Courtney Marie Andrews has announced details of a new studio album, Valentine. The new record is released on January 16 via Thirty Tigers. Advertisement You can hear “Keeper” from the new album below. “Keeper” follows on from “Cons & Clowns“, which she released last month. Valentine was recorded to tape at Valentine Recording Studios in Los Angeles and co-produced by Jerry Bernhardt. The album also features drummer Chris Bear of Grizzly Bear. Advertisement The complete tracklist for Valentine is: Pendulum SwingKeeperCons & ClownsMagic TouchLittle Picture of a ButterflyOutsiderEveryone Wants to Feel Like You DoOnly the Best for BabyBest friend Hangman...
It’s been nine years since Tortoise released their last album… It’s only been nine years since Tortoise released their last album, but it feels a lot longer. The quintet were closely associated with the Chicago post-rock scene of the late 1990s and early 2000s, and when that scene ran its course, they suddenly seemed unmoored from their original context and anchored to something in the past. On 2016’s The Catastrophist they sounded like a band out of time, an impression bolstered by the fact that the album has been commissioned by the City of Chicago to highlight the scene...
ELTON JOHNGoodbye Yellow Brick RoadDJM/MCA, 1973This is the first album I ever felt any individual ownership over. I got it on cassette for Christmas when I was 12 years old, after my obsession with Elton John had taken hold. The songs were alive! Each one was like a movie full of colour, drama, and humour. I had a Walkman and I would listen to it around the clock. I memorised the liner notes and lyrics, and the artwork was almost as important to me as the songs. Some mean boys noticed my fixation on it one day and brought...
Unharness your hopes! As you’ll read in his excellent afterword to this new magazine, Pavement’s Bob Nastanovich has an extremely solid take on the fortunes of the band in which he has played percussion for the last 30 years. Advertisement Things, he notes, have changed. Where once Pavement were part of a US guitar music underground – all 7” singles in limited numbers, fanzine interviews, a shared headline with Polvo – that scene has changed. Whereas this music had the quality of a secret handshake, now Bob notes, it’s become a family affair – as mums and dads have...
Dave Ball, one half of pioneering synth-pop duo Soft Cell, has died at the age 66. He passed away peacefully in his sleep at his London home on Wednesday (October 22). Advertisement Ball’s combined love of electronica and Northern Soul fed into his creative relationship with Marc Almond, a fellow art student at Leeds Polytechnic, when they began performing as Soft Cell in the late 1970s. As their million-selling cover of Gloria Jones’ “Tainted Love” topped the UK charts in 1981, the duo seemed to complement one another perfectly: Ball the taciturn background presence, Almond the showy, kohl-eyed frontman....
The Art Of Falling Apart The Soft Cell story is one of wild, hedonistic success. Here, Marc Almond and Dave Ball confess all – about controversial performance art, New York’s depraved club scene, the perils of having hit records and their own eventual downfall. One bystander claims: “It was sex, drugs and electronic rock’n’roll!” Originally published in Uncut 257 (October 2018). Advertisement “There was always a darkness around Soft Cell,” says Marc Almond, warming to the story of his band’s relentlessly perverse progress through the 1980s. “And that fuelled Dave’s darkness, and it fuelled my darknesses… Our whole career,...
Read our review of Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere Director Scott Cooper talks to Uncut about the “the trauma and ghosts” haunting his biopic, Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere Advertisement “It was about honouring that particular moment” UNCUT: What was the genesis of this project?SCOTT COOPER: I was introduced to Warren Zane’s book Deliver Me From Nowhere. It struck me as deeply intimate and honest, and highlighted Bruce’s internal struggles in ways that I could relate to. It stood out to me as incredibly cinematic, though I knew it would be challenging, but I felt like I had to...
Photo: Sandy Speiser/Sony Music Archives The young Dylan, hollering his head off The first time we hear Bob Dylan on this fabulous 8CD, 168-track boxset, it’s Christmas Eve 1956. Dylan’s high school trio, The Jokers – Bob Zimmerman (vocals and piano), Larry Keegan and Howard Rutman (vocals) – are whomping through Shirley And Lee’s “Let The Good Times Roll” in a version recorded on a 78rpm acetate at the Terlinde Music Store in St Paul, a bus ride from the 15-year-old Dylan’s home in Hibbing, Minnesota. It’s barely a minute long, not much more than a gloriously raucous din,...
EMMYLOU HARRIS“Wrecking Ball” (from Wrecking Ball)ELEKTRA, 1995All my choices are about atmospheres. That’s what I thrive on. If something gives me a feeling, it doesn’t have to be a narrative, it just has to be something that presses the atmosphere button. When Danny (Lanois) produces, he puts this whole hinterland into a song. The first few times you hear it, you’re listening to Emmylou’s voice, which isn’t exactly shoddy, but subsequently what you hear is this beautiful tonal landscape supporting it. He gives you somewhere else to live for a few minutes. When Cecilie (Eno, Roger’s daughter) and I...
How did you get started in music?There was a club in Harlem that everybody used to hang out in. Somebody dared me to go on stage and sing. Somebody saw me, liked me, and I ended up with a contract. I didn’t quit my day gig until my second album. I sang on the weekend and worked at Schraftt’s, the candy people. I was the first black waitress at 61 Fifth Avenue. You kept working, even though you had a record contract?Yeah, cos I knew it wasn’t going to last. I ain’t had no training or nothing....
