Today, the judges get to grips with Radiohead's "The King Of Limbs". Allan Jones: When I first heard this I felt a sense of anti-climax. Up until In Rainbows I was a bit of a Radiohead agnostic, but that record really made an impression on me in a way that this one didn’t immediately. But on returning to it, I now think it’s got some glorious music on it. “Give Up The Ghost”, especially, is one of their finest songs. Stewart Lee: I thought it was the only record on the list that sounded like it could only have been made now, in as much as the things it was drawing on. I don’t think it’s their best. I think everybody admires their retreat from becoming a huge stadium band and trying to find a business model in which they can carry on doing more interesting things. I don’t think it really sounds like a finished thing, it’s more like a sample of what they’re working on at any given time. Nick Stewart: I’ll be brief. I have a real love-hate relationship with this band. Some of the things they do are just fantastic, and some of the things they do are just garbage. There’s more garbage on here than the fantastic. Mark Cooper: There are some bands, I think, that are best listened to like jazz. The best jazz, when you’re in the moment with it and immersed in it, is the best music on the planet. With Radiohead, I don’t find myself wanting to listen to them that music, but when there are times when somebody puts them on and I just thank God they exist. I really admire their musicality, what they’re doing with rhythms and beats, but a bit like with Polly I miss them being rock stars. The commercial gene in me liked OK Computer. If you put together the musicality and the dread and the originality of arrangement but in a killer song it would be awesome. I wish they would harness this adventurousness into something more accessible. Phil Manzanera: I bought this when it came out, and it’s one of the most played Radiohead albums I own. It’s almost like ambient music, I put it on in the morning and get on with my work with it bubbling away in the background. I’ve got no idea what the lyrics are about, they seem irrelevant to me. That’s the only quibble I have with them, that while there are all these other great lyricists out there at the moment they don’t seem to be saying anything to me. Linda Thompson: If you’re saying that you can listen to them as background music, that’s just unbelievably bad! Phil Manzanera: Well, I listen to Miles Davis as background music, I’ve got very high standards! Stewart Lee: Parts of this actually sound like a 1970s Miles Davis record. Phil Manzanera: I agree with what Stewart said earlier, it’s like a slab of what they’re about at this particular moment in time. I think everything about the way they conduct themselves is admirable, but speaking from a guitarist’s point of view, there’s no guitar on this! And they’ve got one of the best bloody guitarists in the world! Tony Wadsworth: Two of them! Nick Stewart: We were talking about Josh T Pearson being on the edge of self-indulgence, but I think this is completely self-indulgent. They haven’t used their assets. Mark Cooper: I don’t agree with that. They may not have used the assets that I like, but I admire the scope of what they do. Tony Wadsworth: Well, there are so many things that they could do, but they tend to keep things down in favour of experimentation in other ways. Stewart’s right, it does sound like a '70s Miles Davis record, that’s what they themselves have been listening to. I think it’s great that they exist, I think it’s great that they’re still making challenging music, and challenging themselves. Every time they go off to make an album they do want to try and reinvent themselves. Having said that, I don’t think there’s been that much of a reinvention since the last record, this is kind of further along that continuum. But there are beautiful sounds in there, I don’t think it’s self-indulgent, I find it very entertaining. But it would be good to get more of Thom Yorke’s beautiful melodic voice coming through. When it does, like on the song “Codex”, it’s like the sun coming out. But there’s a thing about this band, where they shy away from something when it’s starting to get too big. I mean, OK Computer – arguably the three most commercial songs they recorded in those sessions were left off the album, which is extraordinary for album which was relentlessly commercial in itself. They have that gene where when they think they’re getting too accessible they stop, and that’s what brings out their experimental side. Stewart Lee: It’s interesting that what Radiohead seem to be doing is letting you in on the process of their ongoing system of being artists, which makes it seem fairly arbitrary to think of this as an album. Tony Wadsworth: What will be interesting is how this will sound when they take it live, because it will have progressed even more.

