The album features Perrett’s sons Jamie (guitar / production) and Peter Jr (bass) plus members of his live band, alongside guests including Johnny Marr, Bobby Gillespie, Fontaines D.C.’s Carlos O’Connell and Dream Wife guitarist Alice Go.
Tracklisting for The Cleansing is: 1. I Wanna Go With Dignity 2. Disinfectant 3. Fountain Of You 4. Secret Taliban Wife 5. Solitary Confinement 6. Women Gone Bad 7. Survival Mode 8. Mixed Up Confucius 9. Do Not Resuscitate 10. The Cleansing 11. All That Time 12. Kill A Franco Spy 13. Set The House On Fire 14. Feast For Sore Eyes 15. There For You 16. Art Is A Disease 17. World In Chains 18. Back In The Hole 19. Less Than Nothing 20. Crystal Clear
The Cleansing is available to preorder on DomMart-exclusive red double vinyl with signed sleeve, standard double vinyl, CD and digitally.
Perrett also plays a special show on Saturday October19 at the Moth Club, London.
One day, my first grade teacher, Mrs Robertson – not Robinson! – said, ‘Hey, I’m gonna put on this record, and I want everybody to sing along.’ And she passed out lyrics to “The Sound Of Silence”. I didn’t know what the words meant, but it was heavy: “Hello darkness, my old friend…” I remember the hair standing up on my neck. We were church-going folks, but I never felt the spirit moving through me the way that I did singing along with my friends to that song. I almost see it as the moment when I was really introduced to music. I go back to that song probably at least once a year. Usually it’s a moment when I’m by myself, so I can get weepy.
THE BEATLES
Let It Be
APPLE, 1970
My uncle had given me a couple of singles, including a copy of “Help”, but this was the first full-length album that I ever bought. If I had to name one favourite all-time song, “Across The Universe” might be that song. I didn’t know what he was singing about, but I knew it was magic. There’s something childlike about that melody that hit me super-hard, and I remember playing it over and over and over again. And my mom really liked “Let It Be”, so whenever that song was playing, she’d walk in the room and listen to it with me. In my twenties, I went back and listened to Revolver and Rubber Soul> and obviously ‘The White Album’ and Abbey Road. But this record still holds a special place.
KISS
Alive!
CASABLANCA, 1975
I grew up in a little town in Montana, so the way that I found out about music, a lot of it was just seeing stuff on TV. Kiss were on Midnight Special and I’d never heard of them before. There was a little local record store called Ricky’s Records, run by this Lester Bangs character. I said, ‘Hey, have you heard of Kiss?’ And he goes, ‘Yeah, they suck!’ But he ordered <Hotter Than Hell> for me. The next year Alive! came out, and I just wore that record out. I think it was being so far away from live music – there was no live music really being played in our state. It gave me a little taste of what it must have felt like being at a rock show.
RAMONES
Leave Home
SIRE, 1977
I had been reading about the Ramones in Creem magazine, and then I had a couple of copies of this magazine called Rock Scene, which was kinda about the New York scene. There’s lots of backstage pictures of Patti Smith and David Johansen and Debbie Harry, and it was the first time I’d heard about the Sex Pistols. So I’d heard of those bands, but hadn’t heard them. I was at Woolworths going through the cut-out bins, and there were all these Sire tapes for two bucks. I bought Leave Home, Rocket To Russia, Dead Boys’ Young, Loud And Snotty and Blank Generation by Richard Hell. It completely turned the corner for me. Ted Nugent and Aerosmith were totally out, and I was fixated with buying punk rock records.
DEVO
Duty Now For The Future
WARNER BROS, 1979
In summer of ’79, skateboarding was at its peak for me. I was skating in contests, so there were all these freaky, punk rock skateboarders from all over the state that would congregate. It was the first time I was around 40 or 50 kids who were all punk rockers. Devo were getting talked about a lot in a skateboarder magazine that I read, and I saw them on Saturday Night Live when they did “Satisfaction”. Playing something in 7/4 time isn’t odd for me because of listening to Devo. I think it helped me in playing with a guy like Matt Cameron [Pearl Jam drummer] who loves those odd time signatures. I saw Devo last fall on their farewell tour and it was spectacular, better than ever.
PUBLIC IMAGE LTD
Second Edition
VIRGIN/ISLAND, 1979
I bought the first PiL record and I didn’t love it because it didn’t sound like Sex Pistols. But when I saw them on American Bandstand, it made me buy the second record, and now that probably gets played more than anything I own. There’s something hypnotic about it – it’s almost like watching a movie. Jah Wobble was a huge influence on my bass-playing. He was like a non-musician with a lot of attitude, picking up an instrument and making it his own by doing something totally original with it. I love listening to how he played on that record because it’s raw, but he’s very sure of his playing. It’s the strongest part of the music.
BRIAN ENO
Discreet Music
OBSCURE, 1975
In college, there was a group of older punk rockers that were always playing Roxy Music and the Brian Eno solo records. I didn’t really get it because I was into Black Flag at the time, but shortly afterwards I really got into Music For Airports and Discreet Music. I have a huge crush on Brian Eno, so I was having a hard time picking one record… there’s also The Pearl, the Harold Budd collab which I absolutely love. In my off-time I make ambient music at home, so there’s something about all those records that really hit me hard. He has such strong melodies, and I think that’s probably why he’s such a sought-after producer – he knows how to pull that out of bands.
IDLES
Joy As An Act Of Resistance
PARTISAN, 2018
When I heard that record, it was the first time since the hardcore movement where I was like, ‘Holy shit, this has every bit of the power and the economy and the vulnerability that Black Flag had.’ Most of the punk rock stuff in between didn’t really do it for me. But I saw Idles on tour in Seattle and I’ve been a huge fan ever since. I love how they play with a sparseness – there’s almost like a Wire / Gang Of Four element, the way that they don’t play over the top of each other, there’s just a stabbing of instruments. And they’re getting better and better. There’s not very many bands where I just can’t wait for the next record, but Idles are one of those bands.
Pearl Jam’s Dark Matter is out now on Monkeywrench/Republic
Mercury Rev, MJ Lenderman, John Murry & Michael Timmins and more appear on our On The Highway compilation
All copies of the September 2024 issue of Uncut come with a free, 15-track CD – On The Highway – that showcases the wealth of great new music on offer this month, from Mercury Rev, MJ Lenderman and John Murry & Michael Timmins to Enumclaw, Harlem Gospel Travelers and Krononaut. Now dive in…
1 Enumclaw Not Just Yet This young group from Tacoma, Washington state, summon up a mighty noise to kick us off this month. Taken from their second album Home In Another Life, “Not Just Yet” careens headlong like a thrilling amalgamation of Drive-By Truckers and Nirvana.
2 MJ Lenderman She’s Leaving You Still just 25 years old, Lenderman’s reputation has been growing for years now, most notably with his 2022 album Boat Songs and his work with Wednesday. Manning Fireworks is his latest record, and full of literate, lilting indie-rock like this delight.
3 Nick Lowe Different Kind Of Blue Indoor Safari is the first Lowe album in a decade, a set of new songs and reworked demos recorded with his loyal Los Straitjackets band. Here’s a sultry, lush ballad, originally written for 2001’s The Convincer.
4 X Big Black X The LA punks are bidding farewell with their final album, Smoke & Fiction, before a goodbye tour. Naturally, the album is a victory lap rather than a late-in-the-day reinvention, and tracks such as this one find John Doe and Exene Cervenka as blood-pressure-elevating as ever.
5 Nathan Bowles Trio Gimme My Shit Nathan Bowles, Rex McMurry and Casey Toll have united as an instrumental cosmic-folk trio on Are Possible, their first album together. This highlight lopes along for a brilliant eight-and-a-half minutes, Bowles’ banjo incessant and chiming.
