john legend’s new record dropped last week. i didn’t go out and buy it.

i’d heard a couple of tracks back in july and it was a bit… well, *pftut* i guess. the album’s produced by jack splash but i was left feeling that legend had more than exhausted his soulsleaze credentials and celeb mates production capabilities on get lifted.
so when stereogum posted a quote from legend’s rolling stone press junket interview last week, where he cites jeff buckley as one of the only singers he’s ever felt intimitated by (erm, john. dude. the word humble mean anything to you? no? apparently not) and then posted this track which legend himself calls a ‘homage’, well I took another listen.

the attention to detail soggy production of reverby guitar is uncanny Grace fodder, almost to the point of parody… and that’s before the vocal drifts in. initially, its precious verlaine channelling swimmy heroin production forces such inavoidable comparisons that i couldn’t but help think about buckley jr and really what an amazing talent he was but to tha lege’s (as i’m sure he loves to be called) credit there’s something in the melody which pulled me back in and made me listen another time.
and then another.

and then i’d listened to it maybe 7 times in an afternoon. (all this despite the fact the chorus bears a striking similarity to smoke on the water…)
but i’m still left thinking that jeff buckley was an incomparible talent and that the song writing and production on Grace really does justify its inevitable inclusion in those best ever albums lists. still, despite john legend’s startling lack of humbleness even in the context of this urban hymn (man, at least he’s got unwaivering self belief licked, huh?) its actually a pretty interesting and relatively ballsy joint to drop on your softmore release.

John Legend - Show Me

Okay so one (new) member of the stable (geddit?) was given leave to visit our friends in the East.

It was a short but refreshing trip and the first with full family in tow. Having lived out there before it was a great opportunity to re-visit old haunts… The biggest ice coffee you can drink served in one of those Pyrex kitchen measuring beakers at Mo’Bo’ / Mo’Gal’…a trip to one of the coolest and best stocked book shops I know, with hundreds of titles on geeky record scenes and photos of lovely LP covers…[three I picked up were Record Buyer's Diary, Jazz Next Standard, & How To Play Air Guitar]

And visits to countless different record stores in the continuous quest for the ever unobtainable June Yamagishi record “My Pleasure” which features Shuggy Otis and Bobby Womack. Oh shizzle, I’ve now just created another few dozen people who will be looking for this now…

I didn’t make it out to Koenji to the Boombox collector’s place which was a shame, but I did find a great little cafe / record shop (living the dream, anyone?) in Shimokitazawa. It was named after War’s huge early NYC club hit (and Mancuso classic) City Country City, so I thought I might find some kindred spirits inside. It was a beautiful little store and Tatsuro the buyer there was an excellent host, even putting me on to some great 70s Japanese vinyl including one piece he had recently sold to an over-excited Madlib…but I’m not telling you what it is…
Instead as a tribute to a great store, and a great holiday here is a link to the track City Country City…though I have to apologise, this isn’t the 13 minute album cut, just the 3 minute single, but I think you can get the idea
See you on the dancefloor

about thirty years ago (before I was born even) randy newman - that cuddly los angelian guy you’ll have heard singing on the toy story soundtrack about being friends? well he was a little bit political.

dude’s a great songwriter. a real way with words and all, wrote some amazing tracks about racism and the south and whatnot. then he got quite big with one song.

again, you might have heard it.

its about short people.

in fact, its called short people.

its kind billy joel-y piano-y ditty.

and he was this curly headed geeky looking kid in a bad golfing jacket. the song was this massive hit. short people were up in arms about it. it was kinda rude in a gently ribbing way. “don’t want no short people round here” he sang to his piano. the kind of song my dad would sing to my mum. she’s short. he’s not. so he thinks its funny.

so that song sort of marked his card. and it was a joke song, right?

before the disney soundtrack thing and the short people thing, a couple of years. five maybe, he’d written this other song.

it was political.

in fact, its called political science.

its about american foriegn policy.

and this was like, thirty five years ago, right?

but the thing is. you listen to it and it could have been written today. not like last ten years. like, today.

this is pedro the lion’s cover of it.

we here at horse latitudes have been hella busy in the outside world recently, for which we’re more than a wee bit sorry.

normal service will be resumed shortly.

in the meantime, enjoy this big fat dumpling of hand-claps in a soggy toilet disco spirituality

norman weeks - hold on (dixon edit)

isn’t it funny how quickly we not only adapt to technology but come to embrace it wholeheartedly?my copy of the new j.tillman album, minor works, finally arrived from out of la france and i’ve been indulging myself on my ride to and from work by listening to it. i mean i’ve been listening to the whole album. In the right order. One track after the other. That’s pretty much unprecidented. the funny thing is, listening to it as an album made me feel sort of cerebral.

a bit old school.

very muso.

see, i spend my life on shuffle, and not just my music listening but my reading habits, my working day, my friends and family, my modes of transport, my meal choices. taking a little bit here, a little bit there. and i could blame mtv for the fact that my attention span sees me doing several things at once and none of them particularly well, except i gave up watching tv in 2006. i just like to shuffle.

