bloody valentine's day again

It had been so long (22 years in fact) that no-one really believed it would ever happen, myself included, but suddenly last week Kevin Shields casually let slip that the new My Bloody Valentine album, the follow-up to 1991's legendary Loveless, could be out in "two or three days". Given his somewhat flexible attitude to deadlines in the past this was viewed with a degree of scepticism by most, but lo and behold on Saturday a new website appeared where the album could be purchased and downloaded. And purchase and download is exactly what I've just done: 13 quid for a digital download which is happening RIGHT NOW and a CD which will be in the post in a week or two. The individual tracks are available on YouTube as well, but I would reiterate the point that this is music that benefits from a bit of volume and full frequency-range reproduction, so you may not get the full effect through a set of tinny old computer speakers. The only track I've listened to yet is the album opener She Found Now, which is a mellow yet distorted number very much in the vein of Loveless's Sometimes, which is in no way a bad thing.

The reviews I've read have been generally complimentary to a pantingly moist degree, which is obviously more encouraging than everyone thinking it was utterly shit, but at the same time you wonder how much rock critics who have been writing about Loveless for the last 22 years might have emotionally invested in the new album being good, or at least worthy of another 22 years of critical essays. We'll see.

So, as with Tutti Frutti and Whoops Apocalypse, now I have to find something new to fret about. So here it is: can we please have a follow-up to Neutral Milk Hotel's remarkable 1998 album In The Aeroplane Over The Sea? This couldn't be more different from Loveless, based as it is mostly around Jeff Mangum's acoustic guitar, plaintive vocals and frankly barking lyrics (apparently a lot of it was inspired by the story of Anne Frank, but it's far from obvious) with various odd instrumentation layered over the top. Actually the album this reminds me strongly of is Gene Clark's No Other, not because they sound particularly similar but because they share the same sense of having been made obsessively in a darkened room with no concern at all for what any other contemporary albums sounded like or what anyone else was doing. And they both feature as a centrepiece a largely acoustic 8-minute song (Some Misunderstanding there, Oh Comely here). In a coincidental parallel with the My Bloody Valentine story, Jeff Mangum has recently emerged from a decade or so of reclusivity to play a few gigs. An album next? Who knows.

a new slant on old sounds

So there I was bemoaning the handful of outsize CDs I own which necessitate a sub-optimal use of rack space, little realising that my next CD purchase would increase the size of the problem by a whopping 75%.

These are the long-awaited remastered versions of My Bloody Valentine's only two studio albums Isn't Anything and Loveless, as well as a double-CD collection of non-album tracks from various singles and EPs as well as a few unreleased rarities.

No great surprises with either of the regular albums beyond a bit of tidying up and sharpening of the sound, though the Loveless re-release does comprise 2 CDs, each remastered from a slightly different master tape, but to my untrained ear pretty much indistinguishable from each other. Still, handy to have a spare one if one gets lost or broken, I suppose.

The EPs and Rarities album is a bit lumpy, as these things often are, but includes a lot of good stuff, including the full 10-minute version of Glider, which, depending on your point of view, is either unlistenable headfucking noise or a glorious hypnotic wash of grinding interstellar spaceship rumble. I tend to the latter view, while my wife tends to the former, judging by the rather unfavourable review it got when I played it earlier. Bloody hell, what's that racket, that sort of thing.

Anyway, to recap: Loveless, one of the great albums of the '90s, or any other decade come to that, buy it. By all means buy the other two as well if you like; I did.

albums of the day

By my calculations we haven't done an album of the day post since my shockingly unimaginative choice of Rumours back in May 2009, so you'll no doubt be positively incandescent with anticipation to know what I've been listening to recently. Well, lots of stuff, including some cheapo purchases of old stuff off Amazon of a mildly embarrassing nature (Jethro Tull, anyone? No? Well, what about Yes, then? Please yourselves). To avoid further embarrassment I'll restrict myself to new stuff - here's a selection:

Only Revolutions by Biffy Clyro.

It's awfully easy to put albums out and affect not to care too much about whether anyone buys them or not; indeed a pose either of studied shoegazing inarticulacy or more aggressive rock'n'roll disdain is de rigueur in some quarters. So it's quite refreshing to hear an album that's an unashamed bid for world domination, and this is it. The Biff have been around for a while, and have built up a nicely fanatical cult following with their quirkily complex rock tunes. For this album they've largely ditched the time signature smart-arsery for a series of HUGE rock tunes with HUGE choruses featuring some trademark Scottish wide-mouthed bellowing (see also The Proclaimers), to some consternation from the purist fanbois. But, you know what - fuck 'em, because this is mostly great. Like many albums it's slightly front-loaded with the good stuff, the opening trio of The Captain, That Golden Rule and Bubbles set a standard that only Mountains of the rest of the album quite lives up to, but it's all good. And full marks to Simon Neil for singing in an authentically chewy Scots accent and not going all mid-Atlantic on our ass, even if it does make for an experience uncomfortably reminiscent of Big Country from time to time.

Them Crooked Vultures by Them Crooked Vultures.

There's a tenuous link with the Biffy Clyro album here, as Josh Homme provided some guitar contributions to Bubbles (no idea which bits were his), and here he is again moonlighting from his day job with Queens Of The Stone Age to hook up with Dave Grohl of Foo Fighters (and previously Nirvana, and briefly Queens Of The Stone Age around the time of Songs For The Deaf) and John Paul Jones of Led Zeppelin.

