Hit Singles

Hit Singles

Danger Mouse & Black Thought – Cheat Codes

There have been times when it feels like everywhere you look, you see the hand of Danger Mouse. Over the last decade or so of work, the New York-born producer Brian Burton has accrued a list of credits that read like a who’s who of modern music. Adele, Gorillaz, U2, Beck, The Black Keys, Norah Jones – and that’s before you get to his artistic collaborations, with Cee-Lo Green in Gnarls Barkley, The Shins’ James Mercer in Broken Bells, and Karen O for 2019’s Lux Prima. ORDER NOW: Wilco are on the cover of the latest issue of Uncut As impressive a CV as this is, it’s sometimes given the impression that Burton has been keen to leave his past behind him. He began his career as a hip-hop producer, recording the seminal 2003 LP Ghetto Pop Life with the Brooklyn MC Jemini before breaking into the public consciousness with 2004’s The Grey Album, a visionary – and very much unsanctioned – mash-up of Jay-Z’s The Black Album and The Beatles’ self-titled “White Album”. Since The Grey Album, Burton has occasionally returned to rap (in particular, see Danger Doom, his collaboration with the late masked rapper MF DOOM). But by… Read More →

Hit Singles

Yo La Tengo on ‘Sugarcube’ and working with Bob Odenkirk: “He’s a genius”

Originally published in Uncut’s July 2022 issue “I think it was shown on MTV once, maybe twice,” says bassist James McNew, remembering “Sugarcube”’s video. “As far as I know, that’s it. That’s all.” In the 25 years since, however, the promo has racked up millions of views on YouTube, no doubt helped by the presence of its stars David Cross and Bob Odenkirk, the latter now better known as lawyer Saul Goodman in Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul. He has, it turns out, been a Yo La Tengo fan since the early ’90s. Advertisement “We were all fans of Bob’s from The Larry Sanders Show,” explains Ira Kaplan. “Then Georgia and I were on vacation out in LA and we saw that Bob was doing stand-up at a bookstore, so we went out to see the show. Afterwards he was just browsing the record section, and it was kind of out-of-character for us to do this, but we introduced ourselves. It turned out he knew our band.” There’s more to “Sugarcube” than its video, of course. Since the mid-’80s, the Hoboken-based group had been charting a unique path, mastering the acoustic hush of 1990’s Fakebook as adeptly as they… Read More →

Hit Singles

Crazy Horse on Neil Young’s Toast

It’s been another momentous year for Neil fans. Just as we’d settled down to enjoy the rowdy delights of Barn, the Official Bootleg Series truffled out new perspectives on his storied ’70/’71 and the Eldorado reissue brought back into focus Young’s creative rehabilitation at the end of the ’80s. ORDER NOW: Wilco are on the cover of the latest issue of Uncut This week, Young releases Noise & Flowers – a live album taken from his 2019 European tour with Promise Of The Real. Young started the tour a few weeks after the death of his long-serving manager, Elliot Roberts, which freights this album with a certain rugged pathos. There’s amazing version of “On The Beach”, too. But, for me at least, the biggest Neil release so far this year has been Toast – the mythical ‘lost’ album recorded in 2000 at the end of a scorching run of records with Crazy Horse. You can read my full review of Toast here – but I thought now the issue is off-sale it wouldn’t hurt to run the Q&As with Frank “Poncho” Sampedro and Billy Talbot that accompanied my review. It’s worth reading to the end, as Billy gives some tidbits… Read More →

Hit Singles

Amanda Shires – Take It Like A Man

To really know somebody is to know all the little ways to hurt them. It’s fitting, then, that the most devastating moments on Take It Like A Man are rarely the most dramatic. “You can say it’s all my fault, we just couldn’t get along”, she sings on the quietly dignified “Fault Lines”. “Just so you know, I’ll say ‘I don’t know’/But no-one’s gonna be asking me”. ORDER NOW: Wilco are on the cover of the latest issue of Uncut Like a lot of people – like a lot of wives and mothers – Shires experienced something of a compression of identity during the pandemic, locked down at home near Nashville with her husband, the musician Jason Isbell, and their daughter. A touring musician since joining the Texas Playboys on fiddle at the age of 15, Shires had a considerable body of work to her name before meeting Isbell, whose career-defining albums Southeastern and Something More Than Free charted their courtship and the role Shires played in helping him get sober. As Isbell’s star climbed, the love story captured in his songs charmed fans beyond Shires’ own work: on her solo material; with John Prine and in Isbell’s backing band… Read More →

