Jack White’s increasingly baroque love of packaging means that it takes more than one review to get to grips with a solitary release. Hence “Under Great White Northern Lights”, a package commemorating The White Stripes’ 2007 tour of Canada which, in its simplest iteration, comes as a live CD and a longform documentary DVD about the ambitious jaunt.
Jack White’s Third Man cottage industry has produced a bit of a mixed bag of releases in 2009, with the highlight thus far (of those I’ve heard, anyhow) being his own solo seven-inch, “Fly Farm Blues”. The whole disdain he seems to have for standard record company practise, the sense that decisions are made on a creative whim, is really admirable. But it can’t hide the fact that singles by, say, a local gospel group, Transit, haven’t been hugely compelling.
Joe Pug? No, I hadn’t heard of him either, before he opened tonight for The Low Anthem. Count me as a fan now, though. Pug’s a potentially major song-writing talent, as evidenced on his Nation Of Heat EP, available online and really quite brilliant. But who exactly is he?
Looking back on the blog from a few months back about The Dirty Projectors’ “Bitte Orca”, I found myself talking – like most other critics did, of course – about the contemporary R&B influence on the band, especially to the fore on “Stillness Is The Move”.