6 El Khat La WaLa Led by former classical cellist Eyal El Wahab, the Arab-Jewish outfit, now based in Berlin, conjure up a thrilling maelstrom of sound with homemade junkyard instruments and Middle Eastern ululations. Here’s one of the peaks of their new LP, Mute.
7 Amy Rigby Last Night’s Rainbow Hang In There With Me is the latest from this New York State-based indie-folk singer-songwriter, and another demonstration of her peerless abilities. In just two minutes, she weaves a tale of the dull ordinary world and the occasional magic that can enliven our lives.
7 Amy Rigby Last Night’s Rainbow Hang In There With Me is the latest from this New York State-based indie-folk singer-songwriter, and another demonstration of her peerless abilities. In just two minutes, she weaves a tale of the dull ordinary world and the occasional magic that can enliven our lives.
8 John Murry & Michael Timmins Silver Or Lead New documentary The Graceless Age: The Ballad Of John Murry is charmingly soundtracked by Murry himself, teaming up with Cowboy Junkie Timmins. Here’s a fragile, sparse version of his A Short History Of Decay track, with Murry in the moment in the studio.
9 Moon Diagrams Fragment Rock When he’s not drumming in Deerhunter, Moses Archuleta makes diverse, occluded music as Moon Diagrams. Cemetery Classics is his second album, co-produced by James Ford, and songs like “Fragment Rock” come enigmatically shrouded in echo and reverb.
10 Mercury Rev Ancient Love Born Horses is the first proper Rev album since 2015’s The Light In You, and it showcases a partially changed group. There are new members, Jonathan Donahue’s vocals are deeper and darker, and the music is more synth-based and new age, as the floating “Ancient Love” shows.
11 The Jesus Lizard Alexis Feels Sick Another returning group, this Texas/Chicago noise-rock outfit are back with their first album since 1998’s Blue. They haven’t changed a bit, as this slice of raging, lopsided garage suggests. Check out page 10 to hear from them.
12 Peter Cat Recording Co Suddenly New Delhi’s finest indie-rockers, this group led by Suryakent Sawhney mix colourful genres with ease on their new album Beta: on this track, as our reviewer writes, the group take “The Beach Boys to a tropical nightclub”.
13 Myles Cochran Making Something Out Of Nothing Raised in Kentucky and now resident in the UK, Cochran creates his own brand of ambient Americana on his new, second album You Are Here. It’s cinematic at times, with echoes of Brian Eno, Ry Cooder and Bruce Langhorne.
14 Harlem Gospel Travelers Somebody’s Watching You This New York trio delve through the archives of lost gospel-soul treasures, assisted by producer and mentor Eli ‘Paperboy’ Reed, and reshape in their own, more modern image. Rhapsody is their latest LP, the follow-up to 2021’s acclaimed Look Up!.
15 Krononaut Silver Silver (Edit) Guitarist Leo Abrahams and drummer Martin France come from different worlds – in short, experimental ambient and jazz – but their second collaboration as Krononaut once again marries their skills perfectly, with the result at once propulsive, drifting and gently psychedelic.
The 13-track album will be available from Thursday, August, on limited edition vinyl at all Third Man stores with a wider vinyl release at select independent record stores, as well as a global digital release, following on Friday, August 2.
The album was recorded, produced, and mixed by White at his Third Man Studio throughout 2023 and 2024, pressed to vinyl at Third Man Pressing, and released by Third Man Records.
Drive-By Truckers are an American institution: alt.country punks turned Southern rock revivalists, grizzled latter-day flag-wavers for the 20th-century indie idealism Michael Azerrad documented in This Band Can Be Your Life, and a crucible of world-class songwriting talent that includes ex-Trucker Jason Isbell and founding fathers Patterson Hood and Mike Cooley. Over the course of 14 studio albums and almost three decades of hardscrabble touring, the group has honed a sound and sensibility that’s ragged, steaming, sentimental, political, smartass, heartfelt and heartbreaking, with hollered harmonies and white-knuckle guitar jams owing more to Lynyrd Skynyrd than the Allman Brothers, while also invoking Neil Young & Crazy Horse, old-time string bands and the Southern soul music forged at Alabama’s historic FAME and Muscle Shoals Sound studios (both of which employed Hood’s bass-playing father David in pivotal roles).
The Truckers also made one of the 21st century’s greatest concept albums. Released a day after the 9/11 attacks in 2001, Southern Rock Opera is an epic tale of a doomed musician that also made a potent political statement on “the duality of the Southern thing” (a coinage the album introduced) – the problematic mix of pride and shame that informs, many would say warps, the cultural identity of the American South. The story of Southern Rock Opera’s creation is nearly as epic as the album’s semi-fictional narrative, and it’s documented in this impressive, overdue and yet timely reissue, a double-turned-triple LP with added outtakes, unreleased overflow songs, live cuts and a meaty new essay by loquacious ringleader Patterson Hood.
The condensed backstory goes like this. After a couple of well-received albums recorded on the cheap, the Truckers get a crazy notion to create a magnum opus, which began as a brainstorm for a movie about a fictional band called Betamax Guillotine, with a narrative drawn in part from the real-life story of Lynyrd Skynyrd – whose guitarist and songwriter Ronnie Van Zant, as legend incorrectly but provocatively had it, was beheaded by a flying VCR in the plane crash that killed him and other band-members in 1977. The story would also be colored by Hood’s “near-phobia”, as he writes in the reissue notes, of dying on tour in a van accident, as happened to fellow musicians in the Southern indie band The Jody Grind in 1992.
With the death of the famously racist Alabama politician George Wallace in 1998, the storyline ballooned to include him, the Devil, the legacy of the Jim Crow South, Neil Young and more. The stress of the album project coincided with, and no doubt contributed to, collapsed marriages, internal feuding and bouts of poverty that nearly destroyed the band. But after self-financing the $7000 recording (made on the now-defunct Hi8 audiocassette format), releasing the CDs themselves and taking the album out on the road, Southern Rock Opera was wildly well-received, changing the course of the band’s career. In 2024, the record remains as powerful as ever, with its triple guitar assault and disturbingly current themes, from the dangers of life on the road to the special place in hell it posits for “kiss-ass politicians who pander to assholes.”
By today’s standards, Act 1 should perhaps begin with a trigger warning. It opens with “Days Of Graduation”, Hood’s explicit narration of a bloody car wreck delivered in a distorted voice suggesting a police radio dispatcher. That’s the introduction to “Ronnie And Neil”, a song unpacking a famous songwriter beef that, in 1970s American rock’n’roll terms, was no less seismic than this year’s Kendrick Lamar vs Drake dust-up. Lynyrd Skynyrd’s “Sweet Home Alabama”, of course, was an answer record to Young’s “Southern Man” and “Alabama,” songs confronting the uglier legacies of the American South. Hood’s offering is no less bold, invoking the 1963 Birmingham church bombings that killed four black girls (a turning point in the Civil Rights movement) alongside an image of Aretha Franklin coming to Alabama “to record that sweet soul music / to get that Muscle Shoals sound.” If some verses are less than factually accurate – it’s maybe a stretch to say Van Zant and Young became “good friends,” or that “Neil helped carry Ronnie in his casket to the ground” – the song still amply supports Hood’s narrative argument that “Us Southern men need both of them around.”
Southern Rock Opera, too, was an album that needed both its songwriters. Mike Cooley may log fewer tracks than Hood (five to the latter’s 14, including one co-write), but his are in some ways the album’s emotional heart, palate-cleansers that arguably function as standalones better than Hood’s. Indeed, the record’s most-streamed songs on Spotify are both Cooley’s: “Women Without Whiskey”, a boozy fist-pumper that conjures a losing battle with problem drinking; closely followed by “Zip City”, an affectingly frank jam about adolescent male sexual frustration, questionable as some of its verses might be by current standards.
