I don’t want to give anyone the impression that all I do all day is sit around, browsing through YouTube files and watching fantastic footage of my favourite bands – that’s Steve Sutherland’s job, after all. I do need, however, to bring your attention to a video of Richmond Fontaine live in Amsterdam, which is absolutely brilliant. The set is taken mainly from the recent ’13 Cities’ album, with four songs from Post To Wire, the record that brought them to Uncut’s belated attention – including a storming “Montgomery Park” and fiercely glowering “Western Skies”. There are a few unreleased gems here, too. I missed the band’s last London shows, and after watching this performance I am even more pissed off than I was at the time that I couldn’t go. They seem here to be in the form of their lives. Anyway, here’s the link to the 16-song set: http://www.fabchannel.com/richmond_fontaine I was just talking, by the way, to Chris Metzler, who looks after the band in Europe and puts out their records here. He tells me that the follow-up to Willy Vlautin’s debut novel, The Motel Life, will be out early next year. It’s called Northline. There’s also a possibility of a DVD package in October. Willy will also be playing a solo show in London, at the Luminaire on May 22. Chris has also turned me on to a fantastic new record – World Without End, by Bob Frank and John Murry, a dazzling collection of blasted country folk and grimly haunting murder ballads, shot through with harrowing images of death, damnation and eternal suffering. Legendary producer Jim Dickinson describes the record as “timeless as death” and Frank as “the greatest songwriter you never heard”. On the evidence of this, Jim’s right on both counts. I’ll try to find out some more about Frank and get back to you.

There's something a little disingenuous about opening your album with a song called "Do I Disappoint You?". This is how the fifth album by Rufus Wainwright begins: with wave after wave of opulent, complex orchestral flourishes, building and building; with a multitracked Martha Wainwright screaming "CHAOS!" and "DESTRUCTION!"; and with Wainwright himself, coy in the midst of so much melodrama. It's a theatrical set-piece pretending to be an anti-climax. It's both lovely and knowingly ridiculous. And it's also rather good. Wainwright, as you may have noticed, has been making fine records for nearly a decade now, and "Release The Stars" might just be his best yet. I must confess to being a little anxious about this one. The appointment of Neil Tennant as Executive Producer filled me with vague foreboding. And Wainwright's recent re-enactment of Judy Garland's Carnegie Hall concert suggested a brassier, crasser career turn. Happily, though, nothing here remotely resembles the Pet Shop Boys - in fact, it's the best-sounding album Wainwright has made, with some really inventive orchestral arrangements, a couple of satisfying experiments with guitar rock (notably "Between My Legs"), some exceptionally subtle moments, and less of the hygienised studio gloss that was mildly annoying on "Want One" and "Want Two". As for the Garland thing, only the closing title track has the big Broadway swagger to it, and even then, Wainwright's voice - nasal, schooled in indie stealth as much as Tin Pan Alley bravado, innately mournful - proves to be a brilliant counterpoint to the orchestral flash. I'm probably going to write a lot more about this record in the next few weeks, for Uncut magazine as much as this blog, so I don't want to go on about it too much here. But there are songs on "Release The Stars" that, I think, are a match for Wainwright's very best: the languid protest song, "Going To A Town", and the tremulous, affecting "Not Ready For Love" are reminiscent of the low-key highlights of his underrated 2001 collection, "Poses". Best of all, today at least, is "Slide Show", which features a classically wiry Richard Thompson guitar solo, duelling with giant orchestral stabs and Wainwright, again, being commendably understated amidst all the grandeur. And I haven't even mentioned the fantasy about Brandon Flowers and crisps. . .

It seems a long time ago now, when I thought post-rock was the most exciting music in the world. The thing with those early records by Tortoise and such was that they made anything seem possible. Post-rock was never going to supersede rock, but in the mid-'90s it still felt like a fantastically open-minded scene. The bands weren't hung up on the old signifiers of rock, they had this voracious appetite for so much music: jazz, electronica, Krautrock, endlessly obscure diversions from the well-beaten path. There were no apparent rules, which made it all the more disappointing that it became so formulaic so fast. I guess the stately post-rockers, rather than the eclectic jazzbos, were the ones to blame: Mogwai and Godspeed! You Black Emperor made frequently terrific records, but they had an assimilable schtick that could easily be copied by mundane crescendo-jockeys like Explosions In The Sky. One moment post-rock meant nothing but could mean anything, the next it was a quiet-loud-quiet-loud instrumental cliche. Battles, though, make me feel like there's life in post-rock yet. Over the past few years, they've relocated the restless, questing imperative that made the scene initially so cool. "Mirrored" is their debut album proper, and it often feels like a deluxe technological upgrade of those first couple of Tortoise albums. There's a similar sense of hardcore kids branching out into a dizzying range of styles, but still retaining a sort of punkoid attack mentality, even when they're heading into jazz terrain. Battles, of course, are not kids. Their CVs reveal apprenticeships in a bunch of bands - among them Don Caballero and Helmet - from the tougher, mathematical end of post-rock. All muscle, stamina, hard-edged theory. "Mirrored", though, is much more fun. You could argue that there's not much heart or emotion here, that many of these tracks are exercises in hybridising genres at high intensity. But that would be to ignore how exhilarating it all is, from the math-Afrobeat start of "Race: In" onwards. Yeah, there's a lot of technoflash, and a few tunes like "Ddiamondd" bear a huge debt to prog, albeit prog compressed and diced beyond recognition. Then songs like "Atlas" stomp in, riding a rhythm that owes as much to the Glitterbeat as it does to the avant-garde, and the mischievous magpie spirit of Battles really comes to the fore. "Leyendecker" even suggests they've been inspired by those chattering, capricious R&B productions by Timbaland (his early Aaliyah tunes, maybe). It feels like Battles are stretching way beyond the "approved" chinstroker references and making genuinely broad-minded, exciting music. Warp are putting it out in May, by the way. Apologies for not having blogged much this week. I'm back in the swing now, and we should also be having some reports from Uncut contributors who, unlike me, actually made it to South By Southwest. See you tomorrow.