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This is pretty fantastic. A few days ago, Drag City streamed a song from the forthcoming Joanna Newsom album, “Have One On Me”, which I really should’ve flagged up.

Quite a good one, this week: I think I can be more or less positive about everything here, actually, with the vague exception of the Yellow Swans live comp, which is a bit too industrial for me (John Cale, as it happens, described them thus: “The Swans’ sound grates on your nerves - like you’ve put your head in a jet engine.” Thumbs up!).

Some albums prove harder to write about than others, for reasons that aren’t always easy to fathom. Others, though, seem purposely designed as hard to pin down: a case in point being Kompakt’s latest “Pop Ambient 2010” comp, which I’ve been listening to a lot for a couple of months now. How do you articulate what music sounds like that exists in such a neutral, undemonstrative space?

A load of pretty heavy psych’s been accumulating over the last few weeks: new albums from Major Stars (what an amazing guitarist Wayne Rogers is); from both Wooden Shjips and Ripley’s other project, Moon Duo; a cool new (to me, at least) band on No Quarter called Coconuts.

It’s a dubious business, calling any band empirically ‘great’. But perhaps one indicator of greatness might be the amount of controversy and whingeing generated when a ‘Best Of’ tracklisting is announced.

After last week’s fairly hapless dip into the mainstream (Marina & The Diamonds, incidentally), a more familiar-looking list this week – though there are still a couple of less-than-great albums lurking in this lot among the marquee new entries.

If the accelerating success of Animal Collective in 2009 was weird enough, the level of anticipation surrounding their projects for 2010 must be astronomical, following the placing of “Merriweather Post Pavilion” at Number One in so many end-of-year polls.

Not so much a preview, this one, since I believe “The Glorious Gongs Of Hainuwele” may have come out the best part of a year ago. Forgive the tardiness, anyhow: this pretty amazing album has only just showed up on my radar, shamefully.

A startling amount of responsible journalism behind this week’s playlist: we’ve had a bit of a session getting up to speed on a bunch of mainstream 2010 tips; discovered Lil Wayne should’ve probably stuck to hip hop; tried again to stay awake through the Midlake album and generally done our jobs more or less properly, I suppose.

A bit unusual actually blogging about someone who sits in the same office, but a lovely reissue to start off today: the solitary EP by Apple Boutique, out for the first time on CD and pretty much unavailable since 1987.