Innehållsförteckning för February 2021 #285 från UNCUT

“Controversial music is not something you can take for granted, you have to fight for it” LISTENING to Tom Morello’s raucous new “Comandante” EP, on which he pays tribute to Jimi Hendrix and Eddie Van Halen before trading licks with Slash, it’s hard to believe that it was recorded at home during lockdown. “My 97-year-old mom and my 89-year-old mother-in-law are with us,” he explains, “so we’ve literally been under corona house arrest for eight months with nobody in or out.” But after reading an interview where Kanye West extolled the virtues of recording to voicemail, Morello decided to make a whole EP doing just that. He’s particularly proud of how his version of “Voodoo Child” turned out: “It sounds pretty massive for a phone balanced on a little folding…

The Besnard Lakes Are The Dark Horse JAGJAGUWAR, 2007 After a somewhat vestigial debut album, here’s where The Besnard Lakes’ vision swings into focus. Their major sonic preoccupations – the vocal harmonies of The Beach Boys, the voluminous space-rock of Pink Floyd, a certain orchestral sturm-und-drang – are all present and correct. Lasek’s fixation on espionage takes shape on “For Agent 13”, while the bombastic “Devastations” climaxes with a three-way drum solo. 8/10 The Besnard Lakes Are The Roaring Night JAGJAGUWAR, 2010 Recorded on the 1968 Neve console used to capture Led Zeppelin’s Physical Graffiti and using an expanded palette of instruments including flute, Omnichord and Mellotron, … Are The Roaring Night finds The Besnard Lakes blowing their sound into glorious widescreen. It’s perhaps their most dynamic album: hear how…

1 Ghost Story (feat.Orono) 2 Song For Barbara Payton 3 We Will Always Love You (feat. Blood Orange) 4 The Divine Chord (feat. MGMT & JohnnyMarr) 5 Solitary Ceremonies 6 Interstellar Love (feat.Leon Bridges) 7 Ghost Story Pt 2 (ft.Leon Bridges & Orono) 8 Reflecting Light (feat.Sananda Maitreya & Vashti Bunyan) 9 Carrier Waves 10 Oh The Sunn! (feat. Perry Farrell) 11 We Go On (feat. Cola Boyy & Mick Jones) 12Star Song.IMG 13Until Daylight Comes (feat. Tricky) 14Wherever You Go (feat. Jamie xx, Neneh Cherry& CLYPSO) 15 Music Makes Me High 16 Pink Champagne 17 Take Care In Your Dreaming (feat.Denzel Curry,Tricky & Sampa The Great) 18 Overcome 19 Gold Sky (feat. Kurt Vile) 20 Always Black (feat. Pink Siifu) 21 Dial D For Devotion (feat.Karen O) 22 Running…

1 I’ve Gotta Get A Message To You (feat Keith Urban) 2 Words Of A Fool (featJasonIsbell) 3 Run To Me (feat BrandiCarlile) 4 Too Much Heaven (featAlisonKrauss) 5 LonelyDays (feat Little Big Town) 6 Words (feat Dolly Parton) 7 Jive Talkin’ (feat JayBuchanan& MirandaLambert) 8 How Deep Is Your Love(feat Little Big Town&Tommy Emmanuel) 9 How Can You MendABroken Heart(feat Sheryl Crow) 10ToLove Somebody(feat JayBuchanan) 11Rest Your Love On Me (feat Olivia Newton-John) 12Butterfly (feat David Rawlings &GillianWelch) Producedby: Dave Cobb Recorded at: RCA Studio A, Nashville, Tennessee Personnel:Barry Gibb(vocals, guitars),Jason Isbell,GillianWelch, David Rawlings (vocals,guitars), Keith Urban,Brandi Carlile,Alison Krauss,LittleBig Town, Dolly Parton, MirandaLambert, JayBuchanan, SherylCrow,Olivia Newton-John (vocals),Dave Cobb(guitars, Mellotron),Tommy Emmanuel, TimHanseroth, ElizabethLamb, Leroy Powell (guitars), PaulFranklin, RobbyTurner (pedalsteel), Brian Allen, Phil Hanseroth(bass), PhillipTowns (keyboards), DannyGoodstein, Chris Powell (drums),Jimmy Bowland,…

