Many of us are collectors in some shape or form, and it comes as no surprise to learn that over the years the late Steve Albini amassed an awful lot of stuff - and it's now gradually going up for sale, via the website Steve Albini's Closet, as administrated by Byron Coley.
It's promised that new items will be added to the site every Friday. If they're not calling them Big Black Fridays, then they're missing a trick.
Pithy internet poet Brian Bilston teaming up with a pair of indiepop stalwarts in Amelia Fletcher and Rob Pursey promised much, but sadly Sounds Made By Humans is less than the sum of its parts. Might things have been different had the words been written to work with the music, rather than the music created to fit pre-existing poems?
Buzz review here.
Any article confidently headed "All the best things to do in Pontcanna" is going to provoke debate and disagreement, and this piece by the Independent's Alice Reynolds doesn't disappoint.
Fair enough, her selection of the best places to go for a fancy meal/night out - Milkwood, Uisce (with a passing reference to its sister establishment Heaneys), the newly Michelin Starred Gorse - can't really be faulted.
But then there's no mention of the area's two finest bakeries, Ground and Brod (the latter recently afforded the honour of featuring in the Waitrose magazine), and the Wardrobe Cafe gets the nod for coffee despite (in my experience) offering glacial service and an inferior brew to former inhabitants Lufkin. (King's Road Yard is also generally poorer without superb dirty vegan shack Lazy Leek, and because Pipes no longer bottle their beer for consumption at home.)
While Crafty Devil's Cellar only qualifies as being in Pontcanna by the finest of margins, Reynolds' inclusion of Chapter too is a cheeky liberty. That said, it's not as much of a head-scratcher as devoting column inches directing people to the Pontcanna Inn - a honeypot for Turkey-teethed Madri tossers. The area's boozing options aren't great, admittedly, but surely Slizza (or Pipes, for that matter) would have been more worthy of a plug.
Overall, "Cardiff's most stylish neighbourhood"? Quite probably - but I prefer being a visitor, feeling more at home amid the grit, grime, character and vibrancy of Canton.
Congratulations to Jon Pountney for reaching his crowdfunding target for new book Valleys in just 36 hours. Given I'm a big fan of his work, backing it was a no-brainer.
The discussion on photography and the Valleys at the National Museum in December centred largely on the distinction between insiders and outsiders (or, to use Ian Walker's term, "Valleys visitors"). Pountney is effectively both - an Englishman born in Yorkshire, but resident in Treforest since 2015 - and so arguably has a relatively unique perspective.
As he explained to David Owens of Nation Cymru, the book is the culmination of many years photographing in the area, and a tribute to its places and people.
Buzz review here.
And it turns out it's not the only gastronomic attraction that the village of Angle has to offer. Times restaurant critic Charlotte Ivers recently visited Paternoster Farm and returned to London to deliver a glowing report. An excuse for another trip out west, methinks...
It's one thing to turn to artistic pursuits to try to unravel what's going on in your head. It's quite another, as a rank amateur, to put your creations on display and expect people to pay to see them.
As Eddy Frankel writes in a withering Guardian review of Robbie Williams' new exhibition Radical Honesty, the musician is "not well - and being vulnerable and open in public is to be commended. But to present it as art, in a gallery, is to say you think this has aesthetic merit, cultural value." Frankel is unequivocal in his dismissal: "On a basic, artistic level, the work looks bad and expresses incredibly superficial ideas very poorly."
As he makes clear, though, this isn't simply a matter of Williams' oversized ego. He's been eagerly enabled by the gallery, Moco, when quite simply he "should never have been put in a position to have the ticket-buying public come face to face with [the creations]".
And therein lies the rub. Moco have chosen to showcase the ill-conceived dross of a celebrity rather than platforming the serious work of an up-and-coming artist - an all-too-familiar tale among galleries, but also publishers and record labels. It's a neat illustration of the problem of access that is blighting the world of art and culture, and (arguably) getting worse.
The camera never lies? Perhaps - but the same certainly can't be said of image manipulation software. The advent of AI may have taken things to a whole new level (the tech proving an accelerant/catalyst in this respect, as in so many others), but the truth is that doctored pictures are nothing new - as this Guardian gallery underlines.
