Innehållsförteckning för June 2020 #277 från UNCUT

IN the shadow of coronavirus lockdown, what will become of 2020's cultural record? One of the positives to draw from the current crisis is the way many artists have successfully adapted to their circumstances. On page 7 of this issue, Sam Richards talks to musicians who have been livestreaming during the lockdown, while on page 8, brace yourselves for our deep dive into Bob Dylan’s amazing “Murder Most Foul”, released by Dylan with the accompanying instruction to “stay safe”. Being an avid Uncut reader, you’ll have hopefully also enjoyed Neil Young’s Fireside Sessions, Sonic Youth’s archive of live recordings and Tim Burgess’s Twitter listening parties among the myriad of other inventive ways to beat the lockdown blues online. While we’re all currently dispersed as far afield as Edinburgh, Redcar, Brighton…

1 WILLIAM TYLER A Closing The final track on Music From First Cow, the master guitarist’s soundtrack to Kelly Reichardt’s new film, is a meditative delight. Tyler’s evocative acoustic guitar is slowly joined by other stringed instruments as it builds and then, beautifully, fades. 2 WOODS Next To You And The Sea Jarvis Taveniere and Jeremy Earl have embraced synths on new LP Strange To Explain, but as this subtly psychedelic track shows, their way with a song is still very much intact. Reviewed in full on p31. 3 MARGO PRICE Twinkle Twinkle A brand new track from Price, in anticipation of her third album, That’s How Rumors Get Started, due in a few months; “Mother Mary, geez Louise!” hollers Price, as she free-associates about the meaning…

Strange To Explain WOODSIST 8/10 STRANGE To Explain is Woods’ first album for three years, but the New York group led by Jeremy Earl and Jarvis Taveniere haven’t exactly been slacking. The past few years have brought a couple of personal milestones – Earl’s first child was born and Taveniere moved to California – as well as two excellent non-Woods albums. Myths 003 was a split LP of gorgeous jams recorded with Dungen, while David Berman’s glorious swansong, Purple Mountains, featured Earl and Taveniere as backing band and producers. All these influences have tumbled down the rabbit hole into Strange To Explain, an album about sleep, dream spaces and new places tied around a series of time-distorting, synth-laden songs that at times seem more reminiscent of ’70s Philly soul than…

The Universe Inside ANTI 8/10 THE Dream Syndicate’s third album since reuniting earlier in the decade opens with what may be the boldest, weirdest, longest track in their long career. Assembled from pieces of an 80-minute late-night jam during sessions for 2019’s These Times, the song constructs a rambling groove from Dennis Duck’s kosmische drumbeat, Mark Walton’s fatback bass, Chris Cacavas’s swirls of keyboard, and scribbles of guitar from Steve Wynn and Jason Victor. Later, they added electric sitar, skronking saxophone and low vocals that split the difference between Ken Nordine and Tom Waits. The song rolls on and on, picking up instruments and ideas before discarding them, then it rolls on some more, gradually building to a brief, explosive climax. Clocking in at 20 minutes, it’s by far the…

Great Songs Of Mystery: The Lost Vanguard Session REAL GONE MUSIC 9/10 ROBBIE BASHO was an American guitarist taking his instrument on an extraordinary journey. A bit like his colleague John Fahey, who attended the same Maryland college, and for whose Takoma label he recorded, Basho’s music has the feeling of a quest undertaken in a wild landscape. But while Fahey, channelling blues and ragtime, seems to travel by road and rail across America, close to the dust and dirt, Basho travels through the air, his music floating weightlessly on spiritual currents, the concerns of the temporal world far below him. A Basho piece (like many of those on this collection of previously unreleased recordings) will generally unfold over upwards of six minutes, a sequence of open-ended chord possibilities within…

