Indholdsfortegnelse for January 2018 i UNCUT

Domino was notoriously shy around his female fans ANTOINE Domino Jr was just starting to play around New Orleans in the 1940s whe bandleader Billy Diamond christened him Fats. The nickname not only stuck, but informed his career-making first single, “The Fat Man", in 1949. Derived from an old tune by the local boogie-woogie player Champion Jack Dupree – except without all the original references to reefer – the song made Domino’s weight a part of his brand. “They call me the Fat Man ’cos I weigh 200lbs,” Domino sings by way of introduction. “All the girls they love me ’cosI know my way around.” There’s a wink in his voice, a bit of humour in his delivery, but the assertive lyrics aren’t even the main draw. Domino’s left hand…

A couple of major new Uncut spin-offs have just arrived in the shops. Our latest Ultimate Music Guide is dedicated to Steely Dan , with classic interviews and in-depth new reviews of every Dan, Becker and Fagen album. Major dudes should also be interested in Ultimate Record Collection , our guide explaining how to buy over 1,500 of the greatest albums of the last 60 years, on vinyl, right now! Buy these, and many more of our specials, from nme.backstreetmerch.  com/artist/uncut/ magazines. A new collection of Leonard Cohen ‘s unpublished work is to be officially released next October under the title, The Flame . Cohen himself chose and ordered the poems in the book, of which “the overwhelming majority” is…

“A 12-piece flute section would meet at my cabin” YOU’VE spoken about the “cross-generational, cross-Atlantic” musical conversation you had with Arca. Was there a moment that felt like a breakthrough, where he inspired you to go further, try something new or rediscover something old? Perhaps it was most surprising when he brought up old songs, instrumentals that were his favourite of mine and we kinda used it as a starting point. Songs like “Ambergris March”. I wanted the album to be like air, so there was air everywhere, in the lyrics, my voice, and flutes, and where flutes change into synths and synths into flutes. And I found an old B-side of mine, “Batabid”, which I used as reference, too. At one point I found a loop on an old…

ANGELICA ROCKNE Queen Of San Antonio SELF-RELEASED 8/10 ANGELICA ROCKNE has prior form as vocalist with San Francisco’s Evil Eyes, a band that skirted the edges of shoegaze and psych-rock. On the evidence of Queen Of San Antonio, however, her true métier is country, specifically the cosmic kind patented down the coast by the Flying Burrito Brothers and Gram Parsons in the late ’60s, a nebulous territory where Bakersfield and LA noir collide. It’s an album that serves as an allusive travelogue, Rockne’s songs shifting from dirt roads to border towns, from Old West saloons to the edge of Canada and on down to Louisiana. Her characters tend to be caught in restless states of transition, looking for solutions to emotional crises in all the wrong places, torn between wanderlust…

NEW ALBUMS ROBERT FINLEY Goin’ Platinum! EASY EYE/NONESUCH 8/10 A Southern resurrection. FOR Dan Auerbach, growing up in Akron, Ohio, a touchstone in his musical development was a set of rattlingly great records on the Fat Possum label, which captured the vintage sound of the last of the great undiscovered Southern bluesmen: Junior Kimbrough, RL Burnside, T-Model Ford and Robert Belfour, all now long gone but who were finally afforded some recognition at the end of their lives. Auerbach covered songs by both Kimbrough and Burnside on The Black Keys’ debut, and then signed to Fat Possum, recording two albums for the imprint on the way to Grammy-winning superstardom. When a video of the 64-year-old Louisiana blues singer Robert Finley performing on a street corner reached Auerbach last year, though,…

AM (Special Edition) Being There (Special Edition) RHINO REISSUE OF THE MONTH 7/109/10 A FEW years ago, around the time of Sky Blue Sky, Uncut asked Jeff Tweedy for his thoughts on Americana. He had a few. “I’ve never had the fuckin’ slightest clue as to what it means,” he replied. “I’ve been a reluctant participant at best, and a violent contrarian more often, to that label.” Tweedy said much more in that vein, before suggesting that: “Americana is just a fundamentalist reactionary stance to the modern world. It’s imagining some pure, altruistic past that does not exist. It’s a desperate grasp for authenticity, that you either have or you don’t have. Ultimately, it’s either a good song or it’s a bad song. Or: ‘That guy can sing, and when…