But Hood is the big-picture conceptualist, a word-drunk storyteller who introduces the three-minute long “Wallace” – a jaunty number recalling Rickie Lee Jones’ “Chuck E’s In Love” sung in the voice of the Devil welcoming the deceased Governor Wallace to his new home – with a near seven-minute spoken word track (“The Three Great Alabama Icons”) that rocks even harder. And after Cooley sings the rollicking “Shut Up And Get On The Plane”, Hood gets the album’s final word with the rave-up “Greenville To Baton Rouge” and “Angels And Fuselage”, a Crazy Horse-scented slowburner that has the narrator, moments from death, pondering his choices and confessing “I’m scared shitless/ Of what’s coming next”. As bravura, knock-kneed existentialist singalongs go, it’s one helluva finale.
EXTRAS: The Deluxe Edition’s bonus LP adds leftovers from the original Betamax Guillotine sessions, including the previously unreleased Replacements-style noise ballad “Mystery Song”, and four tracks from a 2001 tour stop, including the phallocentric headbanger “Don’t Cockblock The Rock”. A 28-page book, in addition to photos and Hood’s writing (he’s as strong an essayist as a songwriter), serves as a lovely showcase for the work of the late Wes Freed, whose fantastical cartoon cover art – a Southern indie-rock version of Pedro Bell’s work on the Parliament-Funkadelic catalog – became part of the Truckers’ brand. In all, it’s a fitting reboot of an album that still has plenty to say about post-Civil War American politics, with the sort of clear-eyed insight the US could use more of. As Hood says in his essay, the album may not change anything, but perhaps it can provide “a tonic… as we rally to make a better South and better country and better world.” Cheers to that.
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The genre of collaborative albums between a younger fan and an older hero has started to take on several distinct forms in recent years. Sometimes the artists collaborate as equals, writing new songs together – take Franz Ferdinand and Sparks’ 2015’s album FFS, or Elton John’s 2010 LP with Leon Russell, The Union. Sometimes, the younger fan coaxes the older legend into writing new songs, as Jack White did with Loretta Lynn on Van Lear Rose in 2004, or as Dan Auerbach did with Dr John on 2012’s Locked Down. Then there are those collabs where the ageing legend seems barely aware he’s making an album at all, as with Richard Russell’s <Bowfinger>-style LP with Gil Scott Heron in 2010, I’m New Here.
There’s also the collaboration that’s actually a tribute in disguise, like Elvis Costello’s 2005 album with Allen Toussaint, The River In Reverse, where Costello revived seven obscure old Toussaint songs and co-wrote a few hymns to his hero. This is very much the approach that Esperanza Spalding has adopted here with Milton Nascimento.
Nascimento has been a legend of Brazilian music since the late ’60s. He absorbed some of the psychedelic innovations of his more provocative contemporaries, like Caetano Veloso and Gilberto Gil, but was more musically adventurous, mixing samba and bossa nova with the religious music of Minas Gerais where he grew up, the folksongs of Brazilian cowboys and the music of indigenous people. He also engaged with American jazz, recording several albums with Herbie Hancock and Wayne Shorter from the 1970s onwards, and has collaborated with everyone from Peter Gabriel to Duran Duran.
Now aged 81, Nascimento is pretty much retired. He no longer plays live and his only album in the last decade was another collaboration with a bass player – 2015’s Tamarear, where Dudu Lima and his jazz-rock trio persuaded Nascimento to revive some of his 1970s material. Singer and bassist Spalding, one of the leading breakout stars of American jazz in recent years, adopts a similar approach. Backed by her regular band, she duets on some of her favourite Nascimento songs, singing an octave apart from him, imitating his deliciously chewy brand of Brazilian Portuguese.
“Cais” is a track from Nascimento’s landmark 1972 album Clube Da Esquina. The original is slow and dreamy, just an acoustic guitar and light percussion; here it acquires a sense of urgency with a minimalist piano backing. “Outubro”, a dramatic, string-drenched psychedelic ballad from Nascimento’s 1969 album Courage, is transformed into a piece of mid-’70s CTI-style style funk, complete with a propulsive bassline and a terrific flute solo from Elena Pinderhughes. “Morro Velho”, a delicate, guitar-led ballad from 1967’s Travessia, becomes a dreamy piece of chamber jazz, as does “Saudade Dos Avioes Da Panair”, from the 1975 album Minas.
There are several delightfully odd cover versions. Nascimento’s world-weary growl adds a wonderful piquancy to the John Lennon section of “A Day In The Life”, here presented as a crazed, Os Mutantes-style orchestral wig-out. He duets with Dianne Reeves on a slightly overwrought version of Michael Jackson’s “Earth Song”, but one that drives home the environmental message. “When You Dream”, from Wayne Shorter’s 1985 album Atlantis, is taken into Rio carnival territory. Even better is “Saci”, a ballad by the Brazilian songwriter Guinga (who also guests on guitar), whose title refers to the black, one-legged highwayman of Brazilian myth. Guinga’s lyric presents Saci as a mysterious, gleefully disruptive spirit, here evoked by the delicate, unresolved guitar and piano chords.
Spalding has also written several songs inspired by Nascimento. Some are just fragments – “Late September” is a one-and-half-minute freakout, featuring a garrulous Shabaka Hutchings tenor sax solo; “The Way You Are” is an intriguing 44-second mantra intoned over quizzical piano chords – while others feature snippets of in-studio conversation between Spalding and Nascimento. But some are superb pieces in their own right. “Wings For The Thought Bird” is based around a flute riff that resembles birdsong, and taps into Nascimento’s most magical, folkloric material. “Get It By Now”, meanwhile, is a dense, proggy piece that recalls early ’80s Kate Bush.
Best of all is “Um Vento Passou”, a dreamy ballad filled with traditional percussion and sweeping strings, where Nascimento duets with his longtime collaborator Paul Simon: two croaky octogenarian geniuses singing in Portuguese and bringing decades of wisdom and warmth to a fine song.
This is much more of an Esperanza Spalding album than a Milton Nascimento one. But what Spalding has been able to do successfully is subsume herself into the world that Nascimento has created over the last 50 years – a dream-like realm of folkloric myth, plugged into nature’s heartbeat.
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The track is taken from Greatish Hits: I Followed My Dreams and My Dreams Said To Crawl – a compilation of tracks drawn from his five studio albums to date that’s available digitally from Bella Union today [July 31, 2024].
“I Guess Time Makes Fools of Us All” will also appear on Father John Misty’s forthcoming album which is due out later this year.
The tracklisting for Greatish Hits: I Followed My Dreams and My Dreams Said To Crawl is:
1. Nancy From Now On
2. Disappointing Diamonds Are The Rarest of Them All 3. Chateau Lobby #4 (in C for Two Virgins) 4. Goodbye Mr. Blue 5. When You’re Smiling And Astride Me 6. Mr. Tillman 7. Things It Would Have Been Helpful to Know Before the Revolution
8. Please Don’t Die 9. I’m Writing a Novel 10. Real Love Baby 11. Buddy’s Rendezvous 12. Total Entertainment Forever 13. Hollywood Forever Cemetery Sings
14. Holy Shit 15. Pure Comedy 16. I Love You, Honeybear 17. I Guess Time Just Makes Fools of Us All
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Totalling 81 tracks, the collection is due for release on October 25 via BMG.
The set includes “Star“, Ferry’s first original song to be released in over a decade, and a cover of Dylan’s “She Belongs To Me” which you can hear below.
Retrospective: Selected Recordings 1973-2023 will be released in multiple formats, including a 5CD deluxe box set featuring 81 songs, accompanied by a 100-page hardback book containing extensive new liner notes, rare and unseen photographs and imagery. A 2LP gatefold edition presents The Best Of Bryan Ferry, containing 20 songs pressed to black vinyl with variants including a green/blue vinyl pressing and a clear vinyl pressing. A 1CD version will also feature the same 20 songs and a booklet containing liner notes and photographs. An 81-track edition of the album will be released digitally.
