Around this time in 2012, I came up with 40 records, released between January and June, that I liked enough to include in a six-month Best-Of list. Either I’m being more diligent, or less discerning, or else 2013 is shaping up to be a better year: as you can see, I’ve managed 67 here.
Jack White and T Bone Burnett are producing a documentary about the American recording industry during the 1920s and 1930s.
The film, which Burnett says is co-produced by Robert Redford and the BBC, will be called American Epic.
Although I’m currently watching films due for release in July – which will take us over halfway through 2013 – I’m conscious that there’s a lot of great stuff still to come during the rest of the year.
Getting it together in the suburbs seems to be a peculiarly middle class rite of passage – the moment when city living is no longer tenable and a migration in pursuit of wider spaces, cleaner living and better schools is required. Such considerations are behind the decision taken by Nathaniel and Julia Noailles, who with their young, Aspergersy son Copley exchange their life in Boston for a more spacious existence in Dolores Woods, a large development on the outskirts of an un-named Midwestern city, in Patrick Flanery’s tremendous new novel, Fallen Land.
If, as internet speculation and promo footage imply, “Tomorrow’s Harvest” has a Cold War/atomic age subtext, Boards Of Canada’s focus is, as ever, long-range and aesthetic: less on the actual devastation wrought by nuclear weapons, more on nebulous creep and on the terrible beauty of a mushroom cloud when observed from a relatively safe distance. It’s a potentially glib way of toying with signifiers: Armageddon as nature documentary.
For this week’s archive feature, we delve back into Uncut’s July 2011 issue (Take 170) – just before the release of Bon Iver’s second album – to find Vernon sunning himself in California, consorting with Kanye and shaping up as “the Neil Young of our generation”. What happened? “For Emma… is the past,” he says. “This is the present, and it’s more colourful and inviting.” Words: Alastair McKay
