To the capital’s glamorous West End, then, and the Opening Night Gala of this year’s London Film Festival at the Odeon Leicester Square. Introducing this film adaptation of his novel Never Let Me Go, the author Kazuo Ishiguro hailed the film’s stars – Keira Knightley, Carey Mulligan and Andrew Garfield – as being at the forefront of a new generation of actors. Arguably, Ishiguro was whipping up a bit of hyperbole, but Never Let Me Go is part of a slow shift away from heritage Brit drama towards a more subversive and questioning style of movie-making. I suppose it would be easy to compare Never Let Me Go to Atonement. Both films are based on acclaimed novels; both figure a typically photogenic stately home inside which secrets lie; both figure a typically photogenic stately Keira Knightley; both deal in feelings of guilt and the attempts of one character to redeem herself for past crimes. And, as with Atonement, Never Let Me Go initially presents a reassuringly familiar and comfortable set-up – only for the rug to get pulled out from underneath you. I should point out now that there’s going to be spoilers ahead. The stately home here is Hailsham, an elite English boarding school presided over by the imperious Miss Emily (Charlotte Rampling), where pupils are encouraged in artistic pursuits, their best work submitted to “the gallery” for approval. No one goes outside the school perimeter; we hear one story of a pupil who left the grounds and was later found tied to tree, their hands and feet having been cut off. There is little, if any contact with the outside world. In this strange, creepy place we meet Ruth, Kathy and Tommy. It’s the 1970s, and the three protagonists are young, not quite in their teens, but still they’re fumbling with nascent adolescent feelings; Ruth and Tommy for each other, while Kathy sets her sights on having Tommy for herself. You might think at this point we’re going to flash forward 10 or 15 years and fall into a thoughtful, high-end relationship drama, with some stiff upper lippery and plenty of unrequited love. Which we sort of do, but not quite as you might expect. This isn’t England as we know it; this is a sort of alternate reality, an England where the state has eradicated illness and disease by cloning human beings and farming out their organs until such time as they “complete” – Ishiguro’s euphemism for death. The children of Hailsham are bred specifically to save lives. But what of their own lives and their own feelings? Their eventual fate is revealed to them while they’re still at Hailsham, and what follows – when the adult Ruth (Knightley), Kathy (Mulligan) and Tommy (Garfield) are living in remote “cottages”, still shielded from the real world – provides moments of heartbreak, tenderness and false hopes. Mulligan, who apart from an early role in a Doctor Who episode, is not an actress I warm to tremendously – she was, frankly, punchable in An Education – and Knightley has rarely offered much suggestion of range. Garfield, though, who was tremendous in The Social Network, is equally good here, as the slow-witted, vulnerable centre of the love triangle. He works hard with Mulligan to create a believable dynamic; she becomes a “carer”, looking after donors as they undergo their operations, and you suspect it’s her childhood relationship with the boy Tommy that brought this out in her. Knightley, as the manipulative Ruth, does a lot to move beyond her comfort zone; the scenes where she’s in hospital, her body beginning to fail from multiple donations, clinging on to a walking frame, is – for once – proper acting. Ruth's own moment of atonement, to let Kathy and Tommy be together, is beautifully pitched. And the glimmer of hope – that Kathy and Tommy can defer donating by proving that they love each other – is heartbreakingly played out by Romanek and screenwriter Alex Garland. There is, intriguingly, no ethical debate here. Ishiguro and Garland make the tacit point that if we grow up with a particular horror - in this case, farmed human beings - then human nature will accept it. Most of the Hailsham students, it seems, accept their fate, because they know no other set of circumstances. When Kathy and Tommy visit Miss Emily, she says there is no lung cancer, no breast cancer, anymore - who would want to return to darker times when such diseases existed? That she says all this from a wheelchair seems strangely incongruous, but no matter. Romanek shoots the Hailsham scenes in warm, summer tones; the children basking in the apparent promise of youth. Later, when they reach adulthood, everything is shot in muted, shabby beiges and greys. It perpetually rains. It’s like a Morrissey b-side, particularly when they take a day trip to the Norfolk coast and spend an afternoon on a desolate, windswept pier. It all feels dreadfully hopeless. I suspect it’s not the kind of period drama that will travel – remember, of course, Ishiguro’s more traditional The Remains Of The Day picked up eight Academy Award nominations. This is too a bleak film, however tasteful and restrained Romanek makes it. Never Let Me Go opens in the UK on January 21, 2011