Retrospective: Selected Recordings 1973-2023 5 CD Track Listing:
Disc One: The Best Of Bryan Ferry
1. A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall
2. These Foolish Things
3. The ‘In’ Crowd
4. Smoke Gets In Your Eyes
5. Casanova
6. Let’s Stick Together
7. Sign of the Times
8. Slave To Love
9. Don’t Stop The Dance
10. Windswept
11. Kiss and Tell
12. As Time Goes By
13. Your Painted Smile
14. I Put A Spell On You
15. Which Way To Turn
16. Knockin’ On Heaven’s Door
17. Make You Feel My Love
18. You Can Dance
19. Love Letters
20. Johnny and Mary
Disc Two: Compositions
1. Can’t Let Go
2. Tokyo Joe
3. This Island Earth
4. Love Me Madly Again
5. Limbo
6. When She Walks In The Room
7. Boys and Girls
8. Zamba
9. Chain Reaction
10. Bête Noire
11. I Thought
12. The Only Face
13. Valentine
14. Loop De Li
15. Reason or Rhyme
Disc Three: Interpretations
1. The Price of Love
2. Shame Shame Shame
3. Hold On (I’m Coming)
4. Just One Look
5. Girl of My Best Friend
6. What Goes On
7. That’s How Strong My Love Is
8. You Go To My Head
9. Where or When
10. The Way You Look Tonight
11. One Night
12. Simple Twist of Fate
13. Positively 4th Street
14. Song to the Siren
15. Fooled Around and Fell In Love
Disc Four: The Bryan Ferry Orchestra
1. Virginia Plain
2. Do The Strand
3. While My Heart Is Still Beating
4. This Island Earth
5. Bitter-Sweet
6. Dance Away
7. Zamba
8. Reason or Rhyme
9. Avalon
10. Back To Black
11. Limbo
12. Young and Beautiful
13. Love Is The Drug
14. Sign of the Times
15. Chance Meeting
Disc Five: Rare and Unreleased
1. Feel The Need
2. Mother of Pearl (Horoscope Version)
3. Don’t Be Cruel
4. I Don’t Want To Go On Without You
5. I Forgot More Than You’ll Ever Know
6. Crazy Love
7. Whatever Gets You Through The Night
8. Bob Dylan’s Dream
9. He’ll Have To Go
10. A Fool For Love
11. Lowlands Low
12. Is Your Love Strong Enough
13. Sonnet 18
14. She Belongs To Me
15. Oh Lonesome Me
16. Star (with Amelia Barratt)
Retrospective: Selected Recordings 1973-2023 Digital Track Listing:
When Stevie Nicks played in the UK in mid-July there wasn’t a dry eye in the house – and by house we mean really large park. Some of that was down to the emotional power of Stevie’s mystical pop music. Much of it, however, also derived from an emotional connection with Stevie’s friend and Fleetwood Mac colleague Christine McVie, who had died since Stevie’s last visit to the country. Images of Christine were projected; tears flowed.
It was a very soft rock moment – a testament to the enduring power of this gentle and supremely melodic music. Perhaps the stars of, say, psychedelic rock were more musically or socially controversial, but as you’ll read in this revised special edition, just because artists in this genre sold an exceptional number of albums – if you enjoy large numbers please see our sales chart on p118 – didn’t mean that they were writing vapid jingles to do so.
Think of Fleetwood Mac, turning the thorny emotional details of their private lives into generational anthems. Or Genesis, mutating in a new decade from Edwardian-era prog into clever and accessible pop. Or, most particularly, of our cover stars Steely Dan, whose huge success was surely an ironic one: two highly-intelligent liberal arts graduates transforming their social difficulty, misanthropy and esoteric musical reference into drivetime staples adored by millions.
Did they crave it? Evidently not. In his 2017 obituary for the Dan’s Walter Becker, Uncut’s David Cavanagh pointed out that the band could relish being unrelatable. Steely Dan apparently approached their song “Chain Lightning” as “a song so abstruse it could never be deciphered”. As time passed and clues were reluctantly dropped, it emerged that the song joins two Nazis at a political rally, plucking up the courage to shake Hitler’s (or perhaps any extremist leader’s) hand. After the guitar solo, we meet them again 40 years later as they travel incognito to the same site on an occult itinerary.
In this particular mission, Steely Dan may have been on their own. But as you’ll read on these pages, Soft Rock was a broad and sophisticated church. From the all-conquering Eagles to Hall and Oates, via Supertramp, Boz Scaggs, Wings and Linda Ronstadt, it was a place which embraced femininity, complexity and melody, which worked live or in the studio, and could solve problems as well as start them. Where to begin? We’ve compiled our Top 40 Soft Rock songs to get you started, a primer to Soft Rock rivalry, and a review of its legacy.
It’ll give you a peaceful, easy feeling. Enjoy the magazine. It’s out Friday but you can pre-order here now.
Roxy Music guitarist Phil Manzanera has today announced a new solo box set, compiling eleven of his remastered albums, plus bonus tracks and a 100-page book.
Among the nine previously unreleased tracks are Roxy Music’s live version of “Impossible Guitars” and Pink Floyd’s early version of “One Slip” called “Demo PM 1”.
Hear “Listen Now (Velvet Season And The Hearts Of Gold Remix)” below:
50 Years Of Music will be released on November 1; pre-order here.
Neil Young has released a trailer for his massive upcoming boxset Archives Vol III: 1976 – 1987, due for release on September 6 via Reprise Records in a number of configurations.
The 17-CD limited edition boxed set of Archives Vol III features a total of 198 musical tracks, including 121 previously unreleased versions of live, studio, mixes, or edits, and 15 previously unreleased songs, available here for the first time ever. 62 tracks have been available on various recordings. The set will be packaged in a slim folding box with a poster. Pre-order here.
In addition, a double vinyl LP-only set titled Takes, will also be available on September 6. Takes is a 16-track compilation featuring one track from each of the 16 out of the 17 CDs in the Archives Vol III box set. This collection will include 3 unreleased songs and 12 previously unreleased versions and will be the only vinyl edition to feature these songs.
A US-only limited edition 22-disc Deluxe Edition box set will also be available via the Greedy Hand Store. It features all 17 CDs, and 5 Blu-Rays which compile 11 films, 4 of which are previously unreleased. The Blu-Rays include 128 tracks, over 14 hours of film. The Deluxe Edition box also includes a 176-page book and a poster.
The music covers live performances with Crazy Horse, solo, with Nicolette Larson and with Devo and with The International Harvesters, along with unreleased studio recordings and outtakes.
