Before we settled on the “Music That Made Bolan Boogie” CD to go with this month’s issue, we toyed with a compilation of new, glam-influenced music. Miles Johnson, one of our designers, has been talking for a while now about a distinct glam strain appearing in American garage rock, and songs by Nobunny, King Tuff and The Smith Westerns, among others, would’ve almost added up to a decent CD. The cornerstone could have been something from “Ty Rex”, an EP of fuzzed-out Bolan covers that came out this spring on the Goner label. “Ty Rex”, as the title lets slip, is the work of Ty Segall, a Bay Area workaholic who last year made a terrific album called "Melted", planted with enough tunes amidst the ramalam to suggest he might be the next garage rock poster boy, after Kurt Vile, to step up an indie league or two. This summer’s Segall album, "Goodbye Bread", doesn’t quite do the job, being a little more Lennonish and dislocated than might have been expected. Segall moves fast, though, and the very latest recordings that he’s been involved with - both involving a new name to me, Mikal Cronin - are pretty fantastic. First, and most salient, Segall and Cronin have collaborated on a couple of exuberantly feral David Bowie covers, “Fame” and “Suffragette City”. As is now tradition for this column, these tracks are only available as an extremely limited edition on an arcane format - part of a book of flexidiscs titled “Castle Face Presents Group Flex”. Assuming that, like us, you don’t actually own this already rare artefact, it’s worth checking out the Segall/Cronin jams on Youtube (at http://bit.ly/p9Y1EG and http://bit.ly/pdPTPW). Better still, though, there’s Mikal Cronin’s self-titled album, produced by Segall and out this month on the Trouble In Mind imprint. Segall appears to come from Orange County, California, and also serves with a straight-up garage punk band, The Moonhearts (their own self-titled album from last year, on Tic Tac Totally, is good fun). "Mikal Cronin" is no less exciting, but draws from a much wider range: the very first seconds are filled with a capella harmonies indebted to The Beach Boys’ “Our Prayer”. Trouble In Mind’s crib notes for hacks reference The Everly Brothers and Nilsson, which initially seem a bit far-fetched, but repeated plays genuinely reveal a dazed, jangling melodicism. When the feedback dies down on, say, “Situation” or “Again And Again”, a real sweetness cuts through, while “Get Along” somehow reminds me of both the Everlys and the Nirvana of “About A Girl”. The thumping piano and home-baked grandeur of “The Way Things Go” is rather Nilsson-ish, for sure, and there’s even a whistling solo on “Hold On Me”, for what it’s worth. Not much glam, mind. If you want to check out Miles’ putative garage rock/glam scene, he’s pulled together a Spotify playlist at http://bit.ly/q2uf4T. Have a play and let us know what you think.

Bit of a hack through the backlog today, beginning with a mild disappointment, Stephen Malkmus & The Jicks’ “Mirror Traffic”. No arguing about the clarity of Beck’s production – there’s the same crispness he brought to the Thurston Moore solo set earlier this year. Nevertheless, I’m not convinced that the relative tightness and economy that he brings is the best showcase for Malkmus’ skills these days. I guess I rate “Real Emotional Trash” just about as highly as any Pavement album, mostly because of the way the Jicks collectively bend and stretch Malkmus’ characteristically crafted songs into frequently rearing jams. In comparison, “Mirror Traffic” is a more discreet and tidy beast, and maybe the closest analogue in Malkmus’ back catalogue is “Brighten The Corners”; in some ways more conventional and poppy than the record that precedes it, but oddly harder to get into (for me, at least). “Senator”, for instance, is a terrific song that feels a little squeezed; there’s a point at the end when Malkmus starts a solo, before putting the brakes on in a weirdly anti-climactic way. Malkmus albums can take a while to bed in, of course; it was months before the marvels of “Pig Lib” fully revealed themselves. In the meantime, I can particularly recommend the sweet expansions of “Brain Gallop”; “Spazz” (a varispeed précis of Malkmus’ career, after a fashion, leaning quite heavily on “Wowee Zowee”); the oddly needling solo that ends “Long Hard Book”. Quite a bit written about “Mirror Traffic” has noted how it was recorded while Malkmus was preparing for the Pavement reunion, as if that duty somehow reined in his more psychedelic excesses. It’s not the usual way that solo projects are used, and certainly not how Lindsey Buckingham seems to work. Last time I wrote about Buckingham and “Gift Of Screws”, my self-professed ignorance/suspicion of a lot of Fleetwood Mac drew a fair bit of approbrium from his more dedicated fans. Nevertheless, I’ll risk it again, because “Seeds We Sow” is another really interesting record. Even more than that last album, “Seeds We Sow” feels like a hermetically-sealed, satisfyingly odd album, an absolutely driven pursuit of a singular