Innehållsförteckning för August 2020 #279 från UNCUT

WE’RE NEW HERE “WE call it ‘secret prog’,” says Macie Stewart, with a laugh. “We both went through a bit of a King Crimson phase, and I think you can hear it on this album. In fact, there’s a bit on the opening track, ‘Flood Your Gut’, where these baroque harmonies kick in. First time we did it, we looked at each other and said, ‘Uh oh, it’s the Gentle Giant bit!’” Ohmme – pronounced ‘Om’ and formerly known as Homme, until they got into an online spat with a now defunct K-pop band of the same name – are two 27-year-olds from Chicago who put prog, glam, free jazz and the spikier end of classical composition through a pure pop filter. “We enjoy playing music that is moderately challenging…

Laura Lee It’s live 100 per cent. We didn’t have material prepped before we went in” There is more singing on Mordechai than on any other Khruangbin album. How did you approach writing lyrics? Last year was the culmination of four years of touring, and I realised how much it had impacted my life. I never got sucked into the party, but I realised it was easy to get addicted to touring, the highs and lows. I needed to get back in touch with myself, the Laura Lee that exists outside of touring. So I wrote down as many stories as I could in the span of a week leading up to going into the studio. What I wrote wasn’t in a lyric format, they were stories specific to my…

Gary Louris “The stars were aligning” Why the decision to widen the songwriting circle for XOXO ? I have been unhappy over the years with the fact that during a live show I am singing 95 per cent of the songs when we have two other great vocalists in the band who our audience is dying to hear. And I’ve never been particularly good at writing songs for Karen or Tim. Sometimes I miss sitting back and ust being able to play the guitar on songs. I also knew that Tim and Karen and also Marc Perlman are strong songwriters and felt this might be a way for them to feel more vested in the band. On top of that I had must finished making a solo record, which will…

Nifk an Bakel Lt›v goog to be loove›› Listen to the sun-kissed debut album by Melbourne’s Bananagun and you can hear evidence of all the key in›uences cited by their founder Nick Van Bakel The Beatles, Caetano Veloso, The Incredible String Band, Iela Kuti and Detroit ma}} harpist Dorothy Ashby. But Bananagun’s slightly manic pop sensibility comes from some eclectic sources, particularly Van Bakel’s teenage love of skateboarding. “Skate videos featured ama}ing soundtracks featuring The Stooges, hip-hop and heaps of gold,” he says. “So I followed all that stuff up, and went deeper down that hole.” His songs start as home-recorded demos that are then transformed in the rehearsal stage. “You have to surrender your songs to the band,” he says. “It sucks the life out of it if you’re…

Blues With Friends KTBA 7/10 TEAR-STAINED teen idol in the 1950s, fringe-jacketed folk troubadour in the ’60s, streetwise urban soul poet in the ’70s, pew-rattling gospel testifier in the ’80s. Dion Francis DiMucci has worn coats of many colours during his lengthy career, but his most favoured tones have always been blue. Despite the unassuming title, it’s clear this album is a long-standing passion project, which, in all honesty, may not have garnered anywhere near as much attention were it not for the level of A-list assistance. It’s by no means the first time Dion’s corralled famous pals and fans to boost a record’s profile. In 1989, shortly after his induction into the Rock And Roll Hall Of Fame, DiMucci released Yo Frankie, produced and arranged by Dave Edmunds, with…

The Enraged Will Inherit The Earth (reissue, 1989) OPTIC NERVE 7/10 “GOVERNING TAKES BRAINS”. “An Address To The Better Off”. “The Home Secretary Briefs The Forces of Law And Order”. The song titles alone tell you where McCarthy were coming from. Formed in east London in the mid-1980s by four schoolmates who included future Stereolab co-founder Tim Gane, McCarthy were the UK’s most overtly political band since Crass. But whereas Crass were direct action-espousing anarchists rooted in the aggression of punk, McCarthy were argumentative Marxists grounded in political theory and wedded to head-in-the-clouds fusion of 4AD and post-Byrds jangle. The Enraged Will Inherit The Earth was the band’s second album, initially released in 1989 on Midnight Music and reissued here by Optic Nerve on coloured vinyl alongside a fab second…

