music for when the tide goes out
Just read this feature on the filming of HL favourite, Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, which includes a performance from Michael Kenneth Williams (The Wire’s Omar) and I’ll admit, I’m a wee bit torn.
While it looks like a masterpiece with a cast to be drooled over, I’m already girding my loins to go and spend two hours enduring a heart-wrenching epic set against a post-apolocalyptic distopia.
Maybe it’s not a date movie.
More on this in a bit, but right now that’s more than enough info to set me up for the long weekend…
(for jk)yes, it’s a real robot playing a real synth.
though you might want to ignore the fact he’s doing something which sounds not entirely unlike ’sailing’ by rod stewart and paste in your own soundtrack. It’s certainly way better than the robot in that ‘infamous’ Herbie Hancock video.
My visits to the latitudes, leaving parcels of goodness at your door are getting fewer and farther between. If I keep going at this rate, l’ll soon be as illusive and as Father Christmas (though with a less predictable timetable) and with the way my belly’s swelling that red suit’s going to fit too.
As mentioned in our excuses for a quiet week last week we’ve got other things on our minds, one of which is spending less time with other people’s new music and more with our own.
This track which I came across whilst scuffing my toes on the internet the other day is kind of a prime example of the ensuing dilemma, its really, really great and this time last year I’d be going loop-de-loop crazy over it and resetting my ringtone - but much like the Wire has ruined regular tv for me by being too too awesome - so has living with one half of London’s greatest assault on boogie.
Tippy Toes seem to be the latest incarnation of New York supergroup with various members of DFA affiliates, Hercvles and Love Affair, LCD Soundsystem and Santogold spreading their funk around with sometime vocals from comedian Reggie Watts. There’s little else to be known about them, except this; that should Ulysses 82 get their ventilated, Kevlar driving gloves on this little beauty - I can only imagine how much more fantastic it would sound.
Like I said, its already great, and sure it’s already furnished with a lilting, heavy-heavy bassline, tremolo guitar, sweeping string, afro drum sound, psyche scrawl and something which sounds like the best noise i’ve heard out of an atari in years but let John-Baptiste and Je Suis C loose on this baby and who knows what damage it could wreak.
(Ulysses 82 get are set to get your groove jumping at Favela Chic (London) tonight, come down and support the revolutions)
image courtesy of project8256 for sale here on etsy
Sometime round about 1984 my dad bought my brother and i a walkman & two sets of headphones to share on a long car journey round europe. He got two cassettes for free too. Some early pre-Now That’s What I Call… compilation and a tape called Motown Chartbusters, I don’t think I’d really heard soul music before.
Hell, I grew up in Warwickshire, my parents listened to Radio 4, Yehudi Menuhin and James Taylor. So it was then I heard Al Green and somehow identified that kind of noise with being grown up.
A slow, longing groove which was utterly alien to me aged 7 but somehow intangibly desirable and sophisticated.
As I grew up, and bought more records, that rack reserved for proper old-school soul singers still managed to illicit the same little girl lost feelings in me.
Like, if I were a proper adult, I’d have a beat-up leather sofa, a taste for good whiskey and this is how I’d feel on a saturday night.
And in the 25-odd years since I first heard the Reverend I might have developed a taste for a nice drop of scotch and even have my own turntable to lower a stylus onto but I still don’t feel I’ve ever achieved that real, lonely, headstrong and heartsick independence which resounds in Al Greens breathy sighs.
Even now, in this, his newest recording, featuring the prodigious drumming and silkily respectful production of ?uestlove, the man still knows more than I ever will.
Lay It Down is out on Blue Note in May (thanks to Sit Down Stand Up for the mp3 too)
removed at the request of BlueNote
See him at the Habana Calle (patio 6) at 1:15 am as part of the SXSW Undertow showcase.
That’s 709 E 6th St. As long as you’re in Austin.
If you’re not just get drunk and pretend.
featuring a rather familiar blonde model in the lookbook.
This morning I made fluffy banana pancakes from leftovers in the fridge, we sat and drank coffee, drenching our plates, the pancakes and crispy bacon in syrup and meandered through the morning papers with sticky fingers while I played back Vacilando Territory Blues for the tenth, maybe fifteenth time that week.
It was a beautiful morning, despite the grey Thames sky and puddles, our bellies rounded with a slow, sweet & salty, caffeine-laden breakfast (me with a newly kicking child doing little to aide digestion) we let J.Tillman do the talking.
fascinating interview in the architects’ journal with two members of the UX - the cultural guerrilla group and guardians of an underground, forgotten paris who’s maverick restorations, cartography and events were first uncovered with the accidental discovery of a 400msq cinema and cafe in a subterrainian quarry 18m below the eiffel tower in 2004.
its been a while, and though it was tempting to herald my return with a cover of one of my old posts, but that would have been superlame so i’m only going half way and i’m re-upping something i’d posted before (but which languishes on a far away server now) for this valentine’s thursday.
a tribute to a tribute if you will.
i had this track on over the weekend while i did the domestic thing - preparing for sunday roast with the folks and my heart damn near melted into the gravy.
tender, yearning, soulful and really quite soppy. take it, prince.
