Looks like we’re heading deep into 2011 releases now, and this latest by Arbouretum, slated for January, is a really good one. If you’ve not latched on to this distinctly underrated Baltimore band, there’s a bit of catching-up available here: a piece on their last album, “Song Of The Pearl”; a live review from 2009’s blinding Club Uncut show; and something about Dave Heumann’s recent side-project, Coil Sea. Since that 2009 tour finished, Heumann has fiddled with Arbouretum’s lineup, and it initially looks like bad news that Steve Strohmeier – crudely, Richard Lloyd to Heumann’s Verlaine – has departed the ranks, to be replaced by a keyboards player. As it turns out, though, “The Gathering” is if anything heavier than previous Arbouretum records. The familiar influences I’ve logged before are all present and correct; Heumann’s debt to the serpentine intricacies of Richard Thompson’s songwriting is more pronounced than ever. This time, though, it comes with an extra heft that someone here described as stoner folk-rock. Consequently, when the opening “White Bird” thunders in, it sounds very much as if the martial rhythm section of Corey Allender and JV Brian Carey have been channelling something like Om. The tonal range of the whole album feels pleasingly narrow and focused; it drives on in this linear, psychedelic fashion, remorselessly. Soon enough, Heumann is cutting loose with one of his sensational solos, but he always keeps within the tight parameters of the song: this is a jam as a precision trip, not a freeform self-indulgence (not that there’s necessarily anything wrong with those, of course). “The Gathering” goes on like this, with a pummelling sense of purpose, even when Arbouretum slow down on “When Delivery Comes” or Jimmy Webb’s fantasy on the theme of mythic archetypes, “The Highwayman”. The press notes say the album’s inspired by Jung, by the way, which may be significant here. By the end, they clock up the ten-minute “Song Of The Nile”, which sounds like perhaps the best thing Arbouretum have ever recorded; a low-slung and blasted psych throbber that, when it gets rolling, features Heumann playing – and I suspect he won’t be over-enamoured with the comparison, but it’s meant well – in a way which reminds me of Josh Homme, circa Kyuss, perhaps. The insistent drone pulse reminds me, too, of bands I hadn’t previously seen as such obvious fellow travellers: Wooden Shjips and Endless Boogie, especially the latter’s similarly climactic “A Life Worth Leaving”. I read recently of a New York show where Arbouretum, with Hans Chew guesting on keys, jammed on “Sister Ray” for an hour, before being replaced by Endless Boogie, who kept it rolling for another hour, more or less. Anyone see this, by any chance?

Among the many tales about Ariel Pink, there’s one, possibly apocryphal, about a live show where he came onstage and did nothing but intone the word “Xanax” for the duration of the gig. It’s slightly worrying, then, when he emerges out of the leftover Halloween dry ice at this Club Uncut show to solemnly pronounce “Carrots”, then disappears again. Pink, of course, has several reputations: as a prodigious LA singer-songwriter, finally escaped from his bedroom; as the elfin godfather of chillwave, hypnagogic pop and several other nebulous genres that hazily misremember ‘80s FM radio hits; and as a somewhat unpredictable live performer. As he studiously eats what I assume to be a carrot, it looks like this one could go either way. Suddenly, though, the Haunted Graffiti are surging through the harmonious garage chestnut, “Bright Lit Blue Skies”, with a kind of intense, high-pitched slickness, and Pink – a frail and theatrically agitated man who resembles, from this distance, a glam-rock Kurt Cobain – is keeping up just fine. In fact, what’s most surprising about this terrific show is how accurately Pink and his quartet of experienced Silverlake scenesters can reproduce the weird, insidious pop of “Before Today”; the precision and gloss, the prog intricacies, the lushly deranged falsetto harmonies, and the amniotic effects that drench Pink’s vocal leads. If anything, the likes of “L’Estat” are even more effective live, given a spectacle and bombast that seems odd from such a lo-fi maven like Pink, but is actually totally suitable to his vision: even when, at the end of the song, his girlfriend Geneva Jacuzzi arrives onstage, dressed as a trick-or-treating Marcel Marceau, for some interpretive dancing that she appears to have learned entirely from old Kate Bush videos. Later, Pink wheels out his own Bush homage, “For Kate I Wait”, one of a bunch of old songs that the band manage to carry off with a faithfulness to the unsteady original versions, but with a professional efficiency, too. It’s a neat trick – as, of course, is the old one of a flakey frontman employing a band of reliable artisans as backup. Haunted Graffiti, in their matching band t-shirts, seem to have helped shift Pink towards the mainstream he obviously craves, but without sacrificing any of his psychedelic nuances. The “Before Today” songs are the biggest winners in this, so that “Round And Round” comes out of the blender as a weirdly forlorn anthem for 2010, complete with a cappella five-part harmony breaks. I’m sure I racked up a load of references in my original review of “Before Today”, but a few more spring to mind tonight: Cheap Trick, a lot of Bowie, “Midnite Vultures”-era Beck, Mike Post & Larry Carlton (on “Can’t Hear My Eyes”); and, on the brilliant final double whammy of “Butthouse Blondie” and “Little Wig”, Blue Oyster Cult. If there’s one act the whole production reminds me of, though, it’s a substantially less successful one. Bobby Conn might not have the same quality of songs as Pink, and his place in the underground is far less close to the surface. Nevertheless, in the mixture of FM staples and avant sensibilities, facepaint, theatre, self-conscious otherness and an imperative to blur the boundaries between trad rock abandon and performance art, the two have a lot in common. And here’s an email this morning that says Haunted Graffiti are going on tour in the States later this week with Os Mutantes. Let me know if any of you catch that.

