A couple of weeks ago, I read an interview with Scott Litt about working on “Tempest”, in which he mentioned how Dylan’s voice now reminded him, positively, of Louis Armstrong. Dylan, Litt suggested, should have a go at “Hello Dolly” sometime (The full piece is stuck behind the paywall at http://www.newyorker.com/, unfortunately).

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Pretty busy trying to finish an issue here, but as usual, Neil Young is providing a distraction. Today there’s an opportunity to see why we’ve been making such a fuss about “Psychedelic Pill”: a video for the 16-odd minute “Ramada Inn”…

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Neil Young is not, at a guess, an artist who suffers much from writer’s block. In the past few years, many of his albums have felt like spontaneous dispatches from an over-productive mind.

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I’ve not always had much time for the cult of Brian Eno, and for a lot of the music he’s been involved with in the last 20 or 30 years (I used this piece about Blues Control & Laraaji’s wonderful record to take a few swipes).

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This week I seem to have read more people expending energy on how much they despise Mumford & Sons rather than focusing on music they actually like.

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Emmett Kelly has been making records as The Cairo Gang for a good few years now but, if he’s known at all, chances are it’s for his unusually enduring role in Will Oldham’s band: the amazing Royal Stable site suggests he’s been in on most Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy projects since 2006.

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The new Uncut, as discussed, is in the shops today with The Byrds on the cover, and a free CD of tracks inspired by that band. Woods are included on the comp, and their latest, “Bend Beyond”, is a record I’ve played a lot these past couple of months, but somehow neglected to write much about.

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Lots of links to follow from this week’s playlist, although one should be treated with fairly obvious caution. Not many survivors from previous charts, either; seems we’ve hit a decent new wave here.

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A weirdly deserted Uncut office today, so it falls on me to break off from my usual arduous routine - tooling around on Twitter, listening to Hiss Golden Messenger bootlegs, wondering what time the cricket starts – and write this week’s newsletter blog.

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Given that my last three blogs have been on Neil Young, Bob Dylan and Led Zeppelin, I guess something resembling my tenuous underground credibility might be a bit compromised this week. A good time, then, to flag up some terrific music I’ve been enjoying these past few days that doesn’t have quite the same profile as Dylan et al.

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