Trouble No More: The Bootleg Series Vol 13 (1979-1981) COLUMBIA LEGACY 7/10 ONLY God knows who’s responsible for Bob Dylan’s conversion to Christianity. He had already been touring most of the year when he rolled into San Diego in November 1978, physically and creatively weary from the road. Toward the end of the show, an unidentified fan lobbed a small silver cross onstage. Dylan picked up and kept it, even wearing it around his neck at later shows. In December, he debuted two new songs with overtly Christian lyrics and claims to have been visited by Jesus Christ. Soon Dylan converted to a particularly evangelical strain of Christianity, even engaging in an intense three-month course at the Association Of Vineyard Churches. Over the next three years he transformed his concerts into…

On Air POLYDOR 8/10 The Stones’ early-’60s BBC radio sessions reveal a band in motion, says Michael Bonner BY their own admission, the success of last year’s album Blue & Lonesome caught The Rolling Stones by surprise. A collection of blues covers, recorded on the hoof in just three days, it reached No 1 in 15 countries and gave the reinvigorated Stones the second-highest opening week sales for any album in the UK during 2016. “I’m looking forward to Volume Two already,” remarked Keith Richards with understandable enthusiasm. The Rolling Stones – On Air is essentially that sequel. If Blue & Lonesome was the sound of the Stones, as they are now, paying tribute to the music they played as young men, On Air transports us back to…

“The trouble is, I want to live like an artist and work like an accountant. That’s really my ideal” IN MARCH this year, Josh Tillman was invited to appear on Saturday Night Live. The occasion was the release of Pure Comedy, his new album under the name Father John Misty; it would be a transitional moment in Tillman’s career, marking the moment he was no longer a cult figure but a fully fledged star. Many artists in Tillman’s position may vex about wardrobe choices, song selection, how they’ll wear their hair. For Tillman, he decided to take LSD. “Look, let’s just say that when I went on Saturday Night Live I had no business being on television that night. No business at all,” he explains today. Watching the broadcast, it…

75 RYAN ADAMS Prisoner BLUE NOTE/PAX-AM 74 FEIST Pleasure UNIVERSAL 73 ALDOUS HARDING Party 4AD 72 JASON ISBELL & THE 400 UNIT The Nashville Sound SOUTHEASTERN 71 DAVID RAWLINGS Poor David’s Almanack ACONY 70 PERFUME GENIUS No Shape MATADOR 69 SPARKS Hippopotamus BMG 68 FLOATING POINTS Reflections – Mojave Desert PLUTO 67 THE MAGNETIC FIELDS 50 Song Memoir NONESUCH 66 CRESCENT Resin Pockets GEOGRAPHIC 65 REAL ESTATE In Mind DOMINO 64 BLANCK MASS World Eater SACRED BONES 63 KEVIN MORBY City Music DEAD OCEANS 62 MARK EITZEL Hey Mr Ferryman DECOR 61 LANA DEL REY Lust For Life INTERSCOPE 60 BITCHIN BAJAS Bajas Fresh DRAG CITY 59 JOHN MAUS Screen Memories RIBBON MUSIC 58 WAND Plum DRAG CITY 57 ROLLING BLACKOUTS COASTAL FEVER The French Press SUB-POP 56 HOUSE AND…

KEY PLAYERS “WE didn’t spend more than an hour,” remembers bassist David Hood, “and I bet we did eight or nine songs that day…” Yet, in that hour, the Muscle Shoals Rhythm Section and the Staple Singers produced a US No 1 single: a vibrant, loose and grooving song that simultaneously tipped its hat to God, to the Civil Rights movement and to Jamaica’s new sounds. “‘I’ll Take You There’ was almost 50 years ago,” says Mavis Staples today. “It’s amazing that it still sounds so good! I don’t know music, I don’t even know what key I sing in, but God just blessed me. I can hear what a band are doing and I know where to place my voice.” Written and produced by Al Bell – but heavily…

