Corny fool that I am, today the hot weather's driven me to put on a forthcoming Beach Boys comp. "Compiled and sequenced by Al Jardine, Bruce Johnston, Mike Love and Brian Wilson," claims the press release, and while I'm morbidly suspicious of anything sanctioned by Love, this is a cracking selection. It's not, for a change, the usual surf standards with a couple of "Pet Sounds"/"Smile"-era cuts for the "connoisseurs". In fact, I don't think there are any "Pet Sounds" tracks on here at all. Instead, it plots an alternative course through one of pop's greatest back catalogues, chucking in a few new stereo mixes as a sop to completists. There are a lot of my favourite Beach Boys songs here, with plenty of stuff from "Surf's Up" including Brian's existential masterpiece, "Till I Die". The best songs of other bandmembers are showcased, like Bruce Johnston's tremulous "Disney Girls" - I can't think of a better use of schmaltz in the canon than this one - and Dennis Wilson's gorgeous (if implausible) "Forever". No room, mercifully, for Mike Love's "Student Demonstration Time". What I think is most interesting here, though, is the focus on the 1965 tracks which paved the way for "Pet Sounds". I always think "Today" and "Summer Days (And Summer Nights!!)" get something of a bum deal from history, maybe because they're not perceived as weird enough by people who fetishise Brian Wilson as a mad genius, maybe because there's an assumption that The Beach Boys were merely a singles band before "Pet Sounds". But "Kiss Me, Baby", "Please Let Me Wonder" and "Let Him Run Wild" would all fit perfectly onto "Pet Sounds"; the classic Brian trick of combining adolescent romantic angst with rapturous orchestrations, of playing out tiny personal epiphanies on a symphonic scale, was already fully functioning. And "The Little Girl I Once Knew" is a great, genuinely odd single, still ignored by oldies radio programmers thanks to the caesuras that Brian built into the score, giant anxious pauses that derail the song's momentum, but simultaneously give it more emotional heft. The whole album feels like a compilation burned by your Wilson-bore mate rather than officially-authorised product. Although who's actually going to bother buying it is another matter entirely. Just get the original albums, I'd say.

Since I blogged about the Espers live gig last Friday, I've been playing the Meg Baird solo album to death. Baird sings lead on most Espers songs, and it's sometimes hard to divine the true quality of her voice beneath the layers of strum and drone. There are no such obfuscations on "Dear Companion", a set mostly consisting of her voice and guitar. The songs are mainly covers (though often pretty obscure ones), and I must confess that the first couple of times I played it, it wafted nonchalantly past without making much impact. Another decent but unexceptional acid folk album, I figured. Wrongly, as it turns out. Baird is a discreet talent, certainly. Espers are probably this generation's most effective heirs to Fairport Convention, but Baird will never be Sandy Denny. The purity and delicacy are there, but there's no sense of stridency, of bending the band to her will. On "Dear Companion", though, the intimacy of her tone becomes a massive advantage. At times, it reminds me of that neglected lady of the canyon, Linda Perhacs: Baird's own and quite wonderful "Riverhouse In Tinicum" has the rippling tranquility and distant ethereal hum that made Perhacs' "Parallelograms" such a classic. For a contemporary analogue, Marissa Nadler isn't a bad call (Nadler, coincidentally, worked with Espers' Greg Weeks on her inferior third album). If "Riverhouse In Tinicum" is the stand-out, the rest of "Dear Companion" is notable for the grace and taste of Baird's selections. She does Jimmy Webb's "Do What You Gotta Do", with harmony vocals (I'm not sure whether she's multi-tracked or if it's another singer) that bring to mind the McGarrigles. And she's confident enough to take on an English standard like "Willie O'Winsbury", notably covered by Anne Briggs and Pentangle. It's a great version, and this whole album gets better and better.