A couple of essential new albums are due in the early part of 2021. Israel Nash will release Topaz LOOSE, the follow-up to 2018’s much-admired Lifted , in February or March. “I’ve been recording and writing more music than ever over the past year,” the Texan-based songwriter tells Uncut . “After Lifted , I wanted to make something that was a little dirtier and shakier, where less is more. So there’s a lot of openness to the record and the whole thing is a really moody experience. There’s just a lot of emotion in the parts, things captured live, first takes. The songs are like a real-time journal of the last couple of years for me. It covers some  quite heavy things.” Also due in the spring, on the SUBMARINE…

Lottie Pendlebury on politics, possession and ghosts How did the writing process work this time? It was almost a piecing together of loads of different ideas. Someone would bring the initial idea, whether that be a chord progression or a lyric or something, and we’d try and expand on that together, record what we’d done and then bring those recordings home with us, write our own bits on top and bring them back. It was a cool way of working. Politics seem like a heavy influence on these songs. It’s something that’s always been important to us. We pride ourselves on being leftists, and that’s not just shown through the music, but through the way we live our lives, the things we do outside of the band. That’s obviously…

Jim Ghedi: “This album comes from an emotional place” This is the first record you have sung a lot on, and your voice is quite unusual: do you like it? I don’t know if I do, to be honest. I’m like everyone else – just hearing my voice and going, ‘Fucking hell.’ But I am proud of what we did in the studio. A lot of the things I was trying to get across on this album I was aggressive about; they’ve come from emotional places. You recorded the album in the Hebrides in January: how was that? It was like going to another planet. Completely silent, and the landscape was breathtaking. Going up in January probably wasn’t the smartest move, but I’m glad I did. It was almost like…

1 You Don’t Wanna Be My Baby 2 If I Got It (Your Love Brought It) 3 Can’t Leave It Alone 4 Bad News 5 Have Mercy 6 Done Lyin’ 7 Lover Girl 8 Ride With Me 9 Girl On The Phone 10 Love Is 11 Over You 12 Leanin’ On Your Everlasting Love Produced by: Dan Auerbach Recorded at: Easy Eye Sound, Nashville Personnel includes: Aaron Frazer (vocals, drums), Dan Auerbach (gtr), Tom Bukovac (gtr), Billy Sanford (gtr), Russ Pahl (gtr), Pat McLaughlin (acoustic gtr), Nick Movshon (bass), Ray Jacildo (piano, Mellotron), Bobby Wood (piano, keys), Mike Rojas (synth, clavinet), Matt Combs (strings), Sam Bacco (perc, Vibraphone)…

Masterly vehicles for artistic reinvention. BY 1970, Cat Stevenshad been absent from the charts for three years. Rendered hors de combat by a life-threatening bout of tuberculosis, the time out also offered an opportunity for a major reset. The likes of Leonard Cohen, Joni Mitchell and James Taylor were ushering in the age of the sensitive acoustic troubadour, and to Stevens their songs sounded so much more profound and poetic than the overblown, melodramatic orchestral pop of “I’m Gonna Get Me A Gun” and “Matthew And Son”. As he slowly recovered, a stream of songs in a more reflective folk-rock vein poured out of him. Released from his old recording contract, Stevens auditioned his new material for Chris Blackwell, who had just signed John Martyn and Nick Drake. The result…

MARC ALMOND TheStars We Are (reissue,1988)SFE 8/10 Unlikely star strikes pop goldon fourthsoloouting “Bedevilled by angels, belittled by fools” is a telling line from “Only The Moment”, one of the gems on The Stars We Are – it captures where Almond found himself, having parted with Virgin after the startling but commercially unsuccessful Mother Fist… in 1987. The Stars We Are, then, is one hell of a riposte: a perpetual swoon of an album, scored with Walker Brothers towers of strings, a duet with Nico, another with actress Agnes Bernelle, and then, after everything, a No 1 hit with Gene Pitney on “Something’s Gotten Hold Of My Heart”. He would make more demanding records, but this is the closest Almond got to making a perfect pop album. Extras6/10:An extra CD…