“EVERYONE is sick of the old way,” Johnny Rotten told Caroline Coon in 1976. “We’re just one alternative. There should be several.” In Matthew Worley’s No Future , punk is unshackled from history’s innate desire to order and anthologise, and presented as nothing but a series of alternatives, its fluid “oppositional stances” as attractive to far-right hoodlums as left-wing idealists, to retro-rockers and conceptual futurists, to straight and queer. The one thing they all had in common, claims Worley, was a youthful urge to confront orthodoxies. Worley – a professor of Modern History at the University Of Reading – laments that punk has been “reduced to but another touchstone in pop’s rich tapestry”. He seeks here to re-establish its broader culture, its inherent contradictions, its vagrant energy and its protean,…

“The songs are really pretty and great, and I put my soul into it”CINDY WILSON CINDY Wilson sees certain similarities between Change, her first solo album, and her work with America’s foremost purveyors of kitsch, DayGlo post-punk. “I think The B-52s are a psychedelic band,” she says, “and there is definitely psych in the solo project, too. There are some strange Dada moments.” It’s a rather less aggressively warped take on pop than The B-52s, admittedly – she covers the New Colony Six’s “Things I’d Like To Say”, one of those gorgeous moments of soft psych produced when major labels tried to guess what a blown mind sounded like, and got it beautifully wrong. But there’s a sense of currency, too. Wilson was inspired by listening to Tame Impala (“I’d…

“Outdoors is mystical fog – this fucking mist!/These cliffs are just showing off” Utopia ONE LITTLE INDIAN FORTY years after her eponymous debut album was released in Iceland when she was just 12 years old, Björk remains peerless. No other contemporary artist can match her trajectory: emerging from punk bohemia into indie notoriety in the 1980s with The Sugarcubes; erupting magnificently into the pop mainstream in the 1990s; and charting her own course, via her own star charts, through strange 21st-century seas, into a fourth decade with matchless exuberance, ambition and focus. The hackneyed term ‘pop icon’ for once seems appropriate. She is sui generis, exemplary. Latterly, though, let’s admit it, she became a little exhausting. In her filmed performance of Biophilia at Alexandra Palace, released in 2013, the dollying…

Brave, bold and captivating, the record has many and varied charms… Open Sea AT THE HELM 8/10 AS he’ll happily attest, Hans Chew’s reputation is mainly built on his abilities as a pianist. 2010’s terrific solo debut, Tennessee & Other Stories…, wove together R&B, blues, gospel, rock’n’roll and ragtime funk into a ravishing tapestry of American roots music, with piano as its defining texture. Successive releases – 2014’s Life & Love and last year’s Unknown Sire – were further manifestations of the same free-spirited approach, an extension of his earlier days manning the keys for the late Jack Rose and D Charles Speer & The Helix. Sometimes, though, you need to fuck with the formula to stay engaged. In Chew’s case, he’s chosen to return to a less-acknowledged area of…

YORKSHIRE five-piece Autobahn’s second album, The Moral Crossing , is as punchy as they come, mixing electronica with post-rock but with cavernous propulsion and intensity. “We always wanted the sound to hit you hard,” says singer Craig Johnson. “It can make the music feel like one entity.” Following their widely praised debut, Dissemble , Autobahn have added keyboards to their armoury, bringing a splash of Human League-style Sheffield synth to their gothy Leeds core. Johnson says another important influence was seeing the Warsaw Philharmonic Orchestra performing Beethoven’s 9th Symphony at Leeds Town Hall. The use of the Roland Juno-60 – a previously unfamiliar instrument – forced the band outside their comfort zone, as did their decision to use their own recording studio. “With any…

