April 2012
3 posts
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RIP Levon Helm
Really sad to hear of the death of Levon Helm. Music From Big Pink was the next step I took from Dylan when falling for American music. I’ve been listening to The Basement Tapes a lot of late.
The Band - Up On Cripple Creek
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WatchReally enjoyed playing a short ambient set at Union Chapel, Islington last Saturday, in support of the Wayside & Woodland Recordings showcase. A stunning place for early afternoon sets by My Autumn Empire, a band led by epic45’s Ben Holton, E.L. Heath and P.Manasseh.
Next Friday we celebrate the launch of My Autumn Empire’s incredible classic pop project II at Ikon Gallery,...
March 2012
2 posts
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Upcoming Those Mountains DJ Sets
I have a couple of live DJ sets coming up at Wayside and Woodland Recordings showcases at Union Chapel, London and Ikon Gallery, Birmingham. It will be different to anything I’ve played in the past, incorporating field recordings, found sounds and unreleased material by artists on the label, as well as music by their contemporaries.
Wayside and Woodland Recordings is an independent record...
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Grandaddy - Fentry The Broken Down Comforter Collection | 1999 | Out of Print (Buy Used)
Bands just don’t split up like they used to, do they? Today Pitchfork announced that Grandaddy will play together live for the first time in 7 years. The only UK date so far is a headline slot at End of the Road Festival. This reconvening makes a lot of sense - the band originally broke up due to the...
February 2012
3 posts
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Real Estate - Suburban Beverage Live on the Radio | Underwater Peoples, 2010
Off to see Kurt Vile/ Sonic Boom/ Real Estate tomorrow night at Koko in London. It’s an NME thing, which I’ve never really read - I thought it was more of an outlet for landfill indie than American exports.
Anyway, I’ve been listening to Live on the Radio a lot lately, which sees Real Estate strip...
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Modest Mouse - Dramanine This Is A Long Drive For Someone With Nothing To Think About (1996)
One of the most exciting musical journeys is one in reverse, through the back catalogue of a great band. One of my favourites was working back from Modest Mouse’s Good News For People Who Love Bad News, realising this skewed pop album was born out of something more chaotic and unhinged that united...
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Serenity Now! // Those Mountains Mix 01.2012
New music wise, January started off slowly but gathered momentum with a few teaser tracks from veteran artists popping up ahead of full length releases in the coming months. I’m particularly looking forward to Lambchop’s Mr. M, which sees the Nashville collective taking a fresh approach to their well-worn soulful country template, partly inspired by Frank Sinatra and the passing of...
January 2012
16 posts
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You Will Miss Me When I Burn
This time next month (27 February), Domino will reissue the five albums Will Oldham recorded between ‘93 and ‘97 under the Palace alias he used before Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy. All five, including mini album Hope, will be out on vinyl and record sleeve-style digipack CD, featuring new artwork and liner notes.
I came to Oldham’s Palace work via his later, more refined...
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Belated Best Albums of 2011
Click above for the whole thing.
THE WAR ON DRUGS - SLAVE AMBIENT | Come To The City (MP3) Secretly Canadian | Buy
BILL CALLAHAN - APOCALYPSE | America (MP3) Drag City | Buy
BON IVER - BON IVER | Calgary (MP3) Jagjaguwar | Buy
EPIC45 - WEATHERING | Summer Message (MP3) Make Mine Music | Buy
REAL ESTATE - DAYS | Easy (Youtube) Domino | Buy
KURT VILE - SMOKE RING FOR MY HALO Jesus...
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P. Manasseh - ANA Wayside & Woodland Recordings, 2012 | Buy
I wouldn’t ordinarily post a press release verbatim, but I figure this is okay as I wrote it. ANA is the first Wayside and Woodland release I’ve been involved with.
ANA is the second album by P. Manasseh and sees the multi-instrumentalist working very much in isolation, crafting minimalist compositions that are an...
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Clear Eyes, Full Hearts, Can't Lose
Explosions In the Sky - Remember Me as a Time of Day How Strange Innocence | Temporary Residence | 2000 | Buy
One of my favourite discoveries of 2011 was the NBC show Friday Night Lights, which ended its run of five seasons in the US last February. I’m only at the beginning of season two, in large part because the show has been neglected by UK TV networks.
