It may be a stretch to call Joanna Newsom’s third album her down-to-earth pop record. "Have One On Me" does, after all, extend across three CDs of generally very long songs, features a harp duelling with a kora, and a dream sequence in which the singer arrives before her lover “on a palanquin made of the many bodies of beautiful women.” On the back of an elephant.
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.
It’s a dubious business, calling any band empirically ‘great’. But perhaps one indicator of greatness might be the amount of controversy and whingeing generated when a ‘Best Of’ tracklisting is announced.
If the accelerating success of Animal Collective in 2009 was weird enough, the level of anticipation surrounding their projects for 2010 must be astronomical, following the placing of “Merriweather Post Pavilion” at Number One in so many end-of-year polls.
Pricktease time here, I’m afraid. A truly amazing album arrived this week which I’m absolutely certain will be among my favourites of 2010, but due to various covert record company operations and so on, I’m not at liberty to reveal what it is just yet. Negotiations continue: I’ll write more – lots more – as soon as I can. Hold off on trying to post speculation, if you can, so I can keep this under wraps for a few more days.
There’s a very interesting feature on Vampire Weekend in last week’s New Yorker, which includes a brilliantly ridiculous encounter while the band are on tour in California. With a documentary crew in tow, Vampire Weekend set about interviewing a bunch of allegedly notable Californian musicians, and fetch up at the operations centre of Blink 182’s Tom De Longe.
First off, check this brand new Portishead track out today. It’s called “Chase The Tear”, it’s being released to support Amnesty International, and it’s right up there with anything on “Third”, if our first listens are anything to go by.
I’ve not been hugely interested in much of the end-of-the-decade stuff that’s been appearing over the past few weeks, but this piece by Simon Reynolds at the Guardian is worth a read.