Hit Singles

Little Feat – Waiting For Columbus: Super Deluxe Edition

Ask anyone who was a fan of Little Feat during their initial run – a decade-long stretch from 1969 to ’79 where vocalist and guitarist Lowell George, and keyboard player Bill Payne, steered a leaky ship through toil and trouble – and they’ll tell you Little Feat’s music truly came alive onstage. Much like peers the Grateful Dead, the Feat needed the unpredictable conduction of energy between band and audience, plus the heat-of-the-moment, now-or-never fury of live performance, to take flight. It’s no surprise, then, that Waiting For Columbus is one of Little Feat’s most enduring albums, often included in lists of the greatest live albums of all time; it’s also wild to consider how the sextet pulled things together against the odds, and almost in spite of themselves. ORDER NOW: Wilco are on the cover of the latest issue of Uncut They’d already been through a hell of a lot. Little Feat formed in ’69, when George left Frank Zappa’s Mothers Of Invention, taking bass player Roy Estrada with him, and connected with Payne (whose pre-history included appearing on an obscure garage rock stomper, Something Wild’s “Trippin’ Out”), and drummer Richie Hayward, who’d previously worked with George in The… Read More →

Hit Singles

Lee Bains & The Glory Fires – Old-Time Folks

Like so many artists from the Deep South, Lee Bains is conflicted about his upbringing to the point of obsession. Albums like Deconstructed and Youth Detention have been filled with songs that explore his roots and the complex socio-political legacy of the South, usually set to an energetic musical accompaniment that owes more to The Clash than Skynyrd. Old-Time Folks sees Bains – once of the Dexateens – on familiar lyrical territory, but musically he has tried to slow down a little, introducing elements of folk and country with the assistance of Drive-By Truckers producer Dave Barbe. ORDER NOW: Wilco are on the cover of the latest issue of Uncut Bains is a fascinating character, straddling the polarised worlds of red and blue America. His evocative poems about Southern food have featured in The New Yorker, and he holds down a day job in construction and maintenance. His sometimes tortured need to balance these two worlds have led to his songs becoming perhaps overly verbose, but here he made a conscious attempt to write singalongs in the style of Billy Bragg or classic folk. That said, there are still breakneck epic screeds such as “The Battle Of Atlanta”, an epic… Read More →

Hit Singles

Ty Segall – Hello, Hi

Barely has the dust settled on his last escapade, and Ty Segall, Californian dreamer and one of the most prolific creators in all of rock’n’roll, sidles by once more. Just for context, Segall’s 2021 saw not one but two new collections of music. The first was Harmonizer, a ripping rock album that dropped without warning or fanfare in August 2021. The second expanded Ty’s brief yet further – a film score for director Matt Yoka’s Whirlybird, a documentary following the Los Angeles News Service, whose roving helicopter tracked wrongdoings across LA’s urban sprawl throughout the 1980s and ’90s. Time for a pause? Of course not. ORDER NOW: Wilco are on the cover of the latest issue of Uncut Seasoned Ty watchers will know that he tends to follow a zig with a zag, and so it is with Hello, Hi. It does, broadly, what Harmonizer did not. Where that album was electric, synthetic and raw, Hello, Hi is largely acoustic, rustic-sounding and steeped in a sort of fey, offbeat prettiness. Where Harmonizer felt like the work of a full live band, Hello, Hi bears the mark of a record made alone in isolation, or something close to it. Ty’s album… Read More →