That makes for a potentially pretty classic power trio sort of set-up, and the sound is pretty much exactly as you'd expect from three rock monsters moonlighting from their day jobs - heavy, pummelling, bluesy, sludgy riff-rock shot through with some dark humour. What you don't get is much variety, but as always if you want light and shade, acoustic ballads, harpsichords and the like the Cat Stevens section is over there. Opening track No One Loves Me & Neither Do I sets the tone, Mind Eraser, No Chaser and New Fang up the tempo a bit and thereafter it's a mix of the slower, longer ones like Elephants and Spinning In Daffodils and the slighly catchier stuff like Scumbag Blues and Bandoliers. You could be forgiven for not really noticing a difference, though. Here's a clip from Jonathan Ross's show followed by a rendition of Mind Eraser, No Chaser, and here's New Fang from the Reading festival in 2009.

Man From Another Time by Seasick Steve.

Here's another case in point - all Seasick's albums sound pretty much the same, and indeed most of the songs on Seasick's albums sound pretty much the same, as songs performed by a grizzled old bearded guy with a two-string guitar will tend to do. In case two strings is a bit elaborate for you, here's Diddley Bo, wherein Seasick makes do with just the one.

The Courage Of Others by Midlake.

This is the much-anticipated follow-up to 2006's The Trials Of Van Occupanther, an album so garlanded with critical praise that it would have been easy to be too intimidated by expectation to put out a follow-up album at all. But, finally, here it is.

In a way you could be forgiven a bit of disappointment on first listen - this is a much more folky, one-paced album than its wildly eclectic predecessor, and there's nothing as rockily catchy as Roscoe or Head Home here. But eventually you come to appreciate that this is a band settling into their own sound and not feeling the need to crack out the euphonium and the Jew's harp on every track just for the sake of it. And there's nothing as spookily gorgeous as Acts Of Man or Fortune on Van Occupanther, great though it is. Incidentally the visuals for the Fortune clip are from legendary German nutter Werner Herzog's documentary film The White Diamond.

album of the day

Rumours by Fleetwood Mac.

I know, it's not very "out there". But it's interesting to come back to something dulled by over-familiarity and realise what it was that was so great about it. Here's a selection of things:

• It's Lindsey Buckingham's arrangements that hold the whole thing together - his anarchic instincts (given free rein amid a blizzard of cocaine to less focussed effect on the follow-up album Tusk) stop Christine McVie's songs in particular from being too sugary - a couple of rude guitar interjections in Bill Clinton's favourite song Don't Stop, for instance, just about save it from being a great big galumphing turkey of a song.
• Oh Daddy is very peculiar song - maybe Christine McVie has some issues that need working through, especially since she wrote one called Sugar Daddy on the previous album as well.
• Listen hard right at the start of The Chain (the BBC Grand Prix theme tune) and you can hear a wearily whispered "fuuuuuck" from Buckingham just before the song kicks in. They snipped that bit on the BBC.
• Go Your Own Way is the centrepiece of the album, though. It's instructive to try and analyse what makes great rock songs great, so here goes: the complete commitment of the singer to some fairly withering lyrics; the delicious irony of having Stevie Nicks (who the song is about) warbling away in the background on the chorus; the way the guitar playing gets gradually more savage through the song to the point (2:37 if you want to skip straight to it) where the last chorus ends and the climactic minute or so of guitar-strangling starts, finishing with the series of bashed-out guttural chords as the song fades out; John McVie's bassline in the chorus; but mainly it's Mick Fleetwood's drum pattern - the lopsided wounded-hippo off-beat pattern in the verses, then the ratatat fill leading into the four-on-the-floor driving rhythm of the chorus. Tension, tension, tension, release. That's what music is all about. And sex.
• Also, Stevie Nicks circa 1977. Gorgeous, though perhaps just slightly more bonkers than you might ideally want. But you can't have everything.

album of the day

Greendale by Neil Young & Crazy Horse.

File this one under spooky coincidences. I was singing along with the final track on this album, Be The Rain, in the car on the way to work this morning after it popped up as part of a random iPod sequence. Then, later, I popped in to Strange Maps in an idle moment at work only to find the album cover staring up at me from this post. The map on the cover is the connection, of course - an interactive version can be found at the album's website.

Followers of Neil Young are subjected to an emotional rollercoaster over the course of his uniquely diverse and mercurial album-releasing career; my take on it goes like this:

• 1970s good - his self-titled 1969 debut solo album is a bit ropey, but thereafter it's generally excellent, if wildly eclectic, up to 1979's Live Rust.
• 1980s equally wildly eclectic, but generally not in a good way, from the bizarre vocoder experimentation of Trans up to the lumpy garage/synth-rock of Life. 1988's This Note's For You was an interesting genre exercise, but 1989's Freedom is the only essential 1980s Young album.
• first half of the 1990s pretty good - from the indispensable Ragged Glory through to Sleeps with Angels in 1994.
• thereafter stylistically all over the place as ever, but with slightly more uneven results quality-wise.

Anyway, back to Greendale (no, not that Greendale). It's very stripped-down garage-rock for the most part, particularly stark given the absence of Crazy Horse's second guitarist Frank Sampedro. Since the band don't do anything as poncy as overdubs this leaves some of the songs sounding a bit thin, especially when Young heads off on a lengthy solo excursion without the usual chunky rhythm guitar in the background. Also some of the songs are a bit on the long side, particularly Carmichael, Grandpa's Interview and Son Green, each of which check in at over 10 minutes.