I've always been resistant to the notion that horror movies can in some way function as biting social comment. There are horror buffs who, perhaps sensing that the genre lacks much in the way of serious critical acclaim, are prepared to make over-reaching claims in its defence. Last year's Hostel, for instance, found a trio of boorish American backpackers kidnapped by foxy Eastern European babes and tortured by rich and bored businessmen from around the globe. To some it was a gruesome but rather puerile gore flick -- to others (notably, if memory serves, the film's director Eli Roth and his playmate Quentin Tarantino), it was a searing indictment of American foreign policy with particular reference to the shocking treatment meted out to detainees in the Abu Ghraib prison facility. Um. The most famous horror movies that have been hailed as masterpieces of social comment are George Romero's zombie films. In Night Of The Living Dead, for example, the fact that both black and white survivors are beseiged in a remote farmhouse by hoardes of zombies is held up as peerless comment on Civil Rights issues in Sixties' America. Dawn Of The Dead, which takes place largely in an abandoned shopping mall, offers profound insight into Reagan-era capitalism. The bickering in Day Of The Dead between scientists and the military in a bunker hidey-hole is emblematic of the Cold War's dance towards apocalypse. I was somewhat disappointed, then, to watch Land Of The Dead and find it wasn't, as I'd hoped, a Descartian study of human duality as we head into the 21st century. This morning on Radio 4's Today programme, the actor Robert Carlyle was interviewed about his new film, 28 Weeks Later, the sequel to the Brit horror flick, 28 Days Later. Carlyle, an intelligent and thoughtful interviewee, claimed you could find in 28 Weeks Later reflections on America's misguided adventures in Iraq. Hang on. The premise for 28 Weeks Later is that an American led UN force are helping repatriate Britain after the initial outbreak of the Rage virus has apparently subsided. Even someone with a minor grasp of international politics would fail to find much similarity between this plot set-up and the ill-advised and messy goings-on in Iraq. I certainly don't recall seeing many zombies lurching round the streets of Bazra on the 10 O'Clock News. Carlyle went on to talk about war, suicide bombings and invasions, suggesting that the logical conclusion to all this horror and bloodshed is that we end up eating each other. Maybe if Ken Loach had directed 28 Weeks Later things would have turned out differently, but it seems fairly disingenuous to imbue a horror film -- even one as good as 28 Weeks Later -- with any kind socio-political consciousness. 28 Weeks Later is a slick, exciting chase movie. We pick up seven months on from the events in the first film. London is derelict. The American military are helping bring survivors back into the city; snipers posted on rooftops, helicopters filling the sky, many itchy fingers on triggers in case, somehow, the Rage virus returns. The mechanic for the virus' resurgence is a Typhoid Mary figure, a carrier who seems initially immune to the virus. Inevitably, things go very bad very fast, and soon the films leads -- a brother and sister, played by newcomers Imogen Poots and Mackintosh Muggleton, plus a handful of American soldiers -- are being pursued through London by thousands of the Infected. The producer (and the first film's director) Danny Boyle says he equates the relationship between 28 Days Later and 28 Weeks Later to that of Alien and Aliens. In the first film you didn't really know what was going to happen next. This time out, with the element of surprise removed, everything is bigger, louder, faster. There's guns -- loads of 'em -- napalm, chemical weapons, and the nuclear option hovers menacingly in the background. In the first film, Cillian Murphy recalled the speed at which the virus had spread through Victoria Station. Images of a near deserted London, festering bodies piled high in mounds, eerily recall Samuel Pepys' diary descriptions of the plague-hit capital in 1665. Here, the budget is significantly larger that you actually see something similar happen -- and in the tight, claustrophobic spaces of the tube, too. It's icky. Director Juan Carlos Fresnadillo -- whose previous film was a fantastic Spanish thriller, Intacto -- keeps the film haring along at a fair old pace after a relatively quiet start. To some degree, this doesn't really allow much characterisation to develop, particularly among the military characters, but Poots and Muggleton (and, to some extent Carlyle, as their father) make the most of their roles. Fresnadillo sets up for some incredibly effective scenes -- helicopter flights over the abandoned City of London, shots of refugee camps, flight through the underground, a final stand-off in Wembley Stadium. But to say this is anything other than a particularly good horror film is as deceitful as claiming Sadaam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction buried out there in the desert. Ah. 28 Weeks Later opens in the UK this Friday

I wasn't planning to blog today, since I expected Steve's third report from Coachella to turn up here. But thanks to his fairly quixotic posting strategy, he appears to have turned up on Allan's blog. He's right, of course: I do like Grizzly Bear. Anyway, a couple of things to point out today. First, LCD Soundsystem are releasing "All My Friends" as their next single, one of the best tracks from "Sound Of Silver". Can I draw your attention to the b-sides? One is a version of the song by Franz Ferdinand, which plays up the '80s, pre-disco New Order vibes of the original. It's pretty impressive, and is playing at LCD's Myspace. Another version is on the DFA Myspace and is, marvellously enough, by John Cale. This one uncovers the classic New York DNA in the song, rescoring it with wiry guitars and the usual stentorian grandeur of his voice. Very fine. As - and I would say this, of course - is the new Uncut CD. We've tried this month to bring a bit of a fresh perspective to what Americana means - ie not just a bunch of tumbleweed troubadours. Allan and I were talking about all this, and we figured that Americana wasn't just a synonym for alt-country. We thought it could be expanded to take in artists like Lavender Diamond, Oakley Hall, PG Six, Richard Swift and Lightning Dust - a lot of people I've been writing about here, fairly naturally. Let me know what you think: it's the issue with the Paul McCartney exclusive interview on the cover. Oh, and one last thing. A couple of you have asked me to write about the new albums by Travis and The National but, to be honest, I've never liked either band, and I try to keep stuff as positive as possible here. There are too many records that excite me to waste my time and yours on ones that don't, basically. I'll keep my bitching for the pub.