IT is Christmas morning 1984 and Prince is still working. Music’s newest superstar has certainly earned the right to a day off. Six months after its release, Purple Rain is more than halfway through a 24-week run at No 1 in the States, while the arena tour of the album has been breaking box office records all over the country since it began in early November. On December 23, Prince and The Revolution rolled into Minneapolis, to play the first of five homecoming holiday shows at the St Paul Civic Center. “On Christmas Eve we had a matinee concert,” recalls Prince’s engineer, Susan Rogers. “Prince had asked to have a mobile recording truck there to record the show. From there, we drove the truck away and pulled it into the…

“WE just came along at the right time,” says Tim Butler. “I like to think we were a cross between the Sex Pistols and Roxy Music when we first started!” The bassist and his brother, vocalist Richard Butler, are looking back over their work as The Psychedelic Furs as they prepare to release their long-awaited new album, Made Of Rain – the band’s first record since 1991’s Stephen Street-produced World Outside. “Oh yeah, I really enjoyed the process of making the new album,” explains Richard Butler, “and I don’t want to leave it for another 29 years. I might not be around in another 29 years!” As they take Uncut through their finest albums, from 1980’s raucous self-titled debut onwards, we hear tales of partying dangerously in Woodstock, of turning…

NEW MUSICAL EXPRESS NOVEMBER 8, 1980 LOS ANGELES is the entertainment capital of America. In little more than 50 years, the business of entertainment has built a vast, moneyed urban sprawl around the billboards that line Sunset Strip announcing the latest records and films. Most of the people who live here either work in the entertainment business or else they clean up after it. A city like this, which is not really a city at all but just 72 suburbs in search of a city, is bound to have character problems. America views Los Angeles and the rest of Southern California with apprehension. Southern California, for its part, seems to have renounced the rest of America. Even for a country that regards politicians as being almost by definition corrupt and…

LOVE SARAH OPENS APRIL 24 Light British comedy in which a young woman follows her late mother’s dream by opening her own London bakery RUN SWEETHEART RUN OPENS APRIL 24 US indie filmmaker Shana Feste gives us a horror about a young woman struggling to get back home after a blind date goes badly wrong FAMILY ROMANCE LLC OPENS MAY 1 Is there nothing Werner Herzog won’t try? Here the German master crafts a lo-fi drama from the strange reality of Japanese companies that loan out actors who pretend to be family members. And it’s in Japanese THE ROADS NOT TAKEN OPENS MAY 1 Arthouse veteran Sally Potter returns with a portrait of a man (Javier Bardem) musing on the various alternate lives he could have lived THE HIGH NOTE…

BY GEORGE An excellent feature on George Harrison [Take 276]. I became a fan when I bought the Revolver album in August 1966. Meeting him, briefly, in the car park at Abbey Road exactly two years later in the early hours, as he and Ringo came out after an all-night session was… UNFORGETTABLE! Now for your choices of albums... Concert For Bangladesh has not stood the test of time – he was not in good voice, Dylan is hard to listen to and Clapton was on poor form, for obvious reasons. It is a souvenir – of historical interest. Sad to say, Brainwashed is collection completer, I’m afraid. Two omissions, the not-much loved Extra Texture and the substantial Somewhere In England, merit attention. George is much missed – like soul…

WHEN the Beastie Boys needed a director to help tell a little story about three bad brothers you know so well, they naturally turned to Spike Jonze, whose film documentary about the band is due out this month. Back in 1994, Jonze created the indelible, ’70s cop-show shakedown for “Sabotage” – regularly cited as one of the greatest pop videos of all time – with the future Her director becoming something akin to the fourth Beastie. “We were like, ‘Who the fuck is this little kid trying to take our photo?’”MIKE D However, at their initial meeting three years earlier on a cover shoot for Jonze’s Dirt magazine, the Beasties weren’t so sure about their future co-conspirator. As Mike D writes in the foreword to Jonze’s new photobook, “When we…

EVEN his most optimistic fans could have been forgiven for wondering whether they’d ever hear new original music from Bob Dylan again. After all, in the eight long years since Tempest, he has released three albums of American standards – a vast array of other people’s music, 52 songs in all, that slowly reinforced suspicions that Dylan’s creative well might finally have run dry. All that changed, of course, on March 27, when Dylan sprung “Murder Most Foul” on us out of nowhere. At first, it was hard to process the news. The shock was not merely that Dylan was back with a new song – and, at almost 17 minutes, the longest he’s ever released – but that he had successfully ‘done a Bowie’ and managed to keep news…