It's been alarming (albeit depressingly predictable) to see how Sharon Osbourne's call for Kneecap's visas to be revoked for anti-Israel/pro-Palestine comments made at Coachella has spiralled into a witch-hunt against the Irish trio. They've apologised for past pronouncements/errors of judgement after the press dutifully dredged up some dirt, but that's clearly not been enough - the establishment is affronted by this latest outburst and seems determined that the group should feel the full force of its wrath.
There has at least been a public counteroffensive in the form of an open letter signed by a whole host of fellow artists including Brian Eno, Mogwai, Sleaford Mods, Leftfield, Benefits, Paul Weller, Fontaines DC, Pulp, Orbital, Nadine Shah and (most notably) Tom Morello - but it looks flimsy in the face of the relentless political pressure. Several gig promoters and festival organisers have already buckled and confirmed cancellations, and Kneecap's appearance at this year's Green Man must also be under threat.
Massive Attack - also signatories to the letter - have summed up the situation perfectly in a statement: "If senior politicians can find neither the time, nor the words to condemn, say, the murder of fifteen voluntary aid workers in Gaza, or the illegal starvation of a civilian population as a method of warfare, or the killing of thousands & thousands of children in the same territory, by a state in possession of the highest precision weapons on earth, how much notice should a music festival take of their moral advice on booking performing acts?"
Ultimately, this whole furore is simply a distraction from what we should really be talking about. If only Kneecap's critics expended their energy in service of the Gazan people - by acknowledging the genocide, for a start - rather than doggedly vilifying three men they knew absolutely nothing about until very recently.
The V&A's Lost Music Venues exhibition scheduled for next year promises to pay tribute to some of the spaces we've loved and lost. As the Needle Drop has reported, there's currently a call out for the submission of relevant artifacts, which closes at the end of this month. I wonder whether anyone will donate a pint of the green stuff from the Moon?
The initiative has been backed by the Music Venue Trust, whose work to prevent further closures is critical. The proposed exhibition may help to bring certain venues back to life, but it will only do so briefly and within the confines of the museum's galleries. Better to fight and not lose them in the first place.
On the day that Richard Dawson arrives in Cardiff to showcase material from his excellent new album End Of The Middle, here's a Quietus Baker's Dozen with a twist: his selection of 13 films "that share the record's themes of domesticity, home and family units", including David Lynch's The Straight Story, Bong Joon Ho's Mother, Michael Winterbottom's Wonderland and Paul Thomas Anderson's Boogie Nights.
Dawson will not so much be striding into town for a return to the Gate, scene of a triumphant show almost two years ago to the day, as hobbling along. He's currently wearing a protective boot on his left leg due to an Achilles tendon injury that he's told audiences was sustained eating a cheese pasty while birdwatching in Northumberland. It's fair to say that's not your average rock 'n' roll injury... Credit to him for soldiering on.
More than four decades into their existence, Melvins continue to crank out records at a rate that would exhaust much younger pups. The latest, Thunderball, is the fruits of another reunion with founder member Mike Dillard, under the Melvins 1983 banner.
Buzz review here.
It's been more than a year and a half since fellow Buzz scribe Tom Morgan wrote about a music scene that he branded New Weird Cardiff. At the time, I wasn't crazy about any of the five selected acts, but it was only earlier this month at Clwb that I finally got round to encountering a couple of them - Shlug and Spit Hood - in the flesh. Let's just say I've now seen the light with regard to both...
Buzz review here.
It's a perennial source of dismay to me how much of modern society is driven by the fetishisation of ownership (books and CDs are fine, mind...). In a nutshell, we all have too much unnecessary stuff - a consequence of rampant consumerism.
So it's refreshing to see that Wales is attempting to buck that trend and provide an antidote in the form of Benthyg Cymru, an organisation that has established a national network of "libraries of things". Why buy something you only occasionally use when, for a fraction of the cost, you can simply borrow it?
In this article for the Progress Playbook, co-founder and director Becky Harford explains how it works and the principles that stand behind it. While each library is very much a local community enterprise, collectively they are seen as "part of a much bigger shift" - building "social fabric" and taking vital steps "towards an economy that works for people and planet, not just profit".
For a long time, the prospect of a fourth Mclusky album seemed impossibly remote. Even after they reformed, with Damien Sayell taking Jon Chapple's place on bass, it looked as though plans may have been derailed when Andrew Falkous was struck down a severely debilitating bout of tinnitus. But happily here we are, with the release of The World Is Still Here And So Are We on Mike Patton's Ipecac just days away.