Stumbling onto site today someone told me that it was 107 degrees yesterday but it’s only 105 today. So that’s alright then. What’s that sound, floating across the polo grounds? Lush, harmonised, laid back, Californian… yes, it must be The Feeling from, er, Lowestoft or wherever the heck. Anyway, they do Buggles’ ‘Video Killed The Radio Star’ as I order my first beer of the day so it can’t all be bad. Who’s mooching? Cameron Diaz, Tommy Lee, Paris Hilton and Courtney Love (day three girl, what on earth took you so long?). No sign of my new mate Danny so I head over to check out Grizzly Bear in the smallest tent here, the Gobi. The Bear are, I guess, post rock. Which means they’re the band Thom Yorke and Michael Stipe would like to be in if they didn’t have bills to pay. It also means they’re incapable of playing a song straight without a) swapping instruments; b) pretending to swop genders and c). whistling and so forth. In equal parts intriguing and bloody annoying, they are the dahlings of the Pitchfork set and blogging here for Rolling Stone. I’ll put a tenner on it that the Mulv likes them so we’ll no doubt say hello to them at an All Tomorrow’s Party quite soon and I’ll move right along if you don’t mind because The Kooks are in the Mojave tent next door and girls are actually screaming at them. Hmmm. It’s all about shirt removal apparently so let’s take a shufty at Explosions In The Sky all the way from Texas. What they’re doing on the main stage is anyone’s guess but they’re quiet-loud-quiet-LOUD, with no vocals, just like Mogwai but not as good. Ne’er mind, refill beer and let’s follow the jettrash across to the Mojave again where CSS are playing. And the party starts…here. Singer Lovefoxx strips down to her catsuit after only one number and noo rave rools. I think she’s got spectacles painted on her face but, whatever, she’s totally boombastic. They even do a cover of L7’s ‘Pretend That We’re Dead’, that they attribute, strangely, to Daft Punk. No matter, this is joyous, the very idiot dancing stuff that all the best festivals are made of. The facts? They’re from Brazil but they sound not unlike The B52’s so there’s nothing here to be scared of. Duty calls so let’s troop over to the Outdoor Stage where the Kaiser Chiefs are trying super hard to convince America that they’re any good. In fact, I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone work so hard as Ricky Wilson – he bellows, he climbs the lighting rig, he encourages clapalongs and singalongs, he crowd surfs. But sadly to no avail. All the huffing and puffing looks a bit desperate to be honest and, let’s face it, ‘Everything Is Average Nowadays’ is hardly ‘Modern Life Is Rubbish’, ‘The Angry Mob’ goes down like a lead balloon and even ‘I Predict A Riot’ fails to ignite. Sometimes it takes something more than honest to goodness effort. Just ask the newly reformed Crowded House who are boring the pants off a fairly meagre mass in front of the main stage. No charisma, no presence, no good. Nor was my fact checking over the last couple of days. Please forgive me and put it down to the jetlag/heat/beers. Anyway, of course I meant to put ‘Dani California’ instead of ‘Californication’ in the Chili’s set. It was still shit though. The Klaxons totally got it going on. Party monsters par excellence they pack the Mojave and put in the performance of the day, the crowd – without as many glowsticks as usual – sweat it up batting about a blow-up dolphin and whoo-whooing along to ‘Golden Skans’ and ‘Atlantis To Interzone’ while over on the main stage Manu Chao put in one of those righteous reggae jam performances that really shouldn’t work but, at festivals, they always seem to. This is the dude who was responsible for ‘King Of The Bongo’, the best (only good) track on Robbie Williams’ ‘Rudebox’. And who did backing vocals on that? None other than Lily Allen and, oh look, here she is, back at the Mojave (we don’t just throw this stuff together you know!). Greeted like a homecoming queen, she’s dazzling in white and well overawed by the size and response of the crowd that is most made up of gals who sing better than she does and know every word. Which is more than can be said of Lily who fluffs song after song (“Why do I keep forgetting me fuckin’ words? I’m not drunk or doing anything bad but I’ve had a couple of spliffs today and…”). It’s all giggles and smiles and the more she messes up, the more the crowd cheer. They even cheer when she admits the cardinal sin she’s never heard of Rage Against The Machine. She’s a charmer and can do no wrong. My father in law doesn’t trust anyone who doesn’t like football. I don’t trust anyone who doesn’t like Lily. What’s not to like? Well, the reformed Happy Mondays for one thing. Introduced to a pretty threadbare audience of older geezers in the Sahara Tent by Anthony Wilson who delivered a rather needless historical lecture on the merging of black and white music, the Mondays looked and sounded just what they are – washed up and looking for a(nother) last pay day. I told you Bez was banned so it’s all down to Shaun who spends most of this sorry set moaning. After ‘Kinky Afro’ even he admitted it was shit. “I think I’ll have to stand up here and tell jokes for half an hour,” he growled. They did some new stuff. It was grim. Sad. Sad. Sad. Final slot is the reformed Rage Against The Machine, which brings the fest full circle as they headlined the very first Coachella (which I was actually at). Whatever the motivation for this get together, they are treated as local heroes by the enormous crowd and it is a fitting end as we all struggle off to find our dust-covered cars miles away that they close with ‘Killing In The Name Of’, Coachella vibrating fit to bring on an earthquake as we all roar the chorus: “Fuck you, I won’t do what tell me!” You have a nice day now. Steve Sutherland.