A bit of a catch-up today. First, thanks for the nice response to the Bjork preview I posted on Friday. I've been comparing "Volta" today with the new Timbaland album, "Shock Value". I think Timbaland's work on "Volta" is the first time he's allowed his beats to be tampered with by another producer - in this case, Bjork. Listening to "Shock Value", it's a good job he did. A year or two ago, in one of his rare interviews, I seem to recall Timbaland expressing a certain amount of boredom with making music, and a vague lethargy seems to pervade a lot of "Shock Value". Unlike so many of his records from the late '90s and early '00s, it feels as if he's content with being extravagantly-paid and perilously well-connected rather than being a beat maven who makes spacey, authentically weird pop music. Amidst the cameos from Fall Out Boy, Elton John and 50 Cent, the sub-standard off-cuts from Justin Timberlake and Nelly Furtado, and a pretty good turn from MIA, it's his old muse Missy Elliott who stands out, bringing a vivacity to "Bounce" that's mostly lacking elsewhere. At the height of Elliott's success, it was always assumed that the radicalism came from Timbaland. But I wonder whether he needs someone to spur him on to take those risks, especially these days? Maybe that's why his work with Missy and now Bjork (those extraordinary digital symphonies for Timberlake notwithstanding) are so exceptional? Apologies that you'll have to wait a while longer to hear this Bjork stuff. Unfortunately, I can't satisfy those of you who demanded, "LEAK IT OR I WET YOU!". Apart from the fact it's not terribly ethical, my copy is watermarked and can be directly traced back to me. While the prospect of being "wetted" by Bjork's people might sound quite enticing to some, I have other stuff to do, today at least. . . Like follow a couple of links people have sent me. The spiritual advisor of Millenial Reign sent me a link to their Myspace after seeing me mention Fucked Up here. Millenial Reign are a Fucked Up spin-off, and purport to be keeping the Clevo flame alive. Clevo seems to be '90s hardcore from Cleveland, as far as I can tell, though I must confess I've never heard any of the bands they reference. Still, this is top class grunting which reminds me a bit of the sludgy end of Black Flag, which is fine. Better still, Simon just alerted me to the fact that one of my favourite free folk types, Wooden Wand, has posted a new song on his Myspace. "Delia" is tremendous mystic songcraft, a step on from Wooden Wand's great Dylanish album from last year, that features a couple of Sonic Youth chipping in. I'll report more when the album - it's on Thurston Moore's Ecstatic Peace label that I banged on about here - turns up. Finally, it seems Wooden Wand - James Toth, that is - has a pretty pagan/churchy doom metal band, too. They're called Totem and they sound terrific right here. Enjoy.

Last night, I went to see the first 25 minutes of 28 Weeks Later – the follow-up to Danny Boyle’s British zombie film, 28 Days Later. It’s becoming common practice for film companies to screen what footage they can of a movie while the director still tinkers away on the special effects. It’s not an entirely satisfactory method of previewing a movie, and you can never quite shake the suspicion that you’re not seeing all the film because – whisper it – well, it’s crap. That said, 28 Weeks Later – which opens next month – looks promising, thanks in no small part to the work put in by director Juan Carlos Fresnadillo. He directed a movie called Intacto that came out in the UK in 2003; a cracking and imaginative thriller about a group of people with the ability to transfer, and steal, luck. With 28 Weeks... he works to equal Boyle’s fantastic opening sequence to 28 Days... – remember Cillian Murphy walking through empty London streets? We get a shocking prequel/flashback showing what happened to a group of survivors during the initial outbreak of the Rage virus that turns its victims into zombies. Cutting to the present day, the repopulation of London is being overseen by an American-led NATO force and one of the survivors from the prequel, played by Robert Carlyle, is reunited with his daughter and son. Fresnadillo deploys a series of beautiful helicopter shots to illustrate the deserted London, looking down on the City, landmarks just drifting by underneath, empty, ghost-like. It’s a great start, anyway, and I look forward to seeing the rest of the film. Out next week is Boyle’s own new film – Sunshine, a sci-fi movie about a group of astronauts sent on a mission to reignite our dying sun. Boyle embraces the inevitable sci-fi comparisons by foregrounding references to the genre’s canon – Alien, 2001, even