To mark the merry occasion, the Quietus' JR Moores had a chat with the permaquotable Falkous about everything from the new songs to nostalgia, the music video as art form, Australia, Ed Sheeran teaming up with Offspring, and ska music ("I'm morally opposed to ska on most occasions, even though I grudgingly accept it does make people in shorts happy") - but mostly pesto.
As she told those at the Workers Gallery's new monthly book club this week, things just snowballed from there: the images she posted online struck a chord with others, one of them was shortlisted for and subsequently won the British Journal Of Photography's annual "Portrait of Britain" competition in 2022 (subsequently displayed on screens, bus stops and billboards) and ultimately Sherif Dhaimish of Pendle Press proposed a book.
Church Bingo is slight, and the images it contains are deceptively simple - but there's a lot in them and behind them. The book proved to be a perfect springboard for conversations about everything from community and the connection between images and memory, to insider/outsider access for photographers, the all-male technophilic cliques of camera clubs and the factors that determine which format is best suited to exhibiting/sharing certain types of picture.
Christofilou is primarily a protest photographer so, on the surface at least, this series seems very different. And yet such bingo sessions - self-organised and self-sustained, bringing people together and providing entertainment - are a form of quiet resistance in a neoliberal, atomised society. The images challenge the popular media narrative of the elderly as isolated, dependent and lacking joy.
They also underline the value in documenting the supposedly mundane. Photographers are often feted for recording and thereby preserving a dying way of life, and that is just as true in this case. Five months after the pictures were taken, the COVID-19 lockdown hit. This bingo session never restarted, and the church hall has now closed, likely to be bulldozed for flats. Even more poignantly, Christofilou's nan is now the only featured participant still alive, with several of her fellow attendees victims of the pandemic. Church Bingo is a touching memorial to them, and to community spirit.
Harry Sword's recent interview with fellow drone aficionado Dawn Terry for the Quietus convinced me of two things: first, that I need to investigate Terry's work further (particularly in Bong), and second, more broadly, that I'm right to feel somewhat rueful about being a music-loving native North-Easterner who has never lived in Newcastle itself.
Terry is effusive in the city's praise: "It's a small town but the sheer breadth of weird music on offer is incredibly inspiring. Newcastle is great in that you can just play the gigs, not worry about what the trends are, and just make weird music that you like." She's far from the first person to have paid tribute to the city's vibrant musical underground scene, too.
Oh to be able to wind the clock back a few years, when I might have been in a position to move back and immerse myself in it all...
Republished to mark the 30th birthday of Pavement's Wowee Zowee, this Quietus piece by Lesley Chow does a sterling job of helping to make sense of its messy sprawl.
"Experiments in energy and lethargy" and "singalong tunes with incomprehensible lyrics" could serve as descriptions of all of their albums, but Chow notes that in this instance in particular the band's intent seems to be "to frustrate the listener". Certainly, much as I instantly fell for specific tracks ('Rattled By The Rush', 'Grounded', 'Flux=Rad'), the scrappy, bitty quality of the record overall meant that I never warmed to it as much as the others, including the much maligned Terror Twilight. It was therefore something of a surprise when Spiral Stairs told me in an impromptu post-gig interview that he saw it as their best album.
In that respect, Chow's piece is enlightening, doing what many a good review does: shifting your perspective on an album you think you already have pegged. She presents a positive reframing of its fragmentary quality and the band's low boredom threshold/short attention span. What mattered most to them, she ventures, was "keeping the journey interesting while connecting the dots between sweet spots".
The Wowee Zowee that emerges is a playful, complex, creatively fertile record that refuses to conform to expectations, proceed in a conventionally linear fashion or wear a stylistic straitjacket - and is all the more fascinating for it.
Time for a revisit, methinks.
There's a wonderful passage in The Ongoing Moment, Geoff Dyer's characteristically idiosyncratic book about American photography of the twentieth century, in which he focuses on images of rooms that are empty yet suggestive of activity, waiting to be brought back to life.
Those words came back to me instantly on seeing some of Simon Harsent's photos of football pitches around the world. As the Guardian's Jonny Weeks observes, "the absence of action" does indeed give the pictures "an eerie quality", given that action is the pitches' whole purpose. The lack of any players makes them seem lonely, in desperate need of people to (re)animate them.