Generally speaking it's one of his better recent albums, though. And Be The Rain is a terrific closer, despite featuring a winsome hippy choir warbling "be the magic in the Northern Lights", "we've got to save Mother Earth" and the like, and Young bellowing incomprehensibly through a megaphone, which shouldn't really work. But it's a cracking tune and there's some increasingly manic guitar-strangling towards the end.

The Strange Maps page has a couple of interesting links, most notably this Word magazine list of album cover locations with embedded Google Map facility. You'll be wanting to know that the cover of the Amadildoes' Very Pissed-Off!! was shot in a toilet in Horsens in Denmark, for instance.

albums of the day

I've just noticed I haven't done a proper one of these since the end of 2007, so I thought I'd better rectify the situation, pronto. I wouldn't want you to think that I either haven't been doing the washing-up regularly, or haven't been listening to the occasional album while doing so, it's just that I haven't had as much time to write stuff up. Anyway, here's a brief synopsis of my recent listening:

Saturnalia by The Gutter Twins.

The Gutter Twins are Mark Lanegan of Screaming Trees (and a lengthy solo career), and Greg Dulli of the Afghan Whigs. If you're at all familiar with their respective output you won't be expecting a collection of sunny bubblegum-pop with singalong choruses, and you'd be right not to, as this is a relentlessly black and sepulchral collection, with lots of industrial clanking and grinding behind the two gravelly vocalists.

Clearly you've got to be in the mood for this sort of stuff, and the tracks Dulli dominates suffer from the same problems as the Afghan Whigs' stuff suffered from, i.e. plenty of dark rocky energy but a shortage of melody. The Lanegan-led mid-section from Idle Hands through Circle The Fringes, Who Will Lead Us? and Seven Stories Underground is the best bit, but it's all pretty good. Even The Sun liked it, slightly strangely.

Ágætis byrjun by Sigur Rós.

We're back in "post-rock" territory again here. Crazy Icelandic blokes playing electric guitars with a cello bow and singing in a made-up nonsense language probably isn't for everyone, and it's all a bit one-paced, but when it works it's terrific. Generally these are slow-building mid-tempo tunes which build towards some sort of anthemic crescendo towards the end - when this works it's fantastic, particularly on the 10-minute Viðrar vel til loftárása which is much the best thing here. A lot of the other songs strain for transcendence without ever quite getting there, though; you can almost see the neck veins standing out as the song lumbers along the runway without ever quite taking off. Jónsi Birgisson's wavering falsetto vocals are something of an acquired taste as well, but, again, as long as you're in the mood, great. Note that this probably wouldn't be the same sort of mood as for Saturnalia, just in case that wasn't clear already.

The Caution Horses by Cowboy Junkies.

Blimey, this takes me back. I seem to recall Doug and I playing this album a lot when we were sharing a student flat, which would have been around the time the album first came out in 1990. Critical opinion seems to have decided that it's not as good as its more lo-fi predecessor The Trinity Session, but I suspect it depends on which order you encounter them in. To the impartial observer this is still pretty sparsely instrumented, just Michael Timmins' softly strummed electric guitar, his sister Margo's vocals and the occasional bit of pedal steel or accordion. The best things here are the opener Sun Comes Up, It's Tuesday Morning and the radical reinvention of Neil Young's epic Powderfinger; some of the other songs can tend to be a bit florid in the lyrical department (Rock and Bird being an obvious culprit). Again, the right mood is essential, so, to recap, what you'll be needing is:

• Saturnalia: sleazy druggy bleakness and depravity
• Ágætis byrjun: wide-eyed transcendence and optimism
• The Caution Horses: lovelorn melancholy, possibly while milking a three-legged goat in a log cabin, or something like that

album of the day

Daydream Nation by Sonic Youth.

A slight break with tradition here, in that it's not an album that I've been moved to write about after listening to it while doing the washing up. Instead, I was moved to think "I really must listen to that again" after reading about it in an article in The Independent this morning.

It's in the news because the painting which featured on the cover (Kerze by Gerhard Richter - Kerze is German for candle, language fans) is up for auction at Sotheby's next week and is expected to fetch many times its catalogue price of two and a half million pounds. Which is, it must be said, quite a lot for a painting of a candle.

An alternative approach might be to scoot over to Amazon and invest in the album itself at the bargain price of £5.98. This, in contrast, seems like very little money at all for one of the great rock albums of the last 20 years (a double album as well, from back in the vinyl age - 1988 - when that term still had some meaning). If you have some sort of aversion to electric guitars, electric guitar feedback and general noise, you might want to take the opportunity to augment your Daniel O'Donnell collection instead, though. It's really up to you.

album of the day

Elastica by Elastica.

A lot of things are great at the time, but a bit shit and/or embarrassing when viewed with the benefit of sober hindsight. Various clothing and hairstyle choices, eating caviar off that male prostitute's scrotum, that sort of thing. Britpop is a bit like that - when you look back now a lot of it has deservedly been consigned to the dustbin of history - Shed Seven, anyone? No? Even hugely popular stuff like Oasis's (What's The Story) Morning Glory? and Blur's The Great Escape turn out to be a bit suspect in hindsight.

