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The writer of No Country For Old Men and The Road is back, but not quite as you might expect...

Some stats: it has been 27 years since the last Dexys album, and nine since they released two new songs ("Manhood" and "My Life in England") on a compilation album that coincided with their reunion tour.

One of those mornings walking to work when, in spite of 18,000 or whatever songs on my iPod, I couldn’t figure out what to play. It’s at that point I realised Joni Mitchell’s “Hejira” had become my last resort record; not my favourite, exactly (although I could make a stern case for it, for sure), but the one I can always rely on, whatever my mood or the circumstances.

First things first: you can grab this one for free right now, by heading over to http://natchmusic.tumblr.com. As you’ll see there from the Tumblr’s subtitle, this marvellous Steve Gunn/Black Twig Pickers session is the first in a series of “collaborative recordings from Black Dirt Studio”; Black Dirt being a facility in upstate New York that’s birthed a bunch of superb records in the past few years.

Sad news this morning, with the announcement of Dory Previn’s death at the age of 86. The first thing I came across this morning at home was a useful comp from a few years back, “The Art Of Dory Previn”, which works well as a primer to this eccentric, wise and mostly undervalued singer-songwriter.

After spending last weekend catching up with what seems like a veritable deluge of great new music, I had a yen for some old favourites this weekend, among them two albums by the cult singer-songwriter, Paul Siebel, Woodsmoke & Oranges and Jack-Knife Gypsy.

A quick video to carry us through the weekend. I've been playing the new Starving Weirdos album, "Land Lines", for a few weeks now.

I was playing a new record the other day that was, to all intensive purposes, mediocre American indie-rock; maybe with a touch of mediocre American post-rock. Uneventful enough, you might imagine, except for the fact that a constant barrage of overcomplicated arrangements – shooting for some kind of avant-garde audacity, I guess - made it actively annoying rather than merely nondescript.

Trying hard to disregard the fact that one record here has possibly irritated me more than anything I’ve played for a while, another nice list this week. Second Jack White track out is another keeper, and the Ililta! 12, especially, is really growing on me.

A little over a month into 2012 and great new albums seem to be a-popping up all over the shop, something arriving in the post every day almost that either thrills or beguiles, demanding our attention and more often than not handsomely rewarding it. Leonard Cohen’s Old Ideas was rightly applauded in last month's Uncut, and in the current issue similar praise is lavished on Lambchop’s Mr M, which reminds us why we have loved them for so long and also what it was in the first place that got us so excited about Kurt Wagner’s Nashville country-soul collective.