Other images in the series are fascinating for the way in which they position well-known football stadia in their geographical (and, by extension, socio-economic) context. I hadn't realised, for instance, that streets within very close proximity of Anfield had been condemned. In this respect, the pictures are a timely reminder of clubs' physical rootedness, and the fact that transplanting a team to a new ground - even if close by - is inevitably a very significant decision.
True to form, while the whole world seems to be abuzz about Adolescence, I've only just caught up with a previous Stephen Graham vehicle, The Virtues.
Given Graham's involvement, direction by Shane Meadows, Jack Thorne on co-writing duties and a potent PJ Harvey soundtrack, the 2019 Channel 4 four-parter was never likely to be a laugh a minute. And so it proves - not least because it draws on a long-repressed traumatic experience from Meadows' own childhood.
The Virtues chronicles, in devastating close-up, the damage that can be wrought at an early age, and the scars that never truly heal. It put me in mind of Philip Larkin's lines in 'This Be The Verse' - "Man hands on misery to man. / It deepens like a coastal shelf" - especially in the final part, when lead character Joseph confronts his abuser Damon.
Joseph's alcoholism may have resulted in his relationship breaking down, but the focus is on its root causes. When his son Shea leaves for Australia, with his former partner setting out to start a new life, the sudden sense of separation brings back to the surface demons that he has never really wrestled, or at least certainly never banished.
Graham is predictably superb as the bruised, vulnerable Joseph, but joint lead Niamh Algar is also incredible as Dinah, Joseph's sister Anna's sister-in-law, whose own past haunts her in different ways. The pair's blossoming attraction is portrayed with a touching awkwardness, and there is a raw, improvisational, naturalistic quality in general, especially when Joseph is sat on Shea's bed saying his goodbyes and when Joseph is interrogated at the dinner table by Anna's kids.
Meadows' direction is as masterful as ever - in fact, perhaps even more so. The drinking binge sequence in Part 1 in particular is as viscerally real and disorienting as the drug scene in Dead Man's Shoes, in terms of the way it descends into chaos and replicates the sensation.
And, like Dead Man's Shoes, the extraordinary climactic episode of The Virtues left me floored for days.
Pigs x7 might fly? They do at times on their latest album, the reliably rifftastic Death Hilarious.
Buzz review here.
As someone used to sniping at the corporate music industry from the outside, I found it interesting hearing from Marcus Russell, a man who has spent decades in the belly of the beast (albeit as the founder of an independent label and management company).
Invited to speak at Cardiff University in his capacity as an Honorary Fellow of the Department of Politics and International Relations, Russell talked about the myriad impacts of AI on the industry, but also his route into his current role and his most famous charges, Oasis.
Buzz report here.
For starters, take the intricate plotting. The dots seem innumerable, and how to connect them to form any kind of pattern appears impossible, until Rankin stealthily dripfeeds new information and Rebus' well-oiled cogs start to click into gear. And then there's the dialogue - snappy, razor sharp, zinging back and forth between close confidants and mutually wary adversaries alike.
In Rebus' world, there are no goodies and baddies, no us and them, no black and white; on the contrary, there's just an expansive grey area in which the events play out. It's a world characterised by subterfuge, power dynamics, tangled loyalties and the significance of earning and betraying trust - and all within the police force, let alone outside it. It's a man's world, too - a toxic environment in which women are unable to show any signs of weakness and have to behave badly to get ahead.
Ultimately, Resurrection Men underlines that old adage that knowledge is power. What you know can be a more dangerous weapon than a gun or a knife, and knowing whether or not to reveal it (and when) is critical.
This being a Rankin novel, he can't help but sprinkle/shoehorn in a few music references, though the jokes about Mogwai and Cocteau Twins are good enough to justify their inclusion.
I finished the book wondering whether anyone has been foolhardy enough to try a drinking game in which you match Rebus tipple for tipple - and if so, whether they've lived to tell the tale.
Sleaford Mods frontman Jason Williamson may not be appearing on the next series of Strictly - contrary to what I was led to believe yesterday, as an April Fools' Day prank. But he has been performing in public on a different type of stage to the ones he's used to - as a volunteer at a drop-in homeless centre in West Bridgford, where he now lives.
