Innholdsfortegnelse for June 2022 i UNCUT

“WE have draft manuscripts, dozens upon dozens of his notebooks, all audio and footage from 1964-2012, full session tapes, unused album artwork, drawings, paintings, photos, the leather jacket he wore when he went electric at Newport in ’65…” Mark Davidson, Archives Director at the Bob Dylan Center in Tulsa, screws his eyes shut as he attempts a rough inventory of the 100,000-plus items that constitute the Bob Dylan Archive, the kaleidoscopic resource he describes as the Center’s “beating heart”. “We have a lot of correspondence to Bob, letters from all kinds of people: PJ Harvey, Allen Ginsberg, former presidents. Letters from fans in 1966, sending him everything from Kurt Vonnegut novels to nail clippers… It’s the most expansive collection devoted to any single artist ever comprised.” While much of it…

IN 1987, Dinosaur Jr embarked on what was supposed to be on their breakthrough tour. They had just made their second album, You’re Living All Over Me, which would eventually become an underground rock landmark. Except the album had been delayed, and their new label SST hadn’t given them a reason or even an ETA. “It was horrible,” says frontman J Mascis. “We set off on our big summer tour without an album out. Nobody knew who we were. Our van broke down a lot. There were even some gigs where we were told, ‘You’re not playing here’, even though we were already booked. It was pretty miserable.” Dinosaur Jr had been determined to sign with SST and take their place on a roster that included Hüsker Dü, Bad Brains,…

“The isolation of the last couple of years was certainly part of it,” John Doe says, considering why his new album, Fables In A Foreign Land, is set in the desolate, 1980s USA. This past doesn’t seem such a foreign country, anyway, to the America Doe began documenting in his LA punk band X in 1977, or to its current malaise. “Guilty Bystander”, in which slaves are whipped, was inspired by George Floyd’s murder. “It isn’t necessarily to do with a man whipping another person,” Doe explains. “It could be a man whipping a horse. Because at somepoint, people were treated like animals. And what the fuck, man?” The album’s brisk country sound grew out of backyard jams at Doe’s Austin, Texas home, and the “immediacy and simplicity” of Dylan’s John Wesley…

WHEN Leyla McCalla was a teenager, her father introduced her to the music of Caetano Veloso, in particular his song “You Don’t Know Me”. “I loved his music and had always been fascinated when I learned of Veloso’s own experience of being exiled from Brazil in the early ‘70s,” says McCalla, a singer-songwriter and cellist living in New Orleans and a member of groundbreaking supergroup Our Native Daughters. When she was commissioned by Duke University to write music based on Radio Haiti—a station whose pioneering journalists investigated political corruption and were exiled, tortured, even assassinated – McCalla recorded a powerful cover of “You Don’t Know Me” as the lynchpin for her fourth solo album, Breaking The Thermometer. “The words to the song resonated so much with this experience and I felt it…

We COLUMBIA 8/10 The Canadians’ resurgent sixth. By Jason Anderson ANYONE harbouring the ambition to create a work that encapsulates the chaos and confusion of these times faces a fundamental obstacle: there’s rather a lot to cover. That’s certainly one of the reasons that We – Arcade Fire’s sixth album and first since 2017’s Everything Now – required the most protracted birth process in their two-decade career. In a BBC interview in 2020, frontman Win Butler claimed to have written “records and records” of material while locked down at home. Nor did this torrent stop when they were able to re-enter the world and work on the album in studios in New Orleans, El Paso and Mount Desert Island, Maine, through 2020 and 2021. Somehow, the band and producer Nigel…

Come Away With Me: Super Deluxe Edition BLUE NOTE 9/10 Twenty years on, the road to her debut LP chronicled. By Nigel Williamson ON its release in February 2002, expectations for Norah Jones’ debut album were “modest” in the extreme, as the liner notes accompanying this expanded 20thanniversary edition tell us. In Uncut’s brief original review, we suggested that Jones’ sultry voice sat somewhere between Sade and Shelby Lynne, but did at least hint that she might go on to outstrip both of them. Nine Grammy awards, 30 million sales and two decades later, that judgement seems a tad cautious but not too far wide of the mark. Since her debut Jones has recorded half a dozen more huge-selling albums and lent her beguiling voice to collaborations with Foo Fighters,…