Tribute To 2 ATO 7/10 AS rock’s catalogue becomes ever more expansive and complicated, the album of cover versions is no longer seen as the last refuge of the showbiz sellout suffering from writer’s block. Instead it has become an easy way to connect with the rock canon and a portal into the artist’s own influences, as with Bowie’s Pin Ups or Nick Cave’s Kicking Against The Pricks. Jim James has a long history with the cover version. With My Morning Jacket, the Louisville band with whom he’s made his name in the past 20 years, he performed more than 60 of them. Some ended up on albums and B-sides – a mournful guitar-and-voice version of Elvis Presley’s “Suspicious Minds”, an echo-laden acoustic reading of Elton John’s “Rocket Man” –…

Who Built The Moon? SOUR MASH 7/10 NOT for the first time, Liam Gallagher recently stunned a fairly large number of people with something he said. At a show in front of a record-industry crowd, he attempted to justify his new album being written with collaborators. “It ain’t all about the music,” he said to an audible intake of breath. “It’s also about being a cool cunt like me.” Oasis or no Oasis, if you needed a precise articulation of the difference between Liam and Noel Gallagher, that would probably do it. One is still justifying himself, while the other has comfortably made it. One knows there’s more to the magic of rock’n’roll than just the music; there’s attitude and charisma. And, actually, the other knows that too, but prefers…

VARIOUS ARTISTS Habibi Funk: An Eclectic Selection Of Music From The Arab World HABIBI FUNK 7/10 Cult curios and lost treasures from the Arabic pop vaults EGYPT’S current contender for the Foreign Language Oscar shortlist, Amr Salama’s Sheikh Jackson, tells a charmingly off-the-wall story about the deep impression that Michael Jackson left on the Arab world. There is something of this feverish cross-cultural love affair in the first compilation album from the Berlin-based Habibi Funk label, which specialises in archive gems and genre-blurring oddities from across the Middle East, most dating back to the 1970s and 1980s. Habibi Funk was founded by Berlin-based DJ and globe-trotting crate-digger Jannis Stuertz in 2015. Stuertz has a pretty admirable working model, digging up obscure tunes with an agreeable lack of purist reverence but…

“IT’S a cool time for weird women,” says Tamara Lindeman, the creative force behind The Weather Station. “There are a lot of hostile feelings to express and we’re in a place now where the catharsis is happening. That’s different than it was five or 10 years ago, where it didn’t feel like there was a critical mass or safe place – it was better to just be pretty and make pretty music.” We’re standing in the hall outside the Southern Cross, a small, stage-less room in a venue called the Tranzac in Lindeman’s hometown of Toronto. It’s a homey, familiar place that suits the intimacy of her performances. But she knows they’re not all like that. “Unless you’re doing good and people are coming to a show to see you,”…

At the heart of Steely Dan is a trust in malleable virtuosity THE deceased, one suspects, would not have appreciated sentimentality, and Donald Fagen is not about to dishonour an old friend. “We’re the Steely Dan organisation,” he says. “We’re a little different from what we were a few months ago, but I gotta live with that.” As if to emphasise the change, Fagen launches into “New Frontier”, a song that marked his original liberation from the company of Walter Becker in the early ’80s. Becker himself, dead eight weeks, is never mentioned. Allusion, irony and a fragile air of emotional detachment remain Steely Dan’s key coping strategies, even as they enter the final phase of their suitably complex career. “Their career” is something of a misnomer, of course. This…

THE KILLING OF A SACRED DEER Yorgos Lanthimos has earned his reputation as a purveyor of deadpan, absurdist stories. His earliest films, Dogtooth and Alps, were scalp-prickling black comedies where dark mysteries lay behind glossy middle-class veneers of respectability. But his previous film, The Lobster, took a swerve into more eccentric territory: single adults were obliged to find a marriage partner before a specified deadline or else be turned into animals and packed off to the wild. How do you follow that? Unlike the fanciful dystopias of Alps or The Lobster, The Killing Of A Sacred Deer is set in what we initially recognise as the present day. Colin Farrell plays a successful heart surgeon, Steven Murphy, Nicole Kidman his decorous wife, Anna. They exist in a world of high-end…