“Why do a cover if you’re not going to make it your own?” drummer Alice deBuhr says of her band Fanny s 1970 interpretation of Cream’s “Badge”, which remains one of their most popular songs. “We owned the covers we did, and that song was dissected and put back together Fanny-style. It remains one of my favourite songs to play.” With its nimble shuf›e-stomp, fierce power chords, heavy organ licks by Nickey Barclay and immense harmonies by sisters June and Jean Millington, “Badge” anchors Fanny’s newly reissued self-titled debut, which made history 50 years ago as the first major-label album by an all-woman rock band. Despite being highly accomplished players, the California quartet were often met with condescension from male executives and critics. “By the time we were a line…

Shirley Collins returns with Heart’s Ease , her first since 2016’s Lodestar, while The Flaming Lips are back with American Head – one of their strongest in years. Meanwhile, Fontaines DC continue their stellar rise with A Hero’s Death , and The Lemon Twigs channel Bruce and Lou on their third LP, Songs For The General Public . In the world of archival releases, Paul McCartney’s Flaming Pie gets the deluxe treatment, and there are unearthed gems by Jason Molina, Jody Harris & Robert Quine, Bobbie Gentry and more. TOM.PINNOCK@UNCUT.CO.UK…

“I’M not really a great joiner,” John Martyn told this writer in 2005, sitting in a beer garden in his adopted hometown of Thomastown, in Kilkenny. “I prefer being on the fringe.” That maverick sensibility is scored deep into his catalogue. For anyone seeking a single piece of evidence marking out Martyn as an instinctive non-team player, a man who bolted at the first sign of consensus or acceptance, a contrarian of the first rank, Inside Out is the place to start. A foray into the furthest reaches of his musical mind, a dazzling and sometimes bewildering experiment in tone, form, texture, pace and placement, Inside Out arrived barely six months after Solid Air, by some distance Martyn’s best known and most acclaimed album. The only person who didn’t seem…

ON May 17, Damon Albarn was meant to be performing his new opus, backed by an ensemble of 14 largely Icelandic musicians conducted by André de Ridder, at the Brussels Centre For Fine Arts. Instead he is sitting alone at the piano in his home studio, a converted barn in Devon, ruefully stroking his lockdown beard. Things have not turned out as he – or indeed anybody – had hoped. On the other hand, Albarn reckons there might be something in this music that could be useful for us at this time, even in its not-quite-finished form. And he’s right, of course. The Nearer The Fountain, More Pure The Stream Flows is named after a line by English romantic poet John Clare – a “strong, hopeful phrase”, says Albarn, that…

DA 5 BLOODS There could hardly be a more significant moment for a new Spike Lee joint. As the killing of George Floyd leaves America in turmoil, Lee’s Netflix release Da 5 Bloods looks back at the Vietnam war and asks what it meant for black America. Movies about the war have tended to cast African-American soldiers as onlookers to the tragedies of white heroes, whether it’s Laurence Fishburne’s character in Apocalypse Now! or Forest Whitaker in Platoon. Da 5 Bloods corrects that tendency, and offers a critical commentary on it, in its story of four black veterans who return to Vietnam today on a personal mission – locate a cache of gold bullion and bring back the body of Stormin’ Norman (Chadwick Boseman), their heroic and idealistic platoon leader.…

THE JAYHAWKS XOXO SA /TKLUT\TLGEUS 8/10 A new approach pays dividends for Americana’s great survivors. T is 35 years, give or take, I since The Jayhawks formed in Minneapolis. It cannot have seemed, at the time, a likely longterm endeavour. In a city whose mid-’80s rock’n’roll soundtrack was being furnished by local punks like The Replacements, Hüsker Dü and Soul Asylum, the establishment of a country band dedicated to chiming choruses and soaring sunshiney harmonies was a spectacularly headlong windmill-tilt. But all those years later, here The Jayhawks still are, and with an album that is certainly no worse than any of its 10 splendid predecessors, and that might age well enough to rank among their best. XOXO is the result of a recalibration of The Jayhawks’ internal dynamics: Gary…

SG GOODAN Olg Ti e Ieeling E UE O UECAST 8/10 Vivid introduction to prized young Southerner JOAN SHELLEY, Nathan Salsburg and My Morning Jacket’s Jim James were among those who featured on last year’s Pine Mountain Sessions, a benefit album designed to raise funds for projects in their native Kentucky. Also on the bill was The Savage Radley, the alias of singer-songwriter SG Goodman, with the exquisite “Red Bird Morning”. James was so taken with her talent that he’s now co-produced Goodman’s debut. Old Time Feeling examines the ambiguous nature of the American South that she calls home and, specifically, her place within it. As a politically active gay woman, reared in the rural Kentucky enclave of Murray, deep in Baptist country, Goodman hasn’t had it easy. Her community’s…