THE CURE TITLE Unconfirmed LABEL Unconfirmed RELEASE DATE 2021 Expect “heavy and dark” moods on the much-anticipated comeback from Robert Smith’s band of brothers REEVES GABRELS, GUITAR: We started the record in January 2019 in Wales – we went in for about two months. We’d all been writing before that. So we got together and listened to it all, learned it, went in the studio and recorded it. There’s enough material for two or three records, a lot of stuff. So one of the problems, when you’ve got enough for two records, is deciding which songs to bring to completion. Right now I’m not 100 per cent sure where we’re at. Are we at a record and a half? Are we two records finished? I always feel as though The…

“THIS feels in a lot of ways like a really Toronto record. This is where I have to give Tamara credit – she’s kind of crafty like that, she doesn’t always tell everybody all her plans, intentionally or unintentionally, and she really assembled people from different Toronto scenes. The two drummers: Kieran Adams, who plays in Diana and with tons of other people – he’s an incredible drummer, and he’s a producer as well. And then Philippe Melanson who plays in Bernice, he’s like a free-floating, exploring drummer. She said we’re going to bring in Brodie West (The Ex) to play saxophone because he comes from the free jazz scene, but we’re also going to bring in Ryan Driver (Eric Chenaux) on flute and Christine Bougie who plays guitar with…

IN autumn 1966, Captain Vic Mortensen was travelling down Vietnam’s Highway 1 in an army Jeep. Stopping at a shack by the side of the road, he was surprised to discover that his old group had finally make a record. “The Vietnamese would flatten old cans and make tin sheds out of them where they sold beer,” says Mortensen today. “My driver said, ‘Sir, can we stop here so I can get a beer?’ I stayed with the Jeep, and then half an hour later he came running out. ‘Sir, sir! There’s a Captain Beefheart record on the jukebox!’” The single, a cover of Bo Diddley’s “Diddy Wah Diddy” backed with a Beefheart original, “Who Do You Think You’re Fooling?”, was hardly earth-shattering, but it was a step forward for…

“FOR most of the time of the band, Liz [Fraser] and I were completely in our little bubble,” says Robin Guthrie. “We lived small, we didn’t do much without each other, we didn’t live in big apartments.” That hermetic atmosphere in part helped create the unique feel of the Cocteaus’ records, with Guthrie and Fraser, joined by Will Heggie and then Simon Raymonde, mostly recording in their own studios, improvising songs out of thin air as they battled to keep industry tentacles out of the control room. “There wasn’t much career planning, we were just kids that listened to John Peel and wanted to be part of that,” says Guthrie, explaining why they signed to 4AD, currently celebrating its 40th birthday. “We wanted to be on the same label as…

IN 1967, as the Vietnam War death toll kept mounting, Phil Ochs exhorted fellow radicals to join him on an absurdist mission to declare the war over “from the bottom up”. In the Los Angeles Free Press, he wrote, “I believe there is still something inherent in the fibre of America worth saving, and that the fortunes of the entire world may well ride on the ability of young America to face the responsibilities of an old America gone mad.” As with much of Ochs’ work, the words still feel pertinent today. The only ’60s protest songwriter who Bob Dylan ever considered a serious rival, Ochs walked it like he talked it. A new anthology – I’m Gonna Say It Now: The Writings Of Phil Ochs – charts the Texan’s…

ALTIN GÜN Yol GLITTERBEAT Building on the irresistible pulse of last year’s instant party-starter “Süpürgesi Yoncadan”, the Anatolian psych revivalists go full-on synth-pop. Harika! TINDERSTICKS Distractions CITY SLANG Icy coldwave stylings, a desolate Neil Young cover, “these irritating wounds we need to attend to again and again”… Well, you didn’t expect a party album did you? BONNIE ‘PRINCE’ BILLY & BILL CALLAHAN “Deacon Blues (ft Bill MacKay)” DRAG CITY This is the day of the expanding repertoire… The three Bills bravely tackle the Dan – in a dreamy bossa style no less! CASSANDRA JENKINS An Overview On Phenomenal Nature BADA BING  Sounds like a breakthrough record for the Woods and Kevin Morby associate, her arch observations unspooling into gorgeous sax-led reveries. CARWYN ELLIS & RIO 18 Mas BANANA & LOUIE…

