet Foxes at the Belasco in Los Angeles, where the band’s Robin Pecknold introducing her as “the high priestess of acoustic music”.
Newsom played an hour-long song set – her first public performance since January 2020. She opened with “Go Long” from 2010’s Have One On Me and ended with “Sawdust & Diamonds” from 2006’s Ys and in between she played five unreleased songs. According to Setlist.FM, these were:
Bombs Are Whistling
Marie At The Mill
Little Hand
The Air Again
No Wonder
She also joined Fleet Foxes during their set for “Blue Spotted Tail” while the band later brought back on stage for her own “Good Intentions Paving Company“.
In a statement to Pitchfork, Pecknold reveals that Newsom had approached him asking “if we had any shows in Los Angeles coming up that she could drop in on as a surprise opener to test out some new songs”. Instead, Pecknold built the entire show around Newsom.
You can watch footage of Newsom’s five new songs below:
After the show, Pecknold posted this on his Instagram:
Melbourne psych trio setting the controls for the heart of the sun, in our MAY 2023 issue of Uncut, available to buy here.
When Uncut speaks to Tim Wold, guitarist for Aussie psychonauts Brown Spirits, it’s coming up to 10pm in Melbourne but it’s still 41 degrees outside. “It’s not worth leaving the house, to be honest,” he tells us. “You just sort of fry.” Nevertheless, the Coburg suburb where he and his bandmates reside is a hotbed of musical activity. It’s currently the stomping ground of the absurdly productive King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard– “They’re about as big as it gets in Australia, I’ve never seen anything like it” – and their record label Flightless, home at various times to Tropical Fuck Storm and Amyl & The Sniffers. Courtney Barnett’s Milk! label is also headquartered nearby: “Her record shop is just up the road; it’s a real focus for a lot of new bands.”
But despite the thriving scene in north Melbourne, it’s taken a while for Wold and drummer Ago Soldati to perfect the heady brew of krautrock, psych, funk and avant jazz that makes up Brown Spirits. “We’d been kicking around in punk bands since we were teenagers: The Russian Roulettes, The Specimens, Modvigil,” says Wold. “But we always listened to lots of different stuff. Personally, very little of what I listen to is rock – it’s jazz and ambient. I love The Necks. But we always loved deep funk and Afrobeat and krautrock in particular, and we were always talking about forming a band where we could jam out all of these influences and make them all intersect. Just before lockdown we started Brown Spirits as a kind of bedroom project, recording to tape. Then Covid hit and we carried on recording remotely. We were only a few blocks from each other but we couldn’t see each other. That’s when we really started experimenting with breakbeats and krautrock rhythms and trying to venture into our version of jazz.”
One of these bedroom recordings made its way out into the international psych underground, where it caught the ear of Go Kurosawa, drummer with the legendary (and now sadly defunct) Japanese band Kikagaku Moyo, who encouraged them to get a live band together so they could support him when he came to Melbourne. With the addition of bass player Ash Buscombe, a fearsome live trio was born.
“Live, it’s a lot more ‘kick out the jams’,” laughs Wold. For confirmation check out the sundry live clips of the band on YouTube, where you can witness Soldati seemingly possessed by the spirit of a lysergic freakbeat Ginger Baker. Now, after a couple of singles on Soul Jazz quickly sold out, Brown Spirits are set to release a new album that sees them charting a vast musical universe, from Hawkwind to Funkadelic viaFela Kuti and Can.
“It’s a dream for us to be releasing records on Soul Jazz,” says Wold. “We’ve all discovered so much music from the label, though if you look at our record collections we probably all have different favourites.” One slightly unexpected influence is that of celestial jazz harpist Dorothy Ashby, hymned on album highlight “Ode To Dorothy”. “Ago and I are huge fans,” Wold enthuses. “That track doesn’t sound anything like her though! We were inspired by the groove of one of her singles, and also a bit of Jackie Mittoo, and I guess it developed into our own thing.”
Wold and Soldati have toured Europe in the past in various punk, psych and soul bands, but are eager to come back to the UK as Brown Spirits. “I’m really proud of this band, and I feel like we’re only just getting started,” says Wold. “The new record feels like the best thing we’ve ever done.”
The career of every great rock hope comes wildly front-loaded, but rarely as drastically as The Strokes’. The quintet exploded out of Manhattan at the dawn of this millennium with an achingly cool design classic of a debut album that they’ve never come close to matching. Two decades later, they are actually deep into a respectable second act, though it seems they will never again hit the same heights they enjoyed when first conquering the world as the last in a long line of iconic skinny-jeaned NYC rockers stretching back to the Ramones, Television and The Velvet Underground.
The Strokes were unlikely rock stars. Educated at elite private schools, they were products of gentrified Manhattan rather than the city’s grungy downtown history referenced in their archly retro image and music. All the same, they looked and sounded fantastic, astutely reviving a stripped-down garage-rock aesthetic in an era when bloated nu-metal and slick dance-pop dominated the US charts. Their meticulously constructed songs were lean, propulsive and addictive, providing a beautifully stark sonic canvas for those sublime moments when Julian Casablancas broke out from monochrome yelping into cascading, Technicolor croon. The singer’s voice, cloaked in distortion by producer Gordon Raphael, felt deliciously analogue in an age of diamond-sharp digital production. This fuzzy-warm vintage-vinyl sound was no accident. Their record label demanded a cleaner, fuller mix of the debut album but they rightly insisted on keeping it shabby-chic.
Heard today, denuded of media hype and honeymoon hysteria, how do the band’s opening run of singles and B-sides hold up? Mostly pretty well. “Last Nite” remains a commanding, kinetic pop-punk blast with its jittery Bo Diddley beat and sly melodic homage to Tom Petty’s “American Girl” (which led to Petty graciously inviting The Strokes on tour a few years later). “The Modern Age” and “Hard To Explain” have a sleek linear velocity, with inevitable echoes of veteran NYC rock legends but also some of the elegant modernist thrum of early New Order. Among the B-side tracks, the stand-outs are the rough, truncated home-demo versions of “Last Nite” and “Is This It”, the latter a dreamy Wurlitzer whirl of woozy moans and unwinding music-box chimes. These skeletal rhythms and staccato guitar lines may flirt with postmodern pastiche, but they still proved fresh and vital enough to inspire a thousand new guitar bands, from The Libertinesto Arctic Monkeys to Vampire Weekend.
