It can be quite easy to be sceptical about the endless wave of deluxe reissues that come Uncut’s way most weeks: classic, economical albums stretched over two discs, full of variegated b-sides and out-takes that rarely add much to an artist’s story, really. I am, of course, a big enough nerd to get excited about, say, the juggled alternate mix of Love’s “Forever Changes” that arrived recently. But to be honest, listening to this stuff is like watching a good documentary on BBC4; at the end of it, I feel like I know more about an esoteric corner of history, but I hardly need to watch it again.
I'm just playing an old record by the great folk/psych/raga guitarist Peter Walker, who has recently returned to action after nearly 40 years of, as far as I can tell from a quick circuit round the internet, practising flamenco guitar. Amazingly, Walker - one of the few survivors of John Fahey's generation of American primitives, and the man who provided musical accompaniment to Timothy Leary's early experiments - is playing just down the road from me in Dalston, North-East London tonight.
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.
Someone from a site called Splicetoday spammed one of my old REM blogs last week, posting a link to an interesting compare-and-contrast piece on both “Accelerate” and Mark Kozelek’s new Sun Kil Moon album, “April”. It reminded me, amongst other things, that I’d been sleeping on the Sun Kil Moon record; that maybe the embracing familiarity of Kozelek’s latest doleful epic had made me take it for granted. Or maybe it was just that I’d been listening to it on one of those moody secure streams, and today a CD arrived.
The playlist comes a bit earlier than usual this week, since we've been finishing the next issue today, and I haven't had a chance to write a proper preview. You probably should know, though, that the new Fall album on first listen appears to include, besides the usual murky paranoia, a faintly jazzy song about crows (and possibly "J-Loaded Brown", though we could have misheard that) called "Alton Towers".
That time of the week again. Here are the records that we've played over the last day and a bit in the Uncut office. One thing here worth explaining: Retribution Gospel Choir are fronted by Low's Alan Sparhawk and produced by Mark Kozelek.
