Listening to “Tomboy” on the way to work this morning, I started thinking about how Radiohead and Panda Bear have both played the internet these past few weeks/months. I read a very good piece yesterday by Stephen Troussé, that’ll be in the next print edition of Uncut, about “The King Of Limbs” and what he calls “the re-enchantment of the album release.” Not wanting to steal all Stephen’s thunder or ideas, but he does talk a lot about Radiohead Week and the communal anticipation/gratification that came with “The King Of Limbs”’ release plot, a kind of modern upgrade of old-fashioned, pre-internet, pre-leak frenzy. Panda Bear, though, has taken the opposite route with “Tomboy”, stretching the frenzy out over the best part of a year, exploiting the internet to present a kind of work in perpetual progress: playing the songs live, so that putative versions fill up Youtube; releasing most of the tracks as singles; repeatedly pushing the album release date back; then remixing the lot with Sonic Boom. Rather than a rapid surprise, it’s an epic tease – and Noah Lennox’s dense, elusive music is as suited as any to be showcased in a state of constant flux. For more assiduous followers, I guess the actual arrival of “Tomboy” as a finished piece of work might be something of an anticlimax. But it’s evidence of my quaint attachment to albums over tracks that, fannishness notwithstanding, I haven’t felt compelled to keep up with the singles and leaks over the past few months. Apologies in advance, then, that I’m not in a position to compare these final, Sonic Boom-assisted versions with the earlier takes. In comparison to “Person Pitch”, though, the loops and samples have been much stripped back. This is still fanatically textured music, but the unsteadily shifting layers are closer to those of the Animal Collective rather than any of Lennox’s previous solo records: the glittering timelag accumulation of the lovely “Surfer’s Hymn”, for instance – Terry Riley re-upholsters “Pet Sounds”, glibly – would’ve sat pretty comfortably just after midway through “Merriweather Post Pavilion”. Both Riley and The Beach Boys are reflex critical responses to Animal Collective and especially Panda Bear projects, of course. But more than ever, the latter seems glaringly pertinent: even if, on the waterlogged schaffel of “Slow Motion”, it occurs to me that Lennox is tonally closer to pinched Al Jardine than to Brian Wilson. “Last Night At The Jetty”, “Benfica”, and “Friendship Bracelet”, again, feel like “Pet Sounds” songs dropped into a contemporary echo chamber. If some of AC/PB work has previously been easy to characterise as in some way infantilised, many of these songs capture a tentative, melancholy sweetness on the cusp of maturity; an age of pop defined so poignantly by Wilson. Which reminds me: Lennox has never been involved in a poppier record. Beneath the trademark amniotic sloshing, there’s a melodic clarity and directness that’s more pronounced than ever, unmediated by Avey Tare’s more jarring aesthetic (must revisit his solo album, while I think about it). And for all their deference to adjusted ‘80s pop, it’s hard to think of one of Animal Collective’s chillwave/hypnagogic descendants – save Ariel Pink – who can be quite so accessible while at the same time synthesising such a pervasive air of dislocation, of otherness. If there’s a caveat it may be that, in spite of all their innovations and pleasures, I suspect that there may soon come a time when Lennox and Animal Collective’s aerated schtick might start sounding a little played out to me. Not just yet, though. Belying its public gestation, “Tomboy” feels like an impeccably constructed and complete album experience. But a clutch of songs still stand out as some of Lennox’s very best: “Scheherezade”, devotional ambient minimalism that feels like a technological upgrade of something from “Young Prayer”; and two relative bangers, “Afterburner” and the title track, which both harbour a sort of pulsating urgency, a saturated delirium, while somehow managing to keep the air of dazed solipsism that binds the album together. If you’ve been following the singles thus far, let me know how this tallies…

I have a good few mysterious records in my collection, as you can probably imagine. Among the more obtuse are a bunch by a shadowy New York collective called The No-Neck Blues Band. It’s not always easy to read these albums, since the band have an apparent disdain for even the most fundamental marketing expediencies. Often, their name is nowhere to be found on the package, replaced by a kind of glyph that, decoded, reads NNCK. No surprise, I guess, that No-Neck’s music is similarly elusive. Mostly, their records (I like 2003’s "Intonomancy" best, of the ones I have) are eerie commune jams; improvised dispatches from the wilder shores of the free-folk movement. One of their number, though, is called Dave Shuford, who increasingly works under the name of D Charles Speer to make a radically different sort of music. Where No-Neck feel unanchored and ethereal, D Charles Speer and his band The Helix sound tremendously earthed, deep in American tradition. I’ve written plenty before about bands who straddle the divide between roots music and the avant-garde. Many clustered around the late guitarist Jack Rose, and