Smokin’ The Dummy/Bloodlines (reissues, 1980, 1983) PARADISE OF BACHELORS 8/10, 8/10 First vinyl reissues of Allen’s early-’80s weirdo country classics WHENSmokin’ The Dummy was first released in 1980, it was somewhat lost in the shadow of its predecessor. Allen’s 1979 double-set Lubbock (On Everything) was a sprawling, eccentric and (largely) affectionate portrait of Allen’s Texas hometown, which combined the melancholy intelligence of Randy Newman, the wry poesy of Guy Clark, and the Rabelaisian bawdery of Kinky Friedman. Its influence can be heard at all points on the Americana spectrum from Robert Earl Keen to Drive-By Truckers. Though Lubbock was a tough act to follow, all its virtues were nevertheless reanimated for Smokin’ The Dummy, a tremendous collection of rowdy honky-tonk stompers in which Allen takes a sort of defiant relish…

PATRICK Carney, drummer for The Black Keys, is telling the story of how he nearly chopped off his finger. Sitting in the kitchen area of Easy Eye Sound Studio, he grows more and more animated as he recalls working at a health food store called the Mustard Seed back in Akron, Ohio, chopping vegetables with a crew of older guys. “I was 16, but I was able to use the knife because I lied about my age. They thought I was older than I really was. This guy walks up and shows me this little catalogue of people going at it. What the hell? I kept chopping with the knife and cut my fucking pinky off! I didn’t even realise I’d done it.” He pauses for dramatic effect as his…

MILES sat right up close to me and rasped in a voice like a thin file, “Whadda ya wanna know? Whadda ya wanna know? said, talking about trumpets, he didn’t seem to be playing quite as much these days. There was less emphasis on notes and phrases. “That’s a matter of opinion,” he answered abruptly. “When I was with Bird [Charlie Parker], Fats Navarro used to say I played too fast all the time, but I couldn’t swing with Max Roach ’cos he couldn’t swing. I mean, because you have technique you don’t have to use it. You use it when you feel like it. It’s called good taste. I play whatever comes into my black head, man.” The critics had also claimed he’d been influenced the past couple of…

Royal Albert Hall, London, March 25 A rare and revelatory unplugged outing for Rog and Pete, in aid of Teenage Cancer Trust “WELL, we’ve done two hours of rehearsals,” says Pete Townshend, sidling on like the lankier half of Pete and Dud, “so it’s absolute shite…” When Roger Daltrey decided he needed to get personally involved with his traditional week of Teenage Cancer Trust gigs at the Albert Hall, this acoustic Who show, cheaper than their full-power juggernaut, was his solution. It’s hard to picture the Stones permitting the resultant half-sloppy, tightrope stumbles. But building on the gripping acoustic core of The Who’s 2019 orchestral tour – still to hit Britain – they take the opportunity to investigate littleplayed songs and focus in the moment. No longer operating as a…

THE mind-bending cover of Whitney K’s new mini-album Hard To Be A God features a painting of a dog on its hind legs, rearing over the bodies of Bob Dylan, Lou Reed and Kris Kristofferson, three artists whose influence can be clearly detected on the grooves within. Another less immediately apparent – but equally significant influence – on the record is Hopscotch, the 1963 novel by Argentine author Julio Cortázar. “It’s set up so you can read it in a linear or nonlinear fashion,” explains Konner Whitney (aka Whitney K) from his current home in Montreal. “The result is two different stories. I’ve only read it the traditional front-to-back way, so I guess you could say I’ve only read half the book. Spanishspeaking authors – specifically Central and South American…

Endless Rooms SUB POP 8/10 Aussie guitar gang’s full potential epically realised. By Sharon O’Connell AS for so many musicians, 2020 was a time of stasis and uncertainty for Rolling Blackouts Coastal Fever. The title of their third album, with its suggestion of maze-like entrapment, is the stuff of literal nightmares but also, one imagines, of the psychological effect of the world’s longest lockdown in Australia’s mismanaged pandemic. This record was born out of that time: singer and guitarist Tom Russo, one of three songwriters in the band, has admitted that a lot of his ideas “came from endlessly walking around the same streets of [Melbourne neighbourhood] West Brunswick”. Fran Keaney spent his weekends “building stuff on Garageband, writing without having any sense anybody would listen to it”. All of…

