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.

The Cuckoo Club is a swish, luxuriously upholstered private members bar and restaurant, just off Regent Street, where everything that isn’t leather, velvet, silk or glass is gleaming stainless steel, or something that looks like it. This early Monday evening, it’s packed – ostensibly for a showcase performance by the Honolulu-born singer and pianist, Anjani, here to promote her new Sony album, Blue Alert. What most of us are here for, if we’re honest, is, however, a glimpse of Anjani’s what I suppose you’d call ‘mentor’ – Leonard Cohen, who co-wrote and produced the album. More cynical souls than myself doubted he’d be here – but that’s him, at a small table about five feet from where I’m sitting, sipping a glass of beer and mouthing the words as Anjani essays a supremely tasteful version of “Blue Alert” and almost audibly purring with approval for what she’s doing. Cohen had made a brief speech earlier, to introduce the singer and her backing trio – handpicked jazz veterans, as perfectly groomed as their surroundings. As was Cohen, of course, a handsome 73 now, with close cropped silver hair and a slight stoop, but wholly elegant, like some Democratic elder from the American heartland, a senator or congressman with an impeccable record on all the important liberal issues. There is much mischief about him, too, an eternal liveliness that age has evidently not impaired. “This ritual is very new to me,” he says dryly of the showcase. “I enquired of someone what the audience would be like. ‘Indistry people,’ he said. I immediately thought of the cast of Night Of The Living Dead, shuffling towards the stage with something on their minds other than an appreciation of music.” Anjani, nervous but composed, plays a selection of well-received songs from the new album, thanks Leonard effusively at every opportunity, and is clearly heartfelt in her appreciation, Anjani dreamy-eyed as she gazes swoonsomely at Cohen when he joins her for a touching duet on “Never Got To Love You”, and later on something very tender called “Whither Thou Goest”, after which they go, Cohen giving a little Zen bow to the boys in the band before making an impeccably dignified exit. An entirely unexpected start to the week, then.

It's odd, but the two albums I've played most in the past week both remind me a bit of LCD Soundsystem. This might be because I've played the LCD album more than anything else this year. But 1990s and Von Sudenfed both have strange affinities with James Murphy, I'm convinced. I'll get to Von Sudenfed later in the week, all being well. For now, I've just put on "Cookies" by 1990s again. On the surface, it sounds precious little like LCD. It is nothing like a disco record, for a start. Instead, 1990s are a battle-scarred indie-pop band from Glasgow who play a kind of skinny, rubber-spined garage glam. Two-thirds of them used to be in a bunch of faintly malign cuties called The Yummy Fur, who also featured Alex Kapranos before he formed Franz Ferdinand. Listening to "Cookies", it's easy to imagine 1990s hearing Franz's impeccably calculated pop and thinking, "We'll have a piece of that." Much of this debut seems located at the birth of New York punk, perhaps in transit between Max's and CBGB, maybe with the Dolls and Lou along for the ride. "Arcade Precinct" even struts along like a very louche and sly Scottish cousin of "Walk On The Wild Side". Luckily, 1990s have some great tunes, all cranky riffs and wobbly harmonies, crisply produced by Bernard Butler (how much better would the Libertines' albums have been if he'd produced them, incidentally?). They are also amusingly self-aware, as you'd hope of men who've been flogging around the indie circuit for so long. "Chelsea Hotel didn't ring my bell, I'd rather be in Pollockshields," notes singer Jackie McKeown, wisely (Apropos nothing, I heard this guy on the bus the other day talking on his phone about a forthcoming trip to New York. He wasn't going to make the mistake of staying at the Chelsea again, he said, he wanted to go to that place where Tony Soprano takes his girlfriend instead. Classy). It's McKeown's droll take on being a rock singer of a certain experience, aligned to those vague New York analogies, that remind me of LCD Soundsystem, I guess. He talks about drugs with this weirdly exuberant irony: "I'm going into the forest now, 'cos my pills should be taking effect soon," he hams on "Enjoying Myself". "Why don't you try taking drugs again, you were never funnier than you were back then," begins "Weed", before McKeown confesses to being scared of the telephone - "and I haven't even got one". Best of all, he alludes to the necessity of making this massively entertaining record on "Cult Status". Again like Murphy, there's a deadly hipster sense of his own ridiculousness: "Cult status keeps me alive," he yelps. "Cult status keeps me fucking your wife." Fun - try it: 1990s Myspace.

Just a short post today, basically to bring to your attention a video on YouTube that I’ve been alerted to. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-HjpX__vUTA

The big film this week is 300, director Zack Snyder’s gory and rabid retelling of the battle of Thermopylae, where 300 brave Spartan soldiers faced down the massed ranks of the mighty Persian Empire in 480BC. 300 is based on a graphic novel by Frank Miller, who also created Sin City. Here, Snyder opts for a similar stylistic treatment, replicating Miller’s original comic book almost shot for shot. UNCUT contributor Jonathan Romney nailed it when he described 300 as “the kind of film Leni Riefenshtahl would have made if she had access to CGI.” It’s buffed, pumped-up chaps armed to the teeth with swords, spears and arrows killing each other in the most brutal and sadistic manner possible. Despite the bodycount and liberal blood-letting, you can’t quite take it entirely seriously – there’s a certain campery behind the carnage, Snyder’s increasingly beserk direction lending the whole thing a decidedly preposterous air. Needless to say, it’s great fun, if rather silly – there’s something pre-pubscent about the gleeful manner Snyder (and Miller) approach the Spartans’ suicide mission. As a comic book writer, Miller’s responsible for one of the genre’s stone-cold greats. The Dark Knight Returns, which reimagined Batman as a testosterone-fuelled psycho driving round an apocalyptic Gotham City in what basically passed for a tank. It's equalled only by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons' Watchmen, a vast, conspiracy-laden whodunit featuring a cast of fucked-up superheroes - which is Snyder’s next project. An onerous task, as it’s lain in development hell for over a decade now. Gerard Butler, who plays Spartan king Leonidas in 300, is rumoured to be playing as Snake Plissken in a prequel to John Carpenter’s Escape From New York. I’ll let you know more about that soon as. I caught an early preview of Zodiac this week, the new film from Fight Club and Seven director David Fincher. It’s based on the Zodiac killings in San Francisco that began in the late Sixties. It’s a serial killer film like Seven, sure, but Fincher claims to have some personal investment here – he was raised in nearby Marin County when the killings began. What’s good: Jake Gyllenhaal and Robert Downey Jnr as the two newspaper men, and Mark Ruffalo as the cop assigned to the case, who gradually develop extreme obsessions with the case. Great performances, especially Downey, who looks uncannily like Pacino in Serpico. In fact, the attention to period detail – and the keynote movies of that time – are fantastic. What’s not: the historical circumstances behind the police investigation, sadly, don’t lend themselves to a punchy, third act confrontation and easy narrative resolution. Anway, next week I’ll let you know how 28 Weeks Later shapes up – the sequel to Danny Boyle’s zombie film 28 Days Later. And there’s also the small matter of Boyle’s latest – Sunshine…