Hit Singles

Cheri Knight – American Rituals

Fish around for a minute or two googling “Cheri Knight” and you’ll soon come across a song of hers on YouTube called “Dar Glasgow”. It’s the opening track on her second solo album, 1998’s The Northeast Kingdom. The cover is a painting of Knight in a dress of green leaves holding a guitar in a vegetable field, alluding to her two passions, music and farming. The song is a rural gothic folk tale, spun out over the drone of a harmonium, which slowly pulls the listener in. That harmonium is played by Steve Earle, whose label E-Squared released the album, and the song also features additional vocals by Emmylou Harris. ORDER NOW: The Beatles are on the cover of the latest issue of Uncut In some respects, this is the pinnacle of Knight’s patchy career as a semi-professional musician, though she enjoyed modest attention in the early 1990s as the vocalist and bassist in roots-rockers Blood Oranges. After Northeast Kingdom, she withdrew from music and carried on tending the land where she lived in Western Massachusetts. She hadn’t been heard of since – until now. American Rituals rewinds two decades to the late ’70s and early ’80s to focus on Knight’s… Read More →

Hit Singles

MJ Lenderman – Boat Songs

Asheville, North Carolina, native MJ Lenderman inhabits a crucial nexus of the Southern underground. The singer, songwriter and multi-instrumentalist is a graduate of the local house-show scene, and of an important bygone venue called the Mothlight. He’s been releasing his own music since 2017, and is also a guitarist in the country-soaked alternative-rock band Wednesday, lead by his partner Karly Hartzman. ORDER NOW: The Beatles are on the cover of the latest issue of Uncut While still only 23, Lenderman comes off more like a timeworn indie veteran than an eager newcomer. When a certain music website bestowed its coveted “Best New Music” designation on his latest album, Lenderman didn’t even acknowledge the coverage on his social media. He’s too busy, it seems, creating his own take on a classic sound, and enthusing about the artists he loves, from The Dead C and Les Rallizes Dénudés to Jason Molina and Drive-By Truckers. “All I wanted to do was make songs that were as long as possible, and as slow as possible, with as few chords as possible,” he says, referring to the latter. Yet, with the excellent Boat Songs, Lenderman clears his own path, blending sentimental and stirring everyman observations with… Read More →

Hit Singles

Martin Courtney – Magic Sign

It’s been seven years since Martin Courtney’s first solo album, the subtle delight of 2015’s Many Moons. Since then, he’s shepherded his group, Real Estate, through two more albums – In Mind (2017) and The Main Thing (2020) – and last year’s Half A Human EP. Change is incremental with a group like Real Estate, and the coordinates for the songs Courtney writes haven’t changed hugely over the 15-or-so years he’s been making music: while the production might be tighter, more robust, his melodies still sit as gently within the landscape of sound he sculpts as they did on the first, self-titled Real Estate album, back in 2009. ORDER NOW: The Beatles are on the cover of the latest issue of Uncut That’s not to understate the art of Martin Courtney’s songwriting, though there is something understated about this most artful of songwriters. He’s what we might call a “chiseller” – someone who quietly, determinedly works away at the same area with similar tools but unearths gems at a surprising rate. Not exactly one to hide his influences, on Magic Sign, you can still hear trace elements of the listening Courtney might have done in his teens and twenties – you could… Read More →

Hit Singles

Kendrick Lamar – Mr Morale & The Big Steppers

Kendrick Lamar is one of the finest instrumentalists of his era, although his instrument happens to be his own voice. On previous albums but especially on his latest, Mr Morale & The Big Steppers, he raps in many modes, varying his pitching and flow on nearly every song, switching up his cadence as though changing his identity. He sounds impossibly nimble and declarative on opener “United In Grief”, even as he warns the listener, “I’ve been goin’ through something/Be afraid”. He goes low and legato on “Crown”, then spry and playful on “N95”. He uses short, choppy lines on “Count Me Out” to unsettle the listener, then delivers “Auntie Diaries” in a near whisper, as though drawing you closer to tell you a secret. The album is a remarkable series of disruptive transformations. ORDER NOW: THE BEATLES ARE ON THE COVER OF THE LATEST ISSUE OF UNCUT Lamar isn’t the only rapper who bends his flow into so many different shapes, but few others pull it off so dramatically or so eloquently, and almost no-one achieves the same emotional payoff. It heightened the tension of his 2012 breakthrough, good kid, M.A.A.D. City, and made 2015’s To Pimp A Butterfly one of… Read More →

