Jackson Browne’s self-titled first album introduced a 23-year-old artist whose sensibility was already so advanced that he was immediately singled out as the quintessential singer/songwriter of the Laurel Canyon school. The LP came out in January 1972 to a chorus of critical hosannas, including my own gushing review in Rolling Stone. “It’s not often that a single album is sufficient to place a new performer among the first rank of recording artists,” I wrote – accurately, as it turned out. Touring solo behind the album, the fledgling performer, as boyish as his image on the album cover, sang with disarming sincerity, deriving in no small part from the courage it took for him to stand in front of a room full of people and share his intensely private songs. The next time he hit the road, Jackson brought protection in the elfin form of David Lindley, a former member of eclectic LA folk-rock group Kaleidoscope, whose playing on a variety of stringed instruments proved to be the perfect complement to Browne’s voice and songs. On stage together, they enlivened the material in a way Jackson hadn’t been able to do by himself, and Lindley’s song-serving virtuosity deepened the impact of the captivating follow-up album, 1973’s For Everyman. Browne and Lindley’s shared history makes the former collaborators’ reunion on a 2006 tour of Spain a big deal for discerning fans. What’s more, several of the songs Browne chose to revisit are from records on which Lindley didn’t appear, enabling the onetime partners to see what they could bring to the more recent material in tandem. The resulting performances are less renderings than transformations – including a bittersweet “I’m Alive” from the 1993 LP of the same name, a gossamer “For Taking The Trouble” from 2002’s The Naked Ride Home and a Kaleidoscope-like exotic spin on 1996 message song “Looking East” featuring Lindley on oud. Theirs is a symbiotic partnership. In its time, that has encompassed the gorgeous and gut-wrenching breakup album Late For The Sky (’74) the expansive commercial breakthrough The Pretender (’76) and the laid-back yet wired live document Running On Empty (’77). Lindley’s presence throughout the 17-song selection of material here restores an organic liveliness not heard in Browne’s music since Running… Working primarily as a three-piece with percussionist Tino de Geraldo, they generate high-octane grooves (Lindley’s fleet violin transforming “Take It Easy” into a sort of Tex-Mex reel) and palpable moods (a liquid “Call It A Loan” from Hold Out, a sublimely sad “Late For The Sky”), and ramping up anticipation for the duo’s UK tour. The tour documented here is an exercise in bilingual social networking, as Browne brings a number of guest artists on stage to play and sing. Lindley is also provided with ample opportunity to exhibit his jocular and not at all introspective stage persona, barrelling through “Mercury Blues” from his Browne-produced 1981 LP, El Rayo-X, followed by the title tune. Toward the end of Disc 2, he does a delightful doo-wop falsetto vocal in a duet with Jackson on a medley of the Mickey & Sylvia chestnut “Love Is Strange” and Maurice Williams’ “Stay”, the latter of which ended Running On Empty. On his two-volume ‘Solo Acoustic’ series, Browne reminded us of the undiminished eloquence and beauty of the music he made in his twenties. Here, on Love Is Strange, with a crucial assist from Lindley, he fluidly unifies his entire body of work. The LP enables the veteran singer/songwriter to take care of some long-unfinished business, to get things lined up properly. This is what closure sounds like. Bud Scoppa

Roky Erickson’s turbulent life journey from teen-pop idol in the Thirteenth Floor Elevators to electroshock patient, from lysergic seer to godfather of punk, might best be described as chaotic. As substantial a masterpiece as was 1967’s Easter Everywhere, by the 1980s, Erickson was living an isolated life in the projects of Austin, Texas, having traversed the crazy highs and excruciating lows that generally portend an early demise. Twenty years ago, few would have predicted Erickson would be alive in 2010, much less maintaining a busy touring schedule and recording True Love Cast Out All Evil, an astonishing highlight of his tragically stunted career. Evidently, there’ll be no muted, Syd Barrett-style demise for Roger Kynard Erickson. Ably aided by fellow Austinites Okkervil River and producer Will Sheff – the latter entrusted with sorting through scores of old compositions to arrive at the dozen presented here – Erickson pours his heart into song after touching song on True Love, guilelessly weaving strands of autobiography, myth, childlike wonder, and pleas for universal love into a work that is a marvel on multiple levels. Erickson enthusiasts will recognise some of these songs, which have appeared in primitive form – home recordings, bootlegs, small-label projects – over the years. But not in this