I've been meaning to write about the wonderful Marnie Stern album on Kill Rock Stars for a couple of weeks now. I was tipped off about it by one of Uncut's writers, Louis Pattison, who raved to me about it. She's "an extremely proficient one-woman axe hero," he wrote in an email, "a bit like Deerhoof but with better songs and added lead guitar power." Chuck in the battling influences of Sleater-Kinney and Lightning Bolt and damn, he was right. "In Advance Of The Broken Arm" is a frantic, exuberant rush of a record. Basically, Stern takes as her base the high-end twiddle and stupid velocity of Lightning Bolt (a sort of deranged, minimalist hardcore prog duo, if you've never come across them. They only play gigs on floors rather than stages, and I once saw them instigate a sit-down moshpit. It was amazing). The drummer is a guy called Zach Hill from Hella, who I've always considered something of a math-rock version of Lightning Bolt, but he has great octopoid skills here, contributing to the general frenzy. Over all this, Stern adds really joyful songs called things like "Plato's Fucked Up Cave" and my current favourite, "Put All Your Eggs In One Basket And Then Watch That Basket!!!" It's some gift to make catchy pop music out of what is effectively avant-garde metal, but she does it throughout "In Advance Of The Broken Arm". It reminds me, in a way, of how PJ Harvey was initially so inspired by the music of Big Black and the '80s US underground, but twisted those influences into something that was accessible but never felt compromised. I think Stern draws on the leftfield rock of the past few years in a similar way. And I also reckon that there's enough wit, melody and energy, never mind finger-shredding technical prowess, here to suggest that, like Harvey, Stern might go on to bigger things. Let's hope so. Here's the obligatory Myspace link. Finally, the Bjork album is on its way to Uncut even as I write. I'll post a preview tomorrow.

So Mark E Smith is a DJ, right? He's booked the club for the night, therefore it stands to reason he can play the records. But then this German guy turns up and says he's the DJ, says he's Sven Vath. Whatever should Mark do? Simple: "I flooded the club," he says proudly. That'll show them. This is the compelling scenario of "Flooded", track three of the debut album by Von Sudenfed. Von Sudenfed are a new group consisting of Smith, plus Andi Toma and Jan St Werner from the marvellous German electronica mavericks Mouse On Mars. You have to admire Toma and St Werner's nerve. Smith, after all, is not historically one for harmonious collaboration, tending to favour dictatorship over teamwork. Their last couple of Mouse On Mars albums have been slight disappointments, too, after the mid '90s highs of "Niun Niggung" and "Idiology". In spite of being eclectic leftfield auteurs, it's seemed as if they've been struggling to make a kind of pop music, and not quite getting there. Bizarrely, they've achieved that by recruiting Smith, of all people. "The Rhinohead", for instance, is a glorious technopop stomper, a supercharged update of the sort of hobnailed-boot dancefloor strangeness that The Fall were making towards the end of their period on the Fontana label. It might be a trick of all the processing on his voice, but Toma and St Werner have generally made Smith sound livelier than he has done in years. I mean, much as I like the last few Fall albums, I don't find myself returning to them very often. "Tromatic Reflexxions" (sorry, that's the album title), for all the trademark Mouse On Mars squelch is so much cleaner and tighter - no muttering longueurs here, it's just hits most of the way. And with all the murk cleared away, you can hear Smith's majestic rants. "I cannot boil the chicken," he's saying on the lunatic Delta blues of "Chicken Yiamas". By the end and "Dearest Friends", a highlife-gone-Hawaiian reverie, he sounds positively beatific. And of course, there's my obligatory LCD Soundsystem comparison. What could be better than a Mark E Smith impersonator declaiming over pounding dance music? Mark E Smith declaiming over pounding dance music, of course.

I was recently moved to reminisce about the night Lou Reed invited me to dinner after a show at the Hammersmith Odeon, an occasion that famously ended up in chaos when he was annoyed by something David Bowie said to him that sparked off quite a lively assault, Lou smacking Bowie somewhat savagely around the head. What David actually said to Lou to spark off the assault has long-since been the subject of much speculation. Just before it all went off, the pair took a circuit of the restaurant in Knightsbridge where we were eating, toasting each other and their renewed friendship. Whatever David said that ignited Lou’s fury, he made the mistake of repeating within minutes, thus provoking another flurry of slaps and punches and Lou’s dramatic departure – frogmarched out in the grip of his own minders, probably for his own good as much as Bowie’s or anyone else’s. My thanks to Chuck Hammer, who had played that evening with Lou at Hammersmith, and has replied to my post with the following email, which takes the story on a little further: ‘As a guitarist in the Lou Reed band at that time, I was actually sitting next to both David and Lou at dinner when this exchange took pace, I can tell you exactly what transpired verbally. ‘Lou had been discussing details regarding his upcoming new album- as yet un-recorded. Lou asked David if he would be interested in producing the record and David replied yes - but only upon the condition that Lou would stop drinking and clean up his act. And upon that reply, the aforementioned chaos ensued. ‘It should be noted that this verbal bantering also continued into the night back at the hotel -With Bowie in the hallway demanding that Reed "come out and fight like a man" Eventually it all quieted down as Lou never reappeared to continue the fight, and was most likely already fast asleep.’ Boys keep swinging, indeed

In between all the meetings and extraneous stuff today (oh, and kicking myself for missing the Leonard Cohen lig that Allan blogs about here), I've belatedly got round to hearing Gallows. Gallows, if you haven't come across them, are a five-piece from Watford who look like they've been used as doodle pads at a tattooists' convention. For the past couple of months or so, they've also been the subject of a fairly unseemly scramble, thanks to an album they put out last autumn called "Orchestra Of Wolves". Today, it transpires they've signed to Warners in the UK and Epitaph in the States, after being one of the feted buzz bands of South By Southwest. God knows how this happened, to be honest. Not because Gallows are crap - far from it. It's just weird that a band as relentlessly hardcore as this should have excited the mainstream music business. "Orchestra Of Wolves" reminds me quite a lot of something like Drive Like Jehu, something far from the pogo-friendly type of US punk that usually gets assimilated. I guess there are some affinities with At The Drive-In, but even they had to become a prog-rock band (The Mars Volta) to really make it. Don't get me wrong - it's a great record, and I'm genuinely excited that a band of such thrashing menace should be getting the NME kids in a froth. But I was having a conversation about Gallows with someone in the office this morning, and it struck me that there must be so many bands like this in the States - bands who've little need of mainstream approval, and who are so immersed in their scene that, frankly, I've never heard of most of them. One I have heard of are called Fucked Up and they're tremendous, every bit the belligerent equal of Gallows. What we concluded, anyway, was that the rise of Gallows is a sign of how small the UK music scene actually is: a band can be making notionally uncompromising, traditionally uncommercial music to an underground elite, but they can still be found fairly easily by mainstream band-spotters. It's both an indictment of the UK's shallow talent pool, and a reassuring sign that however lily-livered and narrow-minded we might perceive major labels to be, they're not just looking for the next Mika or whatever. Then, of course, the guy I was talking to kept going on about how Gallows made him want to jump about and smash things up, and maybe that's the secret. See what you think - give Gallows' Myspace page a go, and drop me a line.