When they reconvened to make Room On Firein 2003, The Strokes were the world’s hottest musical property, with all the pressures and tensions that brings. After scrapping early sessions with Radiohead producer Nigel Godrich, they reconnected with Gordon Raphael, recapturing some of their old studio chemistry. But the recordings were rushed, and most reviewers lamented the lack of any major musical progression, the polished blasts of singles “12:51” and “Reptilia” already sounding like a more conventional indie-rock band. The long shadow of the first album also lingers, especially on “The End Has No End” with its undulating echoes of “Is This It”. The flipside tracks are fairly uneven too, especially a predictable live cover of The Clash’s “Clampdown”, recorded at London’s Alexandra Palace. The only pleasingly leftfield twist here is theRegina Spektor duet “Modern Girls & Old Fashioned Men”, which allows Casablanca to fully flex his jaded romantic crooner side.
Third album First Impressions Of Earthscored The Strokes their only UK No 1 to date, but still sold considerably less than its two predecessors. Once the band’s sole control-freak songwriter, Casablancas began to share credits at this point, which arguably diluted their idiosyncratic charm. After firing Raphael early in the sessions, they brought in Grammy-winning producer David Kahne (Paul McCartney, Tony Bennett) and seasoned heavy rock mixer Andy Wallace (Nirvana, Slayer), which helps explain the beefed-up, clobbering feel of singles like “Juicebox” and the shiny stadium-pop anthem “You Only Live Once”.
The B-side tracks feature a radically different demo sketch of the latter, originally titled “I’ll Try Anything Once”, in alluringly intimate late-night piano-ballad form. The blandly adequate cover of Marvin Gaye’s “Mercy Mercy Me (The Ecology)”, which features famous friends Eddie Vedder and Josh Homme, is a ballsy inclusion. The Strokes spent the rest of the 2000s on hiatus, mostly working on solo projects. This was not the end of their story, but undoubtedly the end of their imperial phase.
Back in 1998 it might have been easy to see Elvis Costello’s collaboration with Burt Bacharach as one more step away from the skinny-tie, poison-pen new wave which made his name, part of a decade or more of cross-genre dalliances into classical music, soundtracks, and even ballet scores. But Bacharach was always in Elvis’ DNA. As early as 1977, he was setting his bar higher than his peers, trying to write songs with the complex, carnal craft and emotion of “Anyone Who Had A Heart” and covering “I Just Don’t Know What To Do With Myself”. Way back in 1963, as an amazing photo in this handsome new boxset reveals, his dad was singing with the Joe Loss Orchestra at the Royal Variety Show alongside Marlene Dietrich. You can spy McManus Senior a few rows back from The Beatles, just a few yards away from Dietrich’s musical director, one Burt Bacharach…
It was a marriage made in Hollywood. Commissioned to write a song for Allison Anders’ fascinating if flawed 1996 film Grace Of My Heart, Elvis impudently faxed a first draft of “God Give Me Strength” to California, to find it returned the next evening, the song now augmented with Burt’s signature melodic gift. Though Bacharach had usually worked strictly with lyricists (Neil Diamond was a rare exception in 1982), the relationship seemed to snap into place instantly – the perfect tension of bitter and sweet, raw emotion and architectonic subtlety, black coffee and cream.
The subsequent album, Painted From Memory, the first disc of this box, was no disappointment, and has only grown in stature since its release. What might have been a fleeting media opportunity in practice gave Elvis the perfect structure through which to channel the whole torrent of mixed emotion he was bearing amid the ruins of his 16-year marriage to Cate O’Riordan; what might have emerged as pugnacious, splenetic rock songs were instead perfectly framed in melodies and arrangements worthy of Sinatra or Dusty In Memphis.
“In the darkest place,” it begins, Elvis floating in with a tolling midnight bell and a chilly breeze of flute, “I know that is where you’ll find me”. This is torch song of rare brilliance, calling to mind Julie London, or Frank Sinatra in all his 3am desolation, as turned into magnificent cathedrals of erotic misery on In The Wee Small Hours and Where Are You?, albums on which he consoled and tortured himself with the memory of Ava Gardner. The central line to the whole album is one from the devastating “This House is Empty Now” – which as the sleevenotes explain, he got from his dad, advice to help him through long dark childhood nights: “Oh, If I could just become forgetful when the night seems endless / Does the extinguished candle care about the darkness?”
In his autobiography, Elvis jokes that he kept a print of Dürer’s Melencolia on his music stand to cheer him up, and in truth it’s hard to hear a toe-tapping, singalong Broadway musical in these deep, dark songs. But nevertheless Chuck Lorre, the impresario behind sitcoms from Two And A Half Mento Big Bang Theory, must have heard something in that ballpark when he encouraged Elvis and Burt to write more songs and consider adapting the album for the stage – a prospect Elvis admits in his sleevenotes, he initially considered on the level of “Long Day’s Journey Into Night – only with less tap dancing.”
The musical remains unproduced, but the songs – as collected on the second disc here, Taken From Life – offer a fascinating new perspective on the collaboration. There are new voices: notably Audra Mae, Judy Garland’s great-great niece, on a sublime, spare version of “In the Darkest Place”; Jenni Muldaur, channelling something of Brecht’s“Pirate Jenny” on the savage “Shameless”; and even Burt himself on the wistful “Lie Back And Think Of England”. There’s also a new range of dynamics, lightening the funereal pace elsewhere; “Why Won’t Heaven Help Me?” has some of the deceptive grace of Dionne Warwick dipping a toe into Motown.
But the real find on this new disc, almost justifying the box on its own, is “Look Up Again” – a return to those desolate 3ams, a torch song played in reverse, where the “the pen drinks the ink from the page” and those farewell lines vanish. It’s further testament to the strength of this collaboration, amply bolstered by the live performances of Bacharach and Costello songs old and new on discs three and four. While so many artists of a certain age, from Rod to Bryan, end up resorting to the Classic American Songbook in their dotage in order to find complicated love songs for grown-ups, Elvis Costello has already added to that canon. “These are songs people will be listening to in 20 years,” the label boss told him when Painted From Memory was released, as though pre-consoling him for its lack of commercial appeal. But right now it feels like the life of these songs is only just beginning.
It is published in the UK on October 17 by White Rabbit and in the US by AUWA Books – a new imprint launched by Questlove.
Written with Ben Greenman, who has written memoirs with George Clinton and Brian Wilson among others, Thank You… will include a foreword by Questlove. The book was created in collaboration with Sly Stone’s manager Arlene Hirschkowitz.
“For as long as I can remember folks have been asking me to tell my story, I wasn’t ready,” says Stone. “I had to be in a new frame of mind to become Sylvester Stewart again to tell the true story of Sly Stone. It’s been a wild ride and hopefully my fans enjoy it too.”