Today, the Uncut Music Award judges ruminate on the power of Josh T Pearson's debut solo album, "Last Of The Country Gentlemen". Allan Jones: This has all the hallmarks of his former band Lift To Experience, it’s basically acoustic guitar, some string flourishes, a little Appalachian fiddle. Most of the songs come in at around 10 minutes, so for a mainstream audience it’s perhaps very demanding. For me, it’s one of the most gripping records of the year, one that I’ve returned to perhaps more than others on the list. Stewart Lee: I didn’t know Lift To Experience or much about the backstory, so I came to this record clean without any preconceptions. The bad thing about it is that the lyrics are quite silly – and it’s not helped by the fact that you can read them clearly. I couldn’t really work out if he was in character, but if he is it’s a fairly clichéd character. But I think it’s really bold, the minimal instrumentation, the length of songs, the fact that it takes you time to get into them. If they pop up at random on your iPod you have to stop what you’re doing, they’ve got this atmosphere about them that stops everything else. I think, in a way, it’s a bit like an excessive version of those strange auteurs who’ve been around for ages, like Jandek. But I think it has an amazing sparseness, and a confidence in not trying to augment the sound in any way. I also like the fact that stuff happens with the guitar playing, there are suddenly breaks in the pattern of the song where he’ll go off and do some sort of instrumentation that doesn’t seem to fit with what’s gone before. I think it’s really good, it was great to come across it without having any preconceptions. Nick Stewart: I did know about Lift To Experience, I played them a lot on my radio show, but this couldn’t be more different. You get drawn into this extraordinary experience. The songs are long, some of them are close to complete indulgence. When you think about the PJ Harvey album and its songs of two minutes and 30 seconds that condense so much, the flipside is this man sprawling himself to 12 minutes in some cases. But there is something quite fascinating about it, and it’s a record I’ll want to go back to again soon. If you think about Tim Buckley and those artists signed to Vanguard or Elektra all those years ago, he’s somewhere in there but at the same time he’s not. Is he Randy Newman? No, he’s not Randy Neman either, but he does fit into that field of American auteur observer. It’s intensely personal, it doesn’t look out very much – at least Bill Callahan is looking out, as is Bon Iver. Stewart Lee: What I’d also like to say about this album, in common with the PJ Harvey record, is what’s really good about them is that they’re both on the edge of being ridiculous at times. I think it’s really great to see someone not trying to be cool. It’s on the edge of absurd, you can almost laugh at the joy of the risk of it. Allan Jones: I think one of the aspects of it that hasn’t been too widely remarked upon is the level of pitch-black humour in it. He does take it to the edge of caricature. Nick Stewart: I agree with Stewart; this is right on the edge, PJ is right on the edge. Mark Cooper: When you see Josh live, as I did at the appropriately-named Slaughtered Lamb, the perfect venue to see him, he actually talked more than he sang. He was a stand-up comic, he was hilarious. I think there’s a way of looking at this record as a stand-up comedy record, I really think you could go that far with it. I think it’s just as dramatic as Polly’s record, you could say it’s a record about self-pity, self-mortification, blaming the woman, all the things that happen in straight country music. He’s interrogated all that in a very post-modern way, and then made a very self-indulgent but also rational record. I think it’s very funny, although all I heard initially was the tragedy of it. But there’s often a lot of comedy in tragedy, and there’s a lot of laughs in this record. That might be a weird thing to say when he’s wallowing away for 10 minutes, but I think he knows exactly what he’s doing. I think, as much as PJ has, he’s created a kind of character. Allan Jones: I saw him at The Great Escape in Brighton, and my first reaction to it was that was like a stand-up routine, with the songs interspersing these increasingly weird monologues. Mark Cooper: I love the idea that there he is in Texas, really caught up in the religiosity of that culture, and as an artist he transposes that into a high-wire act, it’s really impressive. He’s an original. Phil Manzanera: Not knowing anything about him before, and not having seen him live, I just didn’t get it. I just thought it sounded incredibly doomy, and it just didn’t do anything for me at all. Maybe because I didn’t know about this other side of it, I didn’t think Americans did irony. I just heard it as this guy who seems to be into religion, but also the feeling that he was just making it up as he went along, as if the reason why the tracks were so long was that he was just stoned in the studio. If that’s not the case, and all this is done on purpose, then I’ll have to listen to it again in a different way. Mark Cooper: Yeah, it is so close to something that could be so awful or, like Stewart said, ridiculous. It does suck you in, though, it stops you in your tracks. Leonard Cohen is a good comparison, because he’s funny in the way that Leonard is. Phil Manzanera: Maybe it would make more sense to me if I’d seen him live. Mark Cooper: Yeah, I think live you’re able to get it more easily, it’s not quite as pious as it may seem on the surface. Stewart Lee: I do feel it’s one of the records on this list that you can go back to, I feel there’s always more to get out of it. It’s a thing that can keep on giving, whereas a lot of the other records, you get to the end of them and you feel they’re a closed book. Tony Wadsworth: I’m more on Phil’s path, the light bulb didn’t quite click for me. I liked it when he brought