Silent Running. And it looks fantastic, full of seductive images and effects. We’ll publish our full review online next week. I also caught a screening of Blades Of Glory, the new comedy from the mighty Will Ferrell, here teamed up with Napoleon Dynamite’s Jon Heder, and on release in the UK from next week. It’s a major improvement on Heder’s last film, the disastrous remake of School For Scoundrels with Billy Bob Thornton. Heder and Ferrell play two rival ice skaters, banned from singles tournaments for brawling on the winners' podium, who’re forced to team up to enter a competition. Ferrell’s a pompous, preening egomaniac! Heder’s a sensitive, caring type! They hate each other! Cue… conflict! Yes, it’s one joke movie hung around their wildly different personalities – but Ferrell and Heder have enough chemistry between them that the brisk 98-minute running time never flags. Delighted, also, to find back on youtube the brilliant Saturday Night Live http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pBqPHJhmFHo Pirates Of The Caribbean film for glimpses of Keith Richards as Cap’n Jack’s dad, Teague Sparrow. Sad to report, I can’t see the old bugger anywhere, but his presence in this third and final Pirates movie is pretty much all that’s going to get me in to see it after the disappointment of last year’s tiresome Dead Man’s Chest. Anyway, if you see Keith -- tell him we said hello. See you next week.

As I write, I've just started listening to Bjork's new album, "Volta", for the third time. The first single, "Earth Intruders", is playing right now, a kind of euphoric marching song driven by three radical beat scientists: freestyling avant drummer Chris Corsano; Congolese troupe Konono No1; and, most notably, Timbaland. It's pretty dizzying, as you might imagine. After the domestic intimacies of "Vespertine" and "Medulla", I think Bjork's plan on "Volta" might be to locate some great global pulse, a way of drawing energies and finding affinities from a wide and tasteful range of collaborators. That's the feel anyway. "Volta" is certainly more exuberant and in-your-face than the gorgeous miniatures of her recent work. It's not commercial pop music, exactly, for all Timbaland's glittery array of previous employers. But it's not unapproachably avant-garde, either, for all the fearsome credibility of many of her new accomplices. If there's an analogue to Timbaland's previous work, "Earth Intruders" and an even punchier, weirder track called "Innocence" recall the alien tribal electro sound he created for Missy Elliott circa "Work It". "Innocence" is quite, quite extraordinary; wild acid clicks and squelches swarming around Bjork as she sings with the sort of triumphal abandon found on "Violently Happy". "Untouchable innocence, it's still here," she declares, "but in different places". Besides "Violently Happy", "Volta" reminds me of "Debut" in a few other places. A radical updating of "Debut", for sure, but there's a similar sense of open-minded adventure. I guess that's defined pretty much all of Bjork's career, but the vigorous desire to embrace a new world of possibilities is comparable here. There are also the sombre massed horn passages, a recurrent theme on several tracks, which remind me a little of "The Anchor Song": "Wanderlust" is maybe my favourite right now, beginning with a long chorus of ship's horns before Bjork sails in, using seagoing metaphors to explain her artistic questing. That, or maybe she's singing about nice trips on her new boat. What else? There are a couple of more fragile pieces recalling "Vespertine", notably "Hope", where Timbaland's simulated tabla flutter goes up against the filigree kora playing of Toumani Diabate. Bjork, incidentally, is singing at this point, "What's the lesser of two evils? If a suicide bomber made to look pregnant manages to kill her target or not?" Then there's an incredibly hard techno track, "Declare Independence", where more ship's horns usher in ferocious beats from Mark Bell that recall his work on the second LFO album. And a couple of tunes featuring Anthony Hegarty, most notably "The Dull Flame Of Desire", which pits both of them up against another austere massed horn accompaniment, and pattering drums from Lightning Bolt's awesome Brian Chippendale. These Anthony tracks are the only ones that haven't really got to me yet, potentially because I find him a lovely but strangely limited vocalist, and his routine has been relatively inescapable for the past year or so. "Volta" finds Bjork driving some incredibly talented collaborators to surprise themselves, and in that context, Anthony's schtick seems predictable. But then again, I need to play all of this plenty more. As ever, I'll get back to you. . .