The Avalanches: “We were in a really good flow ” How relieved are you that it didn’t take 16 years to make this record? TONY DI BLASI: It’s like being saved from the Titanic . Did it come together pretty quickly? ROBBIE CHATER: We were in a really good flow. With Wildflower we made this huge digital catalogue of samples and I got lost. With this one we would find a record, get inspired in the moment and make a song that day. How involved were you with the album’s lyrical themes? DI BLASI: Robbie created a thematic overview of the record that conveyed what we were trying to achieve. We sent it to every vocalist so they knew where we wanted them to come from. The David Berman…

MONABONE JAKON CD1Original Album (2020 Remaster) CD2 Original Album (2020 Mix) CD3 Demos CD4 Live Blu-Ray – Music Video & Live Videos + High Res AudioofOriginal Album (2020 Mix) 12” Etched Vinyl– Live At Plumpton Jazz & Blues Festival (08/08/70) TEA FOR THE TILLERMAN CD1Original Album (2020 Remaster) CD2Original Album (2020 Mix) CD3Tea For The Tillerman² CD4 Demos /Outtakes/ Alternate Versions CD5 Live Blu-ray - Music Video & Live Videos + High- Res Audio ofOriginalAlbum (2020 Mix) 12”- Live At TheTroubadour, 1970…

Saxophone Solos: Aerobatics 1-4 Monoceros: Monoceros 1-4 Six Of One: 1 One Of Six 2 Two Of Six 3 Three Of Six 4 Four Of Six 5 Five Of Six 5 Six Of Six The Snake Decides: 1 The Snake Decides 2 Leipzig Folly 3 Burden’s Ass 4 Haine’s Last Tape Cassette: Aerobatics 5-14 Reissue producer: Abby Thomas Recorded by: Martin Davidson, Jost Gebers, Numar Libin, Adam Skeaping, Michael Gerzon Recorded at: Unity Theatre, London (1975); FMP Studio, Berlin (1975); Wyestone Leys, Oxford (1978); St Jude’s on the Hill, London (1980); St Paul’s, Oxford (1986) Personnel: Evan Parker (soprano saxophone)…

BALLROOM LIVE AT THE AVALON 1966 WAX RADIO, 2018 Primitively recorded, this set shows off the early bluesy Magic Band at their peak. “Tupelo” is a masterful taut slow blues, while “Evil” is suitably savage. Throughout, Beefheart, on harp and stinging vocals, is very much the star. 7/10 SAFE AS MILK BUDDAH, 1967 Psychedelic garage-blues with extra Cooder! Alongside fuzzy, eccentric delights such as “Dropout Boogie”, “Abba Zaba” and “Electricity”, there’s also a seam of soulful beauty in “I’m Glad” and “Call On Me”. 8/10 SESSIONS THE MIRROR MAN BUDDAH RECORDS, 1999 Two LPs of lengthy material recorded in late 1967 for the Safe As Milk follow-up. As John French recalls, there’s not much Captain here because he hadn’t rehearsed with the band and was unsure how to fit his…

STORIES about Syd Barrett are legion. That he became overbearingly egotistical, impossible to work with. That he was thrown out of Pink Floyd. That he suffered a psychological crack-up. That he once went for an afternoon drive and ended up in Ibiza. That he went back to live with his mother in Cambridge as a part of a mental healing process. That occasionally he goes to the house of Richard Wright, the Floyd’s organist, and sits there silently for hours without speaking. Some of the stories are true. Roger Waters: “When he was still in the band in the later stages, we got to the point where any one of us was likely to tear his throat out at any minute because he was so impossible… When ‘Emily’ was a…

IT’S not often that you hear a debut album featuring a song that makes unselfconscious reference to “grandpa”. But when the song is as good as “Different Streets” by 25-year-old musician Made Kuti, and the grandpa in question is the legendary Nigerian composer, bandleader and activist Fela Kuti, then that composition probably becomes a lot easier to explain. “Different Streets” is a stirring seven-and-a-half-minute piece of Afrobeat moderne, and one of the cornerstones of Made Kuti’s forthcoming album For(e)ward. Released in tandem with Stop The Hate – the 11th studio album by his father, Femi Kuti – together the two releases form a powerful cross-generational statement on life in Nigeria today. There, as Femi and Made tell it during a joint Zoom call from Lagos, the people are held in…

