On www.allah-las.com, the Los Angeles band of the same name have posted a bunch of unusually excellent mixtapes. The latest, “Reverberation #25”, is pretty typical, taking in the likes of Jim Sullivan and Tim Hardin as well as the group’s backwards-facing contemporaries: White Fence, Sonny & The Sunsets and another bunch out of what always seems to be an unbelievably small and cliquey LA indie scene, The Beachwood Sparks. There’s a reasonable chance that the Allah-Las might have played a pivotal if discreet role in that scene, since it seems that the band were formed while they were all working at the excellent branch of Amoeba in Hollywood, presumably dealing rare records to their peers. As you’d perhaps imagine, then, the Allah-Las’ do not make notably gleaming and 2012-ready music. Even by the standards of other notionally retro bands, their self-titled debut album is uncannily and magnificently dated, down to every fuzzy chime of the guitars. Beautifully produced by someone I’ve never heard of, described in the notes as “cult new wave R&B wunderkind Nick Waterhouse”, “Allah-Las” seems located right at the point in the mid-‘60s when American garage bands started processing and responding to the British invasion. Obviously, there’s a lot of “Nuggets” love here (“Busman’s Holiday” mixes the Stones with what first seems like a little Dylan, though it’s possibly more likely to be influenced by Mouse & The Traps), but the Allah-Las are more elegant than raucous, a suaver proposition than fellow travellers like The People’s Temple (I wrote about their fine “Sons Of Stone” here). Sometimes, on lovely instrumentals like “Sacred Sands”, the ghostly, lonely surfer draw of The Ventures is stronger than that of The Animals. At other times, you’re lead to suspect that they believe the Stones peaked with “Stupid Girl” (exhibit A: “Tell Me (What’s On Your Mind)”) and that The Byrds were never quite as good as The Beefeaters. Oddly, the most advanced musical echo occurs on “Vis-à-Vis”, when after the jangling intro (cf “She Don’t Care About Time”) they hurtle forward in time to the mid-‘80s, and the kind of, well, Byrds-rich indie promulgated by The June Brides or, for a couple of singles, Primal Scream. It is hard, evidently, to write about the Allah-Las without acknowledging a certain ridiculousness: check the video for “Tell Me” for further proof… http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fiJYecS0vU0 Truth is, though, I’ve enjoyed “Allah-Las” these past few days more than any record in a while: not just for the diligence and love with which they approach this music, but also the quality of the songs underneath the vintage packaging (On “Ela Naveda”, they sound like ‘60s prep boys tentatively becoming bohemian through close study of half a dozen Bossa Nova sides). All very engaging, though it seems as if the band might be evolving towards the late ‘60s next, given that they’re currently in the studio with another noted moderniser, Jonathan Wilson. Promising… Follow me on Twitter: www.twitter.com/JohnRMulvey

To be honest, I’ve not previously had much time for the music of Dan Deacon; for what struck me, perhaps erroneously, as an odd but not quite combustible mix of process, theory, audience participation, electronica and a certain imperishable indie tweeness. Persistent exposure to “America” in my house has, however, provoked a bit of a rethink. “America” still has a writhing, fidgety aesthetic but, more than at least I’ve noticed in the past, there’s a dynamic coherence, too, a melodic force and clarity that emerges out of the glitchstorms as something approaching grandeur. The start might be akin to a 2012 upgrade of Kid 606, but soon enough “True Thrush” spins out, an impressively nagging surge of a song that’s part nursery rhyme and part psychedelic carnival stampede, a juggling of the tropes that have proved so appealing on Animal Collective records, but don’t (to my mind, anyhow) coalesce in quite such a satisfying way on “Centipede Hz”. It’s on Track 4, though, that the greatest strengths of “America” start to emerge, with Deacon’s more formal compositional skills being knitted into an uncommonly exciting soundtrack for his majestic, confusing homeland. “Prettyboy” unveils a sort of vibrating, orchestrated sound that eventually accelerates into the pounding “Crash Jam”, acting as a prelude for the suite which takes up the second half of this increasingly striking record. The first part “USA 1: Is A Monster” alone manages to incorporate symphonic heft, braindance glitch, tribal drumming, choirs and an overall vaulting ambition and nerve which ensures that the results are spectacular rather than an over-reaching mess. It’s the sort of music that, when you’re listening on the move, noticeably increases the length and confidence of your stride and, less viscerally, prompts a scree of potential reference points. Deacon, then, can just about plausibly be recast as a millennial Aaron Copland, albeit one who’s listened to a fair bit of Squarepusher records like “Go Plastic” as well, maybe, as conceptual electronic pranksters like Dat Politics. There are passages towards the end of “USA II: The Great American Desert” which begin like gamelan and proceed, perhaps inevitably, into straight-up Glass systems when that track folds into “USA III: Rail”. Mention of Glass reminds me, too, of Deacon’s similarities with Sufjan Stevens: another notionally indie figure with a passion for incorporating electronica, modern classical composition and an expansive evocation of the USA into his music. While “Rail”’s systems ebb and flow is a neat parallel to passages from “Illinois”, however, many of Deacon’s attempts to build digital noise into his constructs are much more successful than Stevens’ attempts to do something like that on “The Age Of Adz” (maybe closer, now I think of it, to the underrated “BQE” project). What else? A weird echo of Donna Summer’s “State Of Independence” on “USA IV: Manifest”, and a lot that makes me think of a long-forgotten classical/techno hybrid I came across and liked very much in the ‘90s: Todd Levin’s “Deluxe” (I should check out what happened to him, I guess). Finally, plenty of it reminds me of one of the best things I’ve seen and heard this summer, the Olympics Opening Ceremony: specifically the way Underworld and Danny Boyle grasped that electronic music could invoke nobility and epic feats much more effectively than the Coldplay-style anthemic rock that you’d imagine would have been most directors’ default choice as soundtrack. There are endless massed drums, then, elegantly-wrought bombast, and a load of music that could have fitted pretty neatly onto the last album by those unlikely soundtrackers of the athletes’ parade, Fuck Buttons. I should say that The Guardian have a stream of “America” here, and a lot of commenters that seem more preoccupied with Deacon’s facial hair than the excellence of his work. Maybe I’m missing something… Follow me on Twitter: www.twitter.com/JohnRMulvey

With the new Uncut out tomorrow, it just occurred to me that I'd forgotten to post this review from the last issue. I did at least put up the full transcript of my email exchange with Ben Chasny, which you can check out by following this link. "Ascent" is on sale now, by the way. It isn’t, in all honesty, the most canonical and secure of musical judgments. Nevertheless, there is a small cabal of rock fans who will argue all day that a Santa Cruz five-piece called Comets On Fire were one of the great bands of the early 21st Century. Between 2001 and 2006, and over four albums of incrementally rising fidelity, the Comets mastered a hybrid of West Coast psychedelia, hardcore, white noise, classic rock and fever dream sci-fi. “Forward-thinking motherfuckers,” noted an admiring Julian Cope, transfixed by their savagery around the time of 2002’s second album, Field Recordings From The Sun. Around that time, too, Comets On Fire fell in with a guitarist called Ben Chasny, who was making brackish, witchy psych-folk on his own as Six Organs Of Admittance. Initially, Comets were engaged as the backing band for a putative Six Organs release. Soon enough, though, the sessions were aborted. Chasny would continue to release Six Organs records, but his relationship with Comets On Fire had changed: he had also become one of them. Perpetually distracted by their other projects, Comets dissolved sometime after 2006’s Avatar, with frontman Ethan Miller focusing on the brawny orthodoxies of his other band, Howlin Rain. Since then, Chasny has persisted with an adventurous career on the margins, as both an inveterate collaborator (notably with a fractious leftfield power trio, Rangda) and as the meditative Six Organs. It now seems he has decided to tie up some loose ends, too. The supporting players on Ascent, the 13th album released by Chasny under the Six Organs brand, are his old comrades from Comets On Fire: more experienced, steered by Chasny’s vision rather than their collective mania, but no less potent and exciting. Chasny is predominantly known as an acoustic player, with a style that is rooted in the folk ragas of Robbie Basho and Peter Walker, but privileges fervour and caprice, an unruly imagination, over doughty virtuosity. When he switches to electric, his songs often lock into swirling patterns and spiritual drones, orbiting around songforms that take the form of distant muttered incantations. Those frail melodies remain, but Ascent plays down the cyclical scrabbling. “A Thousand Birds” and “Close To The Sky” were both essayed during the doomed 2002 sessions (which Ethan Miller has made available at his blog, www.silvercurrant.blogspot.co.uk) before turning up in acoustic form on Six Organs’ Dark Noontide (2002) and Compathia (2003). Here, though, Utrillo Kushner (drums) and Ben Flashman (bass) wander into dogged Crazy Horse grooves, leaving Miller (a reverbed constant in the right channel) and Noel Von Harmonson to provide simmering guitar backup, and Chasny to fly untethered over the top. His solos may spit, writhe and yank the songs into new shapes, but Chasny is an unusually egoless player. For all the extensive fireworks, his style feels more punkish and exploratory than mere showboating: witness the doubled-up shredding that cuts a swathe through “Even If You Knew” (another tune retrieved from the 2002 batch), its fuzzy pulse related to the Doors’ “Five To One”. The strongest echo of Comets On Fire’s old work comes on the opening “Waswasa”, an overdriven belt-buckle boogie (in which Kushner, as Cope once put it, “is sometimes two drummers [who] both think they are Keith Moon.”) that recalls one of their more streamlined tracks, “Sour Smoke” (2006). Mostly, though, Ascent sounds like Chasny channelling a great band’s alchemical powers to his own ends, in the process making what may turn out to be a highpoint in his already rich and complex career. It adds, too, a pleasing new chapter to one of rock’s less celebrated cult stories, even if we should be wary of overplaying the sentimentality. In “Close To The Sky”, Chasny’s mammoth and elaborate solo is eventually tamed by a beautifully jangling acoustic line, which you’d initially assume to be an intuitive contribution by Miller. The idea of a mythical jam is a romantic one but, ultimately, Ascent is a Six Organs record. The acoustic guitar, it transpires, is an overdub added by Chasny himself, finessing his masterpiece long after the reunion sessions are over. Follow me on Twitter: www.twitter.com/JohnRMulvey