Seasoned campaigner yanks up his roots... Save for a 2005 solo album and an unlikely recent collaboration with Petter Øien at the Norwegian heats of Eurovision, Bobby Bare has been pretty low key since the early ‘80s. So where better to mount a comeback than Plowboy Records, the new label set up by Eddy Arnold’s grandson to restore the profile of once-thriving country players? There is something satisfyingly cyclical about Darker Than Light. Not only has the Nashville veteran returned to RCA’s famed Studio B, scene of 1962’s debut hit “Shame On Me”, but he’s also reached back into the folk-rooted songs that first inspired him. One of them is “Tennessee Stud”, which uses Arnold’s ‘50s version as a template from which Bare canters off at a fair old clip, gut-twanging guitar in tow. It’s one of the standouts of a highly engaging set, mostly covers, that finds him joined by ace guitarists Buddy Miller and Randy Scruggs, as well as Robert Plant’s rhythm section from Band Of Joy. In truth, we could easily do without “House Of the Rising Sun” or his revival of U2’s “I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For”. But the rest of it tips fresh blood into some of America’s more picked-at traditional songs. Largely it’s to do with Bare’s sonorous voice, still a thing of sturdy authority at the age of 78, which gives the likes of “Shenandoah” and “Boll Weevil” the full weight they deserve. Conversely, the band often bring a lightness of touch, zipping through “John Hardy” and Merle Travis’s “Dark As A Dungeon” with an immediacy that suggests these are songs still warm from the presses. Not everything is antique. Alejandro Escovedo is at hand for harmony vocals on his own “I Was Drunk”, a tune that the weathered Bare admits he can relate to more than most. And of the two originals, “I Was A Young Man Once” (co-written with producer Don Cusic) is as elegantly poignant as it is wistful and nostalgic. Let’s hope he’s here to stay this time. Rob Hughes

Journey through the past... The songwriter's solo debut proper is his most personal statement yet... Ironically, Damon Albarn's most personal project so far doesn't open with the singer himself, but with the whiskery bohemian tones of '50s jazz-rap cat Lord Buckley, renowned for his surreal beat monologues, often delivered whilst sporting military 'tache and pith helmet. "They, they didn't know where they was going," barks the Most Immaculately Hip Aristocrat, "but they knew where they was wasn't it." Despite being an outsider's words, they are remarkably apt for Albarn, who despite his success has managed to remain something of an outsider in the pop universe himself. Indeed, it could be the mission statement for his career. For wherever his interests lie at any particular moment - imaginary plastic beach, pan-continental musical hybrid, oriental fantasy, enigmatic historical polymath - the one thing you can guarantee is that it won't be the same impulse driving him next week, next month, next year. Which makes Everyday Robots all the more surprising: because for the first time, this always forward-moving artist has chosen to hit pause and rewind on his life, scanning back through snatched glimpses of childhood, adolescence and problematic maturity to create a musical portrait of himself. Not a strict, naturalistic portrait - those are rarely successful, and too often degenerate into point-scoring retribution – witness Dylan's "Ballad In Plain D" and the bitchier entries in The Beatles' break-up - but a coded, semi-abstract picture in which musical shapes and lyrical images assume anthropomorphic forms and suggestive tableaux, whether it's children swimming in an East London pond, eight hours of "freedom taking cocaine" on a tour bus, Notting Hill vibrating with post-carnival energy, or "flying over black sands in a glass aeroplane", a particularly resonant line from "Photographs". That track also features a proto-hipster soundbite, Timothy Leary warning some psychedelic initiate about being careful with photographs. It's a premise Albarn extends into the notion "When the photographs you're taking now are taken down again," an acknowledgement of the inevitable cycles of time that render all images transitory, even as the images freeze all motion: that frozen moment hurtles into the past, and is gone. Or at least, it used to be gone: now, just pressing "SEND" impales the subject on the spike of global ridicule, forever. This is a subtext of Everyday Robots, the way that interpersonal communication is increasingly ceded from a world of fleshly bonhomie to a technological realm, one more methodical yet bewilderingly abstract - how can you tell the "person" you're "chatting" with on social media is what they claim to be, or indeed, not just a cunningly-programmed machine? "We are everyday robots on our phones," suggests the title-track, "...looking like standing stones, out there on our own." A rickety mechanical gait carries a typically poignant Albarn melody picked out in a simple piano figure, with a curiously unsettling recurrent high-pitched violin squeak lending a discomfiting edge to the wistful strings. That musical formula dominates the arrangements of Albarn and producer Richard Russell, with songs suspended in a fragile net of glitchy found-percussion loops, field recordings, melancholy pastel melodies and tints of strings. It's beautifully designed to evoke both the reluctant abandonment of time in many songs, and the creeping alienation of "Hostiles" and "The Selfish Giant". The latter is especially haunting and memorable, typically Albarn in the way it blends the engaging and the experimental, with delicate details of winds and glockenspiel picking out the sadness of the situation - "It's hard to be a lover when the TV's on, and nothing's in your eyes" - over Keith Jarrett-esque piano flourishes. Elsewhere, wistful harmonium and swirling synth underscore "Photographs", while piano and acoustic guitar surf the keening decline of Eno's synth on "You And Me", its fading carnival glories condensed to a residue of steel pans about four minutes in. "I met Moko Jumbie, he walks on stilts through the All Saints Road," claims Albarn, referring to the African carnival spirit co-opted into the Notting Hill Carnival, but which he first encountered in the Congo. Another of his African encounters is celebrated in "Mr Tembo", the album's simplest, most joyous singalong moment. Dedicated (and first sung to) a baby elephant in Tanzania, it's a light, frisky ukelele number over a shuffle-rattle percussion groove, with a gospel choir from Albarn's childhood manor of Leytonstone brimming with upful exuberance on the hooky refrain. The elephant, apparently, was being transported elsewhere: "He's where he is now, but it wasn't what he planned," sings Albarn, creating a neat link back to the Lord Buckley quote that opens the album. His Leytonstone roots are referred to again in another of the standout tracks, "Hollow Ponds", perhaps the most ambitious attempt at telescoping time here. Brief glimpses whisk us back and forth: kids cooling in a pond in the heatwave of 1976; the road he once lived in being severed by the M11 link road in 1991; seeing the graffiti "modern life is rubbish" sprayed on a wall in 1993. Flugelhorn lends a touch of wan yearning over acoustic guitar arpeggios and organ, with evocative children's playground voices summoning us back to simpler times. On a sometimes courageously candid album, perhaps the most revealing track is "The History Of A Cheating Heart", where over delicately naked acoustic guitar and a poignant three-chord string figure, he admits the intrinsic infidelity of creativity: "I carry this upon my back always/If you fall, then I will put you back/I do love you, but it's just a fact/The history of a cheating heart is always more than you know". It's a moment of brave vulnerability characteristic of what is a predominantly melancholy album, which is perhaps an unavoidable corollary of retrospection. It's surely this realisation that leads Albarn to close the album with "Heavy Seas Of Love", where Brian Eno's fulsome, cheery lead vocal drives home just how sad the rest of the album is by comparison. But the hopeful tone of this song of fellowship points to another aspect of Albarn's character - the outgoing, organisational spirit that pulls together diverse companies to create musical links between continents. For the most part here, however, Everyday Robots is a less ebullient, more intimate and reflective affair, as befits the tentative revelation of a man's soul. Andy Gill Photo credit: Linda Brownlee Visit our dedicated features section, with plenty of our best long pieces archived there. You can find it here.