This, by contrast, is a punky little gem. Only four of the fifteen songs exceed three minutes, and four of them are less then two minutes. There's no extraneous cor anglais solos, either, just some guitars and Annie Holland's trebly Stranglers-esque bass. The Stranglers comparison is apposite in other ways, as there was a bit of furore over some, hem hem, "borrowings", specifically The Stranglers' No More Heroes in Waking Up and a couple of Wire songs in Line Up and Connection.

There's a Liz Phair-esque sexual up-frontness to the lyrics as well, from Car Song's fantasising about being bent over car bonnets to Stutter's ridiculing of a boyfriend with brewer's droop. Add to this that all the women in the group (i.e. everyone except the drummer, who was a bloke - the same sort of deal as the Corrs, in other words) were very attractive in a slightly grimy black jeans and Doc Marten's kind of way, and you've got something considerably more appealing than, say, Embrace. Not that that would be difficult.

album of the day

Desire by Bob Dylan.

A bit of an anomaly in the Dylan canon, this, for a number of reasons. Most of the songs were co-written (unusually for Dylan who was never much of a collaborator) with lyricist Jacques Levy, and prominently feature violinist Scarlet Rivera, and backing vocals from Emmylou Harris. It's very much a studio-bound version of his legendary Rolling Thunder Revue from 1975, and it doesn't really sound like any other Dylan album.

It's probably most famous for a couple of lengthy protest songs: the terrific Hurricane (about boxer, possibly wrongly convicted murderer and biopic subject Rubin Carter) and the somewhat dirge-y 11-minute Joey (about, slightly less defensibly, gangster Joey Gallo), but there's some great other stuff as well: Isis, One More Cup Of Coffee, Romance In Durango and the slightly desperate Sara, where Dylan spends five and a half minutes begging his wife not to dump him (unsuccessfully, as it turns out).

This was the second half of Dylan's mid-1970's renaissance (it followed Blood On The Tracks), and, since he hasn't done anything as conveniently Hendrix-esque as die since, one has to observe that he's spent the last 31 years not releasing anything that's as good.

Here's Dylan and band giving Mozambique a good kicking in concert in 1976.

albums of the day

A veritable mountain of washing-up to be done today, plus a stew to cook, so I had a bit of time to fill, hence three - count 'em! - albums for you today.

Innervisions by Stevie Wonder.

I think I own precisely two albums issued by the legendary Motown label. This is one of them. Its nearly-as-good predecessor Talking Book is the other. You may, if you wish, deduce from this that soul music isn't really my thing, and you'd be mostly right. But you've got to defer to genius, and I think that just for a handful of years in the early 1970s (Innervisions was released in 1973) that's what we were dealing with with Stevie Wonder. Needless to say by the time I Just Called To Say I Love You came out in 1984 that time had long since passed.

Wonder had renegotiated his Motown contract in the early 1970s to give him complete artistic control over his albums, and he exerts that here - almost all the instruments on all the tracks are played by him. He'd also become a lot more politically conscious and a couple of the highlights reflect that - Living For The City and the ridiculously funky Higher Ground (later covered by the Red Hot Chili Peppers). But it's all great - and if you're not up and dancing during the final two tracks Don't You Worry 'Bout A Thing and He's Misstra Know-It-All then you are clearly either too white for words, or paraplegic, in which case I apologise.

Temple Of Low Men by Crowded House.

Speaking of too white for words....Crowded House never really did themselves any favours by having (possibly not of their own volition) a slightly "wacky" image, reinforced by their more straightforward (and hence popular) songs like Weather With You. Dig a little deeper, though, and there's something a great deal more interesting going on, and this, their second and least commercially successful album, is the best thing they ever did.

It's less lushly produced than their big commercial breakthrough Woodface and its follow-up Together Alone, but that's a good thing as it gives Neil Finn's songs some room. And strange and wonderful things they are too; in your basic pop-rock idiom musically, but dark and mysterious lyrically. Into Temptation in particular has something very disturbing going on, and When You Come is unequivocally the sexiest song ever written or recorded, anywhere, ever.

The Velvet Underground by, erm, The Velvet Underground.

It's another mellow, getting-it-together album following a couple of more abrasive efforts, in this case The Velvet Underground and Nico and White Light/White Heat, both of which had their terrifying moments. This is a lot more friendly, and it's probably their best album.

You can spot the difference right from the start - Doug Yule's almost folky Candy Says - and the rest of the album is in similar vein, lightly-amplified and relatively undistorted electric guitars and some conventionaly-structured songs, the best of which are What Goes On with its ringing guitar coda, the much-covered (by R.E.M. among others) Pale Blue Eyes and Beginnning To See The Light, which may just be the most joyously uninhibited vocal the notoriously grumpy Lou Reed ever recorded.

There you go. And the stew was excellent, by the way.

album of the day

The Soft Bulletin by The Flaming Lips.

A bit of a parallel with my earlier Grateful Dead review here: band renowned for herculean drug intake and wildly ambitious but essentially unlistenable sonic experimentation (in this case their previous 4-disc album Zaireeka, which was designed to be listened to on four different stereo systems simultaneously. Well, of course) kick back, sober up a bit, get it together and release an album full of short punchy songs and wide-eyed charm.

