Where the Wild Things Are

I haven't seen what the release date is here yet, but bump this up to full screen when you watch!

Black Cab Sessions

here's a plug for the great Black Cab Sessions site, which i highly recommend...

(pure coincidence that it happens to be when Dawn Landes pops up in the back seat, honest)

Day-dreams...

I've been listening to Wilco since the release of their second album Being There, and while they continue to be critical darlings and release quite good records, i'm surely not the only fan out there who yearns for the days when they were a great band. With Jay Bennett still a member they truly hit their stride with the run of albums that followed Being There, Summerteeth, Mermaid Avenue (their Woody Guthrie collaboration with Billy Bragg) and Yankee Hotel Foxtrot.

The acclaimed film that charts the breakdown of Tweedy and Bannett's relationship - I am trying to break your heart - is a fascinating if sad movie, and a weird thing to watch as a fan. I re-watched it recently and it just makes you realise what the band lost when he left, even if he was argumentative. The two disc version of the film includes some gorgeous extra footage of the two of them playing songs, just guitar and piano/organ, that sound amazing and are genuinely moving. Tweedy of course has form in this regard though - having similarly fallen out with his Uncle Tupelo partner Jay Farrar prior to Wilco - and I guess the just reported lawsuit for unpaid royalties, being filed by Bennett, makes my daydreams of a re-union more than a little unlikely...

Martha & the Vandellas

i love everything about this song and video, here's to bank holiday mondays...

Heavy Pecking

I'm loving Yonder is the Clock, and worth a further mention is the fact that it contains not one, but two chicken songs. Any readers of Hang the DJ will know it contains a great list by RTEs John Kelly (The Pecking Order) about classic country and R&B tunes of that flavour. Well of the two new ones by The Felice Brothers - 'Chicken Wire' and 'Run, Chicken, Run' - it's the latter that already sounds like a classic, a stomping sing-a-long that will, i imagine, become something of a live favourite.

Current listening...

You' ll be relieved to hear i tracked down the Felice Brothers new album (i'm sure!), and very fine it sounds too, particularly the lovely Waits-like 'Sailor Song'. The beauty of anything by the Felice Brothers, on the previous two records at least, is their slow-burn appeal, so looking forward to delving deeper into this one.

I also tracked down a second hand copy of James Iha's (ex Smashing Pumpkins) only solo album, Let it come Down, on CD. I first bought this on cassette before travelling to the West Coast of America in 1998, and so maybe my judgement is skewed, but for me this is an amazing lost record, a surprising and lovely country-soul gem.

Yonder is the Clock... somewhere

i still haven't managed to get a copy of the new Felice Brothers album - not sure if they've had distribution problems or if it's just that the shops are so bad at ordering things thes days. In the meantime though, here's a fine impromptu performance by one of my favourite bands (as written about by Rick Moody in the book!)

Finally...

Twenty-two years after first falling for them, I saw AC/DC on Tuesday night, and they didn’t disappoint. Brilliant and funny, they put on an amazing show, and while they did play a few songs off the new album, Black Ice, it was mainly an impeccable greatest hits set (although I would have included ‘What’s next to the Moon’, and ‘Rock and Roll ain’t noise pollution’). The surprisingly camp Brian Johnson worked the crowd, Malcolm, Cliff Williams and Phil Rudd kept it tight, not missing a beat or note all night, and Angus was just pure sweaty genius, a genuinely amazing thing to see in the flesh – a cross between Chuck Berry and James Brown!

I'm a sucker for a good record sleeve...

Looking forward to...

the new Booker T. Jones album, out here on April 20th. Backed by the ever great Drive-By Truckers, and featuring a certain Neil Young playing lead guitar on one track, it includes covers of Tom Waits' 'Get Behind the Mule', the Truckers' 'Space City' and Outkast's 'Hey Ya'.



(nice retro artwork too!)