FOR the past few years, Nap Eyes have operated as the musical equivalent of a long-distance relationship. All four members met in Halifax, Nova Scotia, but three of the band moved to Montreal soon after forming, leaving vocalist and lyricist Nigel Chapman back home in Halifax. “I love Nova Scotia,” he admits. “It’s rugged, rocky with shitty weather.” However, for the recording of Nap Eyes’ latest LP, Snapshot Of A Beginner, Chapman decided to bridge the gap – if only slightly – by moving to Toronto. “When I was in Halifax, it was 12 hours’ drive to Montreal,” he says. “Now I’m only six hours away!” His main collaborator in the band is Brad Loughead, who provides musical direction and squalls of guitar to accompany Chapman’s lyrics. “The sound of…

A Steady Drip, Drip, Drip BMG 9/10 AFTER spending half a century pursuing and executing some of the most outlandish and original ideas ever concocted in the history of American popular music, Sparks ought to have run out of inspiration or energy by now. Surely a following as fervent and loyal as theirs would forgive Ron and Russell Mael if they decided to phone it in. As two distinguished septuagenarians who’ve already given us pleasures as distinct and indelible as “This Town Ain’t Big Enough For The Both Of Us”, “Amateur Hour” and “The No 1 Song In Heaven”, they earned the right to coast long before the arrival of latter-day masterworks like Hello Young Lovers, their delectably wry 2006 concept album about modern romance, and The Seduction Of Ingmar…

Ghosts Of West Virginia NEW WEST 8/10 ON April 5, 2010, 300 metres beneath Raleigh County, West Virginia, methane seeping from the coal seams of Massey Energy’s Upper Big Branch mine ignited and exploded. Fire roared through two miles of subterranean tunnel and killed 29 miners. Investigations blamed dereliction of safety procedures; Massey’s CEO, Don Blankenship, was convicted in 2015 of conspiring to violate safety standards, and jailed for a year. This is the background that informs Ghosts Of West Virginia, arguably Steve Earle’s best album since 2002’s Jerusalem. Earle wrote seven of these 10 songs to accompany a drama by Jessica Blank and Erik Jensen – Coal Country, drawn from interviews with miners who survived the Upper Big Branch disaster, and families of the miners who didn’t. When the…

Hurray For The Riff Raff/Look Out Mama (reissues, 2011, 2012) LOOSE 7/10, 9/10 ALYNDA SEGARRA took the long route to New Orleans. A Puerto Rican misfit from the Bronx, drawn to hardcore punk and slam poetry, her migratory instincts kicked in early, leaving home just after her 17th birthday to ride hobo. Her travels took her out west, to San Francisco, living out a Kerouac/ Guthrie fantasy of itinerant freedom, before she wound her way Southwards. Segarra arrived in the Crescent City in early 2005, convinced she’d finally found a place to call home. For someone with a burgeoning love of traditional US music – from Appalachian folk to blues to scratchy jazz – New Orleans felt timeless, a teeming repository of living history. It would later provide the soul…

PRINCE didn’t begin work on his Paisley Park studio complex until 1986, after deciding that the Eden Prairie warehouse – which he had bought for $400,000 and is called ‘Paisley Park’ in the album credits – would not be suitable as a longterm workspace. For Around The World… he was still recording partly in his own home. “He lived in a purple house on Kiowa Trail in Chanhassen,” says Susan Rogers. “His home studio, such as it was, was just a regular-sized suburban bedroom, across the hall from his master bedroom. It was basically a console, a tape machine, and some big speakers on the wall – there were no isolation booths or anything. We could work there but you couldn’t have other musicians, it was just a bedroom, not…