THE AMERICANS Stand True LOOSE 8/10 LA trio channel loss and heartbreak into heroic roots-rock THE AMERICANS’ profile is still pretty low-key, but the band comes with high-end endorsements. Greil Marcus was swept up by 2017 debut I’ll Be Yours and was left hankering for more. T Bone Burnett and Jack White commandeered them for The American Epic Sessions, with Burnett singing their virtues as “genius 21st-century musicians that are reinventing American heritage music for this century. And it sounds even better this century.” Belated second albumStand Truereveals the West Coast threesome of Patrick Ferris (vocals/guitar), Jake Faulkner (bass) and Zac Sokolow (guitar) to be keenly attuned to the kind of roots-up music that built America. You can hear the heartland bleat of Springsteen or Bob Seger in their raw…

This Is A Photograph DEAD OCEANS 9/10 Son of Kansas hones his Middle American vision. By Erin Osmon WHAT is Americana, exactly? Since its birth in the margins of Nashville, and in off-lying corners of the American South and Midwest, it’s become a vast, amorphous catch-all for American music that is vaguely rootsy, twangy and aware of tradition, but that does not purport to be country or blues. Today, in America at least, it’s swelled beyond a discernible sound or identity, making way for legions of imitators in brimmed hats and put-on Southern accents – working-class cosplay in search of a record deal on Music Row. There is plenty of great music being crafted under its banner, to be sure, but its sprawling and watered-down status also begs for a…

96 Tears/Action(reissues, 1966, ’67) ABKCO Shades of ’66: enigmatic garage punkers return to vinyl. By Jim Wirth REISSUE OF THE MONTH 8/10 OON April 2, 1968, Rudy ‘?’ Martinez was one of three men picked up by Michigan state police in a lay-by near the Zilwaukee Bridge, not far from his home town of Saginaw, the trio arrested for possession of “several tubes of glue and brown bags containing glue”. In the wrong place at the wrong time with very much the wrong drugs, the perma-shaded? And The Mysterians singer thus found himself about as far from the psychedelic action as he could have been, an improbable local success story recast as something of a laughing stock. Naive, sci-fi crazy, Mexican-American youngsters from a bluecollar backwater two hours’ drive from…

Official Bootleg Series: Royce Hall, 1971/Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, 1971/Citizen Kane Jr Blues (Live The Bottom Line) WARNERS 7/10, 8/10, 9/10 Seductive sets round out important period for Young. By Tyler Wilcox AS with so many other things, Neil Young’s attitude towards bootlegs has been inconsistent, to say the least. An oft circulated film clip from the early 1970s shows him angrily confronting a hapless record store clerk over a stack of unauthorised CSNY releases, eventually absconding with them, unpaid for. By the early 1990s, however, he had changed his tune. “More power to them – they can sell ’em in the parking lot, I don’t give a shit,” Young told biographer Jimmy McDonough. “I have nothing against bootlegs – for an artist like me, they’re essential.” In the 2020s, Neil…

THE history and development of free jazz is marked by larger-than-life figures, intensely invested in their singular, peculiar aesthetic visions. But there were few free jazz musicians quite as divisive as Japanese guitarist Masayuki Takayanagi. He built a fierce reputation as a gifted jazz player during the ’60s, only to volte-face later that decade, embracing the extremities of free jazz and improvisation. It didn’t help that he was a legendarily abrasive character, with a brutally acidic tongue, taking to task anyone who fell short of his impossibly exacting standards, whether concert promoters, fellow musicians or dedicated fans. That formidable presence is writ large across a three-album set, Station ’70: Call In Question/Live IndependenceBLACK EDITIONS 9/10, which reissues two CDs, that originally appeared on the PSF label in the mid-’90s. These…

ISMAILY: Four or five years ago, [pianist] Vijay Iyer was doing a special concert at The Kitchen in New York. Arooj was also on the bill, and during soundcheck someone suggested that maybe I joined them as a trio. It was completely improvised, but something happened with the chemistry where it absolutely clicked. The sonic fingerprint, as well as the ability to find each other through a forest of choices, worked out beautifully. AFTAB: I love playing with both of them. Their experience and their musical wisdom and their confidence… they’re just solid, you know? I feel like I’m in the presence of two giants, two musical geniuses. I take on a very improv role – I’m using words and poetry but it’s really just in order for me to get…