1 With in the her shops Archives , we’ve Vol taken the opportunity to update our Ultimate Music Guide to Joni Mitchell with a new deluxe edition. A lavish 148-page magazine, it includes reviews of every album, her 30 greatest songs as voted for by her peers, and Uncut’s extended account of Mitchell’s gradual return to a more public life in 2020. It’s in shops now or available to buy online via Uncut. co.uk… Also out now – a nd available exclusively from our online store – is the second part of Ultimate Record Collection:David Bowie, presenting every single, album and comp in order of release, with new stories and insights from the people who worked with Bowie to make them. If you missed Part 2 in March, you…

1 Blackstrap 2 Raindrops 3 Christmas Can Wait 4 Our Heads, Our Hearts on Fire Again 5 Feuds With Guns 6 The Dark Side Of Paradise 7 New Revolution 8 The Father Of Time Wakes Up 9 Last Of The Great Thunderstorms Warnings Produced by: Jace Lasek and Olga Goreas Recorded at: The Rigaud Ranch and Breakglass Studios, Quebec Personnel: Jace Lasek (guitars, bass, drums, vocals, synths, keys, string and horn arrangements), Olga Goreas (bass, vocals, synths, keys, flute, string and horn arrangements), Robbie MacArthur (guitars), Kevin Laing (drums, congas, perc), Sheenah Ko (synths, keys, b/v), Richard White (guitars), Loel Campbell (drums on “New Revolution”), Mark Cuthbertson (guitar solo on “The Father Of Time Wakes Up”)…

1 Pest 2 Badibaba 3 Jazz (In The Supermarket) 4 Once Again 5P.T.S.Tea 6 Sad Cowboy 7 The Crack 8 Closing In 9 Anxiety Feels 10 They Bite On You 11 Bang 12 Where Do We Go From Here? 13 A-Men Produced by: Dan Carey Recorded at: Carey’s studio, south London Personnel includes: Lottie Pendlebury (vocals, guitar, various instruments), Ellie Rose Davies (guitar, vocals, various instruments), Rosy Jones (drums, vocals, various instruments), Holly Mullineaux (bass, vocals, various instruments)…

Farmer Dave: “California’s my beating heart!” What does it mean for you to step out of the sideman role into a frontman role? Energetically, it is a big shift. I’ve always loved being in groups, and don’t need to be the centre of attention. But then, when I find I have a bunch of tunes of my own playing in my head, it’s time to do something about that. The main thing for me is to follow the most exciting mystery that presents itself. Why did you cover The Surfaris’ “Wipe Out”? Our drummer, Jud Birza, had been requesting we cover “Wipe Out”. I didn’t resonate with it at first, but he was persistent. One day I thought how fun would it be to play “Wipe Out” but to Duchamp…

Aaron Frazer “The train is leaving the station and we have to get on it” Why did you choose to make a solo record now? I’d been putting all my energy into the Indications for a long time, so I figured I’d just sneak out a 45 here and there when I had a minute. When Dan called me about making a record, it felt like an opportunity to do something for myself that I might not have made time for otherwise – and to do it with a musician who’s been a big influence over the years. Which soul greats do you most admire? Curtis Mayfield and Gil Scott-Heron taught me that you can write love songs and political commentary with equal finesse, equal power. Lee Hazlewood and Smokey…

NANCY SINATRA One More Time COUGAR, 1995 Nancy Sinatra’s Playboy pictorial at the age of 55 earned more attention than the comeback album she was promoting. That’s a shame since One More Time is a classy demonstration of her versatility, with styles that range from the countrypolitan balladry of “I Didn’t Wear White” and saucy R&B of “For Me It’s You”, to the Hazlewood-style sturm und drang of “White Water” and an endearingly grandiose cover of “Nights In White Satin”. 7/10 NANCY SINATRA Nancy Sinatra SANCTUARY/EMI, 2004 Coaxed out of retirement by a new generation, Sinatra shines on songs tailored to her talents by admirers like Thurston Moore and U2. Alas, the sumptuously Smiths-y single “Let Me Kiss You” was beaten on the UK charts by Morrissey’s own version, which…

