So we’re sitting in Domino’s new offices, somewhere on an industrial estate in Wandsworth. There’s a train track outside one window, a gas holder outside the other, and some old Pavement and Sebadoh posters on the floor. Then there’s this massive crash of very heavy drums and guitars. The new Arctic Monkeys album has started, it seems. This is "Brianstorm", the first track and the first single from "Favourite Worst Nightmare". My first thought is that Alex Turner hasn’t got any better at writing song titles. My second is that this is really, really good. I only hear the album once, and I’ve been over-excited at playbacks before – so apologies if the album turns out to be a stinker. I don’t think it will, though. "Favourite Worst Nightmare" is a whole lot bigger-sounding than "Whatever People Say. . .", but not in a lame stadium-wannabe way. It doesn’t feel bloated like so many follow-up albums by successful indie bands - the ropey new Kaiser Chiefs album being a case in point. Instead, it really is more ambitious, heavier – Jamie Cook’s guitar-playing resembles that of Josh Homme more than Carl Barat in many places – and with a fiercely bright production from James Ford, who did such a good job on The Klaxons’ debut. There are certain similarities with that Klaxons record, in fact. It’s not a new rave album, by any stretch, but it feels more part of an art-rock lineage than in the blokerock tradition of Oasis et al. The funk influence is more pronounced, particularly in the bass playing of Nick O’Malley (much better than Andy Nicholson, on this evidence). Tracks like "D Is For Dangerous", especially, are vaguely reminiscent of The Rapture finding a new terrace populism. The opening few tracks are frantic, awkward and pretty uncompromising, and my potentially untrustworthy notes also describe them as a hybrid of Queens Of The Stone Age and The Specials. Then Track Five, "Fluorescent Adolescent", ambles out, by some distance the catchiest song the Monkeys have ever recorded. From hereon in, the most notable influence is The Smiths, I think. Maybe the dreamy, elegiac Smiths of "Strangeways Here We Come": there are some twanging, quasi-ambient backdrops to a couple of songs, and Turner’s voice has matured beautifully, crooning like Morrissey or Richard Hawley. Another track (Turner has explicitly asked we don’t write too much about specifically-named songs, and I’m happy to comply at this stage) reminds me a bit of "Girl Afraid", though Turner is virtually rapping on it. If you still want Turner to be a northern romantic, writing about Sheffield teenage life with a documentary precision, you may be disappointed. There’s little of that, and I suspect he thinks he’d be faking it to place himself back in that world. A lot of these songs seem to be about women, about temptation, about being desired – in a self-satirising rather than arrogant way, though. "Do the bad thing/ Take off your wedding ring," goes one chorus. Turner’s melodies still have that wandering, made-up-as-he-goes-along charm. The heart of the Arctic Monkeys remains the same, it’s just the packaging that has got bigger and stranger. "Favourite Worst Nightmare" feels, too, like a band asserting themselves. If Alex Turner was highlighted as some kind of street poet last year, it’s harder to separate him out from his bandmates: Cook, in particular, is rampant here. I’m trying not to get carried away, but today I like it even more than "Whatever People Say. . ." Now, if only I could hear it again. . .

More on Joe Strummer and The 101’ers Following my somewhat nostalgic post about calling in at the Elgin and being reminded of many great nights there watching Joe Strummer and The 101’ers in their short-lived scruffy pomp, I’ve received the following email from reader Peter Cabret. “Over the last few minutes,” Pete writes, “ I've been reading with interest your blog and memories of seeing The 101'ers at The Elgin. Now, I am 21 so they are years before my time but over the last 5 or 6 months I have been developing a website about The 101'ers. The Elgin page may be of particular interest to you: http://www.101ers.co.uk/theelgin.htm In addition the new Joe Strummer film by Julien Temple "The Future is Unwritten" will, I believe, include footage of The 101'ers playing at The Elgin. Thanks for your time. Cheers Pete” I’ve just spent a very happy half hour on Pete’s site and it’s well worth a look. As well as the basics of a band history and discography, there are fascinating ‘biographies’ of the London venues The 101’ers regularly played – The Elgin, of course, but also The Nashville Rooms, where on two occasions they were supported by The Sex Pistols, The Red Cow, Hope And Anchor, Windsor Castle, The Telegraph on Brixton Hill and The Charlie Pigdog Club, which was a room above The Chippenham pub where I first saw them in February 1975. There are also some great eye-witness accounts from fans recalling the gigs they saw, including a post from former Pink Fairies’ roadie, Joly, who remembers seeing them at ‘some hippie festival’, as he puts it, possibly Windsor or Stonehenge. I wonder if he is thinking of the Watchfield Festival in ’76. This was a chaotic affair, held on a deserted airfield some miles outside Swindon. I remember sitting in a tour bus getting high with Hawkwind when this white van came bouncing across the field, its battered flanks emblazoned with the legend: “The 101’ers – Rhythm & Blues Orchestra”. Joe and the band had turned up on the off-chance they could be added to the bill, but I can’t actually remember them playing. In fact, I can’t remember ANYONE playing, which is what sometimes happened when you hung with the Hawklords. What I do remember is the rain that started falling late in the afternoon, a torrential downpour that accompanied me on the long walk back to Swindon that night, a grim journey still guaranteed to give me nightmares. Anyway, not for the first time, I digress. Thanks to Pete for getting in touch. If anyone else has memories they’d like to share of seeing The 101’ers, you know how to get in touch.

