Still at that stage of the year where I nearly type 2014 every time instead of 2015, but time moves on - swifter, perhaps, than Bjork for one would've liked this week, given how an unauthorised leak forced the release of "Vulnicura" a couple of months ahead of schedule.
Some fantastic new additions here, though it's been tough these past couple of days to navigate away from the playlist that Caribou posted on Youtube: 1,000 tracks that you're advised to play on shuffle. I keep getting Wire and J Dilla every time I dig in, but it's really a constant source of familiar pleasures and usefully contextualised new discoveries.
Iggy Pop has hit out against U2 for the way they 'gifted' new album Songs Of Innocence to all iTunes users – and praised Thom Yorke for distributing a solo album via BitTorrent.
Delivering the fourth annual John Peel Lecture at the Radio Festival in Salford last night (October 13), Pop said: "The people who don't want the free U2 download are trying to say, don't try to force me. And they've got a point."
Instant albums do not, as a rule, encourage reflection. There is surprise, sometimes indignation, a social media flame war, a lot of static about delivery systems. Once the 38 minutes of, say, Thom Yorke's "Tomorrow's Modern Boxes" have passed, it can all suddenly be over. What happens next?
A month, perhaps, of surprises. On the rather intimidating new Scott Walker and Sunn O))) album, there appears to be a joke about Michael Flatley's testicles. Somewhere in the elevated aesthetics of Kate Bush's Before The Dawn, there's an equally dubious comedy routine that hinges on the punchline, "HP and mayo, it's the badger's nadgers." And then, just as we were finishing the new issue of Uncut (out today in the UK, as you may have seen), a U2 album suddenly materialised in iTunes, a bullish play to reassert them as the biggest pop group in the world.