figured on the "Honest Strings" tribute album; The Helix actually joined Rose on his last EP, “Ragged And Right”. Nevertheless, the disparity between No-Neck’s explorations and the Helix’s honky-tonk country rock is still startling. Ostensibly, on their forthcoming third album, Speer and The Helix resemble a terrific, intermittently cosmic, bar band. There’s an obvious antecedent for this stuff, and much of Leaving The Commonwealth has the spirit of The Grateful Dead circa "Europe ’72", especially the roistering, spiralling “Freddie’s Lapels”. But everything here, from zydeco dalliances to the levitational riffing of the title track, is hugely enjoyable in its own right. Speer is a charismatic baritone, paying sweet homage to Rose during “Cumberland” (“Still can’t believe Dr Ragtime’s gone,” he drawls, “he should be right over there, booing this lousy song.”), and he’s blessed with a fine and feisty band; Hans Chew, whose own "Tennessee And Other Stories…" was one of my favourites of 2010, is prominent on piano throughout, along with the pedal steel ace, Marc Orleans (another No-Neck vet, who also figures in the equally zonked Sunburned Hand Of The Man). Digressing for a moment, Chew and Orleans provide back-up to the guitarist Chris Forsyth on his new one, "Paranoid Cat". There’s a tribute to Jack Rose here, too (“New Pharmacist Boogie”), but the album’s dominated by the amazing 20-minute title track, where Forsyth moves through Sandy Bull-ish passages of folk-raga, through systems drones, and into rattling full-band workouts and rearing electric cacophonies. Some of Forsyth’s more abstract moments sit reasonably well alongside yet another D Charles Speer album on the way, a solo set called "Arghiledes". This one is, of all things, a selection of bouzouki freak-outs heavily influenced, it seems, by early 20th Century Greek drug music. As a document of Speer’s eclecticism and virtuosity, it’s certainly compelling, and it makes me wonder what other tangents are hidden on his CV. I found a couple of his albums with The Suntanama, pleasingly ragged Southern-rockers from the turn of the century, at home. But can anyone fill me in on Enos Slaughter? Egypt Is The Magick #? Coach Fingers? Your help, as ever, is much appreciated.

I was reading the latest edition of Uncut last night, as I should, when I came across this quote from Kurt Vile, sat at the bottom of Louis Pattison’s review of “Smoke Ring For My Halo”. “It’s got this kind of wandering, mellow feel,” Vile says of his album. “We recorded a lot of rockers, but they just didn’t seem to fit.” Listening to “Smoke Ring For My Halo” – and I’ve listened to it a lot, in varying moods, over the last couple of months or so – you can see Vile’s point. More even than his previous records, the whole album feels locked into a hermetically-sealed, tonally consistent space. Vile has always been good at creating and sustaining an atmosphere, and on “Smoke Rings…” he excels himself. The space in question, to be honest, sounds mighty like his bedroom, even though the production is mostly plusher than before. There has always been something about Vile which makes him seem like a slacker throwback, in spite of his hallucinatory rethinks of Lindsey Buckingham, Tom Petty and so on. He guests on the new J Mascis acoustic album, and generally cultivates a certain not-quite-sure-how-to-get-out-of-bed nonchalance. “Think I’ll never leave my couch again,” he confesses, perhaps unnecessarily, on the closing “Ghost Town”. A less indulgent way of talking about this sort of thing would be to say that it all sounds the same, of course. But although Vile seems to be operating in an even narrower channel than usual, it’s pretty remarkable how these jangling, insouciant songs, at first hard to distinguish, become memorable. The first half of “Smoke Ring…”, in particular, eventually runs like a sequence of insidious, dazed hits, from the sweetly rippling “Baby’s Arms”, through to the fractionally more wired “Society Is My Friend”. Also in there is one of Vile’s finest songs, “Jesus Fever”, and another called “On Tour”, with a set of lyrics that capture the spectacularly torpid inanity that musicians, stuck indefinitely in the back of a van, can fall victim to. The flipside, of course, is that “On Tour” can sound merely inane, and I guess that while “Smoke Ring…” holds an indolent ambience, it can verge on the irritating if you’re not quite in the mood. For all the air of mildly acidic sloppiness, it’s a meticulously orchestrated album, and while Vile might talk of a “wandering feel”, one or two of the songs would benefit from meandering out of their orthodox structure, heading into the more fraught and abstract lo-fi zones of last year’s “Square Shells” EP; there’s nothing here to match the dislocation of “Invisibility: Nonexistent”, for instance. Maybe, too, by focusing on the dazed troubadour schtick, Vile is hiding away some of his greatest talents. Not only is he good at a certain kind of careering, seething rock’n’roll – like “Freak Train” on his last, more rounded album, “Childish Prodigy” – but you could argue that those rock songs provide a more dramatic and striking context in which to show off the intimacies of his acoustic work. I think this one is out any day now, so perhaps you have different takes on it?