guise. Okkervil’s shimmering, sixth-sense backing, and Roky’s disarming, straight-from-the-heart singing, casts True Love… as an unlikely autumnal classic – think Dylan’s Time Out Of Mind – and a kind of taking stock, refracted through his spooked, terrifying life story. Never has Erickson been this direct. Sheff’s role as editor has been to peel away the outlandishness. He frames True Love with a pair of brittle lo-fi demos laid down in the early ’70s, during Roky’s captivity at the Rusk State Hospital For The Criminally Insane. Here, Erickson is at his most vulnerable and lonely, replete with ambient noise and string overdubs and thereby suggests his post-Elevators life as True Love’s over-arcing narrative. It’s a legitimate device, thematically above reproach, though the tapes are so ragged as to distract from the LP’s cumulative punch. Given the strength of the Okkervil River sessions, it might have been better to have Roky tackle the songs anew. Still, it’s clear Sheff coaxed some of Roky’s best studio performances ever. “Be And Bring Me Home” is cataclysmic. Written during his darkest days of incarceration, it’s a majestic creation, a plea for peace and freedom, its smouldering R’n’B groove complementing Roky’s vocal – pitting immense weariness at the inanities of the world against the joys and comforts of music, family and connectedness. Mirroring its cosmopolitan production, True Love’s arrangements are all over the place: “Bring Back The Past” is chiming, Rickenbacker-styled powerpop, surprisingly effective; “Please Judge”, shorn of its old, Buddy Holly-ish arrangement, is sombre torch song set against a tangle of electronic noise. And then there’s “Goodbye Sweet Dreams”. A spare, haunted acoustic take of this song provides a ghostly parting image in the 2007 biopic, You’re Gonna Miss Me. Okkervil River, though, raining down sheets of electric guitar amid an icy, kaleidoscopic arrangement, transform it into a hypnotic psych-folk juggernaut. Erickson’s superb vocal, draping the song’s pulsing rhythms with loss and melancholy, is as authoritative in its way as the Elevators’ ageless “You’re Gonna Miss Me”. The mere existence of True Love… carries the weight of a miracle. That it so compellingly rescues a cache of unforgettable songs, and signals the unlikeliest of artistic revivals, must rank it among rock’s most transcendent tales. Luke Torn

Genuine indie eccentrics are thin on the ground these days. The class of 2010 all seem so well-adjusted or self-conscious that it’s hard to know where we’re going to find a Mark E Smith or Will Oldham, petulantly pursuing a cryptic muse with total disregard for the expectations of their own followers. But it finally looks like we’ve got ourselves a new contender. Ariel Pink is already a lo-fi legend: a prolific crafter of damaged pop songs delivered in a perplexing array of styles and accents, with the underfed appearance of a teenage runaway and the sincere belief that he’s “halfway between male and female”. Since the late ’90s, while living in an apartment next door to his parents’ house in Pico-Robertson, LA, Pink has spewed over 500 songs into an 8-track using little more than a cheap keyboard, a bass and a three-stringed guitar. Three albums’ worth of his home-recorded material have appeared on Animal Collective’s Paw Tracks label, though much more exists on CD-Rs that Pink used to routinely press into the palms of strangers. Before Today is the first album from Ariel Pink’s Haunted Graffiti the band, a crew of LA freak-sceners who’ve rallied behind Pink’s singular vision. Impressively, it achieves the feat of enhancing Pink’s legend without puncturing his mystique. The ghostly pop sound of Pink’s previous output has proved curiously influential on the current generation of bedroom producers such as Ducktails and Toro Y Moi who’ve been corralled under the semi-sarcastic banner of chillwave. But whereas as most chillwave employs ’80s cues to evoke fuzzy nostalgia, Pink’s relationship with the pop music of his childhood seems altogether more complex. “Round And Round”, with its fidelity to the sound of drivetime radio circa ’83 – think Hall & Oates, Rick Springfield, Naked Eyes – goes far beyond nod-wink irony; as “Can’t Hear My Eyes” fades out, you expect a husky DJ to lean into the mic and dedicate it “to all you night owls out there”. At the same time there’s something distinctly queer about the production, an audio equivalent of Vaseline on the lens that lends these songs a time-and-space-warping effect, making them actually sound as if they’re playing from the cassette deck of a Mitsubishi Starion. Before Today isn’t strictly just an ’80s trip, though. “Bright Lit Blue Skies” is a terrific psych-pop nugget, a cover of a song by the relatively obscure New England garage band Rockin’ Ramrods, showing off the extent of Pink’s vinyl collection. “L’estat (acc. To The Widow’s Maid” mines the same vein of obscure arcane post-punk