artistic vision. On one level, “In Our Own Time” is a pretty orthodox rock song, but Buckingham smartly flaunts his home studio solipsism and his ProTools rig rather than faking a virtual band with it. The results are fractured and disorienting, with some unearthly, obsessive-compulsive guitar textures. While there are certainly some beautiful, rippling reveries like the title track and “Stars Are Crazy”, which hark back to “Under The Skin”, many of the songs on “Seeds We Sow” sound – to a relative neophyte, remember – like they’d work pretty well for Fleetwood Mac. It’s the treatments - so micro-managed and fastidious; hyper-sharp and dreamy at the same time – that see Buckingham really asserting his independence. I like it, if that’s OK with his proper fans…

It is hard not to be nostalgic on nights like this. About an NME night when Pulp were on the bottom of a bill headlined, I think, by Kingmaker. About the party for “OU” at the Leadmill, with a problematic balloon launch and a large papier mache head, and the party for “Do You Remember The First Time” at the ICA. About Glastonbury, of course, and Reading, and the ‘shoegazing’ show at the Underworld, when the band played behind picture frames made from gold-painted shoes and Suede supported, appearing without Justine Frischmann for the first fateful time. About an extraordinary night at the Dome in Tufnell Park, when Pulp opened with a ten-minute instrumental to soundtrack Jarvis Cocker feeding the sparse audience miniature doughnuts off his fingers. And about the farewell show in a Rotherham museum. In many ways, Pulp can come across as a rather callous band, but they are also one with a repertoire – “Do You Remember The First Time”, “Disco 2000”, naturally - that could have been written for sentimental reunions. So it is that 2011’s most noted revival act nears the end of its summer activities with a relatively intimate show at, as Cocker notes early on, a venue with an actual roof. The Mis-Shapes are back, too, though one suspects a good proportion have grown into decent media careers. Watching the BBC’s Reading coverage at the weekend, a few things about Pulp were striking: how they could once again make such an imposing racket out of relatively crude musical skills; how many great songs they have, and how few actual hits. The Reading show looked brilliant, and was brilliantly constructed, balancing the rueful intimacies with surging epics: “This Is Hardcore”, “Sunrise”, “F.E.E.L.I.N.G.C.A.L.L.E.D.L.O.V.E.”, “I Spy”. But those last two songs sadly don’t make an appearance at Brixton - tonight, the setlist doesn’t have quite the same graceful arc. It does, though, have a bunch of songs dug out of the less frequented areas of their catalogue: “Bad Cover Version” and a mightily atmospheric, if somewhat lost, “Wickerman” from “We Love Life”; the art school disco of “Countdown” from “Separations” (though not, unfortunately, “My Legendary Girlfriend”); and a superb “O.U”, its frazzled, homebaked take on spacerock given extra muscle by an extended lineup that includes Leo Abrahams on guitar. Richard Hawley also sits in with his former employers on a few numbers, most notably “Lipgloss” - a song which Cocker admits they’ve always had trouble playing – where Hawley out of the four guitarists seems to be handling the peculiar, rapidly looping main riff. It’s not always obvious what this army of musicians are actually doing, but the sound they make, especially when they cluster round the Peter Thomas sample that threads through “This Is Hardcore”, is seriously impressive. “This Is Hardcore” remains, to these ears, Pulp’s best and most wrenching – poignant even, after a fashion – song. It’s run close by a few more in this set, though: the aforementioned “Sunrise”, still sounding like a cross between Roxy Music, Spiritualized and something very roughly approximating folk music; the jangling and ecstatic “Babies”; and of course, “Common People”. It was to Pulp’s commercial benefit and, perhaps, ultimate misfortune, that Britpop came along, giving them a vehicle into the mainstream that other putative genres (I remembered, mid-gig, one dreamed up by Stuart Maconie and Andrew Collins, called Lion Pop, ostensibly to take the piss out of Steve Lamacq’s energetic neologising) had failed to provide. Away from all that, though, it’s clearer than ever that it was an accident of circumstance that lumbered Pulp with such a tag. In reality, they belonged – and belong – to an older and better tradition of chippy British artrock, one that from time to time comes into fleeting but delicious contact with the mainstream. A reminder, then, of the powers of a great band, but also of what the British music scene currently, and so grievously, lacks. SETLIST 1. Do You Remember the First Time? 2. Countdown 3. Lipgloss 4. O.U. 5. Have You Seen Her Lately? 6. Something Changed 7. Disco 2000 8. Sorted For E's & Wizz 9. Wickerman 10. Bad Cover Version 11. Babies 12. Underwear 13. This Is Hardcore 14. Sunrise 15. Bar Italia 16. Common People ~ 17. Razzmatazz 18. Mis-Shapes