Whatever Happened To The Teenage Dream? is released on May 26 by Demon. The 4CD and 5LP sets include the Tanx and Zinc Alloy albums, along with the non-album hit singles & B-sides, including “Children Of The Revolution”, “Solid Gold Easy Action”, “20th Century Boy” and “The Groover” as well demos and outtakes from both albums. The sets also focus on Bolan’s initial forays into soul music and highlights from the unfinished album he wrote and produced for the American singer ‘Sister’ Pat Hall. There is also a single album anthology entitled Songwriter: 1973.
Both the 4CD & 5LP sets feature a brand new essay along with many previously unpublished photos taken by Keith Morris, as well as ephemera from the era.
Demon Records will also reissue T. Rex’s 1973 singles as 1000-only limited edition 7” picture discs featuring photos from the Keith Morris archive, beginning with “20th Century Boy”.
See the tracklisting below for the various formats, which are available to pre-order here.
WHATEVER HAPPENED TO THE TEENAGE DREAM? 1973 4-CD SET
CD 1: TANX
1. Tenement Lady
2. Rapids
3. Mister Mister
4. Broken-Hearted Blues
5. Shock Rock
6. Country Honey
7. Electric Slim And The Factory Hen
8. Mad Donna
9. Born To Boogie
10. Life Is Strange
11. The Street And Babe Shadow
12. Highway Knees
13. Left Hand Luke And The Beggar Boys
BONUS 45 CUTS
14. Children Of The Revolution
15. Jitterbug Love
16. Sunken Rags
17. Solid Gold Easy Action
18. Xmas Riff
19. 20th Century Boy
20. Free Angel
CD 2: ZINC ALLOY AND THE HIDDEN RIDERS OF TOMORROW/A CREAMED CAGE IN AUGUST
1. Venus Loon
2. Sound Pit
3. Explosive Mouth
4. Galaxy
5. Change
6. Nameless Wildness
7. Teenage Dream [single version]
8. Liquid Gang
9. Carsmile Smith And The Old One
10. You’ve Got To Jive To Stay Alive – Spanish Midnight
11. Interstellar Soul
12. Painless Persuasion v The Meathawk Immaculate
13. The Avengers (Superbad)
14. The Leopards Featuring Gardenia & The Mighty Slug
BONUS 45 CUTS
15. The Groover
16. Midnight
17. Truck On (Tyke)
18. Sitting Here
19. Satisfaction Pony
CD 3: PRIVATE NUMBERS
TANX ERA
1. Jitterbug Love
2. Electric Slim And The Factory Hen [alias You Got The Look]
3. Highway Knees
4. Mad Donna
5. Mister Mister
6. Country Honey
7. Rapids
8. Life Is Strange
9. The Street & Babe Shadow
10. Darling
11. Free Angel
12. Left Hand Luke And The Beggar Boys
ZINC ALLOY ERA
13. Change
14. Galaxy
15. Carsmile Smith & The Old One
16. Spanish Midnight
17. Sitting There [Sitting Here]
18. Gardenia & The Mighty Slug
19. The Groover
20. Dance In The Midnight
21. Saturation Syncopation
22. Delanie
23. Saturday Night
24. Till Dawn
25. Stand By Me
CD 4: LOOK TO YOUR SOUL
T. REX
1. Hope You Enjoy The Show
BIG CARROT
2. Black Jack
3. Squint Eye Mangle
T. REX – ZINC ALLOY OUTTAKES
4. The Avengers (Superbad)
5. Look To Your Soul
6. Down Home Lady
7. All My Love
SISTER PAT HALL
8. When I Was A Child
9. Ghetto Baby
10. Sailors Of The Highway
11. Jitterbug Love
12. High
13. City Port
14. Sunken Rags
15. Do Your Thing
16. Tell Me
T. REX
17. Sky Church Music
18. Teenage Dream [Top Of The Pops version]
WHATEVER HAPPENED TO THE TEENAGE DREAM? 1973 5-LP SET
LP 1: TANX
SIDE A
1. Tenement Lady
2. Rapids
3. Mister Mister
4. Broken-Hearted Blues
5. Shock Rock
6. Country Honey
7. Electric Slim And The Factory Hen
SIDE B
1. Mad Donna
2. Born To Boogie
3. Life Is Strange
4. The Street And Babe Shadow
5. Highway Knees
6. Left Hand Luke And The Beggar Boys
LP2: ZINC ALLOY AND THE HIDDEN RIDERS OF TOMORROW/A CREAMED CAGE IN AUGUST
SIDE A
1. Venus Loon
2. Sound Pit
3. Explosive Mouth
4. Galaxy
5. Change
6. Nameless Wildness
7. Teenage Dream [single version]
SIDE B
1. Liquid Gang
2. Carsmile Smith And The Old One
3. You’ve Got To Jive To Stay Alive – Spanish Midnight
4. Interstellar Soul
5. Painless Persuasion v The Meathawk Immaculate
6. The Avengers (Superbad)
7. The Leopards Featuring Gardenia & The Mighty Slug
LP3: HITS AND FLIPS: THE SINGLES
SIDE A
1. Children Of The Revolution
2. Jitterbug Love
3. Sunken Rags
4. Solid Gold Easy Action
5. Xmas Riff
6. 20th Century Boy
7. Free Angel
SIDE B
1. The Groover
2. Midnight
3. Truck On (Tyke)
4. Sitting Here
5. Satisfaction Pony
6. Black Jack [by Big Carrot]
7. Squint Eye Mangle [by Big Carrot]
LP 4: PRIVATE NUMBERS
SIDE A: TANX ERA
1. Jitterbug Love
2. Electric Slim And The Factory Hen [alias You Got The Look]
3. Highway Knees
4. Mad Donna
5. Mister Mister
6. Country Honey
7. Rapids
8. Life Is Strange
9. The Street & Babe Shadow
10. Darling
11. Free Angel
12. Left Hand Luke And The Beggar Boys
SIDE B: ZINC ALLOY ERA
1. Change
2. Galaxy
3. Spanish Midnight
4. The Groover
5. Dance In The Midnight
6. Saturation Syncopation
7. Delanie
8. Saturday Night
9. Till Dawn
LP 5: LOOK TO YOUR SOUL
SIDE A
T. REX
1. Hope You Enjoy The Show
2. Look To Your Soul
3. Down Home Lady
SISTER PAT HALL
4 When I Was A Child
5. Ghetto Baby
6. Sailors Of The Highway
7. City Port
8. Jitterbug Love
SIDE B
1. High
2. Sunken Rags
3. Do Your Thing
4. Tell Me
T. REX
5. Sky Church Music
6. Teenage Dream [Top Of The Pops version]
MARC BOLAN SONGWRITER: 1973 1-LP
SIDE A
1. Midnight [Master Version] 2:45
2. Down Home Lady [Version 4] 1:42
3. Sitting Here [Original B-Side] 2:20
4. Saturation Syncopation (Alias All Alone) [Version 3] 3:23
5. Satisfaction Pony [Original B-Side] 2:49
6. The Avengers (Superbad) [Solo Electric] 2:49
7. Change [Album Version] 2:47
8. Liquid Gang [Working Version] 2:53
SIDE B
1. Sound Pit [Album Version] 2:50
2. Spanish Midnight [Demo] 0:34
3. Galaxy [Album Version] 1:49
4. Look To Your Soul [Demo] 1:53
5. Teenage Dream [Original A-Side] 4:57
6. Jitterbug Love [By Pat Hall] 2:38
7. Truck On (Tyke) [Original A-Side] 3:08
8. Till Dawn [Take 3] 3:52
Fatoumata Diawara, Panda Bear & Sonic Boom and The Murder Capital are among the artists to have been added to the 2023 End Of The Road Festival line-up.