NEIL YOUNG ARCHIVES VOL III Tracklisting:
Disc 1: Across The Water I (1976) Neil Young & Crazy Horse
1. Let It Shine (previously unreleased live version)
2. Mellow My Mind (previously unreleased live version)
3. Too Far Gone (previously unreleased live version)
4. Only Love Can Break Your Heart (previously unreleased live version)
5. A Man Needs a Maid (previously unreleased live version)
6. No One Seems to Know (previously unreleased live version)
7. Heart Of Gold (previously unreleased live version)
8. Country Home (previously unreleased live version)
9. Don’t Cry No Tears (previously unreleased live version)
10. Cowgirl in the Sand (previously unreleased mix)
11. Lotta Love (previously unreleased live version)
12. The Losing End (When You’re On) (previously unreleased live version)
13. Southern Man (previously unreleased live version)
14. Cortez the Killer (previously unreleased live version)
Disc 2: Across The Water II (1976):Neil Young & Crazy Horse
1. Human Highway (previously unreleased live version)
2. The Needle And The Damage Done (previously unreleased live version)
3. Stringman (previously unreleased mix)
4. Down By The River (previously unreleased live version)
5. Like a Hurricane (previously unreleased live version)
6. Drive Back (previously unreleased live version)
7. Cortez the Killer (previously unreleased live version)
8. Homegrown (previously unreleased live version)
Disc 3: Hitchhikin’ Judy (1976-1977): Neil Young
1. Rap
2. Powderfinger (previously released on Hitchhiker)
3. Captain Kennedy (previously released on Hawks & Doves, Hitchhiker and Hawks & Doves)
4. Hitchhiker (previously released on Hitchhiker)
5. Give Me Strength (previously released on Hitchhiker)
6. The Old Country Waltz (previously released on Hitchhiker)
7. Rap
8. Too Far Gone (previously released on Songs For Judy)
9. White Line (previously released on Songs For Judy)
10. Mr. Soul (previously released on Songs For Judy)
11. A Man Needs A Maid (previously released on Songs For Judy)
12. Journey Through the Past (previously released on Songs For Judy)
13. Campaigner (previously released on Songs For Judy)
14. The Old Laughing Lady (previously released on Songs For Judy)
15. The Losing End (When You’re On) (previously released on Songs For Judy)
16. Rap
17. Helpless (previously released on The Last Waltz)
18. Four Strong Winds (previously released on The Last Waltz (2002 edition))
19. Rap
20. Will To Love (previously released on American Stars ‘n Bars and Chrome Dreams)
21. Lost In Space (previously unreleased original)
Disc 4: Snapshot In Time (1977): Neil Young with Nicolette Larson & Linda Ronstadt
1. Rap
2. Hold Back The Tears (previously released on Chrome Dreams)
3. Rap
4. Long May You Run (previously unreleased version)
5. Hey Babe (previously unreleased version)
6. The Old Country Waltz (previously unreleased version)
7. Hold Back the Tears (previously unreleased version)
11. Lost In Space (previously released on Hawks & Doves)
12. Goin’ Back (previously unreleased mix)
Disc 7: Neil Young & Nicolette Larson Union Hall (1977):