This subtle, intimate drama...
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Pictures of Paradises
My dear friend James Nash is an illustrator and comics artist based in London, who, alongside other projects, has been drawing a diary comic for years now. After a six month hiatus to “get a life worth drawing”, he’s restarting it for one year, serialised weekly. Through three panel daily strips, James captures the frustrations, failings and occasional emotional breakthroughs...
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Damien Jurado - Nothing is the News Maraqopa | Secretly Canadian, 21 February 2012 | Buy
Damien Jurado looks set to continue his collaborative hot streak with Richard Swift with Maroqopa, out next month. ‘Nothing is the News’ starts out softly, a cousin to the tender ‘Pear’ from 2010’s career-high Saint Bartlett, before unexpectedly bursting into the kind of epic...
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The Shins - Simple Song Port of Morrow | Aural Apothacary/ Columbia | Buy
James Mercer may have jettisoned the original lineup of The Shins in favour of Richard Swift and some other new faces, but if ‘Simple Song’ is an indication of the direction of Port of Morrow, he’s happy to carry on as usual. Sure, it all sounds cleaner in a ‘major label money’ kind of...
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The Water | Dir. Kevin Drew | Revolver Films, 2012
Pitchfork.tv are currently showing The Water, the directorial debut from Broken Social Scene frontman Kevin Drew. A subtle, harrowingly poignant short about the tragic inevitability of loss, it’s haunted me all week. I’m loathe to say any more as it deserves to speak for itself.
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I was trawling through the archives of my old blog the other day and came across this post I wrote in the bleak midwinter of 2008, back when my mind was sharper. Blood on the Tracks is at the top of my vinyl ‘want list’, so it was interesting to revisit this a few years on.
Blood on the Tracks: The Perfect Winter album
Winter is there in the taught strings seemingly on the verge...
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The War On Drugs - Come to the City b/w Don’t Fear the Ghost 7” | Secretly Canadian, 2012 | Buy
On 24 January, Secretly Canadian release ’Come to the City’, the emotional core of The War on Drugs’ Slave Ambient. That album - a definite top five album of 2011 for me - was defined by an exhilarating sense of urgency, propulsive classic rock songs chugging through a...
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Joanna Newsom on Bill Callahan’s listening habits. From Arthur Magazine, 2006.
I was reminded of this inspiring quote when writing my post about my own listening habits yesterday.
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"TL; DR"
I made two significant acquisitions over the festive period: the 1970s National Panasonic record player pictured above (a wonderful gift from my wife) and Simon Reynolds’ fascinating Retromania, a detailed examination of pop culture’s obsession with recycling its own past. A significant point Reynolds makes is about how readily available music has become with the advent of iPods,...
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Introducing Wayside and Woodland Recordings
A belated happy new year to you. I’ve been in semi-hibernation over the winter but I’m looking forward to getting back to writing, listening and sharing music new and old.
One project I’ve been working on over the last couple of months has been building a website for Wayside and Woodland Recordings, the label run by Rob Glover and Ben Holton from the band epic45. Home to...
November 2011
1 post
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THOSE MOUNTAINS | THIS IS TOMORROW DJ SETLIST Gardens & Villa show | 9 Nov 2011
Deerhunter - Hazel St / Pavement - Grounded / Real Estate - It’s Real / Yuck - Georgia / Dinosaur Jr. - Muck / Tennis- Marathon / Wild Nothing - Summer Holiday / Washed Out - Untitled / Panda Bear - Surfer’s Hymn / Bibio - Artists’ Valley / Neon Indian - Polish Girl / Ducktails - Hamilton Road...
October 2011
5 posts
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Soul Food Project serve exciting Southern cuisine in two Birmingham venues, Kings Heath’s Hare & Hounds and The Victoria in the city centre. Every Sunday, both kitchens offer an American twist on the classic Sunday Roast, soundtracked by soul, blues, funk, jazz etc.
On Sunday 30 October, 2-6pm, I’ll be taking over The Victoria’s Deep South Diner, playing a laid back...
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Bonnie “Prince” Billy -Quail and Dumplings (via Epitonic) Wolfroy Comes To Town | Drag City/ Domino Records |2011 | Buy
Mike Powell interviews Will Oldham for Pitchfork
A Will Oldham interview is a rare thing indeed - his conversation with Powell is the only promotion he’ll be doing for the new Bonnie “Prince” Billy album Wolfroy Comes To Town. Perhaps this...