THE NORTHMAN Robert Eggers is a prodigious American director committed to deep dives into the eerie past. His debut The Witch was about hapless Puritans facing dark forces in 1700s New England; The Lighthouse was steeped in 19th-century maritime madness. Now Eggers has gone back to the age of Icelandic sagas. A Viking revenge tale, The Northman is his biggest film yet, vaulting onto a huge visionary scale and showing a tendency to Kubrickian perfectionism and grandeur – although it’s moot whether this film more closely resembles Kubrick or Leni Riefenstahl. Set in the ninth century, The Northman retells the original Hamlet story that inspired Shakespeare. Alexander Skarsgård plays Amleth, a prince turned ferocious Berserker warrior determined to avenge his murdered father (Ethan Hawke) and kill the man (Claes Bang)…

HAVING quit Buzzcocks after their 1977 “Spiral Scratch” EP, singer Howard Devoto was seeking a new collaborator when sleeve designer Malcolm Garrett told him: “The guy I share a house with can play all the parts to Marquee Moon on guitar.” As it happened, John McGeoch could do more than ape Television. His work with Devoto’s new band Magazine and later Siouxsie And The Banshees established a spiky tonal palette that would be endlessly imitated in the 1980s. “He played like no-one else,” says Mogwai’s Stuart Braithwaite in Rory Sullivan-Burke’s The Light Pours Out Of Me: The Authorised Biography Of John McGeoch. “I hear his influence everywhere.” Born in Greenock, McGeoch moved to Essex as a teenager – taking guitar lessons from Dire Straits’ Mark Knopfler at Loughton Tech –…

JAGJAGUWAR Jersey girl turned Pilates mum makes peace with the darkness on devastating sixth album. By Stephen Troussé ALBUM OF THE MONTH 8/10 THROUGH the past couple of years of fresh hell there have been records that might console you (Ignorance), albums that might sustain you (Rough And Rowdy Ways) and even pop songs so defiantly absurd they could make you briefly forget the relentless ongoing catastrophe (“WAP”/“Chaise Longue”). But no song from the long years of lockdown was more likely to make you throw open the windows and dance on the table than “Like I Used To”, Sharon Van Etten’s magnificent 2021 collaboration with Angel Olsen. Way back in 2009, on her first album that wasn’t a homemade CD-R, Van Etten sang “I am the tornado, you are the…

Just Like That… REDWING 8/10 Love and loss on a landmark anniversary album. By Terry Staunton MORE than 50 years on from the release of her self-titled debut, Bonnie Raitt returns with her first LP since 2016’s Dig In Deep and some key dates in her diary. Early April found her at the Grammy ceremony picking up a lifetime achievement award, and she’s gearing up for a busy touring schedule that will include shows with fellow veteran traveller Mavis Staples. On the surface, Just Like That… is business as usual, its maker’s default setting of bluesbased AOR and soulful country balladry all present and correct, but much of its content is informed by specific events during the period since she last took a record to market. Artists reacting in song…

Kumoyo Island GURUGURU BRAIN 8/10 Fifth and final album from the Japanese psych-rockers carefully preserves their enigma. By Sam Richards KIKAGAKU MOYO seemed like a band going places. After initially struggling to make headway in their native country – despite tapping into a noble lineage of Japanese longhairs stretching back through Acid Mothers Temple to Happy End and Flower Travellin’ Band, Kikagaku bandleader Go Kurosawa complained to MonsterChildren.com that “most people [in Japan] don’t like this kind of thing, they like following the rules” – they’d been steadily building a worldwide following since relocating to Amsterdam in 2017. They toured with Wooden Shjips and hooked up with Ryley Walker at Le Guess Who? for a heady live improv set, released on his Husky Pants label as Deep Fried Grandeur; and…