Not that they've left the weirdness completely behind - the lyrical concerns are still pretty non-standard right from the opening Race For The Prize, and it's mixed somewhat weirdly - the drums are oddly splashy, echoey and trebly, as if they'd been recorded in someone's garage (and maybe they were?). But mainly the focus is on Wayne Coyne's reedy Neil Young-ish vocals and some great songs: Race For The Prize, A Spoonful Weighs A Ton, Waitin' For A Superman and the joyous closing track Buggin' being the pick of the bunch.

The follow-up albums Yoshimi Battles The Pink Robots and At War With The Mystics are the ones that really put them on the map commercially, and they're great, but this is The One.

albums of the day

Era Vulgaris by Queens Of The Stone Age.

I reckon Josh Homme is a pretty smart bloke. In music as in other things, dumb isn't much fun, but knowingly dumb is. And while hard rock is, as a rule, pretty po-faced and self-important, QOTSA clearly have a fairly well-developed sense of their own ludicrousness, something that would have prevented Axl Rose and David Coverdale, to name but two, from being such complete berks.

Having duly bigged QOTSA up I now feel obliged to tell you, to restore the delicate balance of the Force, that this, their most recent album, isn't their best.

Their previous album Lullabies To Paralyze was a stylistic mish-mash, everything from fairly poppy stuff like I Never Came and In My Head to the turbocharged rifferama of The Blood Is Love and Someone's In The Wolf (plus some amusing Blair Witch pagan/Satanic imagery in the artwork just to wind up the nation's moral guardians). This one, by contrast, has a much more heavy, muddy, industrial sound which pretty much doesn't let up for the whole album. When it's used in the service of a decent song, like the opener Turning On The Screw with its relentless two-note fire-engine riff, or the single 3's & 7's it's fine, but there isn't much light and shade, apart from Make It Wit Chu which, slightly bizarrely, sounds a bit like Brass In Pocket by The Pretenders.

In the end, as always, it's down to the quality of the songs, and despite some enjoyably gonzoid moments like Misfit Love and Battery Acid these just aren't quite up to the standard of the three previous QOTSA albums Lullabies To Paralyze, Songs For The Deaf and Rated R. Any of those would probably be a better place for the uninitiated to start. Or have a look at this acoustic yet rockin' performance of Hangin' Tree featuring an authentically terrifying undead vocal performance from the legendary Mark Lanegan.

The Avalanche by Sufjan Stevens.

You've just released one of the most critically-lauded albums of 2005 (Come On Feel The Illinoise!), and you've announced that it and its 2003 predecessor Greetings From Michigan will form the first two parts of a somewhat ambitious scheme to release an album for each of the 50 US states. So what do you do next? If you're sensible, crack on with some haste, as your current every-two-years release schedule will see you complete the set in 2101 at the age of 126.

But no. What Stevens actually did was knock together an album of out-takes, discarded songs and general odds and ends from the recording of Illinois and release it as an album in its own right (this one). Er, and then crack on and pick another state, right? Well, actually, no. What he actually did was release a 5-CD box set of Christmas-related songs. As you do.

Anyway, back to The Avalanche. This could have been horrible: Illinois was finely balanced on the edge of self-indulgent whimsy, and reading the track listing reveals that there are no less than three "alternate" versions of its centrepiece Chicago - a great song, but still, too much of a good thing and all that.

As it happens, though, this is great. There's nothing as brilliant as Decatur or Casimir Pulaski Day here, and the right version of Chicago was undoubtedly picked for the main album, but the standard is remarkably high considering there's a total of 43 songs on the two albums. It's the quieter banjo- and acoustic guitar-based stuff like Saul Bellow, The Pick-Up and Pittsfield that does it for me, but the more baroque stuff like Adlai Stevenson is fine too. A few of the atonal instrumentals can be safely skipped over, though.

Now get on and do another state.

albums of the day

Car Wheels On A Gravel Road by Lucinda Williams.

Yes, it's an American country album. Run screaming from the room if you wish at this point. But that reaction, though it's a visceral one some people seem to have (the same goes for English folk music, as I pointed out in a couple of earlier posts), would be a shame. Because this is actually rather good.

Clearly we're not in Dolly Parton/Kenny Rogers territory here; this is all a bit more gritty than the Nashville mainstream (Williams is from Louisiana). This is much more in the country-rock idiom, from the chiming guitars of the opener Right In Time (which is pretty unequivocally about sex in a way that would probably have made Dolly Parton's hair curl, or possibly her tits fall off) and the title track which follows it. Williams' weary drawl of a voice is somewhere between Chrissie Hynde and Sheryl Crow - there's an argument here for "paying your dues" (translation: slogging round the country touring for 20 years) as Williams was 45 when this album was released. I'm not sure a 25-year-old could sing these songs with the necessary conviction.

The pace dips a little in the middle of the album with the slower numbers Concrete and Barbed Wire and Lake Charles, the first of which provides an amusing mondegreen, as it sounds for all the world as if she's singing "concrete and Bob Dwyer", though I accept that's unlikely.

Then it's back to the boogie shuffle of Can't Let Go, the rocky I Lost It, the waltz-time Still I Long For Your Kiss which featured in the film The Horse Whisperer, and the bluesy Joy and Jackson to finish with.

In Rainbows by Radiohead.

It would be a shame if the unusual selling strategy adopted for this album overshadowed the music, but it was an interesting one: download the tracks from the band's website and, beyond a mandatory fee for postage and packing, pay as much or as little as you like. Some surveys suggest that most purchasers opted for the "as little as you like" option (i.e. £0, or $0 if you're in America), thank you very much. Bloody students, I expect. For what it's worth (you see what I did there?) I slipped them six quid, excluding P&P. Which means I'm going to heaven.