Over the summer, I got pretty hooked on a playlist/mixtape thing, "Wah Wah Cowboys", that turned up on a blog called The Old Straight Track. A triumph of early ‘70s crate-digging, "Wah Wah Cowboys" located a high place where country and country-rock found a groove, and packed a fair few revelations into 45 minutes. Who could tell that the good-time trucking opener, “Cross Country”, was the work of an inveterate pub-rocker from Southend, Mickey Jupp? Why hadn’t anyone told me before about “Scorpio Woman”, by Link Wray’s Mordicai Jones project? And where on earth was I going to find the first two solo albums by the man who produced Gene Clark’s "No Other", Thomas Jefferson Kaye? A mixtape can be immensely potent, sending you on an odyssey across the internet, via a few second-hand stores, and opening up arcane seams in rock history. That’s how "Wah Wah Cowboys" worked for me. New music, though, can also tap into deep scenes, and that goes for the records made by the curator of The Old Straight Track, Michael Taylor. Taylor is a folklorist, currently living somewhere beautiful in North Carolina, who used to front a San Francisco band, Court And Spark, that I can’t honestly remember too well. Over the past year or two, Taylor has quietly disseminated a couple of records by his new band, Hiss Golden Messenger, both of which have a strong insidious quality, and which come imbued with Taylor’s profound knowledge and understanding of vintage sounds. The first, from 2009, is a studio CD called "Country Hai East Cotton", heavy with Laurel Canyon vibes, which sits comfortably in between fellow travellers PG Six and Brightblack Morning Light. The second, from earlier this year, is a vinyl-only number called "Root Work", which revisits a bunch of "Country Hai" songs for a radio session, and gives them a looser, less tentative treatment. “Touchstones, as I see them, would be Traffic's "Low Spark Of High-Heeled Boys", possibly some live Dead, some vintage-era Tubby/Jammy,” Michael wrote to me at the time, and he had a point. Those two records came out on Taylor’s Heaven & Earth Magic Recording Company, but for the forthcoming “Bad Debt” EP, Hiss Golden Messenger have stepped on to a UK label, Blackmaps, hired a publicist and begun moving slowly overground. With some perversity, "Bad Debt" is substantially rougher-sounding than its crafted predecessors: just Taylor and his guitar, at home over last winter, essaying nine folk-soul nuggets that recall at least one of the Sacred Tims; Hardin, probably. Even in the rawest state, though, these are powerful songs, not least because of their peculiar mix of fervid Christian visions and hardbitten outlaw country, “Jesus Shot Me In The Head” being the most extreme example of Taylor’s mighty engaging schtick. The blend reminds me a little of Wooden Wand, who coincidentally has two good albums out this month, "Death Seat" and "Wither Thou Goest, Cretin".

