One today that I think might interest a few of you. “Embrace” is the debut album by a Santa Cruz sextet called Sleepy Sun, who you could place as very much part of a new wave of Californian heavy psych. Since we were talking about the area’s titan trees on Friday, this quote from the band stood out: “It comes more from Northern California itself more than any scene or city. There is truly nowhere on Earth like our little corner of the country where the redwoods smother the ocean.”
Biggish news this week, with the arrival of Neil Young’s new album, “Fork In The Road”, Neil’s collaboration with Booker T and The Drive-By Truckers, and the second solo joint by ex-Trucker Jason Isbell, which makes me feel like I’ve been moving in ever decreasing circles for the past couple of days.
According to someone nearby, Richard Swift’s band look like they’ve just come off a trawler – the sort of image I aspire to, obviously. They sound, however, quite different: at this point, uncannily like a soul harmony group, somewhere between The Miracles and The Stylistics.
It’s beginning to look as if, in certain online circles, there’s going to be quite a fuss around the new Grizzly Bear album, “Veckatimest” – comparable perhaps to the heat around the Animal Collective record at the end of last year. Security’s comparably tight around “Veckatimest” – ironic considering it was Grizzly Bear themselves who benignly leaked a couple of “Merriweather Post Pavilion” tracks – but we did manage to sneak one listen yesterday.
A combination of deadlines and a vile cold served to shut down Wild Mercury Sound these past few days, but thanks for all your blog recommendations last week. When I get a chance, I’ll follow all your links and put together a decent blogroll. In the interim, please keep your suggestions coming.
You might assume that Encounters At The End Of The World could be an agreeably apposite subtitle for many of Werner Herzog’s best known films. You could think, for instance, of Brian Sweeney Fitzgerald taking Verdi’s music to the Peruvian jungles in Fitzcarraldo; the Conquistadors lost in the Andes in Aguirre: The Wrath Of God; Grizzly Man’s activist Timothy Treadwell and his bears in the wilds of Alaska.