“I’M not a singer, I’m just someone who’s guilty,” Sarah Beth Tomberlin gently warbles on “idkwntht”, the acronymic title track of her second album I Don’t Know Who Needs To Hear This …But for all her self-effacement, she has much of value to share with us, and not just her own self-examination. Where her 2018 debut At Weddings was sparse but captivating, she and co-producer Phil Weinrobe added beautifully subtle arrangements – wistful pedal steel, drowsy sax and pulsing synth textures – to her delicate meditations, which touch on regret as the above line suggests, but also “the theme of learning to let go and not hold onto things”. That theme took shape as the Florida-born, Illinoisraised songwriter relocated nomadically during the pandemic before settling in Brooklyn, where she recorded this album, mostly…

Early Home Recordings EARTH 7/10 The folk legend’s solo demos from 1966-’68 released on vinyl for the first time. By Graeme Thomson THE market in Sandy Denny’s pre-Fairport Convention recordings has been increasingly well served in recent years. Who Knows Where The Time Goes?, the first major retrospective of the late English folk singer, who died in 1978, started the ball rolling in 1985 with the inclusion of a handful of early home demos. It was followed by The Attic Tracks, a coveted cassetteonly Australian release from the late ’80s. In 2004 came A Boxful Of Treasures and in 2010 an epic eponymous boxset which covered pretty much every inch of Denny’s oeuvre across no less than 19 CDs. Recordings Denny made in 1967 with Alex Campbell and The Strawbs…

WE get a brief glance of Arooj Aftab’s home base – a lightfilled room in a shared brownstone in Brooklyn’s Bed-Stuy, borrowed double bass propped against the wall – before she politely asks to switch the camera off. It’s still early, and the singer is feeling a little worse for wear following a heavy session at a local bar the previous evening. “It was a really warm day after five months of winter,” she pleads. “So we just lost our minds and went out and drank so much gin for absolutely no reason.” As it turns out, this is not an uncommon occurrence for Aftab. “I’m the biggest hedonist,” she admits. “I love being social, I love talking to people, I love just being out and about. I’m inspired by…

IN A SILENT WAY (1969) Hard to believe now, listening to this twinkling and insistently groovy suite, that it was once thought so controversial to jazz listeners. A comparable paradigm shift to that made by Sketches Of Spain, perhaps, here key players including John McLaughlin, Joe Zawinul and Chick Corea begin to map an expansive new space. BITCHES BREW (1970) Keep it tight! A fuller continuation of Miles’ new approach. Joined by many of his Silent Way band plus additional percussionists, the music is complex and evolving (producer Teo Macero provides gamechanging edits), but the mood also chimes with market-dominant, carpet-level psychedelic rock. Hear also Miles’ essential version of David Crosby’s “Guinnevere”, released on the Complete Bitches Brew Sessions. MILES DAVIS AT FILLMORE (1970) At the dawn of 1970, Miles had seen Jimi Hendrix…

WHERE ARE YOU, JAY BENNETT? WIENERWORLD LTD. 7/10 Thoughtful, revealing portrait of the anti-hero of Wilco legend. By Rob Hughes JAY Bennett’s reputation never quite recovered from the battering it took in Wilco. Sam Jones’ documentary I Am Trying To Break Your Heart: A Film About Wilco, about the complex, lengthy gestation of 2002’s Yankee Hotel Foxtrot in often painful detail, portrayed a band slowly pulling itself apart, with chief songwriters Bennett and Jeff Tweedy its twin opposing forces. The implication being that Bennett was a headstrong, intractable figure responsible for most of the discord. He was sacked as soon as the album was done. Filmmakers Gorman Bechard and Fred Uhter seek to redress the balance on Where Are You, Jay Bennett?. A feature-length study of an abundantly gifted talent,…

Email letters@uncut.co.uk. Or tweet us at twitter.com/uncutmagazine 300 NOT OUT! Your list of the 300 greatest albums since the start of Uncut makes enjoyable reading, but I’m sure you’re not surprised that some of your readers will have differing views on some of your selections – as well as some obvious omissions and, of course, the order. I found some very interesting choices in the lower half of the list. However, I have an issue with The Strokes being well above any of the White Stripes albums. McCartney III at No 27 seems a nostalgic choice – as indeed may be placing Bowie’s excellent Blackstar as the best of all! I loved seeing some unexpected selections – Beachwood Sparks, the early Comets On Fire album. Robbie Fulks’ Georgia Hard is…