Oscillating garage rock weirdness from West Coast psychonaut... There’s always been something restless about Thee Oh Sees. It’s in the shimmering psychedelic music they have been recording since 2008’s The Master’s Bedroom Is Worth Spending A Night In. It’s in the speed with which they put out new releases, 13 in six years including lives and comps, plus numerous EPs and seven inches. It’s in the constant changes of musical emphasis, the switches between light and dark, pop and experimental, with the band’s heaviness peaking on 2013’s formidable, metal-flirting Floating Coffin. And it’s there in spades on Drop, the first album since ringmaster John Dwyer announced he was taking a break, a widely misinterpreted “hiatus” that lasted, oh, a couple of months, while Dwyer moved to LA and effectively became a solo artist, having left the band behind in SF. This is a band that refuses to settle down. That isn’t clear at first, when Drop sounds like a continuation of Floating Coffin, with the monstrous opening track “Penetrating Eye” playing out on an unsettling, industrial palate of wildly shrieking guitars and an evil ‘na na na na’ chorus that sounds a little like being aurally tortured by the Joker. Nothing else on the album is quite as heavy, even if it shares that discomforting atmosphere. “Encrypted Bounce” is a mite more relaxed – if sounding like Suicide can be considered thus – but even here there’s a semi-crazed Mellotron solo in the middle eight before it locks into a wicked groove. Drop was created in a Sacramento studio by Dwyer and producer/drummer Chris Woodhouse, and carries an air of synth-heavy experimentation, as the pair take a song and then beat it boldly out of shape and back again. The joy is in how much of it there is to listen to, with constant changes of tempo, instrument and texture that manage to maintain an overall coherence while keeping anybody from getting bored. The occult, mysterious “Savage Victory” ends in a buzz of fuzz that leads to the strange delights of “Put Some Reverb On My Brother”. “I can’t see you, you can’t see me” the Lynchian lyrics repeat intensely against claustrophobic 8-bit guitars, before the song abruptly switches to blissed-out 1967 freakpop, with refreshing organ and acoustic guitar backing dreamy vocals that counter, “I can see you, you can see me”. Then the cycle repeats, going back and forth for two-and-a-half endless, spiralling, minutes. “Drop” is a more conventional piece of guitar-led garage-pop, and Dwyer probably could have recorded a whole album like this, but it wouldn’t have been half as interesting. This is one of the few songs from the album you may hear live given that Dwyer has decided to ditch keyboards as he puts together a new touring band from LA-based musicians. Dwyer had lived in the Bay Area for 16 years, becoming a key part of the scene that spawned Ty Segall, Mikal Cronin and the Fresh & Onlys. He moved to LA for reasons of space as much as anything, but was delighted to discover he’s now neighbour to a stoned, 60-year-old drummer “who can’t hear shit”, so is free to make as much noise as he wishes. Fittingly, “Camera” comes in thumping like a grunge “Stepping Stone” and wears well its menacing Link Wray strut, before we meet the ultra-weird “The Kings Nose”, that lulls you by beginning with a Pink Floyd-style haze until you realise every line of lyric will be met by a jolting guitar flourish, creating a stop-start effect that really pulls the rug out from under you. Once more, you don’t quite know what to expect. “Transparent World” is abuzz with feedback, before Dwyer says goodbye with the lush “The Lens”, wrapping up a lyrical fascination with the human gaze – eyes, camera, lenses are recurring themes. It’s a soothing ear bath after 30 torrid, tremendous, minutes of electrifying weirdness. Peter Watts Q&A John Dwyer Is the hiatus over? That was a social media shitstorm and I decided to stay out of it. People’s memories are so short everything is relative. I just said I was taking a break while I moved to LA. It was a reboot of my life. I’m older, I need some elbow room. I have nothing bad to say about SF, it was just too damn full. There’s still such an amazing scene there. There’s Pow!, the Scrapers and a band with a terrible name who are so fucking good, Chad And The Meatbodies. They blew my head off, total shredders, like a psychpop Iron Maiden. Who played on Drop? Me and Chris [Woodhouse] worked on it together. I wrote a bunch of demos and then brought them to him. We recorded in a studio in Sacramento, an old banana-ripening warehouse. He plays drums and we switch instruments throughout. We recorded 15 songs and then cut back. Regardless of what people might think about my output, I’ve tried to be a little bit better at editing. Have you put a new touring band together? I’m working on a few things. I don’t know how much of this will be played live. The future of the band doesn’t hold much keyboard, I want to go more guitar. I’ll still record with a keyboard but I’m burned out with it live. I’ve been getting trapped into synthesizer land, I’m just surrounded by drum machines and keyboards while all my rock and roll stuff is in another studio. There comes a time where every guitarist discovers the keyboard. INTERVIEW: PETER WATTS