Hit Singles

Elvis

Of all the filmmakers who could have made an Elvis biopic, it had to be one whose aesthetic is more Vegas bloat than Sun Studios leanness. Baz Luhrmann’s Elvis lives up to the swooning excess of his Moulin Rouge, even down to its digital diamanté-studded end credits. Less a narrative than a deluxe jukebox musical with touches of Douglas Sirk melodrama, Elvis is framed as a sort of Citizen Kane deathbed reverie from Colonel Tom Parker, Presley’s Dutch-born, Mephistophelean manager. He’s played by Tom Hanks with a bizarre, undefinable European accent, in makeup suggesting a cross between the Penguin and a papier-mâché effigy of Rupert Murdoch. ORDER NOW: THE BEATLES ARE ON THE COVER OF THE LATEST ISSUE OF UNCUT How Parker ‘created’, or rather enslaved Presley is the narrative drift, but the film’s real pleasure lies in its full-tilt comic-strip stylistics and a terrific performance by Austin Butler (a TV stalwart previously seen in Tarantino’s Once Upon A Time…). His Elvis is something of a coy innocent, less of a confident joker than the original, not quite aware of his powers, but rebellious when it comes to doing things his own way, as on the ’68 TV Comeback Special. Don’t… Read More →

Hit Singles

Joan Shelley – The Spur

Earlier this year, speaking to Uncut about her love of Nick Drake, Joan Shelley expressed a preference for “the more intimate recordings, that stripped-downness. When somebody is that good at being the whole band, I want to be as close to the guitar as possible. It has certainly had an influence on my own record making.” ORDER NOW: The Beatles are on the cover of the latest issue of Uncut The heart of Shelley’s music since her 2015 breakthrough, Over And Even, is located in the warm, unshowy, close-mic’d interplay between voice and acoustic guitar. So compelling is that sound, any additional textures can feel like minute calibrations, delicate but inessential brushstrokes. Yet like all good minimalists, Shelley recognises the value of the sharp, subversive intervention. Though her music is cool and calm at the centre, a continuous and compelling tension tugs away at the edges. “I always want there to be a landscape in my music,” Shelley tells Uncut some months later. “It’s not overly done, but I want to be haunted by some weird thing. I think of it as a tiny orchestra, the ghost of Frank Sinatra’s studio band. A little swell.” It’s this shimmering luminosity, this… Read More →

Hit Singles

Arthur Russell – Calling Out Of Context / Instrumentals (reissues, 2004, 2017)

Thirty years after his Aids-related death, aged just 40, Arthur Russell’s music still has a luminous freshness and richly emotional power. The cult composer, cellist and downtown New York scene-hopper amassed a vast body of work spanning avant-classical chamber pieces, disco and dub, experimental electronica, folksy Americana and Buddhist bubblegum pop, but he released very little solo material in his lifetime. Russell’s radical queerness and genre-blurring musical promiscuity confounded peers and record labels, but he also stifled his own potential with painstaking perfectionism, endlessly hoarding and reworking pieces that deserved a public airing. ORDER NOW: The Beatles are on the cover of the latest issue of Uncut Russell’s posthumous reputation has blossomed over the last two decades, his legacy celebrated in books and films, his songs sampled by Kanye West and covered by Tracey Thorn, Hot Chip, Sufjan Stevens and more. This resurgence is largely thanks to the meticulous efforts of his former partner Tom Lee, designer Melissa Zhao Jones and Steve Knutson, boss of Portland-based boutique label Audika, who have assembled an ongoing series of mostly glorious anthologies excavated from Russell’s massive tape archive. In partnership with Rough Trade, these Audika albums are finally receiving a full physical launch… Read More →

