I can’t pretend to know why Hot Snakes split up a year or so back, but listening to Night Marchers and, now, Obits, it doesn’t seem likely to have been much in the way of musical differences. Obits, for those of you not quite up to speed with the complexities of US punk rock’n’roll, are the new band formed by Hot Snakes/Drive Like Jehu frontman Rick Froberg after his old bandmates, lead by John Reis, headed off to become The Night Marchers.
I suppose, after all these years, I should be able to spot when PJ Harvey is taking the piss. But sometimes, as on the new PJ Harvey & John Parish album, “A Woman A Man Walked By”, the line between bravura self-parody and slightly daft self-indulgence can be hard to identify.
First off, a quick plug, since we have Crystal Antlersplaying Club Uncut tonight (Tuesday January 27) in London. Tickets still available, apparently, and the supports (The Delta Spirit and Banjo Or Freakout) are worth a look, too. Secondly, we’ve just announced that March’s headliners (after Richard Swift next month) will be Baltimore’s excellent Arbouretum, so it’s high time I wrote something about their “Song Of The Pearl” album that we’ve been playing a fair bit for the past few weeks.
Over the past year or so, the Drag City label have quietly embarked on a series of reissues whose provenance is so obscure that I’ve briefly suspected them of being exquisite fakes: my favourite reissue of this year, Suarasama’s “Fajar Di Atas Awan” from Sumatra; the incredible Gary Higgins album; JT IV and so on.
A sad start to the day, then, to be woken by news on the Today programme of Oliver Postgate’s passing. For anyone in their late thirties and early forties, Postgate’s wonderful and vivid animations were an indelible part of our childhoods. As a spokesman for BBC’s children’s channel CBeebies noted, Postgate’s great strength lay in his ability to create “worlds within worlds”, the kind of places populated by talking dragons, sentient trains, pink woollen aliens and crotchety, intellectual woodpeckers.