MONTEREY POP: SPECIAL EDITION THE CRITERION COLLECTION 9/10 Trailblazing documentary about a trailblazing festival. By Mark Bentley RUN over the weekend of June 16-18, 1967, the first (and only) Monterey International Pop Music Festival is the ur-text for the music festival. Its influence on Woodstock, Glastonbury (and therefore every major festival since) is incalculable, and the chief instrument of this influence was this technically beautiful, totally unmissable accompanying film documentary. Released in 1968, Monterey Pop disseminated the “new generation/new explanation” message. It is, of course, home to the ’60s’ greatest visual hits: Janis Joplin’s orgasmic rip-cord “Ball And Chain”; The Who’s call-to-action blast of “My Generation”; Ravi Shankar’s intense, spiritual virtuosity – and most iconic of all, Jimi Hendrix and his flaming guitar. This three-disc 50th-anniversary issue takes…

“Her son Ari has no resentment. He says, ‘I thought she was indestructible’”SUSANNA NICCHIARELLI IN 1980, Nico – the German singer born Christa Päffgen – relocated to Manchester. Drawn to the city by the thriving drug and music scenes, she assembled a new band and embarked on a series of disastrous overseas tours. As it transpired, these tours assumed a valedictory quality: Nico died in 1988 following an accident in Ibiza. This curious third act of Nico’s life is the subject of Nico, 1988 – a new biopic by Italian filmmaker Susanna Nicchiarelli and starring Danish actress Trine Dyrholm as the singer. Accompanied by her unruffled manager (John Gordon Sinclair) and a band comprising a “bunch of amateur junkies”, it is a film composed of on-the-road yarns: the problems scoring…

BASSIST and composer Joshua Abrams has been making music across a wide range of genres for more than 30 years. In the late ’80s, while living in Philadelphia, he played in an early incarnation of The Roots. Since moving to Chicago, he’s been a key figure in the city’s intermingled jazz, experimental and post-rock scenes, collaborating with jazz luminaries like Hamid Drake and Matana Roberts as well as guesting with artists as diverse as Tortoise, Godspeed You! Black Emperor and Will Oldham. He’s also written numerous film soundtracks, including several by the Chicago-based Hoop Dreams filmmaker Steve James. Running parallel to all this activity, since 2010, has been Abrams’ own outfit, the Natural Information Society. “I’ve explored a lot of different areas with different people over the years,” says Abrams.…

First Light THE STATE51 CONSPIRACY 8/10 DAN Michaelson’s voice – a parched, papery rasp, the aural equivalent of a desert plant endlessly thirsting for water – has always resembled the weary croak of a man struggling to rouse himself into reluctant wakefulness. It’s entirely appropriate, then, that First Light, his first solo album since 2011’s Sudden Fiction, takes inspiration from the moment when a new day sparks into life, that split second of infinite promise before consciousness gives way to awareness. With a gift for low-key emotional intensity, widescreen minimalism and mordant wit, Michaelson can usefully be regarded as the British Bill Callahan. Other touchstones include Townes Van Zandt, Low, Lee Hazlewood, Mark Eitzel and Leonard Cohen. He’s a seasoned operator in the field of ravished romanticism, and First Light…

TOMORROW’S GIFT , the new collaborative album from south London’s Virginia Wing and Leeds’ XAM Duo, is a deeply blissed-out improvisation channelling the astral jazz of Pharoah Sanders and the devotional music of Alice Coltrane. It’s also a demonstration of just how far great music can transport you. “I would love to say we created a tranquil ashram vibe,” says Christopher Duffin of XAM Duo. “But in reality, we were in my windowless practice space in Bradford steadily zoning out from the oppressive heat of two portable heaters and one by one getting ill, surviving on Asda layered salads and camomile-and-honey tea.” Two days of recording were taken away and stitched together, with a friend, Misha Hering of Holy Mountain Studios, doing a final mixdown. “Misha loved the…