Sitting on stage at London’s BFI Southbank, Bruce Springsteen is reflecting on events 33 years ago, when he and the E Street Band entered New York’s Record Plant studios to record the Darkness On The Edge Of Town album. “It’s funny now,” he sighs. “We really didn’t know what we were doing. We really didn’t know how to make a record. We were adverse to professionalism.” Springsteen is in London, along with manager Jon Landau and film maker Thom Zimny, to unveil a new documentary, The Promise: The Making Of Darkness On The Edge Of Town – part of the capacious 3 CD/3 DVD reissue box set that also includes The Promise, an album of 21 unreleased outtakes from the Darkness…sessions. That Springsteen has chosen to focus the launch of this extraordinary archival package around the film perhaps indicates how important it is as a document of the Darkness… period. He premiered the material first at the Toronto Film Festival in September, where he was interviewed onstage by Ed Norton, and after this London showing he’s taking it straight off to the Rome Film Festival. Indeed, the film itself is tremendous. It’s a mixture of contemporary interviews with Springsteen, the E Street Band and others involved with the album, cut in with fascinating black and white archive footage from the studio, shot by a friend of Springsteen’s, Barry Rebo, on a hand-held video recorder. “He shot this stuff then sat on it for 30 years,” says Springsteen at the BFI. “Once in a while, I’d go over to his apartment and we’d look at it and laugh and wonder what to do with it.” Of course, Springsteen has done this kind of thing before – the 2005 reissue of Born To Run included a documentary, Wings For Wheels, assembled from footage of Rebo’s visits to those recording sessions. It caught the band at a pivotal period; they entered the studio lean and hungry, and came out with a major hit record. The Promise film, meanwhile, finds them in an equally critical period, but one characterised by much uncertainty. “I was so filled with doubt, the only way I knew to get something done was to slog away at it for hours and hours,” admits Springsteen from the stage of the Southbank. “The sense of purpose was desperation.” The cause of this seems to be two-fold. As Springsteen acknowledges in one of the contemporaneous interviews in Zimny’s film, “the success we had with Born To Run… brought me an audience, but it also frightened me.” Another problem was the legal dispute between Springsteen and his then-manager Mike Appel (who appears in the film, resembling a lost Osmond brother). The lawsuit prohibited the band from entering the studio for a year, the very time when they should have been capitalising on the success of Born To Run. Instead, the band regrouped at Springsteen’s house at Holmdel, New Jersey, for endless rehearsals. “These guys were my soldiers,” Springsteen says. “I thought I’d failed them in some way.” The mood: “deep despair and resilience.” But something quite profound happened to Springsteen during this period. As more than one person wryly comments in The Promise, Springsteen had only written nine songs for Born To Run, eight of which actually appeared on the record. Now, perhaps galvanised by the legal wrangles with Appel, he went into creative overdrive. When the band eventually made it to the Record Plant in New York to begin the Darkness… sessions, they recorded 70 songs. As Springsteen explains in the film’s present day footage, he had “multiversions” of songs, “a big junkyard of stuff” that he’d cannibalise accordingly. “It’s like a car. You pull stuff out of one car and put it in another car to make that car work.” In one of the film’s most telling archival clips, we see co-producer Jon Landau point at one of Springsteen’s notebooks in the studio and say, “Close that book, Bruce. The only thing that can come out of that book is more work.” The volume of songs he eventually discarded was astonishing. “It took an enormous amount of disciple,” says Steve Van Zandt. Patti Smith pops up to tell a sweet story about the first time she heard one of those jettisoned songs, “Because The Night” – that she eventually recorded with great success – while waiting for a phone call from her future husband, Fred ‘Sonic’ Smith. In the film, Springsteen admits to creative tensions driven by conflicting musical influences: his love of the Brill Building aesthetic, a discovery of country music (in particular, Hank Williams), the nascent punk scene, and curious love/fear relationship with pop music. “I was 27 and the product of FM pop radio,” he says early on. Later, he talks enthusiastically about the thrill of pop’s “never-ending now” – only to can potential hits like “Fire” and “Because The Night”. As Van Zandt ruefully observes, “It’s a bit tragic, in a way. He would have been one of the great pop songwriters of all time.” Springsteen eventually settled on a more thematic approach for Darkness…, inspired as he reveals on stage at the BFI by “James M Cain novels, Jim Thompson novels, and film noir. Gun Crazy, Out Of The Past, they were big pictures for me. Film noir was adult. It felt very close to my own psychology. I wanted my characters to have their own existential complexities.” All of this bubbles away to make pretty compelling viewing in The Promise, but what makes is such a significant release is Rebo’s archive footage. It gives what could otherwise be a simple, if admittedly high-end, Making Of… doc texture and warmth. The E Street Band circa 1977 resembles undercover narcotics officers in an Al Pacino movie, all shabby Hawaiian shirts and outsized sunglasses. One of the film’s most striking moments finds Springsteen bashing out an early version of “Sherry Darling” on a piano, while Steve Van Zandt, in an Adidas top and bandana, drums away on a carpet that’s been stuffed on top of it improvising backing vocals. It’s interesting to wonder how Springsteen views his own back catalogue, and indeed what future plans there are for similar such projects. In light of Dylan and Neil Young’s successful presentation of their own archives – will Springsteen follow, too? And if, so how? Springsteen admits at the BFI that there is no similar studio film from after The River sessions until he reconvened the E Street Band in 2002 for The Rising, which sadly means we’d be unlikely to see anything quite as puissant as Rebo’s archival materials beyond a possible River reissue. But as it stands, The Promise film powerfully captures Springsteen at what Max Weinberg describes as “the defining moment of his young career.” “We wanted to refine the narrative,” explains Springsteen simply, dressed in black jeans, a black leather jacket, boots and a grey T -shirt, from the stage of NFT1 at the Southbank. “We wanted to go back and fill in the story we’d been working on for most of our working life.” MICHAEL BONNER The Promise: The Making Of Darkness On The Edge Of Town is available as part of The Promise box set, which is released on November 15. For our full review of the box set, check out the new issue on UNCUT, on sale now