ABOUT 10 years ago, you could have stumbled across Brigid Mae Power performing in the most unorthodox places. Along with other members of Galway’s bohemian set, she could often be found in a vast, subterranean car park, singing traditional folk songs and cheered on by her ragtag gang of artist friends. “It was so spooky, pitch-black with just bits of light,” she recalls now.“There was a really good scene of a few weirdos with nowhere else to go, who made interesting things down there. Other weirdos who lived in the country came in from Leitrim or Longford. People painted on the walls. It was freezing, seawater seeped in. There was a lot of droney stuff played – harmoniums, banjo, accordion, and electronics. I remember once, a Japanese band with trumpets…

“DURING this next song,” says Danny Goffey ahead of the appropriately titled “Rebel In You”, “I want you to turn to the person next to you and touch their face…” Two weeks before the UK’s live music lockdown, and Supergrass are still playing the giggling classroom imps. It is, perhaps, why we need them back so badly, 12 years after their last album, Diamond Hoo Ha, and 25 since they encapsulated Britpop’s gnashing joie de vivre in singles like “Caught By The Fuzz” and “Alright”. The grainy home videos of the band in their teenage prime that play out on Alexandra Palace’s big screens – mucking about in canoes, recording naked and generally making like a mutton-chopped version of The Beatles in Help! – don’t just represent the abandon with…

MOFFIE This tense and tender South African war drama takes us back to the early 1980s and the experiences of Nicholas (Kai Luke Brummer), called up to fight on his country’s border with Angola. The film’s title is a homophobic slur, so immediately we’re on the lookout for how this handsome and green 18-year-old, who we follow right from his awkward goodbye to his parents (when his dad hands him a porn mag as a going-away gift), is going to manage within this violent, macho world. The film mostly unfurls in the limbo between call-up and action, focusing on the rituals of military training and the relationships between these young soldiers, all of them away from home and all trying to keep their heads above water within a suffocating and…

WHEN invited to headline last year’s We Out Here festival, backed by a band of British twentysomethings he’d never met, jazz veteran Gary Bartz wasn’t in the least bit fazed. “I did the Isle Of Wight in 1970 with Miles Davis!” the saxophonist reminds us. “It might sound corny but the feeling I got from that festival was love – it was beautiful. We Out Here was like a miniature version of that, it was so much fun.” Bartz, it turns out, had been keeping tabs on the UK jazz explosion for a while. “I knew about the scene,” he says, “but what surprised me was the calibre of the musicians.” He’s talking specifically about his new compadres Maisha – the fluid, London-based sextet led by drummer Jake Long, whose…

Ballet Of Apes CASTLE FACE ALBUM OF THE MONTH / 13 LISTEN to almost any Oh Sees release since 2006 and you’ll hear Brigid Dawson. That’s her providing interjections like Kim Deal on Floating Coffin’s “Minotaur”, melding with John Dwyer’s falsetto on Smote Reverser’s “Sentient Oona”, and harmonising spookily on Putrifiers II’s “Wax Face”. A valuable, spirited team player, for sure, but, to the casual listener, there was little sign that she could be a brilliant solo artist. There had been rumours she’d been working on her own music in San Francisco for a few years now, though; and in 2017, she contributed three excellent songs to Memory Of A Cut Off Head, the ornate, Forever Changes-esque album she and Dwyer created under the name OCS. Yet the majesty and…

Brother Sister 8/10 GIVEN the fact that the Watkins siblings have been holding a live residency in LA as an open invitation for various musician friends for 18 years now, it’s surprising to note that the collective’s recorded output is so slim. But then again, maybe not. Core member Sara Watkins has spent most of her time shuttling between Nickel Creek, a healthy solo career and, most recently, a Grammy-winning turn as one third of folk-roots combo I’m With Her. Older brother Sean, Watkins Family Hour’s other prime mover and Nickel Creek co-founder, has been busying himself with various collaborations as well as his own solo work. Studio time for the siblings, therefore, is at a premium. Unlike 2015’s self-titled covers debut, Brother Sister finds Sean and Sara writing together…

