As I mentioned on Friday, I’m indebted to David for turning me onto this album by Date Palms. Quickly, it reminds me of a bunch of my favourite music - Alice Coltrane, Terry Riley, Pandit Pran Nath, Cluster, Sun Araw, Brightblack Morning Light, PG Six – while combining the influences into something relatively original. Essentially, on “Of Psalms”, Oakland's Gregg Kowalsky and Marielle Jakobsons strip a lot of their music back to the drones and devotional ambience of Eastern-facing cosmic jazz records; Alice Coltrane is an obvious reference point, though the record that seems to me the closest fit, especially with the pivotal “Psalm 3”, is “The Elements”, on which she backed up Joe Henderson. “Psalm 3”’s raga tone is what obviously recalls Pandit Pran Nath, too, and there’s some time-lag layering that brings to mind an obsessive Pran Nath scholar, Terry Riley (with particular emphasis on “Persian Surgery Dervishes” and “Descending Moonshine Dervishes”, I’d say). But there’s also a slothfully funky bass cutting through the piece, joined after about ten minutes by a low Fender Rhodes, which is where the Brightblack allusion comes from: there’s also some of that bass groove on the opening “Psalm 7”, which brings to mind the slow, deep grooves of Sun Araw and maybe just about their British analogue, Forest Swords. Also here, there’s the first sighting of what I think is an autoharp (hence the PG Six reference). “Psalm 4”, meanwhile, is more in a kosmische electronic vein, akin to the bucolic percolations of Cluster circa “Sowiesoso”. I’m conscious that this string of specific references doesn’t really do Date Palms justice, and that it’s perhaps not the best way of articulating a record’s precise sound. But “Of Psalms” joins the dots so effectively between so much music that I love, it’s hard not to flag up the serendipitous echoes that pulse through it. As a profound and transporting meditation, it works great in its own right; just the first, I suspect, of a bunch of good records that I’ll belatedly deiscover after having missed them last year.

Fans of The Fall are, as a rule, hardy beasts. Complaint may come naturally to them, but then so does loyalty. John Peel’s famous encomium, “They are always different, they are always the same,” is the perpetual excuse for their favourite band, which disregards a certain erosion of Mark E Smith’s charms. What once seemed like iconoclasm can now come across, not least in his autobiography, as reactionary: as if Smith has curdled into a Jeremy Clarkson figure for men who prefer a slightly different cut of leather jacket. In this role as picturesquely gnarled National Treasure, Mark E Smith tends to be portrayed as a genius who can compel any old rabble towards brilliance. But actually, for all his dictatorial impulses, Smith often works best as part of a focused, talented, properly-produced team. It’s no accident that Smith’s finest music in the past decade or so has come away from The Fall, on the 2007 Von Südenfed album, when he shared creative responsibilties with the German electronic producers Mouse On Mars. Latterday Fall lineups and periodic critical rehabilitations (last year’s over-praised "Your Future Our Clutter" being a case in point) are decent enough. But when the band’s never-ending, if capricious, reissue programme recycles an old classic, it inevitably throws most of Smith’s 21st Century endeavours into a pretty unflattering light. So it is with the ‘Omnibus Edition’ of "This Nation’s Saving Grace", an album often cited by Fall part-timers – with some justification, it has to be said – as their very best. Here, in all their menacing and utilitarian finery, is arguably the band’s strongest configuration – the 20th Fall lineup, the sleevenotes reveal. At the back, Craig Scanlon (rhythm guitar), Steve Hanley (bass) and a soon-to-depart Karl Burns (drums) operate with a kind of clockwork belligerence. Listen to Hanley – mesmerisingly staunch, covertly funky – grafting away on the Blackwing Version of “Bombast” that surfaces amongst the rough mixes and out-takes on CD2, and the thought occurs that perhaps he, not Peter Hook, was the pre-eminent Manchester bassist of the period. Upfront, meanwhile, it’s easy to characterise Brix Smith as bringing a certain pop nous to The Fall, and while there are glimpses of that (“Vixen”, the b-side of “Cruiser’s Creek”, especially), closer negotiations with the