The set-up of this piece is a bit out of date, since I wrote it a month ago for the current issue of Uncut.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 Woke up this morning to the pretty good news that The xx had won the Mercury Prize (see what I mean about out of date?).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

What's this, you say? The Coen brothers remaking a John Wayne classic? With the Dude, no less, as Rooster Cogburn? Is this just the latest curveball from the Coens, the kind of twisted joke they're often accused of playing on their audience? This was, roughly, the initial reception last year when news broke that the Coens were eyeing up True Grit. And, last week, the trailer finally arrived to prove they were serious. [youtube]uco41pOKeJg[/youtube] The idea of the Coens taking on True Grit is strangely compelling. In interviews, Ethan Coen has made the point that they're not remaking the Henry Hathaway film - this is an adaptation of Charles Portis' original source novel. Ethan, it seems, thinks "the book is much funnier than the movie was," which perhaps suggests they're going to turn it into a rip-snorting comedy; Blazing Saddles for the 21st century, perhaps. But on the strength of the trailer, this is a typically shaggy dog comment from the brother. If anything, Allan reckons the trailer seems closer to The Outlaw Josey Wales than a Mel Brooks-style spoof. Certainly, the first glimpse we get of Jeff Bridges as Cogburn - grizzled, taciturn, looking great on a horse with a .45 - looks anything but funny. You would not, I reckon, mess with this man. And then there's Matt Damon, virtually unrecognisable as the Texas Ranger Cogburn hooks up with, and Josh Brolin as the bad guy they're after. It's all extremely promising stuff, and a characteristically interesting project for the Coens. One can only hope it fares better than their last attempts at a "remake" - The Ladykillers. But I'm curious about their desire to remake this - one of Hollywood's unassailable classics that starred one of the most iconic actors ever to appear in movies. Maybe it's just more deadpan humour from the Coens; it might well be a masterpiece. We won't know for sure until the end of this year (it's due for a UK release in January 2011), but the trailer looks good enough for now.

I was reading over this interview with Robert Wyatt today, thinking about “The Ghosts Within”, and about how he flourishes as a collaborator with friends, but not as a bandmember. “The trouble with a band is I can’t take orders and I can’t give orders,” he said around the time of “Comicopera”. “So there’s no comfortable role for me in a band, whereas on a project I think, well, if they’ve asked me I shall try and do whatever it is they’ve imagined me doing. As close as possible. There’s no pressure on me. I try and do what they want.” “The Ghosts Within”, credited jointly to Wyatt, Ros Stephen and Gilad Atzmon, is a bit closer to a band record than Wyatt has managed for a good while, though it still feels like more of a collaboration project. Wyatt doesn’t actually sing on every track, though his abiding presence – good-humoured, thoughtful, a unifying force with heroic disdain for cultural boundaries – infects every minute of the album. On one level, you could see much of “The Ghosts Within” as a standards album, a covers album, a mature and contemplative sequel to “Nothing Can Stop Us”. Listening to Wyatt take on “Laura”, “What’s New” or “What A Wonderful World”, it’s odd that while the strength and charm of his voice remain potent, its peculiarities seem less pronounced. It’s harder to talk of Wyatt as a unique voice – realistically, it’s pretty sill trying to call anyone unique, but anyway… - when the fragility and artfulness of his phrasing is so reminiscent here of Chet Baker. The idiosyncracies are provided as much by his two eclectic collaborators: Gilad Atzmon, an Israeli jazz saxophonist and longtime Wyatt vet, adds ornate, middle-eastern-tinged swirls and textures; Ros Stephen factors in lush and kinetic tango strings. As ever with Wyatt, there’s a sense of boundaries collapsing, of harmonious fusions, though perhaps with a fixed team – as opposed to the shifting squads of musicians who’ve figured on recent Wyatt albums – “The Ghosts Within” feels more focused, tidy even. The jarring exception is “Where Are They Now”, which begins with jinking whimsy from Atzmon, then charges into a bouncy Palestinian hip-hop track with raps from a band called Ramallah Underground and, after a fashion, from Wyatt himself. It’s pretty good, but feels a little out of place here. There are a good few production tricks deployed more subtly elsewhere, though: a return visit to Chic’s “At Last I Am Free” (another link to “Nothing Can Stop Us”) is hazy and heavily phased. On his first version, Wyatt actually sang along to the original in his headphones. This time, he’s a ghostly, unanchored presence, increasingly content to let his voice be used as a texture rather than a lead. The rampant democracy comes to a peak on the title track, one of a small clutch of new songs written by Wyatt and Alfie Benge. From Atzmon’s Arabian-styled opening, through to the massed voices of the chorus, it might well be one of the pair’s best latterday songs; a companion piece, perhaps, to something like “Lullaby For Hamza” from “Cuckooland”. Wyatt, though, generously cedes lead responsibilities to Tali Atzmon, a relative presumably, and possessor of one of those clean, ringing female voices, like Monica Vasconcelos perhaps, that Wyatt has long valued as a foil to his own. Not one to let a good song lie, or be precious about a final version, maybe Wyatt should have a go at it himself on his next solo record?