A news story in my inbox the other day reminded me that I still hadn’t blogged on the El Guincho record, the one I’ve been alluding to on playlist blogs for a while now. I say “a while”, though in truth I was heinously late hitching up to this particular bandwagon, since most go-getting bloggers were onto “Alegranza” sometime last year, when it was first released in Spain.
A bit of shameless self-promotion today, since I’ve spent the past month or so selecting a bunch of tracks for a new CD which comes free with the new issue of Uncut, out this Thursday or thereabouts. Ostensibly, “Interstellar Overdrive” is a compilation of newish psych to coincide with our Pink Floyd cover story. Alternatively, though, it’s a bit like a Wild Mercury Sound playlist.
Residual indie prejudices can be tough to shake off and, for me, one lingered longer than most: a profound distrust of Fleetwood Mac. I read all the essays about them – and especially about Lindsey Buckingham – where they were extolled as great emotional confessors and discreet musical radicals. But their records always seemed to me the epitome of hollow decadence, redolent of a certain air-conditioned, blow-dried Hollywood vulgarity, the criticism of which is now every bit as clichéd as the original material.
Not for the first time, of course, I was wrong.
I guess if there’s an emerging newish music in Uncut’s world, it’s a kind of gauzy, harmonious strain of Americana typified this year by the Bon Iver and Fleet Foxes albums and, a little while back, by the second Grizzly Bear album. I trust you’re not sick of this stuff, because there’s another good one on the way.
A bit stretched today, with next month’s issue nearly finished and a load of fiendish strategising to be done in preparation for the Latitude festival (I’ll be blogging live from there all weekend, incidentally, over at our dedicated blog).
OK, so now it’s 101 degrees and the crowd is crawling from patch of shade to tented shelter, the mass influx of Hollywood types and music biz bigwigs (them that’s left!) arriving in limos when the sun goes down.
This week's playlist, then. The Dennis Wilson record is a bootleg, incidentally - the expanded "Pacific Ocean Blue", with the first official release of those "Bambu" tracks, is due in the office any minute now. Tonight, I'm going to see Portishead, so I'll endeavour to report back first thing tomorrow morning.
One of those professional obligation sessions in the Uncut office right now: we’re on Track Eight of the Panic At The Disco album, “Pretty. Odd”. Interest piqued by some frothing and slightly dubious suggestions that “Pretty. Odd” is a landmark of WEIRD! and AMBITIOUS! rock music, imagine our surprise when it seems to sound a bit like The Feeling and those shabby Beatles pastiches that Tears For Fears came up with in the ‘80s. We do, however, have new records by Paul Weller, Peter Walker and James Blackshaw.
A load of new stuff again this week, much of it pretty interesting. The Brethren Of The Free Spirit, incidentally, are a duo featuring the guitarist James Blackshaw, who's received much love here over the past year.