mainstream remain a year or two away. On "This Nation’s Saving Grace", it’s her psychedelic exuberance that stands out, cutting a swathe through the glowering throb of “L.A.” as she incants, “This is my happening, and it freaks me out!” Just off to the side, there’s Simon Rogers, on keyboards and guitar. Rogers is something of an anomaly among the legions of ex-Fall members, a Royal College Of Music graduate who previously figured in panpipe-toting novelty hitsters Incantation (“Cacharpaya (Andes Pumpsa Daesi)”, Number 12 in December 1982) and would subsequently produce The Lightning Seeds and Boy George, and write incidental music for Dalziel And Pascoe. According to new interviews in the sleevenotes, Rogers was at odds with his speeding bandmates because “the fact that I wanted to eat three times a day was seen as weird.” He did, though, bring a new depth to the band: promoting the looming sequencers on “L.A.”; and facilitating the tape collage of “Paintwork”, superior to most of Smith’s similar lo-fi experiments over the next 25 years. Producer John Leckie suggests that Smith was “suspicious” of Rogers’ musicality, and that “Mark… would always have the last word.” Nevertheless, there’s a clarity and force to "This Nation’s Saving Grace" which illustrates the usefulness of studio professionals as a counter to Smith’s idiosyncracies. None of it sounds much like a compromised record, or one remotely anxious to please. Instead, the likes of “I Am Damo Suzuki” are imbued with the sonic richness, as well as the maverick spirit, of Can, while “Gut Of The Quantifier” has the momentum of a runaway juggernaut, miraculously holding a straight course (a Peel version of the same song, included on CD3, doesn’t quite have the same greased heft as Leckie’s album mix). In the midst of it all, of course, there’s Mark E Smith. As ever, he affects to be oblivious of everything going on around him, but it’s doubtful his gravity and wit have ever enjoyed such a dramatic setting. At the start of the Omnibus’ fourth version of “L.A.” (a Peel session take), Smith begins by redeploying the lyrics from his own “Bombast”. “All those that mind entitle themselves shall feel the wrath of my bombast,” he warns, convincingly. “And Lloyd Cole, whose brain and face is made out of… cowpat. We all know that.” Enhanced by the boldness of Brix Smith’s tunes, by Rogers and Leckie’s clean lines, by the thrust of his doughtiest troops, the bile is positively phantasmagoric.

Happy new year: I trust everyone had some kind of decent break. I read Robert Byron on Tibet (for climatic context, possibly), watched Robinson In Ruins, played a fair bit of Pharoah Sanders and The Watersons, and rediscovered that a body clock wrecked by parenthood can be very useful during an Ashes series. I was also introduced by another music journalist to a newish British folk singer called Elle Osborne. Osborne has an EP, “Good Grief”, coming out this month, and the press release that comes with it presents her as pretty appealing: a quote from Alex Neilson pitching her as a cross between Lal Waterson and Nico; some connection with Barry Dransfield; support dates with Alasdair Roberts, James Yorkston and Cath & Phil Tyler (I really must get hold of more stuff by that last duo, incidentally). As the Nico/Waterson allusion suggests, “Good Grief” is quite an austere listen, and there’s a sense that Osborne is drawing lines between the drones and atmospheres of the avant-garde and their ancient antecedents in the British folk tradition. Mostly, though, the four songs here put the focus squarely on her quavering, earthy voice; “The Time Of The Small Sun” features little more than a harmony vocal, some found sounds of children in the distance, and lapping water. Like a good few of Roberts’ records (perhaps “No Earthly Man”, a personal favourite, in particular), Osborne is exceptionally good at making unadorned traditional music sound new and otherworldly; the hovering drones and faintly unnerving birdsong of “The Boatman” being especially potent. I’d say her voice reminds me of Anne Briggs as much as Lal Waterson, but this one’s a good start to 2011. The label “Good Grief” comes on, Folk Police, appears to have some other good stuff lined up, including a new Bob Pegg album. In the meantime, I’ll push on with working out a chart from your favourite albums of 2010 submissions, and post it tomorrow, all being well.