“Jay [Bennett] brought more than a lot to that band. He brought soul on top of soul. You can’t fake that thing” What do you remember about AM ? I remember a lot. Right at the demise of Uncle Tupelo, Jeff came to all of us and said, “I want to keep going, I enjoy this, this is what I do.” We all grouped together at Tony the manager’s place in St Louis and started just running songs and song ideas. Maybe less than a month later, we went to Memphis to record at Easley [McCain] studios – the old Bar-Kays place – and it was hot as hell. We were playing basketball outside all the time in this ghetto basketball court, and making music. We brought…

Sailors’ Tales PANEGYRIC 7/10 The 27-disc, 1970-’72 motherlode. By David Cavanagh WHILE other pioneers of progressive rock play cruise ships, split into rival factions or think about retiring, King Crimson seem shockingly active these days. Currently touring North America for the second time this year, they’ve released two recent live albums (Live In Chicago and the Japan-only Live In Vienna) as well as an EP (“Heroes – Live In Europe”) and the latest instalment in their ongoing ‘tour box’ series, The Elements Of King Crimson. Onstage in cities like Raleigh and Newark, their eight-piece lineup goes deep into the back catalogue. They play, oddly enough, a lot of the music on Sailors’ Tales, a lavish-looking 27-disc boxset (21CD/2DVD/4Blu-ray) that focuses on the years 1970–72. This was a troubled…

YEAH YEAH YEAHS Fever To Tell (Deluxe) INTERSCOPE 9/10 NYC scenesters’ grimy, glorious debut, redux YEAH Yeah Yeahs must have felt like seasoned veterans by the time they released their full-length debut in April 2003. Karen O(rzolek) had refined an outrageous and unpredictable stage presence on stages around the boroughs, while guitarist Nick Zinner and drummer Brian Chase teased more sound out of their two instruments than most bands get out of a full orchestra. On the strength of word-of-mouth live shows and a scuzzy-sounding EP, they graced the covers of major music magazines, signed a flashy record deal and then suffered a backlash – all before they had a proper album to their name. Nearly 15 years later, when the dust has settled and the era has been oral-history’ed…

Clark’s voice is on great form, but the songs seem anaesthetised AS introductions go, it’s an A-grade tease. Before the house lights are fully down, the curtain draws back just a few feet, revealing St Vincent stage right, stood still in a fuchsia-pink bodysuit. Grasping the mic with both hands, she launches into “Marry Me”, the title track from her debut album – a touchingly soft rendition that has something of Marilyn Monroe about it. Then, she’s handed a pink guitar and the curtain is nudged aside by increments, first for the slo-mo, to-and-fro motion of “Now, Now”, and again for the Björk-meets-Broadwaymusical pizzazz of “The Strangers”, with strobes. So far, so intriguing. Anticipation runs high for the Fear The Future tour – after all, thanks to the brilliance of…

GEORGE YOUNG Easybeats songwriter and AC/DC producer (1946-2017) AC/DC have been quick to acknowledge the debt owed to George Young. “Without his help and guidance, there would not have been an AC/DC,” the band said in a statement. Together with songwriting partner Harry Vanda, Young produced the first five AC/DC albums, from 1975’s High Voltage through to Powerage (1978), as well as live effort, If You Want Blood You’ve Got It. The older brother of AC/DC stalwarts Angus and Malcolm, Young returned in 2000 to oversee Stiff Upper Lip. He’d first made his name as rhythm guitarist for The Easybeats, the quintet he co-founded in Sydney in 1964. Sparking the kind of fan hysteria that drew comparisons to Beatlemania (‘Easyfever’, as the Australian press called it), the band enjoyed a…

LED ZEPPELIN AT KNEBWORTH 1979: REFUNDS AVAILABLE? The December issue just arrived, and I was immediately drawn to the Robert Plant article. Back in January 2016 I was at the Bert Jansch tribute night in the Old Fruitmarket in Glasgow. I was there with Ryley Walker, who was thrilled to learn from Robert that he had a copy of his current album (Primrose Green). I had no expectations of meeting Robert, but after the gig he walked into the hospitality room, opened a bottle of Asahi lager, and then stood right next to me. What do you say to Robert Plant without sounding ingratiating or stupid? The only thing I could think of was to suggest that we were probably the only people in the room who were at Knebworth…