The news comes as Final Tier tickets are available at the festival website. End Of The Road returns this August 31 – September 3 at Wiltshire’s Larmer Tree Gardens.
Also joining this year’s event are Deerhoof, Allah-Las, 75 Dollar Bill, H. Hawkline, Sessa, Sylvie and more.
As previously reported on Uncut, Wilco, King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard, Future Islands and Unknown Mortal Orchestra headline this year’s festival.
They’ll be joined by an Uncut-friendly bill including Angel Olsen, Arooj Aftab, Cass McCombs, Joan Shelley, Ezra Furman, Horse Lords, Greentea Peng, Mary Elizabeth Remington, Oren Ambarchi, Nina Nastasia, Sam Burton, The Mary Wallopers and Caitlin Rose.
We’re delighted to once again be partnering with End Of The Road for what promises to be a brilliant festival.
FATOUMATA DIAWARA
PANDA BEAR & SONIC BOOM
THE MURDER CAPITAL
CHARLOTTE ADIGÉRY & BOLIS PUPUL
DEERHOOF
SAMIA
ALLAH-LAS
ELA MINUS (LIVE)
KING TUFF
HMLTD
MARIE DAVIDSON (DJ)
ELKKA (DJ)
75 DOLLAR BILL
TOM RAVENSCROFT (DJ)
H. HAWKLINE
SESSA
ROYEL OTIS
SYLVIE
KARA JACKSON
HÉLOÏSE WERNER & COLIN ALEXANDER
MARY IN THE JUNKYARD
Lankum‘s new record, False Lankum, is one of the best of 2023 so far. Their third album proper, it finds the experimental Dublin group dragging folk into the future, with tape loops, pedals and droning noise elevating their sea-bound songs. Here, in this extended version of the Q&A that appears in the current issue of Uncut, multi-instrumentalist and vocalist Ian Lynch discusses the record, the ‘traditional’, Martello towers and the songs’ “maritime connection”.
But first, you can hear their new song, “Newcastle“.
__________________________
UNCUT: It’s been a while since The Livelong Day. How did your writing and recording process change in this time?
IAN LYNCH: The Livelong Day came out in October 2019 so we only did a few short tours before lockdown. We used the time quite well, delved into some personal projects and then after a year we were ready to start on an album. We had the use of a property n Dublin, a 220-year-old tower that I was minding for the owner. It was the perfect place to work on an album. We’d spend time there, then go to the studio for a week and lay down some stuff, then take a break, return to the tower for a week or two, before doing another week in the studio. We kind of did that over the course of six or seven months in 2021 as we gradually assembled the album. That was very different to how we worked before. Normally, we would have got some material, worked it up to a certain level and then gone into the studio for three weeks and lost our minds down the rabbit hole. This was done in short stints, and meant we came back to the studio we’d almost forgotten what we had already done. It took a lot longer but it’s a lot easier on the brain.
How does a typical Lankum song develop?
We had very rough ideas of arrangements but 75% happened in studio where we experimented with sounds we’d never tried before. That was a very exciting part of the process. I learnt how to use tape loops and we did that a lot. We’d take the hair off the bow of the fiddle and use that on the wires of the piano, we used a detuned hammer dulcimer, tried different tunings on banjo and guitar, used pedals, delay and reverb and put different found sounds in the mix.
How do you get the balance between tradition and experimentation?
Getting it right is very subjective, all you can rely on is your own musical instincts and what sounds good to your ears. What we are doing isn’t traditional or folk. There are elements of that, but there are many different elements and finding the balance is a very subconscious thing. We have immersed ourselves fully in the tradition. We have spent a good many years learning and performing traditional songs and playing them in traditional settings. But we have a lot more going on in our brains than just traditional music and if we didn’t let that come into our music, we wouldn’t be true to ourselves.
How do you choose the material you cover?
We are always coming across new traditional songs or we might have one we’ve been singing for years. There are lots we bring to the table that don’t work out. Maybe not everybody is into them, or we have tried to arrange them and it just doesn’t click for whatever reason. There are certain songs we have tried to record every time we do an album and haven’t managed to get right. We are quite strict on ourselves. It has to get through our filter. Certain songs don’t translate and it can be heart-breaking because it might be a song you are really invested in but you have to put it by the wayside. We are constantly refining and distilling. We will record a certain number of tracks and then have to work out how they fit into the narrative of the album.
What’s the narrative on this one?
The sea is a very strong theme. That was completely accidental but when we put the songs together we saw that every song seemed to have a maritime connection. It fit into how we were working because the tower we were staying in was right beside the sea and I was sea-swimming every day. Darragh and I grew up by the sea and our uncle is a sailor. All that came together. On a musical level, there’s a real ebb and flow to the songs, that lightness and darkness. We wanted to create a dialogue between the two elements and that was an expansion on the last album, with the dark elements being a lot darker and more apocalyptic and the lighter elements are sweeter and more beautiful.
Not all of the traditional are that old – “Clear Away In The Morning” and “On A Monday Morning” are both quite recent I noticed?
The Gordon Bok and the Cyril Tawney songs. We came across them in a traditional context, you’d hear somebody sing it and think ‘oh that’s deadly’. I think Darragh brought those two and I’m not sure he realised how recently they were composed. That speaks to the kind of ever-changing nature of the tradition, that it’s not something that is stagnant and pure. There is always more material being added to it over time.
People have this idea of the tradition as something that’s unchanging with a certain number of songs but these songs didn’t come out of thin air, they were all written by somebody at some stage and had to find their place in the stream of the tradition. It’s important to recognise that is still happening today. Maybe the function of the songs has changed, society is different, but the human need to tell stories and sing as a social way of engaging has remained unchanged over the years. That speaks to my own interest as a folklorist, that these process are eternal and endemic to human nature.
