This Week's Top Releases

John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band The Ultimate Collection

For John Lennon’s 30th birthday, Yoko Ono presented him with a sensory box. Fingers could be inserted into holes containing different materials: liquid, say, or a spike. It was a hit, though you’d be forgiven for thinking the birthday boy might’ve preferred something less surprising. ORDER NOW: The July 2021 issue of Uncut After all, it’d been a turbulent old year. The Beatles were over. Lennon and Ono had embarked on primal scream therapy, during which Lennon had examined his feelings of abandonment and his grief over his mother’s death. To top it all, he had been unexpectedly reunited with...

Sun Ra Lanquidity (Definitive Edition)

The night before recording their 1978 album Lanquidity, Sun Ra and his Arkestra filmed a brief live spot for Saturday Night Live. Given a window of only four minutes, Sun Ra crammed three classics into the performance: Space Is The Place, The Sound Mirror, which featured a typically cosmic monologue from Ra himself, and Watusa. With their membership in double figures, the Arkestra couldn’t help but look cramped on the small SNL stage, but the kaleidoscopic whirl they brought to America’s TV sets – spinning dervish dancers, multicoloured robes and shawls, glittering headdresses – still feels uncontainable, even watching...

A Hit Album By Nraakors, “Hoppel Poppel”

Nraakors dazzles fans once again, but this time with a collection of a 19-track album labeled “Hoppel Poppel.” The Iowa City rock band boasts tracks that will have you swooning over their energy and unmatched artistic talents. The band is constantly known to match various genres to bring forth an all-new tune, and this album is the true testament to their talents. The lead vocalist, Gigi Macabre, graces the tracks with her theatrical energy leaving behind an unforgettable feeling. The album’s exquisite soundscapes paired with contagious lyrics will have you setting the playlist on repeat. The four member band...

Bobby Gillespie: “Where does this rage come from, this suspicious nature, this anger, this cynicism?”

Bobby Gillespie has been taking stock recently. Primal Scream’s inveterate rabble-rouser has written a memoir about his early life and recorded an album of heartworn duets inspired by the country greats. He’s even – finally – come to terms with his early records. But where is all this soul-searching heading? “People want us to take their heads off,” he tells Uncut in our latest issue, out now. “But I don’t know if that’s the kind of music I want to keep on making.” ORDER NOW: Read the full interview with Bobby Gillespie in the July 2021 issue of Uncut...

Klaus Voormann on George Harrison: “The Quiet One? He wasn’t quiet at all…”

The new issue of Uncut includes a candid interview with Klaus Voormann about his encounter with a 17-year-old George Harrison, during The Beatles’ formative residencies in Hamburg. The German artist and Plastic Ono Band member tells Graeme Thomson tales involving fish finger diets, late-night phone calls from “Herr Schnitzel”, and the making of George’s very own masterpiece… ORDER NOW: Read the full interview with Klaus Voormann in the July 2021 issue of Uncut The thing to remember about George Harrison is that he was a Gemini. The twin sign. Yin and yang. On Revolver you have “Love You To”...

Introducing The Complete Bob Dylan

BUY THE COMPLETE BOB DYLAN HERE The Complete Bob Dylan. Sounds like we’re setting ourselves up to fail here, doesn’t it? There have, after all, been 39 Bob Dylan studio albums, nearly 100 singles, 15 volumes of the Bootleg series, and 11 live albums. There have been movies, acting roles, countless collaborators and sidemen (and women). Many, many books. Uncut itself has presented detailed Dylan covers (and, recently, exclusive Dylan-related covermount CDs). The man, as we’ve lately had confirmed for us on his most recent album, contains multitudes. Advertisement But amid all the stories and scholarship, it seemed to...

My Bloody Valentine Isn’t Anything / Loveless / m b v / EPs ’88 ’91

“Magic isn’t about pulling rabbits out of hats,” says Ewen Bremner as Alan McGee, fancying himself the dark lysergic mage of EC1, midway through the recent, regrettable Creation Stories biopic. “But it is about making something materialise.” As if on cue, like the shopkeeper in Mr Benn, Aleister Crowley appears in the loo of a south London squat to inform him that “ideas are everywhere – you only have to reach out and grab one”. ORDER NOW: The July 2021 issue of Uncut READ MORE: My Bloody Valentine: “We were like the Partridge Family on acid” Sure enough, downstairs...

Mdou Moctar Afrique Victime

What’s known as “desert blues” by western music consumers clearly has a history aeons older than Tinariwen – but it’s fair to say that the sound was popularised by their second album, 2004’s Amassakoul, a hybrid of assouf and electric rock. If the Malian band have become the style’s leading ambassadors, they’re by no means its sole representatives: Songhoy Blues, Imarhan, Tamikrest and Kel Assouf each have their own identity and are some of the names now well established outside Africa. Mdou Moctar, maybe less so. ORDER NOW: The July 2021 issue of Uncut The songwriter and guitarist, born...

Sons Of Kemet Black To The Future

The tuk-band is not one of the Caribbean’s more famous musical exports, but it is a relatively common sight at carnivals around Barbados, the island where Sons Of Kemet leader Shabaka Hutchings spent much of his childhood. It is a marching band featuring snare drums, bass drums and triangles, fronted by one or two flutes playing military-style riffs and melodies. During festivals, tuk-bands are accompanied by dancing costumed figures – the Shaggy Bear, the Donkey Man, a man in drag called Mother Sally, and another man on stilts. What seems like a joyous, celebratory music actually has darker roots...

Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young Déjà Vu: 50th Anniversary Deluxe Edition

Sometimes, the only way to follow-up a best-selling critically acclaimed album is to do it all over again, only bigger. That’s the approach Crosby, Stills & Nash took in 1970 with their follow-up to May 1969’s Crosby, Stills & Nash. They enlisted Neil Young to expand the trio into a quartet and spent six months hammering out arrangements in the studio, but in most other ways they simply repeated their magic trick of combining “big personalities, pristine voices and achingly personal lyrics”, as Cameron Crowe summarises it in his liner notes. The same but bigger also describes this set,...