Hit Singles

Barbara Keith – Barbara Keith

When Barbara Keith, acoustic in hand, headed from Massachusetts to Greenwich Village during the height of the folk era, she became one of countless aspiring troubadours tentatively following in Dylan’s footsteps, singing folk standards at Café Wha? and Gerde’s Folk City. She fell in with a bunch of Café Wha? regulars, and they formed the short-lived band Kangaroo. By the time they’d scored a record deal, Keith was starting to write songs, and soon after the group dissolved, she was signed by MGM/Verve, with Peter Asher assigned to produce her self-titled 1969 debut album. Although the LP caused barely a ripple, several labels saw enough promise in the youngster to keep tabs on her. ORDER NOW: The Beatles are on the cover of the latest issue of Uncut During a brief fling with A&M in 1970, Keith had her first taste of success when her song “Free The People” was covered by Delaney & Bonnie and Barbra Streisand, dramatically increasing her visibility. Before long she was auditioning for Columbia chief Clive Davis and Warner/Reprise Chairman Mo Ostin, who personally signed Keith to a three-album deal. Producer/A&R rep Larry Marks (Gene Clark, Phil Ochs, The Flying Burrito Brothers), who’d become her… Read More →

Hit Singles

Drive-by Truckers – Welcome 2 Club XIII

As musicians mature, they tend to travel diverging paths. There are those who defy the sentimental haze of their pasts, who refuse to be the thing they were before; and then there are those who rest on their laurels and play the hits. Most alluring, however, are those who meditate on the journey: from humble origins and regional memory, to defining relationships and unshakable loss, creating salient new work rooted in their past. From Loretta Lynn’s “Coal Miner’s Daughter” to Tom Petty’s “Southern Accents”, memory as song, as a tribute to home, becomes a welcome milestone in an artist’s body of work. ORDER NOW: THE BEATLES ARE ON THE COVER OF THE LATEST ISSUE OF UNCUT With Welcome 2 Club XIII, Drive-By Truckers’ principle songwriters Patterson Hood and Mike Cooley have crafted a vivid acclamation of their 37 years together, with all of its highs and lows, sung over walloping Southern rock. Pondering their origins in nowhere dive bars in nowhere towns, on bygone drives through the South’s empty backroads, they stew in the rich absurdity of it all, and offer a collection that rings of the band’s tendency toward Southern-gothic neo-noir, but with frequent punctuations of light. It’s a pivot… Read More →

Hit Singles

Al Stewart – The Admiralty Lights: The Complete Studio, Live and Rare 1964-2009

Riding high in the US charts at the start of punk rock’s annus mirabilis, Al Stewart was eager to make clear to an NME interviewer exactly how well he was doing. “Only two albums from the British folk scene have ever got into the American Top 30,” said the 31-year-old, who had moved to California a few months earlier. “Out of Steeleye Span, Incredible String Band, Pentangle, Fairport Convention, Ralph McTell – you know the list – only two albums have ever made it. They’re Modern Times and Year Of The Cat – both by me.” ORDER NOW: THE BEATLES ARE ON THE COVER OF THE LATEST ISSUE OF UNCUT Having spent much of his career being regarded as a minor talent (“When I looked for respect all I got was neglect”, he fumed quietly on 1976’s “If It Don’t Come Naturally, Leave It”), commercial success proved to be intoxicating for Stewart. In the sleevenotes to this colossal summation of his life’s work – 21 commercially released albums, 18 live discs, eight sets of outtakes and home recordings and three more of BBC sessions, plus a 160-page book – Paul Simon’s one-time London flatmate remembers wallowing in his vindication as he… Read More →

Hit Singles

Frank Sinatra – Watertown

Should you ever feel like being shredded, head to YouTube and seek out Nina Simone’s performance of “For A While” at Ronnie Scott’s club in 1984. Co-written by The Four Seasons’ Bob Gaudio and singer-songwriter Jake Holmes, the song is a simple and bottomless one that fits a loose lineage running from Hoagy Carmichael’s “I Get Along Without You Very Well” through to Bob Dylan’s “Most of The Time” – songs about how, when you suffer devastating loss, the world still just keeps turning around you, life goes on, and you gradually get pulled back into going along with it; until, suddenly, the memory of your loss comes rising up out of the everyday, raw as ever, to stun you all over again. Simone’s entire Ronnie Scott’s show is extraordinary, but “For A While” is its bleeding heart. She sings like she’s creating it from her own pain and, if you let it, it will tear you apart. ORDER NOW: THE BEATLES ARE ON THE COVER OF THE LATEST ISSUE OF UNCUT Simone was always ahead of the curve. By the time of that performance, “For A While” was a lost song from a forgotten record: Watertown, a suite of 10… Read More →