Quickies NONESUCH 7/10 THE MAGNETIC FIELDS rarely release a song that surpasses the four-minute mark, so an album of “quickies”, split across five EPs, isn’t exactly novel. Ascribe it to leader Stephin Merritt’s love of a theme, a desire to huddle each batch of songs under an offbeat umbrella. To wit, 2017’s 50 Song Memoir included one song about every year of Merritt’s life at that point. His 1999 album, 69 Love Songs, considered by many his opus, delivered precisely on its title’s promise. The songs on 2004’s I all begin with that letter, while 2008’s Distortion finds its tracks in varying states of malformation. Despite these varied themes, each album reflects Merritt’s knack for writing compact verse abounding with bright imagery and double entendre, tidy and tender morsels that…

UNCUT: What comes to mind when you think of Homegrown ? MAZER: I don’t think the songs [on Homegrown] were as memorable. To be honest, I remember Harvest much more than I remember Homegrown. [Harvest] gave me a whole new career. Harvest is how you initially hooked up with Neil, right? Neil played a Johnny Cash TV show [in Nashville]. Somehow, we met after that. He said, “You have a studio?” “Yes.” “Great, you have a band?” “Yes.” So, I got Kenny Buttrey [drums], Ben Keith [pedal steel], and then Tim Drummond [bass], and then various pianists that were good, bad and OK. I went to the studio, I set it up. I heard [Neil’s] voice with a slight delay. We cut one song. Neil comes into the control room…

“I COME out here to make a lot of noise,” says Jason Isbell, unlocking the door on what appears, from the outside at least, to be a regular barn located deep in the Tennessee countryside. But the inside resembles something like a rumpus room, painted completely black and filled with instruments and gear – like a toybox tumped over by a hyperactive kid. “That Marshall used to belong to Neil Young,” he says, nodding towards a large black amp. “It gets real loud. That with my ’59 Les Paul is a lot of fun.” The barn isn’t quite a studio, despite having more than enough equipment. It’s not quite a live venue either, despite the large stage at one end and the constellation of mirrorballs dangling from the ceiling. It’s…

IN 2009, The National were burned out. They had toured solidly on the back of their Alligator (2005) and Boxer (2008) albums and found themselves in what guitarist Aaron Dessner calls “a dark place”. “It was exhaustion and everything that comes with being that fatigued,” he says. “Relationships were suffering. We almost broke up, actually.” Instead, The National set up their own studio in Brooklyn’s Ditmas Park neighbourhood and made High Violet – an album of brooding magnificence that “healed the band”, reaching No 3 in the US charts and taking them into arenas and what Bryce Dessner describes as “another universe that wasn’t even in our vocabulary”. “Everyone was more ambitious,” remembers vocalist Matt Berninger. “We could all feel that we were on the edge of something. There was…

LAUREL CANYON: A PLACE IN TIME EPIX 7/10 Familiar stories from a fabled West Coast locale, enlivened by intimate archival footage. By Stephen Deusner One overcast morning in March 1969, Graham Nash and Joni Mitchell descended from Laurel Canyon down into Los Angeles to eat breakfast and run some errands. Along the way the two lovers stopped by an antique store, where Mitchell bought a small, blue vase – nothing extravagant, but beautiful in its modesty. When they returned to her home, Nash suggested she stroll through the woods to pick flowers for that vase. Rather than build the fire he promised, he sat down at her piano and began writing a song about their shared domestic bliss: “I’ll light the fire, you put the flowers in the vase that…

KENNY ROGERS Country superstar (1938-2020) KENNY Rogers’ solo career took time to gain traction. He was already in his late thirties when “Lucille”, a barroom tale of infidelity and racked conscience, was released in 1977 – two decades after his debut single. The song was a massive global hit, reaching No 1 in the UK, establishing Rogers as both a commercial country artist and master of the narrative ballad. “Once we made the story song a viable artform for me, the songs just poured in,” he wrote in his 2012 autobiography Luck Or Something Like It. “Every songwriter with a story song sent it to me.” Rogers enjoyed a string of hits over the next few years – “The Gambler”, “She Believes In Me”, “Coward Of The County”…