In the May 2023 issue of Uncut – in shops now – you can see some exclusive, unseen Elliott Landy photos of The Band from across his various sessions with the group as they fashioned their unique and influential sound up in Woodstock at the tail-end of the 1960s. The pictures are taken from Landy’s forthcoming second volume of The Band Photographs 1968-69; you can sign up for the Kickstarter campaign or pre-order the book here.
You’ll have to buy the magazine to see all the pictures, but here’s a longer version of our interview with Elliott about the new book.
Peter Gabriel is on the cover of the latest issue of Uncut
Was there a particular discovery that prompted you to put together a second volume of Band photographs?
One day I was looking through the boxes of seconds from the selections we made for the first book, and I saw so many pictures in there that I couldn’t believe were not in the first book, because they were so fabulous. They were some of my favorite photographs. I said, ‘Wow, why didn’t we use this one, or this one?’ Of course the reason was that we had 160 pages, and I like full-page photographs. So we didn’t really have room for as many photographs in the first book as deserved to be in there.
Did you meet The Band for the first time at Big Pink?
Actually the first session was when I went up to Canada to photograph their families. They wanted to include a picture of their relatives in the [Music From Big Pink] album, as a way of saying thank you for helping us our whole lives. And then a few weeks after that, I went up to the house they called Big Pink, which was in West Saugerties, New York, in the area of Woodstock – just down the road from where I live now, by chance. There’s some great pictures in that first shoot, but they didn’t see one that they felt was a cover, so I went back a second time, [by which point] they were no longer in Big Pink. I guess they got their advance from the record label and instead of living in one house, they got two larger places.
…Which is where the photos of the group playing instruments out on the lawn come from, right?
They’re in the garden outside a house that Garth [Hudson] and Richard [Manuel] rented on Ohayo Mountain Road, which is one of the mountains that surround Woodstock. It was quite a beautiful home that overlooked a big reservoir, and they just got musical instruments and went outside and started playing and fooling around. There’s a number of really good pictures from that sequence that I plan to put in the new book. They weren’t seriously creating music there, so they were improvising as far as I know. Garth was not a violinist, of course. I imagine he must have played violin somewhere on some of the tracks, but that wasn’t his job with the group. So they were really fooling around and just making for interesting photographs. They were improvising both visually and musically.
Would you say that one of the reasons these photos are so evocative is that they’re taken in the same environment that the music was made?
I guess I’d have to agree with that. When I photograph, basically I don’t set things up, unless I have to. In general, I take my cue from what’s happening. I start with where people live and take pictures in that environment. And I don’t tell them how to pose, how to dress or what to do. I just walk in with my camera and there you are. In those years there were no stylists, no wardrobe people, nobody figuring out what it should look like or what effect we want. It was something that was completely open. When I met the guys in the band, we didn’t have a clue as to what we were going to do; it just evolved over the four photo sessions I did with them.
What struck you most about spending time with The Band in those early days?
I saw that they were rooted to the past – not in the past, but connected to the past. They were not your usual kind of hippie musicians of those years. They were old-fashioned, in a way. One good example is that when we would meet someone in the street, let’s say the clerk from the local grocery store, they stopped to say hello to this person as if he was the president of a record label. They paid normal regular people the same kind of respect that they would to someone that could be influential for their careers, which is how I think it was in the old days. You said, ‘Good day, how are you?’ and there was a lot of politeness. All of them were brought up in rural situations and they had that older-type cultural politeness. They were just genuine human beings, really nice people, and everyone in town liked them. They didn’t feel they were better than other people, they felt they were the same.
There is mild confusion ahead of time as to whether this is a regular Dean Wareham show, as suggested by his own tour itinerary, or whether it’s one of the ‘Dean Wareham Plays Galaxie 500’ sets he’s been doing recently, which is how it’s billed on the venue’s website (it doesn’t help that they’ve then embedded a Spotify playlist by an entirely different artist called DEAN).
When Wareham ambles onstage with his four-piece band (including long-term life and musical partner Britta Phillips on bass and BVs), he embraces the ambiguity, starting with Galaxie 500’s “Flowers” before playing three songs from his excellent 2021 album I Have Nothing To Say To The Mayor Of LA. Despite more than three decades of separation, there’s no great schism between the old and new material. The recent songs are marginally tighter and more assured, with Wareham’s disillusionment now manifesting itself as wry humour rather than spooked introspection.
But when he returns to the Galaxie 500 songs, he resists the temptation to imbue them with accumulated wisdom or superior chops. Sometimes these retro-focused shows don’t quite work because the musicians have become too accomplished over the years and can’t find their way back to the awkward desperation of their youth. The great hair certainly helps, but Wareham (59) seems unusually in touch with his 24-year-old self.
You certainly couldn’t accuse him of overplaying. “Snowstorm” and “Tugboat” are still dreamy, fragile things. When he takes a solo he almost never breaches the limited confines of the song, on a mission to hypnotise rather than to excite. There is a brief moment of concern when it looks like he might be about to swap his guitar, but that would be far too much of a decadent rock move – he’s just taking off his jumper. The spell remains unbroken.
After an aborted crack at Sex Pistols’ “Submission”, the band return for an encore to play two covers that Galaxie 500 made their own: the awed wonder of Joy Division/New Order’s “Ceremony” and the poetic pleading of Jonathan Richman’s “Don’t Let Our Youth Go To Waste” turned into a celebratory thrash. Go to waste? Dean Wareham’s still eking out his youth 35 years later. May he never grow up.
Setlist:
Flowers
As Much As It Was Worth
The Last Word
Under Skys
Pictures
Temperature’s Rising
Robin & Richard
Snowstorm
When Will You Come Home
Strange
Another Day
Victory Garden
Tugboat
Listen, The Snow Is Falling Encore:
Submission (aborted)
Ceremony
Don’t Let Our Youth Go To Waste
The great reset has arrived. After two exhausting albums of political ranting, Van Morrisonappears to have got everything off his chest and gone back to basics. Moving On Skifflesees him working through 23 covers of early country, gospel, folk and blues numbers that he first encountered at Belfast’s Atlantic Records during the skiffle craze of 1956–57. Whether his own versions can be considered skiffle is a moot point, despite the constant buzzing presence of Alan Wicket on washboard.