1. Comes A Time (previously released on Comes A Time)
2. Love/Art Blues (previously unreleased version)
3. Rap
4. Are You Ready For the Country? (previously unreleased version)
5. Dance Dance Dance/Love is a Rose (previously unreleased version)
6. Old Man (previously unreleased version)
7. The Losing End (When You’re On) (previously unreleased version)
8. Heart Of Gold (previously unreleased version)
9. Already One (previously unreleased version)
10. Lady Wingshot (previously unreleased song)
11. Four Strong Winds (previously unreleased version)
12. Down By The River (previously unreleased version)
13. Alabama (previously unreleased version)
14. Are You Ready For the Country? (reprise) (previously unreleased version)
15. Rap
16. We’re Having Some Fun Now (previously unreleased song)
17. Rap
18. Please Help Me, I’m Falling (previously unreleased version)
19. Motorcycle Mama (previously released on Comes A Time)
Disc 8: Boarding House I (1978): Neil Young
1. Rap
2. Shots (previously unreleased live version)
3. Thrasher (previously unreleased live version)
4. The Ways of Love (previously unreleased live version)
5. Ride My Llama (previously unreleased live version)
6. Sail Away (previously unreleased live version)
7. Pocahontas (previously unreleased live version)
8. Human Highway (previously unreleased live version)
9. Already One (previously unreleased live version)
10. Birds (previously unreleased live version)
11. Cowgirl in the Sand (previously unreleased live version)
12. Sugar Mountain (previously unreleased live version)
13. Powderfinger (previously unreleased live version)
14. Comes a Time (previously unreleased live version)
Disc 9: Devo & Boarding House II (1978): Neil Young and Devo
1. Rap
2. Hey Hey, My My (Into The Black) (previously unreleased version)
3. Back to the Boarding House
4. My My, Hey Hey (Out of the Blue) (previously unreleased live version)
5. Homegrown (previously unreleased live version)
6. Down by the River (previously unreleased live version)
7. After the Gold Rush (previously unreleased live version)
8. Out Of My Mind (previously unreleased live version)
9. Dressing Room
Disc 10: Sedan Delivery (1978): Neil Young with Crazy Horse
1. Bright Sunny Day (previously unreleased song)
2. The Loner (previously released on Live Rust)
3. Welfare Mothers (previously released on Rust Never Sleeps)
4. Lotta Love (previously released on Live Rust)
5. Sedan Delivery (previously released on Rust Never Sleeps)
6. Cortez the Killer (previously released on Live Rust)
7. Tonight’s the Night (previously released on Live Rust)
8. Powderfinger (previously released on Rust Never Sleeps)
9. When You Dance, I Can Really Love (previously released on Live Rust)
10. Hey Hey, My My (Into the Black) (previously released on Rust Never Sleeps)
Disc 11: Coastline (1980-1981): Neil Young
1. Coastline (previously released on Hawks & Doves)
2. Stayin’ Power (previously released on Hawks & Doves)
3. Hawks And Doves (previously released on Hawks & Doves)
4. Comin’ Apart at Every Nail (previously released on Hawks & Doves)
5. Union Man (previously released on Hawks & Doves)
6. Winter Winds (previously unreleased song)
7. Southern Pacific (previously released on RE-AC-TOR.)
8. Opera Star (previously released on RE-AC-TOR.)
9. Rapid Transit (previously released on RE-AC-TOR.)
10. Sunny Inside (previously unreleased original)
11. Surfer Joe and Moe the Sleaze (previously released on RE-AC-TOR.)
12. Get Up (previously unreleased song)
Disc 12: Trans (1981) & Johnny’s Island (1982): Neil Young
1. Rap
2. Sample and Hold (previously released on Trans)
3. Mr. Soul (previously released on Trans)
4. Computer Cowboy (previously released on Trans)
5. We R In Control (previously released on Trans)
6. Computer Age (previously released on Trans)
7. Transformer Man (previously released on Trans)
8. Rap
9. Johnny (previously unreleased song)
10. Island In The Sun (previously unreleased song)
11. Rap
12. Silver & Gold (previously unreleased version)
13. If You Got Love (previously unreleased version)
14. Raining in Paradise (previously unreleased song)
15. Big Pearl (previously unreleased song)
16. Hold On To Your Love (previously released on Trans)
17. Soul Of A Woman (previously unreleased original)
18. Rap
19. Love Hotel (previously unreleased song)
Disc 13: Evolution (1983-1984): Neil Young
1. California Sunset (previously unreleased original)
2. My Boy (previously unreleased original)
3. Old Ways (previously unreleased version)
4. Depression Blues (previously released on Lucky 13)
5. Cry, Cry, Cry (previously released on Everybody’s Rockin’)
6. Mystery Train (previously released on Everybody’s Rockin’)
7. Payola Blues (previously released on Everybody’s Rockin’)
8. Betty Lou’s Got A New Pair Of Shoes (previously released on Everybody’s Rockin’)
9. Bright Lights, Big City (previously released on Everybody’s Rockin’)
10. Rainin’ In My Heart (previously released on Everybody’s Rockin’)
11. Get Gone (previously unreleased original)
12. I Got A Problem (previously unreleased original)
13. Hard Luck Stories (previously unreleased original)
14. Your Love (previously unreleased version)
15. If You Got Love (previously unreleased version)
16. Razor Love (previously unreleased original)
Disc 14: Grey Riders (1984-1986): Neil Young with The International Harvesters
1. Amber Jean (previously unreleased original)
2. Get Back To The Country (previously unreleased original)
3. Are You Ready For The Country? (previously released on A Treasure)
4. It Might Have Been (previously released on A Treasure)
5. Bound For Glory (previously released on A Treasure)
6. Let Your Fingers Do the Walking (previously released on A Treasure)
7. Soul of a Woman (previously released on A Treasure)
8. Misfits (Dakota) (previously unreleased live version)
9. Nothing is Perfect (previously unreleased version)
10. Time Off For Good Behavior (previously unreleased song)
11. This Old House (previously unreleased original)
12. Southern Pacific (previously released on A Treasure)
13. Interstate (previously unreleased live version)
14. Grey Riders (previously released on A Treasure)
Disc 15: Touch The Night (1984): Neil Young with Crazy Horse
1. Rock (previously unreleased song)
2. So Tired (previously unreleased song)
3. Violent Side (previously unreleased live version)
4. I Got A Problem (previously unreleased live version)
5. Your Love (previously unreleased song)
6. Barstool Blues (previously unreleased live version)
7. Welfare Mothers (previously unreleased live version)
8. Touch The Night (previously unreleased live version)
Disc 16: Road Of Plenty (1984-1986): Neil Young
1. Drifter (previously released on Landing On Water)
2. Hippie Dream (previously released on Landing On Water)
3. Bad News Beat (previously released on Landing On Water)
4. People On The Street (previously released on Landing On Water)
5. Weight of the World (previously released on Landing On Water)
6. Pressure (previously released on Landing On Water)
7. Road of Plenty (previously unreleased song)
8. We Never Danced (previously unreleased original)
9. When Your Lonely Heart Breaks (previously unreleased original)
Disc 17: Summer Songs (1987): Neil Young
1. Rap
2. American Dream (previously unreleased original)
3. Someday (previously unreleased original)
4. For The Love Of Man (previously unreleased original)
5. One Of These Days (previously unreleased original)
6. Wrecking Ball (previously unreleased original)
7. Hangin On A Limb (previously unreleased original)
8. Name Of Love (previously unreleased original)
9. Last Of His Kind (previously unreleased original)
10. Rap
Blu-Ray 1:
Across The Water
Blu-Ray 2:
Boarding House
Rust Never Sleeps
Blu-Ray 3:
Human Highway
Trans
Berlin
Blu-Ray 4:
Solo Trans
Catalyst
A Treasure
Blu-Ray 5:
In A Rusted Out Garage
Muddy Track
Takes (vinyl only)Tracklisting:
Side A: 1.Hey Babe (previously unreleased version) (From: Snapshot In Time: Neil Young with Nicolette Larson & Linda Ronstadt)
2.Drive Back (previously unreleased live version) (From: Across The Water II: Neil Young & Crazy Horse)
3.Hitchhikin’ Judy (From: Hitchhikin’ Judy: Neil Young) 4.Let It Shine (previously unreleased live version) (From: Across The Water I: Neil Young & Crazy Horse)
Side B:
1. Sail Away (previously unreleased original)(From: Windward Passage: The Ducks)
2. Comes A Time (previously unreleased version) (From: Oceanside Countryside: Neil Young)
3. Lady Wingshot (previously unreleased song) (From: Union Hall: Neil Young & Nicolette Larson)
4. Thrasher (previously unreleased live version) (From: Boarding House I: Neil Young)
Side C:
1. Hey Hey, My My, (Into The Black) (From: Boarding House II: Neil Young)
2. Bright Sunny Day (previously unreleased song) (From: Sedan Delivery: Neil Young with Crazy Horse)
3. Winter Winds (previously unreleased song) (From: Coastline: Neil Young)
4. If You Got Love (previously unreleased version) (From: Trans/Johnny’s Island: Neil Young)
Side D:
1. Razor Love (From: Evolution: Neil Young)
2. This Old House (previously unreleased original) (From: Grey Riders: Neil Young and The International Harvesters)
3. Barstool Blues (previously unreleased live version) (From: Touch The Night: Neil Young with Crazy Horse)
4. Last Of His Kind (previously unreleased original) (From: Summer Songs: Neil Young)
Electric Lady Studios: A Jimi Hendrix Vision – a new documentary and box set chronicling the creation of the New York recording studio and Hendrix’ work there – will be released on September 13, by Experience Hendrix L.L.C., in partnership with Legacy Recordings.
The deluxe box set contains 39 tracks (38 previously unreleased) that were recorded by the new-look Jimi Hendrix Experience (Billy Cox on bass, Mitch Mitchell on drums) at Electric Lady Studios between June and August of 1970.
The set also includes 20 newly created 5.1 surround sound mixes of the entire First Rays Of The New Rising Sun album plus three bonus tracks: “Valleys Of Neptune”, “Pali Gap” and “Lover Man”.
The Blu-ray includes the full-length documentary Electric Lady Studios: A Jimi Hendrix Vision, featuring interviews with Steve Winwood, Billy Cox and original Electric Lady staff members. The documentary includes never-before-seen footage. The package includes an extensive booklet filled with unpublished photos, Hendrix’s handwritten song drafts and comprehensive liner notes.
You can pre-order the set here, meanwhile all confirmed worldwide theatrical bookings for the film can be found here.
You can watch the new music video for “Angel [Take 7]” below.
Jane’s Addiction have shared a new track, “Imminent Redemption“. It’s the first new music from the original line-up for 34 years. You can hear it below.
Speaking on the new single, singer Perry Farrell, guitarist Dave Navarro, drummer Stephen Perkins and bassist Eric Avery said – “It is different this time. To have everyone back together, releasing new music. It’s time. Welcome to the next chapter of Jane’s Addiction. Imminent Redemption is only the beginning.”
The band released three records – 1987’s self-titled live album, 1988’s Nothing Shocking and 1990’s Ritual De Lo Habitual – before their initial break-up in 1991.
The track is taken from The Night The Zombies Came – their first new music since 2022’s Doggerel – which is released on October 25 via BMG.
The Night The Zombies Came features new bass player Emma Richardson (Band Of Skulls) and has been produced by Tom Dalgety, who’s worked on the band’s since 2016’s Head Carrier.
The tracklisting for The Night the Zombies Came is…
Primrose
You’re So Impatient
Jane (The Night the Zombies Came)
Chicken
Hypnotised
Johnny Good Man
Motoroller
I Hear You Mary
Oyster Beds
Mercy Me
Ernest Evans
Kings of the Prairie
The Vegas Suite
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The place: New York City. The date: January 2001. In the financial district, the Twin Towers stand tall. Somewhere in town, a band of young hopefuls calling themselves The Strokes are preparing to release their debut EP “The Modern Age”. But tonight, your Uncut correspondent is at the Mercury Lounge in Manhattan, watching a bill of local underground up-and-comers. Later, the Moldy Peaches will reduce the crowd to hysterics with their wry hipster folk. But first up is a duo going by the name of Avey Tare and Panda Bear. The pair dart around the floor, triggering electronics, bashing away at percussion and singing in strange, otherworldly cries. It’s a captivating performance, teeming with ideas. But right now, at least, it feels way out of step with the zeitgeist: a glimpse of something strange going on way out at the margins.
What a difference eight years makes. As 2009 dawns, Avey Tare and Panda Bear – real names Dave Portner and Noah Lennox – and their friend Brian Weitz, aka Geologist, are most talked-about band in indie rock. This is thanks to their eighth album under the name Animal Collective, Merriweather Post Pavilion – 12 tracks of bright neo-psychedelia threading together dub and African rhythms, soaring Beach Boys harmonies and shimmering rave, housed in a bright leaf-covered sleeve drawing employing the Japanese psychologist Akiyoshi Kitaoka’s concept of illusory motion. The album debuts at No 13 on the Billboard 200 a couple of places below Mariah Carey, which is unusual enough. But perhaps even more surprising is that its momentum seems to build and build throughout the year. There are late-night TV appearances, rapturously received performances at Glastonbury, Sonar and Lollapalooza, and critical acclaim from all quarters – including from Uncut, whose critics vote Merriweather… the best album of 2009.
