Wooden o

Back to work after the long Easter weekend, and we're being lulled into action by the debut album from Original Silence. Original Silence are ostensibly The Good, The Bad & The Queen for men of a certain age who went to All Tomorrow's Parties and never came back. Their ranks include Mats Gustafsson - a great, spluttery, avant saxophonist from The Thing - one of The Ex, Jim O'Rourke (who claimed he'd quit music a while back, with Sinatra-esque implausibility) and, perhaps inevitably, Thurston Moore.

A few years ago, I spent an afternoon in Camden interviewing a mildly psychedelic indie band called Simian whose first record had been pretty good. To be honest, it was a rather frustrating experience: the singer was quite interesting, if detached, but he didn't get a chance to say much because the drummer just wouldn't shut up. With hindsight, the weird power structure made sense. The singer hasn't done much since, while the drummer - James Ford - has become a dark force in British music, producing Arctic Monkeys and Klaxons and making hip little dance records as Simian Mobile Disco with his old bandmate Jas Shaw.

A bit of a catch-up today. First, thanks for the nice response to the Bjork preview I posted on Friday. I've been comparing "Volta" today with the new Timbaland album, "Shock Value".

The Syd Barrett tributes we couldn't squeeze into this month's Uncut.

Scott Walker returns after 11 years with his most maddeningly cryptic yet compelling album yet

Uncut's John Mulvey's final report from the music world's biggest annual conference in Texas

Zach Braff writes, directs and stars in a romantic comedy about an actor who returns home to New Jersey.

Thirty-track compilation tracking a quarter-century in the life of Reilly

Affable comedy on the news behind the headlines.

It's very long and extremely po-faced, and most of the performances are pretty wooden, Yul Brynner's imperious pharaoh aside. Even so, Cecil B DeMille's 1956 account of the life of Moses (Charlton Heston) still has some impressive sequences-notably the Exodus from Egypt, with 60,000 extras—and remains the definitive Biblical epic.