Van Morrison first talked about recording a skiffle album in the late 1970s, and in 1998 he recorded The Skiffle Sessionsin Belfast, a live album (released in 2000) that featured skiffle maestros Lonnie Donegan and Chris Barber, plus Wicket on washboard in a band that also included Dr John and Big Jim Sullivan. On that occasion, the approach to skiffle was more conventional, a rough-edged rinky-dink feel to complement the souped-up jazz and blues. Moving On Skiffle is richer and more sophisticated but has a lightness of touch that recalls Bruce Springsteen’s delightful 2006 album of Pete Seeger reinterpretations, We Shall Overcome. Although it is more New Orleans than 2i’s, Morrison’s love of these songs rings true, and there’s a generosity of spirit, with almost every band member given space to showcase their own chops, from Richard Dunn’s perky Hammond on opener “Freight Train” to Seth Lakeman’s mournful fiddle on closing track “Green Rocky Road”. Morrison himself plays guitar, harmonica and saxophone.
That sense of joy is welcome after Morrison’s two Covid albums, Latest Record Project Volume One and What’s It Going To Take?. These were curious affairs, with lyrics infused with rage at pandemic restrictions but music that could be astonishingly beautiful. Both these were recorded at Peter Gabriel’s Bath studio with a versatile band, all of whom appear on Moving On Skiffleand are attuned to Morrison’s current semi-improvised recording style. Credit also to the backing vocals and harmonies, which provide one of the strongest links back to skiffle.
Most of these songs were recorded by skiffle groups of the 1950s, which is how Morrison first discovered them. “Freight Train” is one of several tracks performed by skiffle pioneer Chas McDevitt (who was present at sessions for Moving On Skiffle but isn’t credited). The Vipers are represented on several tracks: “Sail Away Ladies”, a hit in 1957 under the title “Don’t You Rock Me Daddy-O” (produced by George Martin), as well as fine versions of “Streamline Train” and “No Other Baby”, to which Morrison contributes his own honking harmonica solo. There are tracks popularised by Ken Colyer (Lead Belly’s worksong “Take This Hammer”), Chris Barber (“Gypsy Davy”) and Lonnie Donegan (“Travelin’ Blues”).
On Morrison’s new versions, the skiffle genre’s more abrasive qualities – nasal vocal delivery and DIY sound – are replaced by beautiful singing, exceptional musicianship and clever arrangements. The weary “Travelin’ Blues” is reinvented as an ensemble piece, while “Come On In” has a fabulous swing. The size of the band gives the songs more heft. Take “Worried Man Blues”, a Carter Family song covered by Lonnie Donegan, that turns into a buzzing honky-tonk number under Morrison’s guidance, or the boogie-woogie of “Greenback Dollar”, another song recorded by McDevitt.
Some of the best reinterpretations are of country numbers. Don Gibson’s “Oh Lonesome Me” is presented in a radically different form to Neil Young’s heartbroken take on After The Gold Rush. That’s followed by a couple of Hank Williamsnumbers – a cracking “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry” and “Cold Cold Heart”, between which sits a funky take on Hank Snow’s “I’m Movin’ On” that at times sounds like it’s been crossed with “Green Onions”.
Midway through the album comes “Gov Don’t Allow”, a rewrite of “Mama Don’t Allow”, a song dating back to the 1920s that adolescent skiffler Jimmy Page performed as “Mama Don’t Allow No Skiffle Playing Round Here” on the BBC in 1957. Morrison’s playful version lists various things he believes that the government has banned, from freedom of speech to washboard playing. In isolation, it’s rather funny. It’s also a reminder that Morrison is never going to change.
A few songs into Unknown Mortal Orchestra’s fifth album, there’s an extraordinary sound. It’s not a musical one, however – at least not in the conventional sense. In the final moments of “The Widow”, a loose-limbed exercise in Headhunters-style jazz-funk, most of the instruments abruptly fall away, leaving only a final series of plaintive piano chords and the twittering of birds outside (a child’s laughter and a few noisy frogs are discernible too). It’s as if a window has been flung open to allow the air and the light in. Since this moment of ordinary magic is generated by a band whose recordings can sometimes feel cloistered to the point of claustrophobia, the effect is startling.
It’s also indicative of the warmth that suffuses V, an album confirming Ruban Nielson’s versatility and imagination, as well as a new willingness to escape the nooks and crannies of his own psyche and engage more fully with the world outside. Just as the marriage of melodic songcraft, emotional frankness and avant-rock mess-thetics on 2015’s Multi-Love marked an artistic and commercial breakthrough for the Auckland-born musician, the new album does the same by embracing a more extroverted disposition. Full of carefully crafted, pleasingly askew songs that evoke the sunniest pop and soft rock of his childhood, along with freewheeling instrumentals that combine the languor of Khruangbin with an edge of psychedelic soul, Vbrandishes a summery vitality – albeit one that still coexists with the darker aspects of Nielson’s lyrical vision.
One reason for Unknown Mortal Orchestra’s brightened outlook may be Nielson’s decision to move his base of operations from rainy Portland to more inviting climes. An extended visit to California while performing at Coachella in 2019 inspired him to relocate to Palm Springs in the early months of the pandemic. After beginning work on the album with his brother Kody – sprightly yacht-pop marvel “Weekend Run” and the Prince-ly “That Life” were the first songs here to emerge as singles in 2021 – he made a wider effort to get more of his kin together in Hilo, Hawaii. Nielson’s travels back and forth across the Pacific prompted a deeper consideration of his Hawaiian heritage.
That included the musical tradition known as hapa-haole, a hybrid form combining indigenous styles and instruments with the western influences that became ever more pervasive after America’s annexation of the Hawaiian islands at the end of the 19th century. Its influence here manifests in Nielson’s clear affection for the
slack-key guitar style of local players. Beatific songs like “Guilty Pleasures” also share the sun-kissed feel of Hawaiian reggae, a sound originally pioneered by one of Nielson’s uncles.
That said, Nielson ventures beyond travel-brochure ideals about an island paradise. The ugly history and legacy of colonialism are overtly addressed in one of the tracks he created when work on Vresumed. In the spare “I Killed Captain Cook”, he imagines himself as one of the islanders who killed the English explorer after his attempt to kidnap Hawaii’s high chief Kalani’õpu’u in 1782. “Keaukaha”, a near-ambient instrumental named after a beach on Hawaii’s south coast, has the same elegiac quality.
Yet for the most part, Nielson’s new surroundings seem to have had a more salubrious effect. With their insistent melodies and irresistible rhythms, “The Garden”, “Guilty Pleasures” and “The Beach” all boast an easy buoyancy rarely achieved since the days of deep-dive soft-rockers like Airplay and Maxus. Besides proving his ability to tap into Prince’s paisley-patterned wavelength circa Around The World In A Day, “Layla” also demonstrates the casual grace Nielson can achieve as a guitarist when he resists the temptation to smear everything with effects.