Did Animal Collective change to get here? Undoubtedly, but it was an evolution, rather than a full-on metamorphosis. What’s striking is that the wider world, it seemed, had now tuned into their wavelength. The preceding years of the noughties had seen the rise of ‘landfill indie’ – a string of bands taking the formula set down by The Strokes and diluting it into something increasingly tired and generic. It had also seen the explosion of peer-to-peer filesharing and the rise of MP3 blogs, breeding a new generation of open-minded and omnivorous listeners. This was the landscape that “Brother Sport” dropped into when it leaked online in November 2008. A euphoric swirl of technicolour electronics, carnival drums and vocal harmonies that tumbled over one another like a troupe of circus gymnasts, it felt both more accessible than anything they’d done before, and crammed with possibilities: a yellow brick road leading somewhere new.
If Merriweather… felt surprising on its release, it still has the capacity to surprise 15 years on. The band had been workshopping its songs live for over a year when they entered Mississippi’s Sweet Tea studio in early 2008, further refining an electronic, sample-based sound that Lennox had debuted on his 2007 solo album as Panda Bear, Person Pitch. The album still sounds distinctive, occupying as it does a strange and vivid soundworld. Much of it has a sharp, shimmering quality – listen to a song like the opening ticker-tape explosion “In The Flowers” and it’s all up in the higher registers. But “Lion In A Coma” and “Guys Eyes” come with a low-end thump that, played on a good system, hit you right in the chest – a quality enhanced by the album’s co-producer Ben Allen, an Atlanta recording engineer who had honed his craft on records by Notorious BIG and Cee-Lo Green.
The other thing that strikes you about Merriweather… is the warmth of sentiment running through it. Lennox really finds his voice here – a clear and plaintive cry, which he multitracks into harmonies recalling The Beach Boys at their most wistful and reflective. He and Portner also come with songs that, either by accident or design, seamed to speak to the current generational moment. Merriweather… landed amid an unfolding global financial crisis that saw millennials facing a bleak future of limited job prospects and withering opportunities. In this context, the carefree romance of “Summertime Clothes” or Lennox’s “My Girls” – a rejection of material wealth and social status that longed only for “four walls and adobe slats for my girls” – felt like a balm.
Like so many surprise hits from the indie underground, Merriweather Post Pavilion made Animal Collective reluctant stars. It brought a lot of new listeners into the tent, not all of whom ultimately vibed with the group’s more bristly, experimental qualities. Over releases like 2010’s “visual album” ODDSAC and 2012’s Centipede HZ – both made with returning member Josh Dibb, aka Deakin, back in the fold – they got more awkward and feral again, gradually retreating to a more comfortable spot on the margins. But the success of Merriweather… left a mark. Its breadth of influence and adventurous sonic signature changed the culture, opening a portal through which a wider cohort of adventurous experimental groups – the likes of Deerhunter and Tuneyards, Dirty Projectors and Gang Gang Dance – would scurry into the mainstream. And it changed indie rock forever, into something wilder, braver, weirder. Fifteen years on, the reverberations are still being felt.
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Every Wednesday afternoon, Jake Xerxes Fussell hosts a radio show with his pal Jefferson Currie II on WHUP FM, a community station in Hillsborough, North Carolina. They play songs from far and wide – a recent episode moved quite naturally from Bob Dylan’s “Hearts Of Fire” to Nigerian soul music to Swedish fiddle to June Tabor singing “Pork Pie Hat” – but they have a particular passion for songs of the American south, interpreted in the most expansive sense. Though they are both learned students of American folklore, they’re at pains to distance themselves from hidebound notions of authenticity and antiquity. “As much as we cherish our pre-war blues 78s and old-time fiddle tunes,” they insist, “we also love hip-hop, bounce, banda and norteña.”
The title of the show, Fall Line Radio, is taken from a geological term for those areas where piedmont highlands meets the coastal plains (Jefferson has a day job in conservation as riverkeeper of the Lumber River). Fall lines are marked by rapids and waterfalls, powering mills and hydro-electrics power plants. They traditionally mark the limits of upstream travel, and they’re the place where different flora, fauna and cultures meet. “We’re intrigued by junctions of such seemingly incongruous elements and the wonderful, endless alluvium to which they give rise,” the pair note wryly, as though adjusting mock-professorial spectacles.
Over the past decade, Jake Xerxes Fussell has been patiently, diligently and beautifully charting his own particular fall line through American folk musics. Fussellania, if we might give a name to the territory, is rooted in Georgia’s Chattahoochee Valley where he grew up, the son of folklorists himself, but it expands wildly across borders of time and space, from Florida fishmongers to Irish rovers, from the North Carolina mills to the Mexico hills, from ancient highland ballads to singing schoolteachers from the Ozarks.
But the alluvium has never been quite so rich and strange as it on his fifth album, his first for Fat Possum, When I’m Called. It’s a record that begins way out on the west coast, with a lonesome but determined painter saddling up his pony, cantering right across the country to East 47th Street, Manhattan, and showing up like Jon Voight in Midnight Cowboy to bring Andy Warhol the news that there’s a new art sheriff in town.
The title track, meanwhile, adapted from lines found in a discarded schoolbook at the side of a Californian highway (“I will answer when I’m called / I will not breakdance in the hall / I will not laugh when the teacher calls my name”), is an eerie folk song that might be sung by Bart Simpson if he grew up to be the last of the high plains drifters.
Elsewhere, the album travels back in time to the Prestatyn classroom where Benjamin Britten composed “Cuckoo!” for schoolboys’ singing classes in the 1930s, back deeper into the dark green forest of English song with the traditional “Who Killed Poor Robin”, up to Milngavie to meet a couple of 18th century wastrels who prefer the alehouse to the job market, out to Alabama where “the water tastes like cherry wine”, and venturing even as far as Ilo, Peru on the sea shanty “Gone To Hilo”, before eventually touching down back home in Georgia.
That’s to say, there’s a new liberty and licence to Fussell’s musical freewheeling, but also a sense of longing for home after long nights roaming the highways and byways of song. Since his last record, 2022’s lush yet forlorn Good And Green Again, Fussell has become a father. As a result, there are dreamy flights of lullaby to some of the tunes here – the skylarking string arrangement on “Cuckoo”, the murder mystery of “Poor Robin” – as though he’s gently inducting a third generation of Fussells into the lore and mystery of the great traditional songbook. But there’s also a rueful reckoning with the temptations of the road (both “One Morning In May” and the closing “Going To Georgia” warn young maidens to “never place your affections on a green, growing tree”), and a sense of regret that professional obsessions can end up taking you far from the family home.
When I’m Called is the second album Fussell has made with James Elkington, the English home counties fingerpicker who has somehow, through his work with Wilco, Steve Gunn, Nathan Salsburg and Joan Shelley, established himself as a linchpin of modern Americana. If those early albums had a raggedy wildness to them, rowdy with the smell of pork and beans, the clang of the shipyards and the blare of the marketplace, on Good And Green Again Elkington brought a verdant, dappled orchestration to Fussell’s songworld. It’s like the polar opposite of field recording – these battered, barnacled, ancient songs ascending from the soil, river and rails to some lambent, reverbed Daniel Lanois dream realm.
On When I’m Called, the contrast is even more pronounced. Album opener “Andy” was composed by Gerald “The Maestro” Gaxiola, the aircraft mechanic who reinvented himself as the Bay Area’s answer to Vincent Van Gogh, a sharp-shooting outsider artist in rhinestone. Listen to the original, on the Maestro’s 1986 cassette Go’n To New York, and the Bontempi rhythms suggest a kind of jaunty, downhome John Shuttleworth auditioning for Canned Heat. Fussell’s stately fingerpicking interpretation renders it sadder and spookier; the line “You can tell Andy Warhol the ghost rider’s on his way” sounds ominous rather than funny.
