I'm just getting my head around the new Elliott Smith compilation, and there's a lot to take in. "New Moon" features 24 songs stretched over two CDs, dating from the mid '90s. Ostensibly, I guess they're demos; mostly Smith plus acoustic guitar recorded without fuss at a variety of basements in the Portland area. But the clarity and quality is obviously stronger. Like everything Smith released in his lifetime, these are stealthy, insidious songs that are worth living with. What's immediately obvious is Smith's fecundity at the time. After a couple of listens, it's likely that most of these songs would hold their own on the "Elliott Smith" and "Either/Or" albums for which they were demoed. There are no revelations as such, no unexpected experiments in style. Instead, they compound our impression of Smith as one of the great songwriters of his time, whose simple and affecting strummed melodies mixed warmth, prettiness, unsettlingly quiet rage and an emotional intensity all the more potent for the casual, unmelodramatic way in which it was delivered. I'm playing the album for the second time now, and virtually every song seems striking. "Looking Over My Shoulder" has that sort of offhand, McCartney-esque jauntiness at which Smith excelled, especially when he juxtaposes it with a clenched-teeth whisper about "another sick rock'n'roller acting like a dick." There's a great song called "Angel In The Snow", a skeletal take on "Miss Misery" - the song that he gave to the Good Will Hunting soundtrack, which made his name commercially, and which he then staunchly refused to play. There's also a lovely version of Alex Chilton's "Thirteen", which reminds me of the first time he turned up in the UK just before "Either/Or" was released: a bunch of wonderful solo shows; interviewing him in some cafe off Tottenham Court Road, talking to this amiable and courteous man who gradually explained, through a series of hints and allusions, that he'd been recently incarcerated in a mental hospital. Significantly Joanna Bolme, who was caring for him on the trip, sat in on the interview. Looking back, her calm fortitude was awe-inspiring. But Smith had that kind of charismatic vulnerability that encouraged people to look after him. It's obvious in his songs, in these ones as well. "What are you doing hanging out with me?" he sings in "Whatever (Folk Song In C)", one of his classic self-deprecating shrugs. Elsewhere, there are the usual allusions to drugs ("High Times", "New Monkey"), relationships ending, lives ending. "New Moon" tells us little new about Smith, but it further justifies why we hold him in such high esteem. It also, perhaps, explains why he had to fatten up his sound for "XO" and "Figure 8". These seem to be unflinchingly fine songs, but you also get the sense that the tonal range he worked in was so narrow, he had to incorporate bigger arrangements to keep himself interested. He couldn't really escape being the introspective troubadour - I'm not sure he could write music any other way - but he needed to dress himself up in some bolder clothes for a while, at least. Let me play this some more and get back to you. First, though, I'm off to South By Southwest in Texas next week, and I'll be blogging from the festival every day. Tomorrow, I'm going to try and put together a list of bands I'm looking forward to seeing; if anyone has any recommendations, please let me know. I saw over 50 bands there last year, and I'm keen to beat that score next week.

Perhaps he's been inspired by the way his other half, Joanna Newsom, goes about her work. Perhaps he's up to some clever contract shenanigans. Whatever the real reason, it's pretty easy to read high creative significance into Bill Callahan's decision to drop the Smog brand and release this fine new album, "Woke On A Whaleheart", under his real name. More even than his old running mate Will Oldham, Callahan has been a supremely untrustworthy narrator on the winning sequence of albums he's released over the past decade or so. Believe what he's singing, and Callahan has routinely emerged as a faintly homicidal misanthrope, a cruel campfire Lou Reed with a thing about rivers and horses. “I told her I was hard to get to know,” he claimed in “I’m New Here” on his last LP, "A River Ain't Too Much To Love", “and near impossible to forget.” Fair point. Has working under his real name changed Callahan? Well, the first track on this new one suggests a change in water imagery, at least, called as it is "From The Rivers To The Ocean". On a cursory listen, the cruelty which has often been so prevalent on Smog records appears to have been toned down. It'd be a bit risky to claim this is the belated unveiling of the real Bill Callahan. But the publicity photo which accompanies my promo copy - taken by Newsom, perhaps significantly - features him smiling. He certainly sounds mellower on this nine ambling tunes, too. Again, I haven't had a chance to scrutinise every lyrical nuance - I'll save that for the reviewer - and with a baritone like his, anything he sings sounds pretty sombre. But on the likes of "Honeymoon Child", Callahan certainly gets closer than usual to tenderness as he sings, "You bring out the softness in everyone". It's a lovely-sounding record all round, given woody resonances by co-producer and ex-Royal Trux dude Neil Hagerty and fiddler Elizabeth Warren. "Woke On A Whaleheart" (how much does that sound like a Newsom title, incidentally?) reaches a jolly country climax with "A Man Needs A Woman Or A Man To Be A Man", an unlikely outpouring of good loving vibes set to a cowboy lollop that pastiches Johnny Cash. And, I suspect inadvertently, reminds me of Val Doonican's "Walk Tall". Not a record that springs to mind most days, it's fair to say.

I've been thinking some more about that new Wilco album, not least in response to a post from someone called Andrew. "It appears every thinking American songwriter," he writes "has been listening to Midlake's "The Trials Of Van Occupanther" and decided that America and Fleetwood Mac circa "Rumours" and "Tusk" are the way forward." You can see his point, though I imagine Jeff Tweedy would laugh incredulously at the idea he'd been inspired to do anything by Midlake. To be honest, I'm one of the few people around Uncut who doesn't really like "Van Occupanther": a couple of nice songs at the start, sure, but its pursuit of a bland aesthetic seems a little too successful to me, along with the slightly mimsy post-Mercury Rev mythologising. After a while, I forget it's playing. Someone in the office mentioned Fleetwood Mac when Wilco was playing the other day, specifically the deluxe passage of harmony guitars towards the end of "Impossible Germany". And maybe "Sky Blue Sky" works for me in the same way that the Midlake album works for so many of my colleagues: I can take the AOR sonorities because I'm comfortable (OK, smug) in the knowledge that Wilco could spiral off into some heavily awkward free jam at any moment. It's a dubious way of measuring an album's worth, but then blogs are meant to be all about subjectivity, right? Anyway, enough critical hand-wringing/waffle. A quick mention for today's Japanese freak-out. "Rainbow" is the new album from Boris, a prolific bunch of doom-mongers who've developed quite a cult following thanks to the burgeoning interest in very slow leftfield metal (Uncut contributor Simon Reynolds has been pondering this at length on his Blissblog recently; interesting read). "Rainbow" is their first effort this year - I think - and is a collaboration with the guitarist Michio Kurihara, who normally plays in the terrific psych band, Ghost. Kurihara seems to have mellowed Boris out a touch: after the obliterating thud of "Rafflesia", "Rainbow" is a lot lighter on its feet than typical Boris efforts. The title track, especially, recalls Damo Suzuki-era Can. Not much like Fleetwood Mac, it's fair to say, though I'm sure the Lindsey Buckingham loyalists could probably point me in the direction of one of his weirder experiments as an analogue. Couldn't you?