Credit to Williamson for acknowledging that sounding off on record - however forcefully - isn't enough, and deciding to roll his sleeves up and get his hands dirty in his local community. It is, he suggests, a way of making a positive contribution and banishing feelings of impotence in the face of overwhelming difficulties and injustices - and, as a self-confessed former drug addict, he can relate to those he's helping.
Given that Williamson's role is in the kitchen, I'd be interested to know if his alter ego Baking Daddy has put in an appearance yet...
If Deafheaven's Infinite Granite seemed to signify a bold step in a new direction, then its successor Lonely People With Power - released last Friday - is an ambitious attempt to represent and encapsulate all facets of their previous work in a single album.
Buzz review here.
John Reis' new album, released under the name Swami John Reis, is called Time To Let You Down - the irony being that, over a music career that has spanned approaching 40 years, he's never come close to letting anyone down.
Speaking about that career to the Guardian's Stevie Chick, he describes Rocket From The Crypt - his rock-'n'-roll-influenced punk outfit, complete with brass section - as "the most fun band ever. When we were playing, that was the place on planet Earth you had to be that night." I can very much vouch for that, having first caught them at Reading '96 and then witnessing their stupendously thrilling showmanship at the Riverside in Newcastle about a month later - ridiculously, my first ever proper gig.
Our paths crossed again at Glastonbury '98 (where they thrilled before the torrential rain really set in) and in Nottingham, but for some reason it wasn't until about 15 years ago that I discovered Hot Snakes, Reis' third project with his long-time buddy the late Rick Froberg, not long before seeing them play on the Les Savy Fav-curated day at ATP. Live album Thunder Down Under is exceptional, the songs outshining their studio versions in the same way that tracks recorded for KEXP sessions almost invariably do.
There's something jarring about people talking about COVID-19 in the past tense. "COVID times" are actually ongoing - not only because variants of the virus are still doing the rounds and the debilitating effects of long COVID are endured by many, but also because the wider social, economic, political and psychological impacts of the pandemic will be felt for decades.
Those impacts are perhaps most concerning with respect to children, as this recent Guardian article underlines. For some people, lockdown may have been about bingeing boxsets and baking banana bread - but for the young, it has caused enormous damage, the scale of which is only likely to become truly apparent in years to come.
Missed developmental milestones, plummeting school attendances, increased screen time and device dependence, a surge in support for populist politics, "a 'tsunami' of mental health problems" - all of which are exacerbating existing inequalities while being themselves being exacerbated by the economic consequences of the pandemic.
It's incredibly hard to know where to start in tackling these issues - but I'd suggest that we might begin by actually acknowledging them (and the collective trauma that COVID has caused) and accepting that substantial targeted effort and investment is needed, rather than dismissively blundering on in the belief that a return to business as usual is best.
Some photographers wield their cameras as weapons against injustice. For Ernest Cole, showing the world what life was really like in apartheid-era South Africa came at a significant personal cost: permanent exile from the country of his birth.
Raoul Peck's superb documentary Ernest Cole: Lost And Found traces the trajectory of his career and showcases his work in a way that ought to help bring him the credit he was denied in life.
Buzz review here.
Buzz review here.
As a comparison of the two albums' covers might suggest, Benefits' debut Nails was very much black and white - or black and grey, at least - whereas on its follow-up Constant Noise, released on Friday, they've introduced some colour to their palette. The rage is still there, bubbling away, but is mediated and modulated rather than given such ferocious expression.
Buzz review here.
Few musicians can have had as unlikely career trajectories as Daniel Blumberg: from member of indie also-rans Cajun Dance Party and Yuck while still in his teens, to Oscar winner in his mid-30s.
Guardian journalist (and family friend) Simon Hattenstone has spoken to the man who "has spent his career walking away from mainstream success" only to land the Academy Award for Best Original Score (for The Brutalist) - an incongruity underlined by the photo of Blumberg and his Oscar sat at a table in his miniscule Hackney flat.
While I can't comment on the soundtrack to The Brutalist, I can say that hopefully its victory will fire wider interest in his solo albums, among which On&On is a gem.
When Alan Sparhawk played in Cardiff last November, I particularly sang the praises of some of the "as-yet-unrecorded material". As it turns out, the songs I singled out as special - Princess Road Surgery, Screaming Song and Don't Take Your Light - had already been recorded, a year earlier with Minnesotan folkies Trampled By Turtles. That trio (and more) will be on the album With Trampled By Turtles, out at the end of May.
