David Bowie - Station To Station: Review

Great strips of mystique have been peeled away from the recording process in our quest to thoroughly pull apart music history, ultimately de-mythologizing years of carefully created hyperbole and mythmaking. But there are still some obstinate beasts out there, a few hallowed recordings that are never going to be fully gutted and dissected, whose secrets are likely to go to the grave with their makers. Uncut magazine took a shot at going in-depth on David Bowie’s Station To Station a few months back, with distinctly mixed results. Producer Harry Maslin refused to be involved, guitarists Carlos Alomar and Earl Slick both claimed credit for the riff for ‘Golden Years’, and no one can quite recall how E Street Band keyboard player Roy Bittan got involved. And Bowie? His famous quote about the recording sessions is: 'I know it was in LA because I've read it was'.

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Grinderman - Grinderman 2: Review

It’s appropriate that the four members of Grinderman saw fit to don gladiatorial garb for the promo video for ‘Heathen Child’, the first song to be lifted from Grinderman 2. Their eponymous debut was a battle record, a chance to eviscerate people’s expectations, an opportunity to wipe the slate unclean, all executed with such visceral glee that it induced a disorienting feeling, akin to being told a tasteless joke whilst being punched in the gut. In many ways that album’s fecal tales of malice and animosity, punctured by gloriously atomised guitar and organ noise, felt like the definitive word on Grinderman. The only course to take once you’ve hit a particularly brutal passage of middle age — when you look in the mirror and see hair sprouting from your ears and receding from your head, where hangovers last for days and that belly flapping over your waistline just caused a trouser button to ping onto the floor — is to pick yourself up by the lapels, dust yourself down, and get your life back on track. Right?

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ATP New York 2010: the DiS review

The New York incarnation of ATP may only come around once a year, but few folks who have braved the charmingly decrepit surroundings of Kutshers Country Club can resist its lure. Most of the lineup this time around is made up of 40-something musicians who are lifers at this game, working every shitty day job imaginable to support themselves, playing notorious flea pits all over the globe, and finding a home of sorts in the shape of multiple ATP festivals. Filmmaker Jim Jarmusch is on board as a curator, porn star Ron Jeremy is stalking the corridors, Bill Murray is rumoured to be in attendance (false, sadly), and Thurston Moore is talking about hummus at a Q&A. Just another vintage weekend in the Catskills for what is hopefully now an annual trans-Atlantic jaunt for the ATP organisation.

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