Very taken by the Blackest Rainbow label at the moment, thanks to things like the Wooden Wand album I blogged about last week, the Beggin’ Your Pardon Miss Joan album and various Natural Snow Buildings projects. A couple more good ones from them today, beginning with a split vinyl from Magic Lantern and a British musician called Ben Nash. Magic Lantern, and especially Cameron ‘Sun Araw’ Stallones from the band, have figured here plenty over the past year or so, and sketching out my albums of the year the other day, their valedictory “Platoon” looked it’d be sitting pretty high. After “Platoon”, word was that Magic Lantern had gone on hiatus, Stallones concentrating his energies on Sun Araw. The two big tracks here don’t exactly contradict that – “Mosquito Coast” dates from 2008, “Long Way Down” from 2009 – but they do hold out the promise that there may be more to come from the archive. Listening to these two, it’s strange to think they were recorded a year apart, since they work together so neatly. “Mosquito Coast” is essentially a percolating warm-up, a scene-setter, a jamming band coming into focus, which acts as a low-key overture for “Long Way Down”, a more obviously produced piece, recorded by Best Coast's Bobb Bruno. “Long Way Down” is one of those heavy, trancey processionals so beloved of Stallones; an obliterated march/trudge with Crazy Horse beats, Black Ark organ and fx, muffled incantations and a thicket of guitars that owe something, at a push, to Funkadelic. It’s his familiar trick, but no less potent here. On the flip, Ben Nash is a new name on me, but his micro-detailed, droneish pieces are mighty effective, too (the second, “For Johnny Standon/Caradon Figure”, features Cam Deas, who’s also got an interesting newish album on Blackest Rainbow). Better still, though, is “Alchemy”, a CD Nash has out in collaboration with Sophie Cooper. Two tracks, each clocking in between 15 and 20 minutes, and both some of the best drone/out/free folk stuff I’ve heard in a while. “Alchemy” itself starts placidly enough, a clinking and scraping meditation, with pipes and guitars, in the neighbourhood of the Dream Syndicate, possibly with some affinities to the Vibracathedral Orchestra. Towards the midpoint, however, it subtly shifts towards something more discomforting, as sustained keyboard tones come to the fore. “Natural Liberation Through Naked Vision” is marvellous too, initially dominated by some kind of disconsolate horn (I’m reminded of Kim Gordon’s playing on “Lightnin’”), before Nash’s guitar takes over for a lovely passage reminiscent of Ben Chasny. Need to find out more about Nash and Cooper, I guess.

The set-up of this piece is a bit out of date, since I wrote it a month ago for the current issue of Uncut. Nevertheless, worth running here I think, not least because I've subsequently discovered Forest Swords' "Dagger Paths" is getting a CD release in the UK on No Pain In Pop. Woke up this morning to the pretty good news that The xx had won the Mercury Prize (see what I mean about out of date?). For those who are feeling anxious about some data from Music Week released the other day – only five of this year’s Top 100 singles classify as ‘rock’, apparently – The xx’s triumph will probably be hyped up as some great ray of hope in an embattled market. Not that The xx could particularly be categorised as rock, of course, but at least they’ve had the audacity to reconfigure various bits of minimalist R&B with spindly indie guitars. If indie/urban crossovers have often sounded determinedly lively – desperately so, perhaps – theirs is a fresher, pointedly downbeat attempt at a hybrid. It’s not the sort of thing to traditionally set an A&R pulse racing, but I can’t help thinking there might be a vague hunt on for The New xx over the next few months. The heart sinks at the sort of lower-case rubbish that might be dished up as cutting-edge as a result. But if anyone is daring enough to check some of the skankier areas of the British underground, there’s just a chance they might fish out the excellent Forest Swords. Since Forest Swords’ debut album, Dagger Paths, was released earlier in the year, information about its provenance has remained sketchy. The sleeve reveals that Dagger Paths was recorded “on the Wirral Peninsula and Liverpool, UK”, and that someone called M Barnes wrote all but one of the tunes. The exception is “If Your Girl Only Knew”, a Missy Elliott and Timbaland song originally recorded by that pivotal influence on The xx, Aaliyah. Like The xx – and I promise I’ll drop the comparison imminently – Forest Swords applies a spectral, gothic quality to R&B, but unlike The xx, he surrounds the song in a sort of psychedelic murk. Dagger Paths, in general, has an appealingly dank air (one track is evocatively titled “Hoylake Misst”), a sense of uncanny musical ritual being enacted in a wet English suburb. The opening “Miarches”, in