As good - and as necessary - as White Roses, My God was, it's a relief to learn that Sparhawk hasn't totally abandoned or lost faith in the strength of his own unfiltered voice.
There are many reasons to love Los Campesinos!, and one of them is their refreshing transparency about the realities of being in a band. Take this blog post, for example, in which Gareth offers a candid insight into the economics of their recent gig in Dublin - their first show outside the UK, the US and Canada since 2014.
For anyone inclined to grumble at the steadily rising cost of gig tickets and bemoan artists' reluctance to tour extensively, it's an eye-opening read. The alarming reality is that a band of their stature can sell out a 520-capacity venue in around two hours, at 25 euros a ticket, and yet still end up making a loss of over £1,700.
Perhaps most staggering is the fact that the venue, the Button Factory, charged £2,500 (up from the standard £1,000) because LC! insisted on the gig being 14+, to compensate for the (presumed) lack of bar takings. It would be interesting to know how many under 18s were in attendance - but massive credit to the band for sticking by their principles, even at considerable personal cost. Ultimately, as Gareth argues, "[i]f we want kids to be excited about live music, why would we want to exclude them at an age where they're developing these interests?" In a climate of declining attendances and closing venues, this is very much an attitude to be commended.
The breakdown of earnings and costs is also revealing in terms of the value of merch sales and the financial and administrative burden of the red tape imposed after Brexit.
Gareth acknowledges that LC! are seven strong, with three crew members, and that there are certain things that they won't scrimp on - but the fact that they have no manager on the payroll and marketing costs were zero and yet they still ended up in the red really underlines quite how tough the current climate is.
For anyone wondering how Geoff Barrow was going to keep himself busy after quitting Beak>, here's your answer: by following in Warp's footsteps and launching a film division of his record label. (No doubt he's bristling at being described as "Portishead co-founder" - sorry, Geoff...)
Invada Films' debut offering will be Game, which is "set against the backdrop of the 1990s rave culture where two men - one a thief and one a poacher - must use their wits to survive". It sounds like the perfect project for Sleaford Mods' Jason Williamson, who co-stars with Marc Bessant.
Martin Parr is a polarising figure - but love him or loathe him, I don't think you can deny that our highest-profile documentary photographer is a worthy subject for a film. Director Lee Shulman may be an avowed fan, but thankfully he remains savvy enough to prevent I Am Martin Parr from becoming merely a fawning tribute.
Buzz review here.
The righteous force of nature that is Andrew Falkous of Mclusky and Future Of The Left is of the opinion that no band should have more than one member wearing shorts on stage at any one time. A sentiment I'd wholeheartedly endorse - but when it comes to the Norwegian joy bomb that is Pom Poko (three-quarters of whom were be-shorted at their gig at Clwb on Friday night), I think allowances have to be made.
Buzz review here.
On a related note, hats off to Sam Fender for giving the pictures of another North Eastern photographer greater exposure. His latest record People Watching features images taken by Tish Murtha, who he described as an "absolute legend": "It's an honour to be able to use her art to help tell the story of the album." As ever, though, it's bittersweet - Murtha having not lived long enough to witness her work finding its rightful acclaim.
For publishers, explicitly drawing parallels with a runaway bestseller in the blurb for your latest novel is a calculated risk. On the one hand, it can act as a helpful signpost, attracting the attention of a much larger readership than it might otherwise have had; on the other, it can have the whiff of desperate bandwagon jumping, and set the book up for a fall if (as is likely) the comparison proves to be more of an unflattering contrast.
I can’t comment on whether Cold Grace is indeed “for readers of Where The Crawdads Sing”, having not read Delia Owens’ book – but I can appraise Meredith Miller’s fourth novel (and second for Welsh imprint Honno) on its own terms. And indeed I have, for Buzz, here.
There's no doubting - for me, at least - the quality of Panda Bear's new album Sinister Grift. What remains a concern, however, is whether it will translate successfully live, at Green Man - or whether the performance will be an awful echo of the horrible shambles that was Animal Collective at Glastonbury 2009...
Buzz review here.
Crude and uncharitable though it may be to say it, but, as was the case with their previous outings, The Murder Capital's latest album Blindness would sound markedly better if Fontaines DC didn't already exist. Not a record to deliberately avoid, by any means, but one that only really impresses when it offers deviation from the norm.
Buzz review here.