Hit Singles

Steve Earle & The Dukes – Jerry Jeff

In 1971, 16-year-old Steve Earle arrived at gigs with a battered guitar, long hair and a cowboy hat, often half-pissed, and trying more than anything to be like Jerry Jeff Walker. He eventually caught up with the “Mr Bojangles” writer in Nashville, becoming a student and friend as he had with Townes Van Zandt and Guy Clark, in progressive country’s febrile heyday. Walker was the last of that pantheon to die, in 2020, and Jerry Jeff completes Earle’s trilogy of homages, after Townes (2009) and Guy (2019). ORDER NOW: Queen are on the cover of the latest issue of Uncut Walker began as a Greenwich Village folkie down from upstate New York, then played psychedelic rock before changing his name and becoming the hitchhiking, careless country troubadour the teenage Earle dreamily idolised. Songs picked here are steeped in the trade’s romance, before the cost of hard living has worn it down. Earle adopts a phlegmy, trailing growl as he inhabits his hero, and the Dukes mostly speed down the track, heedlessly immediate. “Gypsy Songman” defines Walker’s persona, “I Makes Money (Money Don’t Make Me)” elaborates on his code, Earle muttering “ain’t a dollar in the world makes me change my stuff”… Read More →

Hit Singles

Angel Olsen – Big Time

Angel Olsen’s records are most often characterised as heartbreak music – love, loss and loneliness expressed with almost desperate intensity and a directness that has its own poetry. It’s a reasonable take but, as is the case with so many female singer-songwriters, it overlooks her music’s thoughtfulness and ignores Olsen’s agency, as if the artistic decisions she makes always take a back seat to the emotions that inform her songs. ORDER NOW: Queen are on the cover of the latest issue of Uncut A couple of recent projects alone, though, prove that internal weather systems don’t direct all of Olsen’s creative moves. Two years after the triumph of 2019’s All Mirrors, which saw her teaming up with Jherek Bischoff and John Congleton for a synth-blasted set full of lavish orchestrations and saturnine theatricality, came a covers EP. A move so leftfield it played as almost frivolous, “Aisles” saw Olsen taking on the likes of Laura Branigan’s “Gloria” and (most startlingly) “The Safety Dance” by Men Without Hats. It was, it seems, a way for her to loosen her reputation for unbending conviction. Around the same time, there was a writing and recording hook-up with Sharon Van Etten for “Like I Used… Read More →

Hit Singles

The Smile – A Light For Attracting Attention

“There was a point a year and a half ago when I wondered whether I would be doing this again,” admitted Thom Yorke on stage at the Albert Hall last October. “I’m a British musician, and I was told during the pandemic, like all British musicians, that I should consider retraining. And after we finally left [the EU] they told us we didn’t really need to tour around Europe anyway, did we? So perhaps I’m one of a dying breed… who knows?” ORDER NOW: Queen are on the cover of the latest issue of Uncut That classic Radiohead sense of embattled, paranoid defiance was only amplified by Mark Jenkin’s video for The Smile’s “Skrting On The Surface”, released in March, which cast Yorke as a miner, 200 feet beneath Cornwall, his face grimy with soot and sweat as he trundled his lonely cart down a rail track. Is UK indie rock one more venerable heartland industry to be blithely cast onto the national slagheap? Could Thom and Jonny Greenwood’s next jobs be in cyber? It’d take a heart of stone not to smirk – but there’s something heartening about Yorke and Greenwood’s vocational commitment to angular, knotty, intensely pissed-off art-rock. While… Read More →