Anyway, the music. The skittering electronic drumbeat at the start of the opening 15 Steps gives the listener pause for thought and perhaps a slight gulp of apprehension - are we in for another "challenging" Radiohead album in the Kid A or Amnesiac vein? Then after 40 seconds or so you get a twisted little guitar riff and the song settles down a bit. Then after 2 minutes or so Colin Greenwood's bass and some kiddie-choir singing kick the song up another gear, and you can sit back, relax and unclench the buttocks. It's all going to be all right.

Bodysnatchers with its bassy, distorted guitar figure is as orthodox a "rock" song as they've done since OK Computer, though in general this isn't a particularly "rock" album, despite being largely guitar-based. The songs are more in the slow arpeggio-y style of No Surprises than the rock epic style of Airbag or Lucky. Nude is a queasily gorgeous ballad, All I Need is just a bit odd with its menacing synthesizer backing and strange fragmented lyrics about being "an animal trapped in your hot car", Reckoner is very reminiscent of Laughing Stock-era Talk Talk, and the glum piano ballad (with random percussion stabs) Videotape is a suitably arresting conclusion.

Kingsley Amis must have hated every half-decent book he wrote after 1955 being hailed as "his best since Lucky Jim", just as John Irving must hate every book he writes being reviewed somewhere with the phrase "his best since Garp". Undeterred by that I'm going to plough on and say it anyway: this is their best album since OK Computer. Sorry guys.

album of the day

Siamese Dream by Smashing Pumpkins.

Would it surprise you to learn that Sharon Osbourne's finest moment is not her Botox-ed judgmental musings on X-Factor? Nor indeed her contributions to the family soap opera? No, her greatest contribution to modern culture is her very public resignation from managing Smashing Pumpkins back in 2000, on the eve of the release of their fifth album MACHINA/The Machines Of God, citing medical reasons - "Billy Corgan was making me sick", and going on to refer to him as "a six foot baldy twat in a dress". All hilariously undignified but quite amusing given Corgan's slightly humourlessly high opinion of himself - and around this time he was regularly sporting a full-length leather skirt combo, so he hardly had grounds for complaint.

Back in 1993 things were a bit simpler. Corgan hadn't started wearing women's clothes, for one thing, and Smashing Pumpkins were releasing the follow-up to their debut album Gish. And a pretty splendid album it is too. Smashing Pumpkins were, like a lot of other early-1990s bands, bracketed together under the "grunge" banner with Nirvana and others, but this couldn't be more different from Nirvana's primitivism; it's a lavishly produced, layered and overdubbed affair, all the more surprisingly given that it was produced by the same man as Nevermind, Butch Vig.

Corgan's nasal yelp (very much an acquired taste) and buzzy, sludgy guitar sound (rumour has it he re-recorded all his bandmates' guitar and bass parts himself) dominate the first few tracks Cherub Rock, Quiet and Today. The album really gets into its stride with the longer songs that give the band a bit of space to stretch out: songs like Hummer, Soma and Silverfuck. A few lighter acoustic-based numbers like Disarm, Spaceboy and Sweet Sweet aside one could criticise the album for being a bit short on variation, light and shade, etc., but then again you could always pop on a Joni Mitchell album afterwards.

album of the day

Live At Massey Hall 1971 by Neil Young.

Part of the massive series of reissues from Young's archives, this is the second album released as a teaser for the gargantuan 8-CD box set. This catches Young at an absolutely pivotal moment in his career - After The Gold Rush had come out the year before and kicked off his solo career after his various successes with Buffalo Springfield and Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, and this tour saw him previewing songs that would appear on Harvest, the 1972 album that briefly made him a global superstar.

It's a sparse acoustic concert, basically just Young accompanying himself on either guitar or piano. Considering the vintage of the recording the sound quality is astonishing; either they wheeled in a high-tech set of kit for the original concert, or they've done a state-of-the-art digital post-production clean-up job, because it's pin-sharp throughout.

As for the songs: in typically perverse style the majority of the songs performed here would have been unfamiliar to the audience at the time, but he was banging them out faster than he could commit them to record - as he himself says in the preamble to Journey Through The Past:

I'm going to sing mostly new songs tonight....I've written so many new ones that I....can't think of anything else to do with 'em other than sing 'em.

A number of the new songs turned up on Harvest, including some gems like Old Man and The Needle And The Damage Done, though no amount of acoustic stripping-down and reinvention can disguise the fact that A Man Needs A Maid is a rotten song, and There's A World isn't much better. A couple of the others sound better in their original studio incarnation: take away the meandering electric guitar excursions from Down By The River and there isn't really much of a song left, and See The Sky About To Rain isn't quite the same without the gorgeous Wurlitzer electric piano accompaniment it came with when it finally saw the light of day on On The Beach in 1974.

Those minor quibbles aside it's straight aces all the way: On The Way Home, Tell Me Why, Journey Through The Past, Helpless, the previously unreleased Bad Fog Of Loneliness, Ohio, I Am A Child. If you want an introduction to Young's acoustic troubadour incarnation, this wouldn't be a bad place to start. The beauty of Young's career, though, is his absolute refusal to do what the public, his fans and the critics might want or expect him to do; Exhibit A in this respect is the dark, noisy, messy album Time Fades Away he released as the follow-up to Harvest, thus quite calculatedly and deliberately alienating his new-found mainstream audience, or, as he put it:

[Harvest] put me in the middle of the road. Travelling there soon became a bore, so I headed for the ditch. A rougher ride but I saw more interesting people there.