Evan Parker “Each instrument has a kind of mind…” What’s the story of the original came Collected out in Solos 1989 box after , which you’d ended your partnership with Derek Bailey in the Incus label, and was distributed by John Jack at Cadillac? I left Incus fairly abruptly. I’d had enough. I just said to Derek, let me take my stuff and carry on. He was angry but there wasn’t anything he could do about it. I was left with records and no covers. John Jack said, “If you put them all in a box and make something special of it, you can sell them off.” How had you started playing solo? To begin with I thought solo playing was a species of composition in a way that group…

ALL OF IT WAS MINE YOU’VE CHANGED RECORDS, 2011 Sparser than her debut, this is Lindeman’s most straightforward folk album – led by voice, fingerpicked banjo and guitar, and with a determinedly pastoral bent to the lyrics (porches, lilacs, jars of honey), it captured the reigning nu-folk feel of the time. Recorded at the home of producer Daniel Romano, there’s a captivating intimacy to this short, simple record. 8/10 LOYALTY PARADISE OF BACHELORS,2015 Lindeman decamped to a deteriorating French mansion to record her third album in the company of engineer Robbie Lackritz and  Bahamas leader Afie Jurvanen, sharing both production duties and instrumentation. It’s an elegant, hushed recording that sometimes belies the new sharp confidence of Lindeman’s lyrical style, grown more concentrated and precise and unsparing. 9/10 THE WEATHER…

“I SAW some examples of it. One night Don’s doing an interview at my apartment in New York, and we heard something like a car backfire, and he says, ‘Hold on, man, did you hear that? Something really heavy just went down, and you’re gonna read about it on the front pages tomorrow.’ In the middle of the next interview, the phone rang and it was the first journalist: ‘Gary, I don’t believe it, man. John Lennon was just shot. How did Don know?’ He was definitely sensitive to stuff in the air. He’d say the phone would ring and then it would ring. I think there are people who might not have mystical power, but they just have different channels on the world and their nervous system picks up…

“I BECAME involved with Syd through my girlfriend at the time, Jenny Spires; she and Syd were childhood sweethearts. When he’d been younger he was of course very charming, the life and soul of the party, but by that time he was very withdrawn, living in his mother’s basement in Cambridge. He was haunted, you know? He would wander around not really talking to anybody, hardly engaging even with us. “In January ’72, Twink and I played with the American blues musician Eddie Burns at the Cambridge University Blues Club – we were like the house rhythm section – and Syd came to that gig and maybe even sat in with us. I don’t think he was playing really, until we came and said, ‘Right, let’s get together.’ We thought…

SOUL Directed by Pete Docter Starring (voices) Jamie Foxx, Tina Fey Streaming from December 25 Cert PG 8/10 MANK Directed by David Fincher Starring Gary Oldman, Amanda Seyfried Streaming from December 4 Cert 12A 6/10 MA RAINEY’S BLACK BOTTOM Directed by George C Wolfe Starring Viola Davis, Chadwick Boseman Opens December 18 Cert tbc 7/10 MURDER ME, MONSTER Directed by Alejandro Fadel Starring Victor López, Esteban Bigliardi Opens December 4 Cert tbc 7/10 THE MOLE AGENT Directed by Maite Alberdi Starring Sergio Chamy Opens December 11 Cert PG 7/10…

VARIOUS ARTISTS CLASSICS BLOWING THE THAT FUSE ROCKED : R&B THE JUKEBOX BEAR FAMILY, 2007 I love music from the ’40s, because it feels so much less self-aware, before the distraction of TV and the oversaturation of showbusiness. The 16 compilations in this series are probably my all-time favourite collection; the personalities in those records make me feel happy and connected to a sense of authenticity that I didn’t experience but that I can relate to. I heard a lot of these songs growing up – while my mother was getting ready for work, she’d yell from the bathroom, “Go put this record on!” And then, “Go put the needle back!” When I heard these collections, I felt a warm feeling of home and comfort. RUFUS FEATURING CHAKA KHAN THE…