particular, sounds like someone plugging in and jamming along to a Burial record in their bedroom; a mix of dubstep and stoned dronerock that looks contrived on paper, but turns out to be rather compelling in practice. Dagger Paths crept out on the arcane US vinyl label, Olde English Spelling Bee, but a single, “Rattling Cage”, has recently appeared on the London indie, No Pain In Pop. This one, with its sluggish reggae rhythm, creaking organ and heavy dub fx, firmly positions Forest Swords as a forlorn English analogue to Sun Araw, Cameron Stallones’ sticky project out of Southern California that I championed at length in Uncut 157. Also worth looking out for this month is a new EP from Rick Tomlinson’s Voice Of The Seven Thunders. Their self-titled album has been a big favourite since it was released at the start of the year, a dextrous and rousing blend of various psychedelic strains (Anatolian, Swedish, Germanic, acid-folk and so on) that’s deservedly found a place in the longlist of nominations for the Uncut Music Award. Tomlinson currently seems to be running with veteran avant-gardists Nurse With Wound (and compilers, in 1979, of a legendarily outlandish list of esoteric music), who he apparently played live with in May. Now, Nurse With Wound’s Andrew Liles has remixed four Seven Thunders tracks for an EP, “The Blue Comet Mixes”. To be honest, my knowledge of Nurse With Wound is sketchy, but these four tracks are superb, extending Tomlinson’s freakouts with all manner of Kraut buzz and free skronk, and sounding nothing like the industrial gruel with which the NWW brand – perhaps erroneously – tends to be associated.

The arrival this week of a second new Wooden Wand album prompted me into finally getting round to “Death Seat”, James Jackson Toth’s terrific return after what, for him, seems to have been a relatively quiet stretch. In the time since the “Waiting In Vain” (“A sad slide with Ryko Records,” Michael Gira notes in the press biog; this one’s on Young God) album, I know Toth has figured in a band called Sabbath Assembly, recording an album of Process Church hymns (never heard this). Gira also mentions something about him “laying floors down in Murfreesboro, Tennessee”. “Death Seat”, though, returns him to the kind of vivid songwriting that illuminated the tremendous “Second Attention” and “James And The Quiet”. I suspect I’ve probably mentioned Dylan before in relation to Toth’s work, and again here he has a great handle on stuff that a lot of lamer Dylan acolytes miss: the fervid visions and apocryphal jokes, the hallucinatory narratives like “Ms Mowse”. “The Mountain”, too, is richly in the tradition of mid-‘70s Dylan, with a nice line about living life in reverese, walking into rooms and saying goodbye and so on. Also, some stuff about kodiak bears. “Servant To Blues”, meanwhile, is a kind of psychedelic death blues for gloaming times, where the freakout guitars of Toth’s early career (hooked up with the free psych outfit The Vanishing Voice) make a restrained reappearance. There’s an uncanny edge to the sound of a few of these songs, which relocates Toth in that continuum, an odd but effective mix with the Townes Van Zandt measures that he also favours. I often think that, in spite of that classic songcraft, the impact of Toth’s records comes from the weight of music, sustained atmopshere and vibes, rather than from the individual songs. But as with almost all the Wooden Wand solo albums, concentrated listens start revealing a sequence of really memorable work: a droll and slightly menacing song from the point of view of a/the Creator, “I Made You”; a poignant and, again very funny, rumination on loneliness, relationships and the possibilities of parenthood called “Until Wrong Looks Right”; and “Hotel Bar”, one of Toth’s trademark sing-song dirges, imbued with a weird catchiness, which reminds me of his great “Portrait In The Clouds”. Finally, there’s “Tiny Confessions”, which summons up both Townes Van Zandt and Skip Spence, the latter a neat reference point for Toth ever since the "Harem Of The Sundrum And The Witness Figg" album which signalled his shift from out jams to solo intensities. It’s a comparison that rears up again with regard to “Wither Thou Goest, Cretin”, a selection of home recordings being put out on vinyl by the Blackest Rainbow label. The feel is predictably sketchier, less formally finished, but it’d be a mistake to imagine these songs are throwaway, or realistically any less potent than the stuff on “Death Seat”. Maybe the mood is a touch jauntier, a little less portentous: “Uncle Bill” is a hardboiled and cute story-song which involves the title character pulling girls through the interventions of “America, Poco and Bread”. But there’s still nothing distractingly lo-fi about Toth’s work, and songs like “The Fly”, “Ragtop Ruby” and “The Ballad Of Squeaky Wheel” rank right up there. Not sure how limited/unlimited this one is, so it might be worth your while moving a bit faster for this one; it’s certainly worth it