Young Mark II is the lumberjack-shirt-clad rocker grinding out long, slow, ramshackle rock epics with his legendary backing band Crazy Horse. Here's a good example: Like A Hurricane from Hammersmith Odeon in 1976.

album of the day

Liege And Lief by Fairport Convention.

I don't care what you say, there's a shockingly limited range of subjects which are made the subject of songs in the pop/rock idiom these days. Yes, love, sex, bitches, being a playa, popping a cap in some brutha's ass, all that stuff, and that's all well and good, but what about:

• getting press-ganged into the army, deserting multiple times, eventually getting shopped by your sweetheart, court-martialled and sentenced to death, only to be reprieved at the gallows by Prince Albert who just happened to be passing (The Deserter)
• getting picked up by the local Lady Muck outside the local church and spirited back to the baronial castle for a bit of hide-the-mediaeval-saveloy, and proving yourself every bit the equal and then some of Lord Muck in every department, if you know what I mean, and I think you do, only to be confronted by the man himself, armed to the teeth and not best pleased, and messily slaughtered (Matty Groves)
• wandering round amiably enough minding your own business only to be confronted by a bothersome raven handing out vague prognostications of doom (it's a talking raven, by the way) which you kill in a bit of a tantrum only to find that it was a shape-shifting version of your lady friend, who is now dead - ha! that'll teach you (Crazy Man Michael)
• or being spookily impregnated in some unspecified way by some elfin type lurking in a castle whom you then rescue from being dispatched to hell by the evil faerie queen (Tam Lin)

On a more serious note (and I touched on this a while back as well) British folk music has a bit of an image problem, but at its best it's a uniquely spooky genre, for the obvious reason that a lot of the songs still being performed were written hundreds of years ago, when one's day-to-day concerns really were more in the realm of being raped and disembowelled by rampaging Scots, Vikings, etc., or at the very least starving to death or drowning in the village pond, rather than more superficial concerns like what colour lip-gloss to wear or which particular group of Premiership footballers to get spit-roasted by. Most of the songs here are electrified versions of traditional tunes; Tam Lin in particular is based on a Celtic folk tale of some considerable vintage, and also happens to be a rollicking electric folk epic driven by the late Sandy Denny's vocals and some aggressively choppy guitar work from the great and far-from-late Richard Thompson, who, astonishingly, was only 20 at the time.

If you're only going to have one Fairport album, make it this one. The only others you might need are its immediate predecessor Unhalfbricking for songs like Genesis Hall, A Sailor's Life and the Bob Dylan cover Percy's Song, and its immediate successor Full House (after Sandy Denny's departure), solely for the 9-minute Richard Thompson/Dave Swarbrick electric guitar/electric violin duel of Sloth, which I urge you not to die without hearing, lest your life be revealed, in the final reckoning, to have been a hollow sham of a mockery of a travesty. Don't say I didn't warn you.

album of the day

The Wall by Pink Floyd.

This review will be in the form of a few seemingly unconnected random observations. Here goes:

• Pink Floyd are bracketed together with Yes and various others in the group of bands that punk had to happen to act as an antidote to (Steve Jones famously wore an I Hate Pink Floyd T-shirt). If you mark the advent of punk at 1976/1977 then it's certainly true that Yes's popularity had peaked well before this, but The Wall was released in 1979, so.....oh, I dunno. I might have had a point there, but I've forgotten what it was.
  
• Your clichéd progressive rock album has a small number of long meandering tunes on it; certainly something you could say of The Wall's predecessors Wish You Were Here and Animals, but actually The Wall is a series of quite concise songs (26 of them); Comfortably Numb at 6:21 is comfortably (you see what I did there) the longest song on the album.
  
• Roger Waters' son Harry provides the child's voice at the start of Goodbye Blue Sky.
• Another Brick In The Wall Part 2 is a perfect pop single (famously, the first UK number 1 single of the 1980s), and it's David Gilmour's loose-wristed funky guitar part that makes it. My old schoolfriend Mungo (no, that really was his name) was at the school that provided the kiddy choir.
• The film is a bit of a mixed bag; obviously the songs are great, and Bob Geldof isn't bad in a blank-faced sort of way as the central character, but the live-action sequences are just an interlude while you wait for more of Gerald Scarfe's jaw-dropping animation to come along. This is Goodbye Blue Sky, and this is Empty Spaces.
• It starts to get a little bit rock opera towards the end, round about the time of The Trial, not that I'm knocking a song which prominently features the word "defecate".
• Comfortably Numb is another one of these vital-signs litmus-test songs; if this doesn't do the hair-on-the-back-of-the-neck thing for you, then get yourself checked out. The Scissor Sisters' camp disco version should, if there's any justice in the world, result in the perpetrators having their large intestines pulled slowly out through their ears with a crochet hook throughout eternity.
• More than any other Floyd album this one features intelligent combined use of Waters and Gilmour's vocals - for instance Gilmour doing the lullaby bits in The Thin Ice and Mother and Waters doing the oh no, everything's fucked bits in the same songs, and of course Waters doing the verses and Gilmour the chorus in Comfortably Numb.
• Roger Waters dominated Pink Floyd's output increasingly throughout the 1970s, and this album is largely his brainchild. The single dominant event driving the creative juices here is Waters' father Eric's death in 1944 - Another Brick In The Wall Part 1, Vera and Bring The Boys Back Home reference it directly, as does most of Pink Floyd's next and last album The Final Cut in 1983 and the unreleased track When The Tigers Broke Free which was included on the compilation Echoes in 2001. Those are your actual "issues", right there.

album of the day

Déjà Vu by Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young.