Songs like “Shin Ramyun” – another beguiling instrumental named after a Korean brand of instant noodles – and “In The Rear View” still have the woozy, frayed-cassette-tape vibe that’s been a component of Unknown Mortal Orchestra since the first spate of home recordings that yielded 2011’s self-titled debut. But when compared to the more clamorous and sometimes combative nature of 2018’s Sex & Food, the clarity and effervescence of much of Vcan seem revelatory. Likewise, for all the dreams of escape that permeate songs like “Layla” (“Lay low, Layla / Let’s get outta this broken place”) or the painful memories of fading romances and family rancour that surface elsewhere, Nielson sounds like an artist who’s arrived at where he needs to be. All indications suggest the weather there is excellent.
The film, directed by Jonathan Demme, captured the band at the height of their powers in 1983. Stop Making Sense was shot in Hollywood at the Pantages Theater, with the band touring in support of their fifth album, Speaking in Tongues.
The entire concert was a tightly choreographed production and something unique at the time. The film’s release was announced via a Tweet which featured frontman David Byrne collecting his famous oversized suit – check it out below.
If the suit still fits… This year, we’re bringing Jonathan Demme’s groundbreaking 1984 Talking Heads concert film STOP MAKING SENSE (newly remastered in 4K!) back to theaters worldwide. #StopMakingSense2023pic.twitter.com/Kh2Nevaf2X
The promo clip sees Byrne collecting his suit from a dry cleaners, telling the owner: “It’s been here a while.” Byrne then, quite literally, suits up and recreates some of his moves from the December ’83 concert.
As of yet, the film – which is being remastered in 4K – hasn’t got a release date. However, there has already been an announcement that alongside the film, there will be a new deluxe edition of its soundtrack. This is due out on August 18 via Rhino Records.
It will be available digitally with a Dolby Atmos mix of the complete concert as a double LP set. The reissue has been mixed by Jerry Harrison and E.T. Thorngren. Of interest to Talking Heads fans will be the addition of two previously unreleased performances of Cities and Big Business / I Zimbra. This is all accompanied by unseen photos and new liner notes from the band’s four members.
You can pre-order the soundtrack as of now from the band’s official website – here.
Released on Wednesday (March 15), the trailer for I Am Everything offers fans a look at the retrospective film that chronicles the late icon’s life and contributions to music, the queer community and more.
The film will feature archival footage from the legend’s career and personal life, as well as never-before-seen interviews with the man himself as well as new interview with musicians, his family and friends and Black and queer scholars – all of whom discuss his cultural impact.
Watch the trailer for I Am Everything below.
An official description for the film reads: “Little Richard: I Am Everything tells the story of the Black queer origins of rock n’ roll, exploding the whitewashed canon of American pop music to reveal the innovator – the originator – Richard Penniman. Through a wealth of archive and performance that brings us into Richard’s complicated inner world, the film unspools the icon’s life story with all its switchbacks and contradictions.”
“In interviews with family, musicians, and cutting-edge Black and queer scholars, the film reveals how Richard created an art form for ultimate self-expression, yet what he gave to the world he was never able to give to himself. Throughout his life, Richard careened like a shiny cracked pinball between God, sex and rock n’ roll. The world tried to put him in a box, but Richard was an omni being who contained multitudes – he was unabashedly everything.”
Little Richard: I Am Everythingis set to receive a single-day cinematic release on April 11 before being released on digital on April 21. Ticketing details for the film’s screening in the UK have yet to be announced.
Little Richard – born Richard Wayne Penniman – passed away in May 2020 after a battle with bone cancer. He was 87 years old.
An outpouring of tributes followed the “Tutti Frutti” singer’s death, including Paul McCartney, who remembered Little Richard “screaming into my life when I was a teenager” in his written tribute.
“I owe a lot of what I do to Little Richard and his style; and he knew it,” McCartney wrote. “He would say, ‘I taught Paul everything he knows.’ I had to admit he was right.”
Celebrating the 60th anniversary of the Yardbirds, the British band who gave rise to Eric Clapton, Jeff Beck and Jimmy Page. From rave-ups at the Marquee, via psychedelic sonics, all the way to Led Zeppelin. “Pop group are you? Why you got to wear your hair long?”
Which musical moment is the most definitively “Yardbirds”? The thrilling rave-ups of “I’m A Man”, which were so inspirational to David Bowie? Jeff Beck’s devastating one note feedback solo on “The Nazz Are Blue”? A delivery during which, as Simon Napier-Bell recalls in the following pages, Jeff just “glared at the band through the glass”? It’s a classic. But topping the lot would surely have to be the thirty second burst of madness about one minute and 45 seconds into the 1966 single “Happenings Ten Years Time Ago”.
In historical terms, we welcome this as one of the few recorded instances of the Jimmy Page/Jeff BeckYardbirds of June-October 1966. On a more visceral level, though, it does something less easy to rationalise when a warning siren sounds and Jeff Beck begins a series of bombing runs on his guitar. One guitar solo threatens to start, but then another one, oblivious to the first begins on top of it. After a few seconds, someone starts talking – actually, more like heckling. “Pop group, are you? Bet you’re making money…” At this, there is mad laughter in the mix. “Why you got to wear long hair?”
It’s disorientating, but it feels representative of how things generally were for this band: hectic, confusing, often magnificent. The Yardbirds, like their more storied contemporaries like The Rolling Stones made a successful transition from R&B enthusiasm to professional pop and psychedelia (something they did markedly better than the Stones). It’s inescapable, though, that they are today better known for giving a home to Eric Clapton, the late Jeff Beck, and Jimmy Page, than for their own collective output.
In the face of overwhelming odds, we’ve made some sense of it all. Inside you’ll find in depth reviews of the band’s intriguingly scattershot catalogue, presented alongside our pick of archive interviews. The Yardbirds own lifespan was an explosive five years, so beyond that, we’ve taken the opportunity to follow Jeff Beck’s career, from blues rock, to jazz fusion and even drum ‘n’ bass as he maintained a hunger for fresh sounds, much like his friend David Bowie.
In 2016 he looked back with Uncut to a time when, as ever, the Yardbirds were up to their necks in a tricky situation. On this occasion, it was playing a show at the San Remo Song Festival – but doing so with a very drunk singer.
“During rehearsals,” Jeff told David Cavanagh, “Gene Pitney came up and said, “You guys better watch out because that singer is di-a-bolical.” I suddenly felt very protective of Keith and went, “Fuck you. We do not do cheesy pop songs. We don’t even know what the fuck we’re doing here.”
“We wanted nothing to do with it,” Jeff said. “But I think we sold 80,000 singles the next day because the kids loved us.”
Get your copy in stores now, or here with free UK P&P.
