A little over a month into 2012 and great new albums seem to be a-popping up all over the shop, something arriving in the post every day almost that either thrills or beguiles, demanding our attention and more often than not handsomely rewarding it.
Leonard Cohen’s Old Ideas was rightly applauded in last month's Uncut, and in the current issue similar praise is lavished on Lambchop’s Mr M, which reminds us why we have loved them for so long and also what it was in the first place that got us so excited about Kurt Wagner’s Nashville country-soul collective.
A strange night at St Giles-In-The-Fields with Tim Hecker, which turned out to be something more like a real-time sound installation rather than a concert. This, I guess, is not a new problem with organ recitals: Hecker is sat in the organ loft, playing the church’s venerable instrument while the audience sit below, with their backs to him, in complete darkness, looking at the altar, and the silhouettes of two large speaker stacks.
Phew and all that. I’ve just been listening again to the 37 minute stream of new music by Neil Young and Crazy Horse that was posted at the weekend on neilyoung.com. I’m sure there were more important things I could have been doing throughout the day, like filling in health and safety reports and similarly essential tasks. But after reading John’s Wild Mercury Blog on the Neil and Crazy Horse jams, which are titled, tantalisingly, ‘Horse Back’, I haven’t needed much encouragement to utterly neglect such housekeeping duties to further take in the roiling brilliance of Neil and Crazy Horse.
Post-war Los Angeles was doubtless a swell place to live if you were a movie star, Hollywood mogul, business tycoon, captain of industry, political big-wig, gangster or otherwise a money-bags, cosseted by wealth, not much in life you couldn’t afford.