In theory it sounds great to have a whole bunch of independent singer-songwriters in your band; everyone's only got to write a couple of songs each, so you can just cherry-pick the best ones from each party.

Of course in practice this can make for rather lumpy and inconsistent albums; the later Beatles albums, for instance, like The White Album or Abbey Road, suffer from this problem.

And, to be fair, so does this one. The first Crosby, Stills & Nash album was a bit more consistent in tone, but the addition of Neil Young to the mix had a couple of effects: a slightly harder and more electric sound and a general increase in the levels of anarchy and chaos - this is par for the course for anyone working with Young, as Jimmy McDonough's fascinating biography Shakey makes clear.

So the album is divided into four distinct sections (all mixed up with each other): Stills' folk/rock numbers Carry On and 4+20 and his cover of Joni Mitchell's Woodstock, Crosby's amusing cocaine paranoia on Almost Cut My Hair and Déjà Vu, Nash's romantic pop sentiments on Teach Your Children (lovely) and Our House (nauseating), and Young's gorgeous Helpless and slightly overwrought Country Girl. Stills and Young's collaboration Everybody I Love You finishes things off.

The key to all this, of course, is the three and four-part harmonies, and I suppose it's a bit like loud electric guitars, in that it either sends shivers down the spine, or it doesn't. If it doesn't, take a look at yourself, have a word, and possibly have your vital signs, pulse, etc. checked.

album of the day

Beyond by Dinosaur Jr.

Well, this is a pleasant surprise. The original line-up of Dinosaur Jr. last played together on an album in 1988's Bug - the group continued after that as a J Mascis solo project in all but name until 1997's Hand It Over, while original bassist Lou Barlow went off and formed Sebadoh, who were reasonably successful in a low-key sort of way, but who I never really got the hang of.

But now they've re-formed and released a new album, this one in fact. And it sounds pretty much exactly as you'd expect it to sound. Their 2001 compilation Ear-Bleeding Country sums it up pretty succinctly; these are fairly simple country-rock-tinged tunes played by a thunderous rock power trio fronted by a mad guitar genius, Mascis, who these days seems to have turned into a cross between Jerry Garcia and Gandalf.

It's a more ramshackle, less produced affair than their best album, 1993's Where You Been - you can hear that on the first track, the rockin' Almost Ready, where someone seems to have turned the recording apparatus on a couple of seconds after the song started. The other contrast with that album is that Barlow gets to sing a couple of songs here, Back To Your Heart and Lightning Bulb - weirdly he sounds a lot like Bob Mould. There's the obligatory weird plangent acoustic number (I Got Lost) in among the noise, otherwise it's the usual showcase for Mascis' absurdly brilliant guitar playing. The YouTube collection of video clips is all a bit lo-fi; this one of them playing This Is All I Came To Do in Northampton, Massachussets last November is probably about the best.

album of the day

Crosstalk: The Best Of Moby Grape.

The 1960s is almost certainly the most minutely examined and documented decade in popular music history, and it's no great mystery: the birth of "rock" music, The Beatles, The Stones, The Doors, Dylan, Hendrix, The Who, etc. etc. Even so, there are some nuggets to be found among the groups who don't normally make it onto these sort of lists. Try Love's Forever Changes, for example, or Spirit's Twelve Dreams Of Dr. Sardonicus.

Or try this. Moby Grape weren't even the most famous band in San Francisco; Jefferson Airplane and The Grateful Dead grabbing most of the headlines. And you can hear the connection, though they're less strident than Jefferson Airplane, and more concise and less druggy than The Grateful Dead. So what you're left with are some cracking two- and three-minute psychedelic pop-rock nuggets, with some great harmonies and guitar playing; just the sort of thing you can imagine naked hippie chicks with flowers in their hair grooving to, as I like to do (the imagining, that is, not the naked grooving).

The tracks are arranged in chronological order, which means that, for a group who sprang into life fully-formed and gradually disintegrated over the next couple of years (1967-1969), the best stuff tends to be at the start, songs like Hey Grandma, 8:05 and Omaha. Which isn't to say the later stuff like Ooh Mama Ooh and Going Nowhere isn't pretty good too. And they even manage to sound a little bit Sly And The Family Stone on the funky Murder In My Heart For The Judge.

One of the reasons they never quite cracked it was the instability of founding member Skip Spence. An excellent advertisement for the hazards of mixing schizophrenia, alcohol and gargantuan quantities of LSD, Spence drifted around for the next 30 years or so before dying a couple of days before his 53rd birthday in 1999. And, thanks to the wonders of the internet, I can tell you that if you ever want to visit his grave, you need to pop over to Soquel Cemetery, a few miles down the coast from San Francisco. And be sure to wear some flowers in your hair. And then take them out of your hair, and pop them on the grave. It's what he would have wanted.