Miscellaneous - July 2009

  by Admin

published: 10 / 7 / 2009

intro

Hello and welcome to the July edition of the Pennyblackmusic magazine.In the time since our last up-date, the world has learnt of and mourned the sad death of Michael Jackson. The 25th June 2009 will go down as a black day in musical history. Earlier that day

Hello and welcome to the July edition of the Pennyblackmusic magazine. In the time since our last up-date, the world has learnt of and mourned the sad death of Michael Jackson. The 25th June 2009 will go down as a black day in musical history. Earlier that day, and of equal significance to some of us at Pennyblackmusic, news came through too of the death in a hospital in Austin, Texas of Sky Saxon, the former front man with the influential 60's garage group the Seeds. Like Jackson who was about to return to the public arena for allegedly the last time with his fifty farewell concerts in London, the timing of Sky Saxon’s death, who Pennyblackmusic spoke to in April in what sadly turned out to be his final interview, was especially cruel. He had just released his first album under the Seeds moniker in many years and also had several new musical projects planned. In this month’s magazine we are paying tribute to both in our Profiles Section. Several of our writers look back on different chapters and events in the turbulent life and career of Michael Jackson, while lifelong Seeds fan Anthony Strutt, who conducted the interview with Sky, pays personal testimony to him. Elsewhere in our Profiles section, there is a feature on early 80's San Francisco punks Flipper, who have just had their four albums reissued, and articles too on Loops Magazine, the new bi-annual joint venture of Domino Records and publishers Faber. In our Interviews Section there are twelve new interviews this month. In what is his first lead interview for the site, Peter Allison speaks to Huey Morgan from the genre-defying, ever popular the Fun Lovin’ Criminals about his band’s unique musical identity, its beginnings on the club scene in New York and ‘Classic Fantastic’, their upcoming sixth album. The majority of the remainder of the new interviews are divided amongst already well-established acts and what we see at the moment as some of the best new bands on the current music scene. Of the already well-established acts, we have interviews with Canadian new wave band Metric, who have recently returned after an absence of four years with their third album proper, ‘Fantasies’ ; legendary blues guitarist Johnny Winter ; Scottish singer-songwriter and former Arab Strap guitarist Malcolm Middleton, who has said his fifth and latest solo album, ‘Waxing Gibbous’, will be the last under his own name for the time being, and 60s-influenced Australian group the Lovetones, who have just put out ‘Dimensions’, their fourth album. Our interviews with new bands include troubled San Diego punk act and recent Bella Union signing Wavves ; Cinnamon Chasers, the project of DJ, producer and multi-instrumentalist Russ Davies ; Scandinavian psychedelic/surf instrumental trio The Good The Bad ; London art-rock trio Sweet Billy Pilgrim, who have recently released their second album, ‘Twice Born Men’, on David Sylvain’s Samadhisound label, and classic-sounding rock band, Remedy, who have recently finished their first headlining tour. There is also an interview with author, publisher and journalist, Mark Hodkinson, who has just published his debut novel, the heartfelt ‘The Last Mad Surge of Youth’, which partially set in the 80s post-punk scene, tells of two friends, long absent from each other, trying to come to terms with one another and the band they used to be in, the multi-million selling Killing Stars. In our Live Section there are new reviews of gigs by Blur, the Pretenders, M Ward, Yo La Tengo, the Jim Jones Revue, the Wilkommen Collective, The Good The Bad, Eagles of Death Metal, the Pains of Being Pure at Heart, Remedy, the Parish Music Box and Ten City Nation. In our expanding Features Section we have a new column, ‘Rock Salt Row’, this month. Our Chicago-based writer Lisa Torem will be debating each month with a different Pennyblackmusic writer about a moment in rock history and its impact now. She begins by talking with me about John Lennon's 1966 controversial quote that the Beatles "were more popular than Jesus." Amongst our regular columns there, there are two further instalments in our ‘Soundtrack of Our Lives’series, in which our writers describe the personal impact of music in their lives, from new Sheffield-based writer Fiona Hutchings and also Jamie Rowland. In his ‘This Metal Sky column, in which he examines in detail a new piece of music every month, Jeff Thiessen looks at Dinosaur Jr’s recent comeback album, ‘Farm’, while Ben Howarth in his ‘Condemned to Rock ‘n’ Roll’ piece for this month ask if Michael Jackson was musically any good. There is also a ‘Photoscape’ from Katie Anderson of a recent Shinedown show. In our ‘Re:View’ section, in which we re-assess records from the past, we re-examine Grinderman’s 2007 self-titled first album and Edinburgh-band Isa and the Filthy Tongues’ 2006 debut LP, ‘Addiction’, which has just been re-released in a special edition. Our Website of the Month is Jim Summaria Photo, the website of Chicago-based photographer, Jim Summaria. There are also 32 new album and single reviews. As always this magazine has come together through the hard work of many talented people. Thank you to Peter Allison, Carl Bookstein, Malcolm Carter, Andrew Carver, Dan Cressey, Anthony Dhanendran, Tommy Gunnarsson, Ben Howarth, Adrian Huggins, Fiona Hutchings, Sarah Johnson, Chris Jones, Sarah Maybank, Sarah Mwangi, Anthony Middleton, Chris O' Toole, Jamie Rowland, Mark Rowland, Maarten Schiethart, Dominic Simpson, Olga Sladeckova, Kelly Smith, Anthony Strutt, Jeff Thiessen, Helen Tipping and Lisa Torem, all of whom contributed articles to this edition or the mid-month edition. Special thanks to Katie Anderson for his photographic work and our webmaster Richard Banks at Pennyblackmusic HQ. Please check out the new pod cast of our long-term writers, Mark Rowland, Ben Howarth and Sarah Johnson, which they are using it as a forum to debate about new music. For copyright reasons, they are only allowed to play thirty seconds from any one song, but that has proved enough for Mark, Ben and Sarah to get involved in some very lively and funny conversation about some of the acts that we have been writing about elsewhere on the site. They put on-line their third and longest pod to date with special guest Jamie Rowland in time for our last big up-date and will be putting on-line their fourth pod over the next couple of weeks . We will be back in mid July with another mid-month reviews up-date and then in early August with another more extensive edition of the magazine with interviews, features, live reviews and more album and single reviews. We hope to be running then interviews with That Petrol Emotion, the Lucksmiths, Bill Callahan, Hood/Declining Winter, Richmond Fontaine, Anthony Phillips, Crocodiles, the Leisure Society, Jo Hamilton and Kelman and to have the usual range of profiles, features and live, album and single reviews Thanks as always for reading. John Clarkson Magazine Editor www.pennyblackmusic.co.uk