“My newborn son took over the music room, so the deck became my creative space,” says guitarist Josh Kimbrough, a veteran of the North Carolina music scene who is just now releasing his first solo record. Steeped in Tar Heel folk traditions, the songs on Slither, Soar & Disappea r were composed on Kimbrough’s back deck, where he would sit and play for and with the wildlife wondering through. “Deer and grey squirrels are common. So are red-tail hawks, northern water snakes and beavers. Band practice wasn’t feasible, so the birds became my accompaniment.” He would often play in between the bird calls he heard, not merely imitating but trying to answer back. “I imagined I was part of their call and response.” After working closely with the Chapel Hill-based…

BOX OF CHOCOLATES Fearful Symmetry (reissue, 1990) DRAG CITY 8/10 Curio from future achievers – including Will Oldham – is dusted off, 30 years on AT the fag end of the ’80s, the NYC neighbourhood dubbed Dumbo (district under Manhattan Bridge Overpass) was still a long way from gentrification kick-started by the first tech boom. Which explains how a bunch of then-unknown, diverse talents with an open future were able to rent a loft at 140 Plymouth Street and live there. Among them were young actor Will Oldham, Robert Millis (sound artist and ethnographer), filmmaker Bryan Rich, guitarists Mike Howe, Michael Chorney (later an award-winning composer and arranger), Aaron Woolf (a figure from early Phish lore and later film director) and the self-taught Raphael Riviera. The picture is of a…

IN his 2016 Nobel Prize lecture – which he did not deliver in person but eventually published as a recording, with piano accompaniment, and a short book – Bob Dylan began with a memory of how seeing Buddy Holly in person and being given a Lead Belly record changed his life. But then he went on to talk about the books he read in school that had made the deepest and most enduring impact on him: Moby-Dick, All Quiet On The Western Front and The Odyssey. He closed his speech with Robert Fitzgerald’s 1961 translation of Homer’s opening invocation: “Sing in me, O Muse, and through me tell the story.” This was four years after Dylan had released Tempest, his last album of original material, and while he was in…

“THE thing about Little Richard, he always made an entrance,” says David T Walker, a session guitarist who recorded with the rock’n’roll icon in the early 1970s. “He’d enter a club with bodyguards fanning him with big feathered fans. It didn’t matter where he was. It could be just a small gig, and he’d still roll out the red carpet. He was Little Richard every day. Always flamboyant. He was always himself.” With his mile-high pompadour, layers of pancake makeup and ebullient character, Little Richard was always himself and no-one other than himself. He mixed up every kind of music he heard – popular R&B and rockabilly, jump blues and country, vaudeville and drag – and presented it all in a package that was flashy, outrageous, and sharply subversive. On…

“I’M nervous and emotional,” admits Sharon Van Etten, “but I’m happy to be here – happy we’re together.” Right now, of course, togetherness is a limited concept and “here” is a shared digital space. With her spring tour dates postponed and cabin fever likely setting in, the singer is playing her debut album, 2009’s Because I Was In Love, live in its entirety from her home studio in LA. Since it was written alone in the basement of her parents’ house (“a sort of self-imposed quarantine”), the choice has extra resonance, though solo acoustic guitar songs obviously adapt best to the situation, too. Which is why, when Van Etten appears – framed by a window and surrounded by music gear – she seems both in her element and slightly on…

CARMINE STREET GUITARS MODERN FILMS 7/10 Dropping in on a West Village landmark. By Alastair McKay IN a film where understatement is everything, it wouldn’t do to make grand claims. Ron Mann’s documentary is meditative rather than sensational. It is a quietly observational account of five days in the life of a guitar shop in New York’s West Village. The owner, Rick Kelly, is a gentle, reticent man, who seems happier working with wood than talking about it. When musicians drop in, he lets them chat and play awhile. He is patient, welcoming and pleased to see his instruments in capable hands. The days go by, the shop stays open. Kelly’s elderly mother, who does the books, dusts the guitars, and fails to straighten the framed photo of…

