The New Cue #356 February 9: The Jesus And Mary Chain, Jon McKiel, Borough Council, Brittany Howard, Burial, Frank Turner, Declan McKenna, Bullion, Julien Chang

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Good morning TNC crew,

Are you ready for Recommender? You better be because you’re already in it, it’s already in you, you are one. Frank Turner is in here too. And George FitzGerald. And Ted. And Niall. And Chris. Cosy!

Want to read the whole edition rather than the intro bit that we write last and only do so we can tell you to please consider being a paid subscriber so we can keep this whole fandango rolling? Then click Subscribe Now, it only costs £5 a month. Thanks to all those of you already on board, you’re the best.

Here is this week’s playlist, then we shall get to it:

See you on Monday for a chat with Everything Everything, enjoy the edition…

Ted, Niall and Chris

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An Album To Blow Your Mind #1

As selected by Frank Turner, subtle and piercing indie rock from cult NYC heroes.

Folk punk troubadour Frank Turner has been fighting the good musical fight ever since his days fronting post hardcore act Million Dead in the early 2000s. Frank’s back with a his tenth solo album, Undefeated, in May. You can listen to the latest single Do One below…

You shouldn’t ‘do one’ though, you should hang around because Frank has taken the time to recommend one of his favourite albums for you. Isn’t that nice?

The Van Pelt
Sultans Of Sentiment (1997)

“I stumbled across this record in the far fringes of punk-related esoterica in the late 1990s. The Van Pelt aren’t a punk band, let alone a hardcore band; it's a stretch to call them emo, even in the original, pre-My Chemical Romance version of that term. But then, I suspect it’s not easy to call them anything much other than themselves, and this is the first stage to loving them. Chris Leo (brother of Ted) and his band reached a peak of sublimity on this 1997 masterpiece of taste, subtlety, wry humour and piercing insight. The music is restrained, thought through, perfectly precise - I can’t easily think of another two-guitar record where the interplay of parts is so exquisite. The vocals are startlingly unique, the first thing that hits most people - whimsical, declamatory, somewhere between a softer Mark E Smith and [Catcher In The Rye narrator] Holden Caulfield. And the lyrics, oh boy the lyrics. Personally, Leo’s work on this album opened up entire new vistas of possibility in terms of language, vocabulary and subject matter. In the late ’90s melange of late Britpop sneering (‘D’You Know What I Mean?’) and tired irony, I thought a much more interesting question was ‘Do The Lovers Still Meet At The Chiang Kai-Shek Memorial?’ The Van Pelt had the guts to ask better questions, and the results are here: an album that has haunted me as a listener and a writer for more than two decades now, one of those rare records that essentially has no points of comparison, no peers. It’s one of those albums that makes people tap the side of their nose and say, ‘If you know, you know’; well, now you know too.”