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Red House Painters - Fly Away (John Denver Cover) Take Me Home: A Tribute To John Denver | Badman Recording Co. | 2000 | Buy
My wife stumbled upon this radical reinterpretation of Fly Away while searching for Bonnie “Prince” Billy on Spotify (Will Oldham’s pin-drop acapella take on The Eagle and the Hawk opens Take Me Home). It lifts a fragment from the gentle original to...
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It’s been a while since I’ve played songs for the ‘benefit’ of others - now I find myself with three such occasions:
Sunday 23 October | The Boats with E.L. Heath and Charles Vaughan | The Flapper & Firkin, Birmingham | £5
My good friends Wayside & Woodland Recordings are showcasing two acts on their roster, Shropshire hill roamer E.L. Heath, whose songs are...
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Beck - It’s All In Your Mind One Foot in the Grave (Reissue) | K Records | 1994/ 2009 | Buy
Beck seems to simultaneously occupy the position of being well respected and commercially viable yet strangely undervalued, a staple of record collections but not an artist people froth at the mouth over. Maybe it’s because he’s still hard to pin down, well into his second decade of...
September 2011
7 posts
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I will be gone, but not forever
A couple of months ago I wrote a post about Jason Molina’s sad absence since 2009. On Monday, Jason’s label Secretly Canadian published a statement about his health and whereabouts:
Many of you have inquired as to Jason’s whereabouts and well-being since he canceled his tours with Will Johnson in 2009. Over the last two years Jason has been in and out of rehab facilities and...
“Liking a new band is like climbing a tree: you place your weight on each branch...”
– Laura Barton, The Guardian, 2007.
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Cass McCombs - The Same Thing Humor Risk | Domino Records | 11 November 2011 | Preorder
WIT’S END, McCombs’ first LP of this year, saw him focus intensely on one aspect of a musical personality that had previously embraced many different songwriting façades, instead putting down eight unadorned songs that shirked almost all adornment. It felt like a man turning on his craft, kicking...
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Julian Lynch - Terra Terra | Underwater Peoples | 2011 | Spotify | Buy
It’s rare for albums to come to life as Terra does with its opening title track. After an Angelo Badalamenti-channelling introduction, the song bursts open with sitar and bongos, finding some middle ground between Paul Simon and Atlas Sound. The steady momentum of the song is echoed in Richard Law’s cycling-themed...
“TOP TEN LAST.FM ARTISTS OF THE LAST THREE MONTHS
1. Chad VanGaalen
2....”
– Follow me on last.fm
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Silver Jews - Smith and Jones Forever American Water | Drag City Records | 1998 | Buy “People treat Silver Jews like a piece of shit” - David Berman, c. 2001
Loved ardently by a few but seen by many as a Pavement spinoff due to the involvement of Stephen Malkmus and Bob Nastanovich early on, David Berman’s Silver Jews never got their dues. SM’s smudged fingerprints may be all over American...
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Transistor Heart
AN AMERICANA MIXTAPE | 11 SONGS | SEPTEMBER 2011 | 8Tracks
SIDE A: 01/ Centro-Matic - Only In My Double Mind 02/ Richard Swift - Whitman 03/ Justin Townes Earle - Harlem River Blues 04/ Sharon Van Etten - Don’t Do It 05/ AA Bondy - I Can See The Pines Are Dancing 06/ Richard Buckner - Traitor
SIDE B: 07/ Mount Moriah - Old Gowns 08/ Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy - God Is Love 09/ Sun...
August 2011
8 posts
4 tags
Dirty Beaches - Badlands | Lord Knows Best | Zoo Music | 2011 | Buy
On Badlands, Alex Zhang Hungtai takes classic signifiers and cliches of good-time American music - lounge, honkytonk and heyday rock ‘n’ roll, and renders it claustrophobic and sinister, the vinyl crackles and tape hiss overwhelming clarity and comfort. The beat of Horses could be rapped on a floorboard, the...