The version of “Cuckoo” that follows is sublime, with Fussell’s plainspoken baritone gilded with Joan Shelley’s harmonies, his fingerpicking augmented by piano, horns and strings. There’s a curatorial genius in placing an off-kilter maverick like the Maestro next to the lionised establishment genius of Britten, but the question lingers, does introducing them to each other within the frame of a single album cause new sparks to fly, or simply gloss over what makes them distinctive, flatten out their differences into a kind of mellow tastefulness? Is Fussell the musical equivalent of one of those publishing imprints like NYRB Classics that reprints neglected, out-of-print volumes in handsome but uniform new editions?
In practice, it’s hard to quibble with such a gorgeous, deeply felt record. While Good And Green Again was distinguished by a trio of Fussell instrumentals, strictly speaking there are no originals this time around. But “When I’m Called” is the boldest in its interpretation, and perhaps tellingly the most compelling track here. It’s a very free adaptation of the venerable old folk blues “Long Lonesome Road”, so free that the playing sails off, unmoored from the anchor of song into a kind of enchanted reverie, woodwind rising like mist from a river, Elkington’s lead guitar sparking like the first scintillating rays of sun. The first verse of schoolboy penitence, the inexplicably touching detail of breakdancing in the hall, melts into the old chorus – “Look up, look down that long, lonesome road / Hang down your head and cry…” – and manages to compress an entire lifetime, its youthful mischief soured into midlife regret.
The miraculous, heartbreaking conjunction of found text and ancient lament, forged together in the alchemy of Elkington’s production, feels the most perfect realisation yet of Fussell’s project: tradition sparked back to life by unexpected everyday encounters. There’s magic and mystery still to be divined in those fall line currents, down amidst the detritus and the alluvium. At moments like this, Jake Xerxes Fussell remains our finest musical mudlarker.
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The film stars Timothée Chalamet as Dylan – here’s some blurb about it.
Set in the influential New York music scene of the early 60s, A COMPLETE UNKNOWN follows 19-year-old Minnesota musician BOB DYLAN’s (Timothée Chalamet) meteoric rise as a folk singer to concert halls and the top of the charts – his songs and mystique becoming a worldwide sensation – culminating in his groundbreaking electric rock and roll performance at the Newport Folk Festival in 1965.
A Complete Unknown opens in the UK and Ireland in January 2025.
Uncut readers will, of course, remember Todd Haynes‘ I’m Not There, which Uncut described as “an audaciously prismatic portrait of Dylan wholly as contrary, confrontational, playful, provocative, unpredictable, enigmatic, allusive and often just as downright funny as its subject.”
Mayall came to prominence in the ’60s with his band, the Bluesbreakers, which acted as a finishing school for the future stars of the British blues boom – including Mick Fleetwood, John McVie, Eric Clapton, Jack Bruce and Mick Taylor.
A statement on Mayall’s Instagram page announced that the musician died on Monday at his home in California. “It is with heavy hearts that we bear the news that John Mayall passed away peacefully in his California home yesterday, July 22, 2024, surrounded by his loving family. Health issues that forced John to end his epic touring career have finally led to peace for one of this world’s greatest road warriors. John Mayall gave us ninety years of tireless efforts to educate, inspire and entertain.”
Born in Macclesfield in 1933, he discovered jazz and blues through his father’s record collection. After spending three years in Korea for his National Service, Mayall studied at art college, working as a graphic designer before turning professional musician in 1963.
As part of the emerging London blues scene, encouraged by Alexis Corner and Cyril Davis, he played with the Powerhouse Four before forming the Bluesbreakers in 1963.
“There was a lot of driving,” Mayall told Uncut in 2017. “If it was within reach, we’d play it. You’d do a Friday night gig at the Flamingo, a Saturday early show, a Saturday late-night show. We’d rack up eight or nine shows a week. It was a lot of hard work, mostly just get in the van and drive to where we’re playing. But the reward comes once you get onstage and start playing.”
Famously, the Bluebreakers provided opportunities for future stars. “Everybody was given total freedom in my bands and that’s one of the things that attracts musicians to me,” he told us. “So if someone leaves, it is no big deal, it’s a natural process, and you get someone else.”
Mayall moved to California at the end of the 1960s, where he moved away from straight blues towards acoustic music and then into jazz and funk as the ’70s progressed.
He broke-up and then reformed the Bluesbreakers, releasing over 50 albums in a career spanning seven decades and continuing to tour. When Uncut spoke to Mayall, who was then 83, he was still playing 100 shows a year around the world.
“You get up onstage and you play,” he told us. “Is there much room to improvise? Yeah, of course. That’s the blues.”
Even before he formed Third ManRecords, Jack White had perfected the art of the guerilla record drop – he once hid a bunch of seven inches inside re-upholstered sofas. But he’ll have to go some way to top the release strategy for his surprise sixth album – his first new music since 2022’s Fear Of The Dawn and Entering Heaven Alive. An anonymous white label, No Name was given away free with any purchase at White’s Third Man stores on Friday while a very limited number of copies were also sent to customers at random in the mail. Its mysterious grooves contained 14 tracks of raw, fresh, fierce garage blues – seven on each side. There were no official song titles, no hint at the artist – but there was no doubt that this was the work of Jack White himself.
Although the opening song, a menacing “Killing Floor” style blues, includes the tongue-in-cheek line that “nothing is this world is free”, customers who got a copy of No Namewere encouraged by Third Man to “rip it” and the album is now freely available on You Tube. Any thoughts that this might be a gimmick are dispelled before the end of the first side, with the psych rattle of “Side One, Track Six”. By the time you reach the majestic “Side Two, Track Five”, with cool Hammond and an amazing R&B Graham Bond Organisation groove, it’s clear that this is one of the best albums of the year.
No Namehas some of White’s most memorable riffs since Blunderbuss and is his most red-blooded rock record since Elephant. White has released great solo records since then and his live shows are a blast, but he’s never sounded quite as unshackled and delirious as he does here, pounding out the sort of wild garage blues that made his name. “I’m on a mission baby,” he roars on “Side Two, Track Six” – and suddenly it’s 2001 all over again.
As well as referencing his beloved number seven on the brilliant “Side One, Track Five”, a song that manages to combine spoken word, Sabbath, Hendrix and Jon Spencer Blues Explosion, White has rifled through the White Stripes equipment warehouse. Here are some of the greatest guitar sounds heard on any record in 2024, from the new wave solo of “Side One, Track Two”, the frantic Cream-style riffs of “Side One, Track Four” and the distorted slide guitar of “Side Two, Track Two”.
Several tracks have a hard rock feel. “Side Two, Track One”, which starts like Dr Feelgood before building into a speaker-thrashing AC/DC-inspired crescendo, or the Miller’s Crossing-referencing “Side One, Track Seven”. Led Zeppelin are a major reference point, but always filtered through a punk-garage lens. The closing number, “Side Two, Track Seven”, sees White and his band (perhaps Dominic Davis on bass and Daru Jones on drums?) explore “Kashmir”-style Zep territory, while dogs howl and bark, enjoying the show. Like all great artists, White has a fear of repetition, but looking back doesn’t have to mean regression. On No Name, he’s done something special on his own terms, delighted and surprised his audience, and provided one of the great rock moments of the year.
To coincide with the release of the Official Soundtrack to Gary Hustwit’s generative film Eno, a new video has been released for the track “Stiff“, made from footage newly unearthed during the making of the documentary.
“Stiff” was originally included on the Eno album My Squelchy Life, which was due for release in 1991, but never saw the light of day in 2015.
The vinyl edition of the Official Soundtrack album comes as 2LP recycled black vinyl and 2LP pink & white vinyl (only available from Eno’s website), and a 73-minute long CD with an illustrated 16 page booklet.
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