BETTY WRIGHT Miami soul powerhouse (1953-2020) Betty Wright was born a star. She was recording with her family gospel group Echoes Of Joy at the age of three, signed a solo deal at 12 and scored her first significant hit, 1968’s “Girls Can’t Do What the Guys Do”, two years later. The success of the single, later sampled by Beyoncé on “Upgrade U”, led to an invitation from TV’s American Bandstand, only for Wright to be denied permission to take the day off school. Blessed with a powerful soul voice and octave-leaping range, by 1972, she’d established herself as one of America’s foremost R&B figures after the single “Clean Up Woman”, written by Clarence Reid and Willie Clarke, shifted over a million copies. She was still only 18.…

“THE word ‘reunion’ makes me cringe,” says Eleanor Friedberger. “Maybe we want to replace ‘reunion’ with ‘rendezvous’,” her brother Matthew suggests. “It sounds exciting, right?” When a band is a brother-sister project, it’s not really possible to break up. Since their last show as The Fiery Furnaces in 2011, Eleanor and Matthew Friedberger haven’t played much together, but they’re still family, in contact as much as any adult siblings would be. They’d chatted about recording and touring again, but busy with solo projects, their calendars never aligned. However, an offer to play the 2020 Pitchfork Music Festival in Chicago gave them a concrete appointment, and for the first time in almost a decade, one of the most unique, divisive bands of 2000s indie rock was back, with plans for shows…

1 BANANAGUN Bang Go The Bongos Nicholas Van Bakel’s Melbourne crew start us off this month with the opening track from their debut album, The True Story Of Bananagun – a grooving, Technicolor concoction inspired by Tropicália pioneers Caetano Veloso and Os Mutantes. Van Bakel speaks on p27. 2 SAMANTHA CRAIN Pastime The Choctaw-American singer-songwriter returns with A Small Death, reviewed on p28, her first album since a car crash temporarily rendered her unable to play a musical instrument. “Pastime” is a yearning, stately highlight. 3 ROLLING BLACKOUTS COASTAL FEVER The Second Of The First The Australians take us deep inside their new album, Sideways To New Italy, in our feature on p58. Here’s a characteristically energetic track, as catchy as it is adventurous, which finds Fran…

Though based in part on her own experiences, Nadine Shah’s follow-up to 2017’s Holiday Destination is as outward-looking as its predecessor in its own way, drawing on the diverse stories of women in their thirties and forties. “A good friend of mine calls the song I wrote from her story her ‘anthem’. Another friend said she found empowerment in the song ‘Buckfast’, where I speak about a harrowing experience of gaslighting,” says Shah, who was keen to make sure she had “done the stories mustice” before finalising the album. Shah has described Kitchen Sink as “a diary of sorts” in which the themes – marriage, tradition, choosing whether to become a parent – came together as she wrote. “I’m constantly writing,” she says. “I guess it’s inevitable if I’m writing…

Wachaga SLYAL MUSLC 8/10 IT might seem natural, given his catalogue – and in particular the African nature of this, his fourth album – to assume Israel’s Kutiman took his name in deference to Fela Kuti, one of his most obvious influences. Instead, the 38-year-old kibbutz-dwelling multi-instrumentalist and video artist was merely adapting his birth name, Ophir Kutiel. Kutiman, after all, would never limit himself so conspicuously to one source of inspiration: he first came to attention in 2009 with his Thru-You videos, piecing together new songs from snippets discovered while combing the internet for footage of amateur musicians, whether jazz bands, metal guitarists or even a six-year-old classical piano prodigy, Alma Deutscher, who’d go on, 10 years later, to perform at Carnegie Hall. This aversion to boundaries has remained…

Axe Victim (reissue, 1974) CHERRYRED REISSUE OF THE MONTH 8/10 KEEN to sign up the quirky singer-songwriter whose self-released solo hippie oddity Northern Dream had been getting regular play on John Peel’s Radio 1 show, EMI’s A&R men lured Wakefield troubadour Bill Nelson down to London, but were somewhat nonplussed when he announced that he had formed a band. Invited to see Be-Bop Deluxe play at the Staging Post near Leeds in 1973, the big-city rock scouts were less than bowled over. In his sleevenotes to this super-abundant version of Be-Bop Deluxe’s debut album, Nelson remembers that the men from EMI deemed the band he formed after a chance reunion with former schoolmate Ian Parkin “not really up to professional standards”. They clocked that Nelson’s canny triangulation of David Bowie…

What was the original ethos behind Be-Bop Deluxe? When we started it was just a bit of fun; we didn’t have a plan to make records or turn professional. It was obviously very influenced by the early days of glam – dressing up more or less to freak people out in the local working men’s clubs we were playing in – but it took off. There wasn’t any other band doing it in our neck of the woods. I’d come out of the hippie scene and the psychedelic blues scene. The bands playing in pubs were all doing just middle-of-the-road pop and whatever was in the charts. Writing songs was kind of an unusual move, but Be-Bop Deluxe stuck to our guns and it paid off ’cos we drew a…