and really, it makes perfect sense. much as I shuffle my way through my days, apparently unable to commit to one style of dress, or music or a singular political viewpoint - enjoying the lifestyle equivalent of fusion cuisine - its just here that i end up seeing startling links between things.finding sweeping emotional continuity in the tracklisting of my intrinsic ipod dj, marvelling at how not only am i sat in a row of 6 women on the tube but we’re all wearing grey shoes like some gloriously styled advert for multicultural London. I’ll spot an unusually high number of crows on the way to the office, or hear the word haranguing used three times over in the space of an hour. Tiny seemingly inconsequential things but they’re like the threads which knit my life together. And they might seem like a big tangly mess of apparently random things that make me laugh out loud, make me cross, make me think or make me cry but its in the midst of the shuffling that I get to see and be reminded of a singular truth. that God is right there in the detail as well as the expanse. we can’t deal with the notion of randomness because that leaves us floating and subject to absolute whim, it leaves us without rhyme or reason. randomness reduces the universe to a pile of matter likely at any point to disintegrate into a mound of grey pixels at the bottom of our monitors.and another flip side to all this cultural and social cherrypicking is when you take the time to do something properly. to put on an album from start to finish. to read a book in silence. to switch off your phone and devote attention to one singular thing it feels pretty great.

here’s a j tillman track for a lazy autumn saturday playlist

or buck the trend and buy the whole album here.

(review to follow, you lucky people - its just too good not to talk about)

Cormac McCarthy’s latest book ‘The Road’ is quite possibly the best thing you will read all year.

Stripped of some of the author’s usual dense, impenetrable prose the story of a father and son’s journey through a horrifically bleak post-apocalyptic landscape is at once McCarthy’s most accessible work and his most affecting.

As ever McCarthy never shies away from portraying humanity’s propensity for plumbing ever greater depths of depravity. Indeed with the all trappings of society long past, this evil is unbound upon a ruined and desolate country. The journey of the father and son against this relentless backdrop is one of holding true to an innate sense of goodness, against enormous odds. It is a story about the cost of overcoming, the great price this road exacts and the desperate struggle to hold onto hope and light when all about is fallen.

I read it straight through in two feverish days and would recommend you to do the same. It is hard to imagine a more perfectly crafted thing.

Thanks are once more due to Stereogum (afterall, t’was they brought me that picture of massively dead, Rick James’ gravestone) who posted this cover of the Strokes’ Reptilia by Howie Beck.

That track was always a stand out on Room on Fire for me (and the video was dope see it on youtube right now) but this version strips it right back to its jerky, insistant chord progression exposing the ridonkulously infectious melodic hook and fuzzy soho late night lyrics.

Check Mister Beck on his myspace page.
And help yourself to a slice of reptilia pie here.

So Madlib last night was pretty rubbish.

Great producer-average rapper-really average drummer.

Highlight of the night was J-Rocc, who is without doubt one of the finest party hiphop djs
I ever seen. Great tunes, incredible technique and a really natural understanding of how to build the crowd and pretty much the only person on stage all night with any sort of stage presence.

It was a damn shame because it was building up to be a killer night-KOKO was packed, you could literally smell the anticipation, I think everyone was really excited by seeing what Madlib would do in a live environment-how the undeniable studio virtuosity would translate.
Bottom line-it didn’t.

after the jump

we try to be on it. but sometimes we’re late.

like today. so, i’ll apologise and try and bring you bang up to date with the Margate Exodus.

last saturday (the 30th) saw the launch of the margate exodus down in on the sleepy Kent seaside with amongst other things the prolific and (I think) pretty bloody great, artist Anthony Gormley setting fire to his Waste Man sculpture on the beach all of which is being filmed by director Penny Woolcock for Channel 4.

“The Margate Exodus is a contemporary retelling of the Book of Exodus, the story of Moses and his search for the promised land.”

The way i see it the notion of transcience, flight and promise is an integral part of the human story regardless of historical context, so it’ll be superinteresting to see what this contemporary film throws up. Not only that, but as a further part of the multi-facetted project 10 singer-songwriters were commissioned by arts organisation, Artangel (who regularly put on original and inspirational art events around the country) to write and record a song inspired by one of the ten biblical plagues.

“Following the original biblical order of the plagues, Plague Songs opens with Klashnekoff’s menacing Blood, via King Creosote’s bewitching Relate the Tale (Frogs) and Brian Eno and Robert Wyatt’s insistent Flies, Laurie Anderson’s mournful The Fifth Plague (Death of Livestock) and Imogen Heap’s mesmeric Glittering Cloud (Locusts) to Scott Walker’s evocation of Darkness and Rufus Wainwright’s tragic Katonah (Death of The Firstborn).” (says the website)

(Not wanting to let the hl nepotism slip for a minute, musical director of the project David Coulter is a former collaborator of good friends of the Horse Latitudes The Ukulele Orchestra of Great Britian.)

Anyhoo, the record, Plague Songs is out now to buy on 4AD records - having only heard two tracks I can’t really either recommend or warn you off it - but the roster is pretty awesome, and Rufus’ track is classic lilting, sweeping and soaring Wainwright. 4AD are streaming the album all month, so you can listen to it here

or get Rufus’ contribution right now and right here.

So it’s Madlib day on ‘the hl’.And I’m mighty freakin excited.
Gotta admit I was a bit of a late comer to the whole madlib/stones throw party. I was aware of it, all the stevie cover white label things, but my head was somewhere else-probably on some tangental disco voyage. But he is definitely a producer I really respect, I love the whole madlib myth and the crazy unique approach he has to music making. I wish he(or his label) would add a little quality control sometimes but, that aside, he seems able to do his thing, to be an influencer rather follower, which in this day and age especially seems a precious and rare commidity.

I’m really looking forward to seeing how it all works out/falls apart as a live performance thing-should be an interesting night.
Anyway here is another piece of madlib-ism to celebrate.

Gangstar-Just to get a Rep (Madlib remix)