You've heard of Pablo Escobar's cocaine hippos (or at least you should have) - but what about "Timothy Leary's psychedelic guinea pigs"?
The fact that the guinea pigs in question were Al Jourgensen of Ministry and Gibby Haynes of Butthole Surfers explains a lot. Their residence with Leary was short lived - especially for Haynes, following an unfortunate drunken micturation incident...
Simon & Schuster's decision to no longer require authors to get blurbs for their books has stimulated quite a bit of debate, and I must admit to being somewhat on the fence.
On the one hand, I appreciate that this takes some of the pressure off authors - especially those being published for the first time, who feel the need to prove their worth - and that the current practice can seem emblematic of (in the words of Simon & Schuster's Sean Manning) "an incestuous and unmeritocratic literary ecosystem that often rewards connections over talent".
On the other, as a reader, I'm much more likely to pick up a book that has been enthusiastically endorsed by a writer whose own work I love than if the only promotional copy has been penned by a member of the publisher's in-house marketing team. I dread to think how much I might have missed out on if I hadn't been tipped off by someone whose opinion I respect. Algorithms be damned; personal recommendations remain the best way of discovering new art, books or otherwise.
End Of The Middle is a special album, no doubt - but it's far from the first time that Rich(ard) Dawson has released a dazzling record. Here he talks to JR Moores for Bandcamp about its predecessors, from 2011 debut-of-sorts The Magic Bridge, to 2022's The Ruby Cord and its 41-minute-long beast of an opener, The Hermit.
Jay Rayner decided to dedicate his final Observer Food Monthly column to the key points of the previous 180 - and it's hard to disagree with any of them, whether that's that the practice of tipping should be abolished, that "[w]aiters should always write down orders" or that "food should always, always be served on plates".
"Gravy stains down your shirt are not a source of embarrassment; they are a badge of honour." Amen!
"The kitchen knives in holiday rentals are always terrible; take your own." My mum's not the only person nodding in agreement.
"Most dishes can be improved with the addition of bacon"? Objection, your honour! I can only assume that by "most" he means "all".
What makes for a good album review?
One that, when you listen to the record in question, has you excitedly and repeatedly exclaiming of the reviewer "Yes, they absolutely nailed it!"?
Undoubtedly, yes.
One that helps you to understand a set of songs that, until that point, seem to have made no sense at all, and enables a newfound appreciation of what you're listening to?
Absolutely (and I'm thankful to this sort of review on a regular basis).
Or one that is so compelling that you feel the urge to listen to the album the moment you've finished reading, or indeed before you've finished, regardless of whether you have any prior knowledge of the artist?
Rarer, perhaps, but no less precious.
Emma Garland's Quietus review of Ethel Cain's new LP Perverts falls into the latter camp. It more than piqued my interest; it made me want to stop what I was doing that instant and experience for myself what she was writing about.
The reality is that, in spite of high hopes, I took an almost immediate and visceral disliking to Perverts as pretentious, directionless nonsense.
But this isn't to bemoan Garland's review - not least because she pre-empts just such a reaction to the record, making no bones about the fact that it's "a boundary-pushing work that, depending on the listener, could be considered either powerfully engrossing or deeply alienating".
On the contrary, it's to say that such pieces make the case for music writing being considered an art form in its own right. Personally, at least, I don't feel cheated at the album having been oversold, just as I wasn't overly upset to discover that some (or indeed many) of the records described so enthusiastically and engagingly in books such as Simon Reynolds' Rip It Up And Start Again and Harry Sword's Monolithic Undertow fail to live up to their billing. Garland's review and Reynolds and Sword's books are all testament to the capacity that music has to stir the intellect and the emotions - and the power that the written word can have, in the right hands.
Admittedly, a Clwb triple bill headlined by noiserock supergroup The None and also featuring locals Obey Cobra and Beauty Parlour didn't make for a conventionally romantic Valentine's Day evening - but love was in the air all the same.
Buzz review here.
As a reviewer required to digest, rate and file copy on albums weeks and sometimes months in advance, it can be slightly daunting to have to nail your colours to the mast. Will your appraisal turn out to be wildly wide of the mark, or out of step with the consensus? (The Manics' Critical Thinking, for instance, seems to have been rather better received than I'd anticipated - not that that has changed my view on it much.)
With Richard Dawson's latest, there was no such anxiety; on the contrary, I was confident that I'd be just one of a chorus of writers singing its praises - and so it's proved.