I'm not sure what kind of symmetry this represents, but Richard Swift's new album begins with the sound of tapdancing and nears a close with him crooning, rather sweetly, "I wish I were dead most of the time." "Dressed Up For The Letdown" is Swift's third album, and is a concept album of sorts. It's about a singer-songwriter - let's call him Richard Swift - who struggles for years without success, cursing the ignorance of the labels who refuse to sign him. There's a whole heap of irony here, not least because "Dressed Up For The Letdown" is being released in the UK on Polydor and Swift is now poised for, I hope, a reasonable amount of success. He's one of those prolific types who has such a backlog of songs that each release is a snapshot of a state of mind that he grew out of three or four years ago. So "Dressed Up" presents Swift as fatally resigned to obscurity, while hype-monkeys like me jump around him and call him the new Rufus Wainwright, or the new Harry Nilsson, or maybe a bit of a Laurel Canyon Sufjan Stevens. He's great, clearly. We first came across him at Uncut a couple of years ago, when the fine Indiana label, Secretly Canadian, put out his first two albums, "The Novelist" and "Walking Without Effort". Both had been out before, though I suspect no-one besides Swift's immediate family and the Secretly Canadian A&R actually heard them. Like "Dressed Up", they showed Swift's gift for imbuing contemporary singer-songwriting with a kind of faded, Tin Pan Alley charm. There's a lot of gramophone crackle, and a sort of audio sepiatint that's reminiscent of Van Dyke Parks circa "Song Cycle". A different Americana, I suppose. And it's terrific. Swift has enough charm and skill so that, even at his most maudlin, he sounds playful. He can also put together a neat and direct pop song: check out the video for "Kisses For The Misses" at his Myspace. Now he's got all the suffering out of the way, there's a lot more in his songwriting file like this one. I'm off to Domino Records in a minute to hear the Arctic Monkeys album, by the way. I'll try and report back tomorrow.

What I’ve been playing most recently has been Neon Bible, the second album from The Arcade Fire, the follow-up to Funeral and possibly one of the most keenly-anticipated albums of the year, for which great things are predicted and will probably happen. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ofDTk7j8_WE

I worry, occasionally, that this blog has started to give the impression we spend our days at Uncut listening to nothing but serious, respectable artists with a good decade or two of critical acclaim under their belts. Of course, we do listen to Cave, and Bowie, and Neil Young, and Cat Power, and a hell of a lot of Grateful Dead at the moment. You might not believe this, but Allan even digs out a dusty Dylan CD from time to time. But a big favourite these past couple of weeks has been "The Radiant Mirror", a giant cosmic freak-out by the duo of Chris Corsano and Mick Flower. Those who keep an eye on the psychedelic underground scene documented on Uncut's "Comets, Ghosts And Sunburned Hands" comp from last December may have come across Corsano before. He's a hyperactive, intuitive drummer who emerged from the sprawling Sunburned Hand Of The Man collective, and has played on a lot of free jazz, folk and psych stuff with the likes of Thurston Moore and Six Organs Of Admittance. Mick Flower, meanwhile, is a member of the shadowy Vibracathedral Orchestra, who come from Leeds and who make wild, levitating drones in the style of Sunburned, Jackie-O-Motherfucker. That kind of thing. I first saw them years ago supporting Steve Malkmus and didn't know what hit me. Anyway, "The Radiant Mirror" (on a little French label called Textile) is their first album together, and it's a monster. Three vast tracks ("Earth", "Wind" and "Fire") featuring Corsano clambering spiritedly over his kit and Flower cranking up a shahi baaja - which, the press-release informs me, is a "Japanese electric dulcimer/autoharp". One one level, it's a pretty free racket, fuzzed-out and heavily improvised with heavy echoes of '60s jazz radicals like Sonny Sharrock. But at the same time, there's something about this one that makes it accessible to a bigger audience than pure improv fans. It's a quality, maybe, that's inherent in the shahi-baaja's temple drone being played with such aggression, while Corsano's clatter is always dynamic rather than meandering. Basically, "The Radiant Mirror" is kind of meditative, but totally rocks.