THE story of Oneness Of Juju is one of constant reinvention and mutation, a group pushing their music to take different shapes, placed in service of community and protest. They began as Juju in San Francisco in 1969, an avant-garde jazz troupe, though like contemporaries the Art Ensemble Of Chicago, their experimentations were often tied to the rhythms of the times. By the end of the ’70s, Oneness Of Juju had morphed into a free-for-all pan-generic collective, led by saxophonist James “Plunky” Branch, and hooked up with the Black Fire imprint to release a clutch of fantastically open-minded albums. That connection had Juju nestling alongside Wayne Davis’s surreal soul-gospel shuffling and Experience Unlimited’s astral soul-jazz: there are samples of all of this on the new label compendium, Black Fire: Soul…

KEVIN Harrington “Mal was a trusted friend along with Neil Aspinall he’d been there since the Cavern days. He was a bear of a man, you looked up to him. He was serious, but his whole outlook was that he didn’t work for them, it was a vocation. “Originally he was doing the euipment. Neil Aspinall was the tour manager, so he took care of ›ights, holidays, whatever They would go to Neil first and he would relay it to the office. Neil would co-ordinate, and Mal would look after the gear. “Normally I was sat by them when they were rehearsing, so if they said, do re›ects on The Beatles, so it was always about politeness. “It was all about being polite and being calm it was all about…

IN June 1980, an unsigned all-female American pop-punk group supported The Specials on a jaunt around British seaside towns. During the tour, Terry Hall and the band’s rhythm guitarist embarked on a clandestine love affair. Shortly afterwards, a classic song was born. A co-write between Hall and Jane Wiedlin, the Go-Go’s debut single “Our Lips Are Sealed” isn’t simply an oblique comment on the pair’s relationship; it also captures the essence of a band formed out of the LA punk scene. “I knew the lyrics had a story behind them, and that it was a personal exchange between Jane and Terry,” says Go-Go’s singer Belinda Carlisle. “But I felt and still feel when I sing the song that I can relate to them.” Lyrically, “Our Lips Are Sealed” subverted sexist…

MELODY MAKER AUGUST 2, 1980 To all intents and purposes, 1979 was not a particularly happy time for Siouxsie & The Banshees. For starters, the recording sessions for Join Hands, the band’s crucial follow-up to their widely acclaimed Scream debut album, had revealed both drummer and guitarist Kenny Morris and John McKay pulling away from the band, refusing, by all accounts, to contribute fully to the work in hand. In Newcastle on tour, the tension finally erupted as the two of them publicly walked out of an autograph session at a record shop and back to their hotel. The two of them carefully made up their beds to look as if they were sleeping and scarpered, leaving Siouxsie and Severin to carry on regardless. They haven’t been seen since.…

FURLOUGHED in 1981 while frontman David Byrne made a solo LP, Talking Heads’ husband-and-wife rhythm section, Chris Frantz and Tina Weymouth, soon discovered that their own plans to record an album were not being taken seriously. Their label, Sire, offered them a vaguely insulting $10,000 advance, while their producer of choice, Lee ‘Scratch’ Perry, decided at the last minute that he would only turn up to work with them if he was “paid a thousand dollars an hour”. The newly christened Tom Tom Club made their own arrangements and – recording instead for Island – scored massive global hits with “Wordy Rappinghood” and “The Genius Of Love”. In his memoir Remain In Love, Frantz quietly gloats that both were bigger successes than anything Talking Heads had produced since Byrne, Frantz…

RADIO UNCUT My first issue of Uncut was Take 1, attracted by the Elvis Costello story about his drunken error of judgement back in 1979. I’ve been buying it ever since. Donald Muir’s letter [Take 278] was a good excuse to look at my Uncut CDs – lockdown has produced far too much spare time. I was in a better position than Donald in that I already had a list because they had all been transferred to my laptop when I needed to downsize a few years ago. The 4,325 tracks, growing monthly, constitute a go-to-playlist imaginatively titled ‘Radio Uncut’. Shuffle play allows for an intriguing hour or so of always interesting and eclectic music, plus the occasional Beatles interview (Beatles Talk). Agreed, Drive-By Truckers do get 17 tracks but…