a bit more colour into it, like the track “Sweetheart, I Ain’t Your Christ”, there was a shaft of light. I didn’t really want to wallow for that long in this misery. I like miserable records, don’t get me wrong, but I like them to be a bit more structured. Something like Neil Young’s On The Beach is such an amazingly bleak record, but it’s fantastic. Allan Jones: I think that’s funny as well... Tony Wadsworth: ...Leonard Cohen has that as well, but it’s much more disciplined. I dunno, maybe self-indulgence is a good thing sometimes. I get what Stewart said about being stopped in your tracks when something pops up on shuffle on the iPod, but do you really want to listen to a whole album like that? Stewart Lee: Well..., yeah. But I wouldn’t want to inflict it on people. Mark Cooper: It’s not a social record, is it? Stewart Lee: No, it’s not a very social record, it’s something you’d probably end up having quite a hostile relationship with. A lot of this isn’t the sort of stuff I would normally listen to, and I was struck, having not listened to 25 modern rock records in a row for a while, that we’ve reached a sort of saturation point in production, where it’s quite hard to hear through things to what’s going on. In a way, that thing of low-fi about 15 years ago when you make it deliberately a mess is also a kind of cliché. I knew a guy who was remastering things for the Smithsonian Institute, he was taking all the crackles off old Robert Johnson records but then asked to hold on to them so that someone could put them on to a Chris Rea record. But this album is not guilty of either of those things; it’s not produced to the point of, say, Fleet Foxes being trapped in their own architecture, but it isn’t self-consciously scruffy either. Linda Thompson: Josh is somebody who’s over-pathologised his sadness, to the point where he’s seen how risible it is, and I think that’s fantastic. What a lot of people might think is ill-discipline is just free verse, free association. I like it. Phil Manzanera: But in that free verse has he actually said anything that’s illuminating? Mark Cooper: I think the way he shifts the voices, he shifts his attitude to his self-pity is dramatic. It may appear to be wallowing, but there’s a drama to it. I’m not trying to say that it’s not meaningful, but it is artful. Linda Thompson: I don’t think he means it to be particularly ironic. Nick Stewart: I think he’s a poet, he’s interesting. I wish more records were made like this.

In certain circles, it remains sacreligious to criticise Brian Eno. No matter how many awful records he’s involved with, his reputation seems undiminished; never mind the music, we’re advised, feel the ideas. The problem is, of course, that unless you’re a musician of exalted stature, to some degree bored with the process of making records, it’s hard to be privy to those ideas. Oblique strategies might be stimulating for Coldplay or U2 in the studio, but when the end product is so meticulously tailored to the mainstream, the quirks of its genesis are more or less undetectable. Even on Eno’s recent solo albums, it all seems blandly elitist; rather disdainful of the idea of finished music, and of the listeners who are meant to be impressed by it. A few things this month, though, reminded me of Eno’s original genius. First, there were Adam Granduciel’s selections for My Life In Music (page 8 of the new Uncut), in which the War On Drugs’ canonical rock influences sat alongside Fripp & Eno’s "Evening Star" and a 2007 self-titled album by Blues Control, the low-key New York duo of Russ Waterhouse and Lea Cho. “I’d put Blues Control on late at night, maybe after Evening Star,” said Granduciel, an admirer and, perhaps, friend of Blues Control, since his sparring partner Kurt Vile contributed a few diffident bursts of trumpet to their "Local Flavor" (2009). Both of these Blues Control albums are great, as it happens, but "Local Flavor" has, I think, the edge, with its pianos and squitting drum machines floating through fairly lo-fi synthscapes, and some disruptive guitar buried deep in the mix. One track, “Rest On Water”, is like “a needling reimagining of, maybe, an old Budd/Eno jam,” I wrote on my blog at the time. The blues, incidentally, are conspicuous by their absence. Eno no longer appears to have much active interest in this sort of music, allowing the likes of Blues Control to follow through trajectories that he at least seems to have neglected for three decades. With no little serendipity, a new Blues Control album turned up this month, a collaborative jam with a spiritual maverick that Eno discovered busking, on his zither, in New York’s Washington Square. "Frkwys Vol. 8: Blues Control & Laraaji" is the product of a day long session at the end of 2010, and acts as a neat sequel to both "Local Flavor" and "Ambient 3: Day Of Radiance", Laraaji’s 1980 set with Eno. That latter record focused on the playing, at once contemplative and joyous, of Laraaji (born Edward Larry Gordon in 1943), who had dabbled in acting and stand-up comedy before various spiritual revelations led him to the sparkling consolations of the zither, and providing soundtracks for a generation of yogis, meditators and transcendence-seekers. "Day Of Radiance" established a template for the emerging New Age scene, but Blues Control have instinctively grasped that Laraaji’s music is much more vibrant and exploratory than stereotypes of New Age might suggest. Over the 35 weightless minutes of “Somebody Screams”, with (I presume) Laraaji incanting in a voice pitched somewhere between Pandit Pran Nath and Richie Havens, the psychedelic grace and euphoria of the Blues Control/Laraaji album really hits home: a late personal favourite of 2011. And, just plausibly, one that could still resonate with Eno. Today, I remembered the last time I’d heard a sound like Laraaji’s zither, albeit polished to nefarious ends. It was dancing serenely over tablas, in the intro to Coldplay’s “Life In Technicolor II”.