The wry, sardonic brilliance of David Berman shone brightly until his tragic suicide in 2019, aged only 52. Rob Hughes takes a look at the idiosyncratic life and work of a tragic genius as American Water – the first great masterpiece by his band Silver Jews – turns 25.
The Whitney Museum of American Art has moved around several times since it was founded in 1930. By the turn of the ’90s, it was housed on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, on Madison Avenue, where three aspiring musicians – David Berman, Stephen Malkmus and Steve West – were employed as security guards.
“All these weird older characters worked with us at the Whitney, really interesting people from New York,” recalls Malkmus. “It was more intellectually stimulating than just working in a bar. Mixed with the art, the whole thing was kind of a trip.”
Hosting works by multifaceted artists like Jean-Michel Basquiat, Bruce Nauman and Sherrie Levine, the museum proved inspirational. Malkmus was by then involved with his own band, Pavement. Berman, meanwhile, was primarily a poet. But the Whitney widened his ambition.
“David was constantly writing poetry at the museum,” says Pavement percussionist Bob Nastanovich. “Then suddenly he started spending a lot of time conjuring up lyrics. It spurred him on to using music as a vehicle for his poetry.” Berman christened his conceptual project Silver Jews.
Over the next couple of decades, he presided over a lineup forever in flux, creating some of the most compelling music of the times: a highly literate assemblage of the tragi-comic that operated on multiple levels. More often that not though, his work felt like a series of discharges from his deepest self.
“David was arguably the best English-language lyricist of his generation,” says songwriter-guitarist William Tyler, who appeared on three Silver Jews albums and played in Berman’s touring band. “For someone who didn’t have much formal musical education or intuition, he had an uncanny ability to write melodic pop hooks. To me, he was so far out on his own. In terms of the last 20 or 30 years, I don’t really know who else is even in that conversation.”
“He kind of lived in poetry,” says Silver Jews producer Mark Nevers. “David was very observant. Everything was a potential song or a poem. He was just on a different plane.”
Animal Collectivehave announced the reissue of their debut album, Spirit They’re Gone, Spirit They’ve Vanished – featuring brand-new artwork and a host of previously unreleased tracks.
Announced Monday (March 13), the reissue will arrive on May 12 and features remastered versions of the 10 original tracks. In addition, the band are also set to release a new EP alongside the album – containing five previously-unreleased songs.
Originally released in 2000, Spirit They’re Gone, Spirit They’ve Vanished was initially a collaborative project between bandmates Avey Tare and Panda Bear. However, the album was later classified as the band’s debut and released as part of their own label.
The reissue will feature remastered audio, as well as new artwork designed by American visual artist, Abby Portney, and her brother David – more commonly recognised as band member Avey Tare. Check out the new artwork below:
Credit: Press/Animal Collective
Animal Collective have also announced that the release will be accompanied by a new EP, which consists of five previously unreleased songs.
Entitled A Night at Mr. Raindrop’s Holistic Supermarket, the release includes tracks that were recorded around the same time as the debut album – including a cover of Fleetwood Mac’s “Dreams”.
All of the tracks were mixed by the band’s guitarist Deakin – whose real name is Joshua Caleb Dibb – and “Untitled #1”, the first release from the EP, is out now. Find the official song and visualiser below, along with the new remastered version of “Chocolate Girl”.
The remastered version of Spirit They’re Gone, Spirit They’ve Vanished will be available physically as a two-disk LP. Expanded editions, containing the EP, will also be available in both digital and physical formats.
Both releases, available to pre-order now, will be available from May 12 via Domino.
The tracklist for the upcoming releases are:
Spirit They’re Gone, Spirit They’ve Vanished:
1. “Spirit They’ve Vanished” (Remastered 2023)
2. “April And The Phantom” (Remastered 2023)
3. “Untitled” (Remastered 2023)
4. “Penny Dreadfuls” (Remastered 2023)
5. “Chocolate Girl” (Remastered 2023)
6. “Everyone Whistling” (Remastered 2023)
7. “La Rapet” (Remastered 2023)
8. “Bat You’ll Fly” (Remastered 2023)
9. “Someday I’ll Grow To Be As Tall As The Giant” (Remastered 2023)
10. “Alvin Row” (Remastered 2023)
A Night at Mr. Raindrop’s Holistic Supermarket:
1. “An An Angel”
2. “Untitled #1”
3. “Bus Travel New York Tare My Face Off pt. 1”
4. “Dreams” (Fleetwood Mac cover)
5. “Bus Travel New York Tare My Face Off pt. 2”
His rich, golden voice and music that hovers deftly between tradition and electronic blues has made Baaba Maal one of Africa’s most beloved and critically acclaimed musicians. With his first new album for seven years and a music festival to discuss, Maal invites Uncut to a rare audience in his hometown, Podor.
DECEMBER 7, 2022, Senegal. Driving after dark from the sleek, futuristic new airport on the outskirts of the capital, Dakar, we pass barbers and bars still trading in the nighttime heat, oases of light between baobab trees. We’re on our way to the nearby coastal town of Toubab Dialaw, to pay our respects to one of African music’s greatest names, Baaba Maal. Maal has invited Uncutto attend Blues Du Fleuve, a major African music festival, which he has curated since 2005 in his remote hometown, Podor, a day’s drive north by the River Senegal.
Maal is part of the wave of musicians who took African music to a global platform during the 1980s. Then as now, his music has several elements at its heart: his keening, ecstatic voice, mesmeric acoustic guitar playing and dervish dancing.
You can spot Maal’s home by the queue of people waiting patiently outside. Instead of music fans, Maal’s exalted status here is such that he gets supplicants hoping for an audience – like a president or a priest. “He’s a big personality in Senegal,” Alioune Diouf, his drummer of 33 years, tells Uncut. “That’s why he’s involved in all the things that people need. In Senegal, I don’t think that Baaba has an enemy. Everywhere you go, Senegalese complain a lot if bad things are done, but if Baaba uses his power, they calm down. African presidents and religious leaders give him the same respect. He knows the responsibility he has – people trust their futures to him. That’s why Baaba don’t sleep!”
Maal’s quest to explore musical boundaries has led to collaborations withEno, Peter Gabriel and Damon Albarn’s Africa Express collective, contributing songs to Ridley Scott’sBlack Hawk Down and Martin Scorsese’s The Last Temptation Of Christ while deploying genres from reggae to electronica. More recently, his music has played a central role in the soundtracks for both Black Panther films.
As well as the upcoming Blues Du Fleuve festival, Maal also has his first album in seven years to contend with – Being. As you would expect, this new album continues his lifelong interest in weaving West African traditions with contemporary electronic sounds. “I was crazy in my way, and [producer] Johan Karlberg was crazy in his way,” Maal says, as he reflects on sessions in Dakar, New York and London.
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