Lambchop – FLOTUS
Lambchop – FLOTUS
Out now on City Slang
Review by David Hemingway
It is not, it must be said, business as usual, for Nashville’s self-described “most fucked up country band”.
FLOTUS is reportedly an acronym for “For Love Often Turns Us Still” but given frontman/constant Kurt Wagner’s political inclinations, is presumably also intended to allude to the “First Lady of the United States”. The album was teased earlier this year by “The Hustle”, a lengthy and majestic adventure/statement of intent seemingly inspired by Krautrock and minimal electronic music. Based on a track by collaborator Ryan Norris aka Coupler (who has claimed he was channelling the influence of Italo-Disco, Fela Kuti and Harold Budd), “The Hustle” eschews vocals for the first five of its eighteen minutes until Wagner proclaims “I don’t want to leave you ever/And that’s a long, long time.” Electronic pulses are decorated with warm reeds and horns, as the song builds to Wagner’s exhortations to dance. (more…)
Country Matters
4 November 2016 // Art //Books
Country Matters by Clare Leighton
(Little Toller, paperback, 200 pages. Out now and available here in the Caught by the River shop.)
Review by Frances Castle
Country Matters is the third book by Clare Leighton that Little Toller have reprinted in recent years.
Leighton was born in London in 1898. She attended Brighton, Slade and Central schools of art, where she studied wood engraving under Noel Rooke. After her studies she travelled throughout Europe, taking delight in sketching local people and farm workers, and awakening a lifelong passion for depicting scenes from rural life. In the following years she became an established illustrator, illustrating books by Thomas Hardy, Gilbert White and Henry David Thoreau, and designing pottery for Wedgewood. By 1937 when this book was first published, she was already considered one of the finest wood engravers of the period, and a central player in the in the Arts and Crafts revival of British wood engraving. (more…)
Competition Results
3 November 2016 // Competition
Here are the results of our last couple of newsletter competitions:
First up, we had three copies of Paul Farrell’s Great Britain in Colour, newly released by Pan Macmillan, to give away.
We asked: Citing the aquatic plant as being ‘an important part of Great Britain’s culinary and agricultural heritage’, one page of the book focuses on the annual Watercress Festival. During the celebration, a parade marks the coming of spring, and women and children wear garlands of leaves in their hair. In which English county does the festival take place?
And the answer is: Hampshire. The winners are (more…)
The Caught by the River Book of the Month: November
3 November 2016 // Books //Trees
An extract from Arboreal: A Collection of New Woodland Writing, our Book of the Month for November. Published by Little Toller. Out now and available to buy here in the Caught by the River shop.
Forest Fear
Wood of Cree, Dumfries and Galloway
by Sara Maitland
The Cree is a small river that drains off the western side of the Galloway Hills; it is joined by the Water of Minnoch and most of its relatively short course runs through Dumfries and Galloway. Below Newton Stewart the land flattens out into merse (or more locally ‘inks’) – tidal grass flats, famously home to overwintering geese – and the river officially ends at Creetown where it flows into Wigtown Bay and thence into the Solway. The valley of the Cree above Newton Stewart is to me one of the prettiest places in Britain (not beautiful or sublime or spectacular, but very, very pretty). Green and sweet and sheltered, climbing steadily into wilder country with the profile of the big hills above. On the east bank of the river, half a dozen or so miles above Newton Stewart and hanging on to the steep valley sides is Wood of Cree, the largest extent of ancient woodland in southern Scotland. A series of burns flow down from the high moor, cutting through the wood – fast, always noisy, rocks and water, white with foam and golden brown with peat; there are several impressive waterfalls. (more…)
Thankful Villages #17
2 November 2016 // Thankful Villages
The seventeenth instalment of Darren Hayman’s Thankful Villages project
Butterton, Staffordshire
There are two Buttertons in Staffordshire. I had to be careful to find the right one.
I arrived as light was falling. There were some small patches of melted snow still on the ground. I was tired and heartbroken. I shuffled around in my dirty green coat and filmed the amber glow of the streetlights.
I found a plastic lamb in the graveyard and a small group of goats behind some barbed wire. I thought at one point I heard a howl or a cry of the animal.
A dog walker asked what I was doing and as always I reply with the truth. “I thought you might be a journalist”, she said. “About the abattoir.” (more…)