While The Ruby Cord began with the remarkable 41-minute-long track 'The Hermit', End Of The Middle does the opposite trick: gradually gathering momentum until the last few tracks leave you breathless. It's further (entirely superfluous) proof that Dawson is a genuine one of a kind.
Buzz review here.
Sadly, life being what it is, gone are the days of being able to binge watch major boxsets (I genuinely don't know how we found the time, or how any of my peers still do). So when a series comes along that is both weighty in subject matter, depth and richness but also relatively short and served up in easily consumable chunks, I'm inclined to take note.
The BBC's Mr Loverman - an eight-part adaptation of Bernadine Evaristo's novel of the same name, done and dusted in four hours - certainly fit the bill.
At the heart of the drama is Barrington Walker (Lennie James), a dapper dandy and cad in his 70s, a paterfamilias and pillar of his local community in London who just so happens to have been conducting a secretive gay affair with fellow Antiguan emigre Morris (Ariyon Bakare) for the last 50 years. The blue touchpaper is lit when Barry, having lived a lie for so long but aware he's entering his twilight years, decides it's finally time to come clean to those closest to him.
That means confessing to his long-suffering wife Carmel (Sharon D Clarke), who disapproves of his carousing and boozing and suspects extra-marital dalliances (albeit with women), and his two daughters. And it also means - in Morris' view, at least - taking a step towards being out and proud in public.
It turns out to be an even bigger challenge than Barry could have imagined, and he finds himself hamstrung by inertia and indecision. There are constant reminders of the homophobic prejudice of his cultural milieu that has caused him to conceal his true identity all these years. The illness and then death of Carmel's father back in Antigua puts the confession on ice, while his instinctive revulsion at Morris' suggestion of marriage - at odds with his free-spiritedness, as well as his desire to keep his homosexuality somewhat under wraps - threatens to fatally derail the affair.
What is remarkable is that - while the series cultivates sympathy for Barry as a man caught in an impasse, whose life is unravelling as he sinks into alcoholism - the other key protagonists are also fully rounded characters treated with generosity. Carmel might initially come across as sour and resentful, but she's been ground down by living in a loveless marriage for half a century - a marriage for which, it transpires, she has sacrificed her potential happiness by bringing a short-lived affair of her own to an abrupt halt. Morris knows the meaning of sacrifice too, having lost his wife and children and had to look on as his lover continued to have his cake and eat it.
Mr Loverman is a sensitive, superbly acted portrayal of a complex situation in which everybody is hurting - but a portrayal that is lightened by comic touches and Barry's wit and charm, and that ultimately stands as a celebration of the courage required to be authentically oneself.
It's too blunt to claim that the camera never lies - perspective can be deceptive, after all - but Nate Gowdy's eyewitness images of the January 6 storming of the Capitol tell an infinitely more reliable truth than the narratives "recasting insurrection as resurrection" that have since emerged. Those narratives have been validated by Trump's pardons and the subsequent release of "J6 Patriots".
Little wonder that Gowdy is bewildered by what has transpired - and the fact that MAGA meatheads are now legitimately back in the building. As he wrote in a piece for Columbia Journalism Review, photojournalism may be a beleaguered profession but retains a vital role as a bulwark against revisionism and propaganda: "My photographs document a moment when democracy teetered, the nation's timeline itself an active crime scene. As newsrooms contract and misinformation swells, independent journalists stand at the breach - not just to preserve truths that others reject, but to ensure the past isn't rewritten to fit the present. The pardons don't just forgive, they endorse, transforming accountability into proof of persecution. Without our work, this chapter, too, will be lacquered in sepia and sold as heritage."
Jay Rayner, once critical of Cardiff's food scene, has in recent years understandably updated his opinion - and his verdict isn't the only marker that things have changed. Last night it was revealed that Gorse has been awarded a Michelin Star - the first of any establishment in the capital.
Having paid Tom Waters' Pontcanna restaurant a lunchtime visit back in the summer, soon after it opened, I can vouch for the validity of the Michelin Guide inspector's comments - especially the reference to restraint and how "every composition [is] expertly balanced in a way that underscore[s] Waters' brilliant understanding of flavours".
I suspect a Michelin Star may attract more attention than a glowing Buzz review; whatever draws more people into sampling his cooking is to be welcomed.