psychedelia that MGMT mainlined for “Congratulations”. “Butt-House Blondies” staggers between proto hair metal and a kind of fairground psychobilly, with Pink slipping – apparently unconsciously – into an English accent that only becomes sillier throughout the barely-hinged Bowie tribute/impersonation “Little Wig”. The band understandably appear to be having a blast, and the simian whoops at the end of “Beverly Kills” seem like an entirely appropriate response to the previous three minutes of delicious, sunbaked white funk. But then there are the downer jams. The “Public Image”-esque “Revolution’s A Lie” sounds like the curdled ranting of a man who’s been sold a false dream one too many times, while “Menopause Man” – a prime example of Pink’s disorientating Hollywood gothic vibe, in which the brittle, Cure-like guitars of the verse establish a strange frisson with the Mirage-era Fleetwood Mac harmonies on the chorus – is a rather extreme resolution to see things from a female point of view: “Castrate me, make me gay/ Lady, I’m a lady from today” he sings, quite sweetly as it happens, which only makes it more unsettling. Of course, it’s also the stuff of which cult dreams are made. Ariel Pink is probably the best weirdo pop savant to emerge from the American underground since Beck. Let’s hope the Scientologists don’t get to him. Sam Richards

A café in north London, late 2000. For the first time in an age, Neu!’s three completed albums are to be reissued, and Michael Rother and Klaus Dinger have made a precarious truce to promote them. In the preceding years, there have been endless squabbles preventing this extraordinary music from being restored to the public domain. Dinger, a notably wild-eyed man with the personal grooming of Catweazle and a picture of his girlfriend sellotaped to his shirt, has been releasing Neu! sessions on a Japanese label, Captain Trip. Rother, a calm European technocrat dressed in black, has been pointedly unimpressed. As Neu!’s reputation and influence have increased, it seems the pair’s relationship has exponentially degenerated. “We’ve never been very close,” Dinger counters. “The only thing we’ve done is make music together, and in my opinion, it’s the only thing we can do. I mean, we would never go on holiday together.” For most of the interview, they have stiffly disagreed with each other’s interpretations of their shared history. This time, though, Rother’s silence implies total agreement. Neu! are not, of course, rock’s only dysfunctional band. Nevertheless, the tension between the pair – birthed during their brief time in Kraftwerk in 1971, and persisting until Dinger’s death in 2008 – was always strikingly at odds with the harmonious music for which Neu! became renowned. This Neu! Vinyl Box – with a 1972 live session, a 1986 reunion attempt, a T-shirt and a stencil(!) thrown in – still begins with their first LP from 1972, and with “Hallogallo”. Clear-sighted, effortlessly propulsive, it feels like recording started in the middle of a telepathic jam that has already been running smoothly for hours, even days. Neu!’s work is often simplified to this idea of ‘motorik’ – a term which Dinger characteristically disliked, preferring something with less mechanical implications like ‘Lange Gerade’ (‘Long Line’) or ‘Endlese Gerade’ (‘Endless Line’). Listening to their music in its entirety, however, gathered on Vinyl Box (with free downloads for all buyers, and not a vulgar old CD in sight), a more complicated picture of Neu! emerges. It might be the pristine motorik pulses that influenced generations of electronic auteurs, post-rockers, dronerockers and most every band who’ve looked for the next hip option after the Velvets. It might be Dinger’s clenched, glammy acceleration of motorik – on Neu! 2’s “Lila Engel” and “Super”, on Neu! ’75’s “Hero” and “After Eight” – that so invigorated John Lydon and the less cloistered punks. But the corners of Neu!, Neu! 2 and the exceptional Neu! ’75 are sketchier, unfocused places. After the epiphany of “Hallogallo”, Neu! immediately slides into “Sonderangebot”, the amniotic squelching and scruffy dislocation setting a template for ambient diversions to come. That first LP was cut in four days, the third after an extended hiatus, reinforcing Dinger’s view of a duo clearly unenthusiastic about each other’s company. Neu! 2 was also finished in four nights, climaxing in a famously expedient rush, with two tracks being re-run at various speeds to pad out Side Two. It’s this oddity which springs to mind when listening to the box’s Neu! ’86 album, a fraught reunion session previously – and controversially – released by Dinger as Neu! 4. Neu! ’86’s inclusion signposts a new phase in Rother’s relationship with his own legacy: his new live band (including Sonic Youth drummer Steve Shelley), specifically recruited to play Neu! music, confirms as much. Rother’s version is markedly different from Dinger’s Neu! 4, since he “completely reworked the LP from original multitrack and master tapes”, but fears that Rother’s politeness might take the edge off the sessions can be discounted. Neu! ’86’s chief pleasure is in how it makes explicit their inchoate bickering, so that “Dänzing”, for example, slings raw guitar chords, bird noises, deranged sing-songs and elements of musique concrète into what is essentially ’80s electropop. Mostly, the album sounds like a messy argument about how Neu! should evolve and transcend their own stereotype. Sometimes, recidivism triumphs; “Crazy” is ostensibly a bubblegum punk retread of “Hero”. At others, the mischief-making can be rather forced; “La Bomba (Stop Apartheid World-Wide)” is basically “La Bamba” being grappled over by Stock, Aitken & Waterman and Throbbing Gristle. It’s easy to see this ’86 session as despoiling the Neu! legacy. But Neu! Vinyl Box is both a tying up of loose ends, and a way of seeing the band’s music as haphazard, multi-faceted and innately impossible to tidy up. It concludes with the 18 minutes of Neu! ’72, a rehearsal tape similar to another clandestine Dinger release, Neu! ’72 Live In Dusseldorf, which reveals how they could be an exhilarating live band – and also how much Conny Plank, as producer, brought to their studio albums. At times, the groove sounds like it will roll on eternally. But then, again and again, the jam collapses in on itself; as fragile and capricious, perhaps, as the band who created it. JOHN MULVEY

When Matthew Houck, the creative force behind Phosphorescent, released an album of Willie Nelson covers in February 2009, he can’t have guessed it would lead to him performing alongside his hero at Farm Aid later that same year. But the bracing, brassy sound of To Willy showed Houck to be a man with real love and understanding of country music and Nelson was quick to embrace a kindred spirit. Being acknowledged by one of his musical heroes has clearly given Houck real confidence: his new album, Here’s To Talking It Easy, is a bold record steeped in the golden, rich sounds of classic rock and country. Houck is a 30-year-old from Alabama, and has been recording as Phosphorescent since 2003. Here’s To Taking It Easy, his fifth album, duly reflects a sense of purpose in what he wants to achieve. The songs were recorded by Houck and band in three days, then he then took the tapes to his DIY studio in New York and tinkered, layered and dubbed for months until he successfully arrived at the classic 1970s rock sound he was aiming for. The result is an album that echoes mid-1970s Dylan, Gram Parsons and Neil Young, and it begins with a swagger on “It’s Hard To Be Humble (When You’re From Alabama)”, a song that lives up to its eye-catching title in a swirl of Rolling Thunder pedal-steel and horn. It’s an impressive statement of intent, with Houck announcing, “I ain’t came to stand here for none of this bullshit, man/I came here to play…” It’s great, but it was never obvious that Houck had this sort of album in him. His previous work, like 2005’s Aw Come, Aw Wry and 2007’s Pride, were engaging but introverted. Houck played and recorded all the instruments himself, and the results had more in common with classical music than country-rock, utilising atmospheric orchestration with slow, layered melodies and hymn-like singing. The recruitment of a band to record To Willy helped Houck cut loose. He toured with Bon Iver and Akron/Family. By the time Phosphorescent played Farm Aid in October 2009, it made perfect sense for them to share a bill with Nelson, Neil Young and Wilco. Houck says he sees albums as albums, not just collections of songs, and Here’s To Taking It Easy, duly is an artfully structured piece. So the vulnerable “The Mermaid Parade” is followed by brisk ode to defiance “I Don’t Care If There’s Cursing”, after which comes the semi-apologetic “Tell Me Baby (Have You Had Enough)”, although even here he seems to be issuing a challenge, daring his partner to walk away. Like Neil Young, whose “Doom Trilogy” era albums this much resembles, Houck has a crack in his singing voice that gives it natural sensitivity. With the plangent pedal steel much in evidence, the album could be melancholy, but Houck’s arrangements ensure the mood is rousing, uplifting, but also thoughtful. The album closes with probably its best track, “Los Angeles”, a slow-burning and evocative masterpiece that sounds like a distant cousin of Young’s “Vampire Blues”. Meandering but never directionless, the driving interplay between guitar and piano and indistinct vocals make the listener feel like a semi-conscious passenger on a midnight drive down Sunset, half-listening to somebody else’s conversation. The lyrics are evasive but the intent is unmistakable – “I ain’t come to Los Angeles just to die”, Houck sings. It’s the sort of defiant spirit that so impressed Willie Nelson. If there’s any justice, it should now impress many more people besides. PETER WATTS