I’ve never played guitar, so may not be the best person to judge, and I’m generally averse to wild comparatives and superlatives in music reviews. Watching Arbouretum last night, though – it was somewhere in the last quarter of “Song Of The Nile”, to be specific – I started to think that, just maybe, Dave Heumann might be one of the best guitarists I’ve seen play in years.
I have a good few mysterious records in my collection, as you can probably imagine. Among the more obtuse are a bunch by a shadowy New York collective called The No-Neck Blues Band. It’s not always easy to read these albums, since the band have an apparent disdain for even the most fundamental marketing expediencies. Often, their name is nowhere to be found on the package, replaced by a kind of glyph that, decoded, reads NNCK.
Plenty of interesting psych stuff accumulated here over the past few weeks, while I’ve been distracted by a bunch of other things. A bit of a roundup today, kicking off with Daughters Of The Sun, whose “Ghost With Chains” is forthcoming on Not Not Fun.
Last blog of the year, I suspect, so I thought it’d be useful to post my whole hundred in one place: apologies for the half-arsed obligation to get extra traffic which compelled me to post it in chunks, at least initially.
Allan Jones: I’m told this is a work of genius... I must admit that it’s not a record I’ve particularly warmed to myself, or engaged with, but I’m open to being persuaded otherwise.