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Bon Iver - Holocene Bon Iver, Bon Iver | Jagjaguwar | 2011 | Spotify | Buy
In just over six months my wife and I are heading for Iceland, a place that seems so ancient despite constantly remaking itself. Its otherworldly landscape is an appropriate setting for the Holocene video, a song taken from an album so imbued with a sense of landscape, blurring places real and imagined, concerned with how...
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AA Bondy - The Heart Is Willing
Believers | Fat Possum Records | 13 September 2011
Judging by The Heart Is Willing and its cover, Believers will mark a departure for Auguste Arthur - if his previous two records were like a lonesome wind through the trees, this promises to be as charged as electricity coming through the wires. There’s a quietly insistent drama to this song, Bondy’s...
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(Smog) - John Peel BBC Session | 3 January 2002
1/ Cold Discovery 2/ Dirty Pants 3/ Beautiful Child (Fleetwood Mac cover) 4/ Jesus (Velvet Underground cover)
Bill Callahan’s Apocalypse is still getting a lot of attention in this neck of the woods, a continuation of his transformation from lo-fi cult figure to masterful chronicler of the American condition. His often darker former life as...
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Bernd and Hilla Becher - Kraftwerk Album Innencover | 1970
You can’t do this with an MP3 album.
Kraftwerk - Ruckzuck Kraftwerk | Philips | 1970 | Out of Print
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If things go a little quiet here in August, it’s because I’ve got September on the brain. I’m currently involved with Ikon Gallery’s SLOW BOAT project, undertaken by Ikon Youth Program (IYP) and aimed at engaging young people with contemporary artists and the local heritage of the Inland Waterways. In September, the focus of the project is on music. I’ll be working...
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The effect of landscape, history and journeys on music has been a common thread running through my posts on Those Mountains, whether it’s the personal soundtrack to my commute (Yo La Tengo’s Night Falls On Hoboken - my first full post on here), the familiar: music borne out of a lifelong engagement with the English countryside (epic45, July Skies) or the exotic unknown of the desert,...
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Lanterns On The Lake - You’re Almost There Gracious Tide, Take Me Home | Bella Union | 19 September 2011 | Preorder
You’re Almost There is the first single from this Northumberland sextet’s forthcoming Bella Union debut, an intriguing glimpse into an album of dramatic, melancholy folk inspired by the history and often unforgiving landscape of the north.
Following on from...
July 2011
10 posts
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Calexico - Clothes of Sand (Nick Drake cover) Aerocalexico | Our Soil, Our Strength Recs | 2001 | Buy
Cover versions have always been a staple of Calexico’s live sets and tour-only recordings, featuring everything from Minutemen to Joy Division and The Specials. Despite their wide-ranging influences, covering English pastoral saint Nick Drake might seem like a bit of a stretch for the...
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Euros Childs - Spin That Girl Around Unreleased - BBC 6Music Session | 2010
I wanted to include this song in my recent post on Childs’ old band Gorkys Zygotic Mynci, but it’s only ever seen the light of day in a Marc Riley session for 6Music and I couldn’t find it anywhere online. Maybe Riley sensed my current love for Wales as he played it last Thursday, just as I was packing...
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The Ballad of Britain | Will Hodgkinson | Published 2009
Stumbling across The Ballad of Britain while researching a potential project felt fortuitous, providing a much needed spark of inspiration. A drunken conversation about the unique traits of British music leads journalist Will Hodgkinson on a merry jaunt around the Isles, in an attempt to document and understand it contrary, awkward...
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SPAGETTI JUNCTION
9 Songs | July 2011
01/ Y Niwl - Undegpump 02/ Real Estate - It’s Real 03/ Girls Names - I Lose 04/ Wooden Shjips - Lazy Bones 05/ Parts & Labor - Rest 06/ The War On Drugs - Baby Missiles 07/ Chad VanGaalen - Burning Photographs 08/ Cass McCombs - What Isn’t Nature 09/ Dirty Beaches - Lord Knows Best
Forget notions of authenticity - this mix features wilfully lo-fi psych...
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KING CREOSOTE & JOHN HOPKINS - BUBBLE Diamond Mine | Double Six Records | Spotify | Buy
I find myself increasingly interested in psychogeography - the effect of landscape on our mental state and outlook - and its various manifestations in music. One obvious way is through the use of field recordings, either with a performance put live to tape in a setting to capture ambient noise, or by...