There are some bands that somewhat cluelessly, from album to album, I tend to forget I like. Portland’s Blitzen Trapper probably fall into that category. I was re-reading what I wrote about their “Wild Mountain Nation” back in 2007, about how much I enjoyed it, how much I enjoyed “Field Rexx” before that, then more or less forgot about them. I have a vaguely optimistic feeling, however, that “Destroyer Of The Void” will make more of a lasting impact. Not to start wringing my hands and fall into a Joanna Newsom trance all over again or anything, but right now Blitzen Trapper’s fifth, I think, album feels like one of the most directly entertaining I’ve heard in 2010. Although a lot of the band’s playfulness remains, they’ve streamlined and cleaned up their treatments of Americana and classickish rock in the past few years; there’s little this time that could be compared to Pavement, for instance. What there is, though, are 12 crisp and almost uniformly memorable songs; dense with myth and allusion; beautifully, unfussily performed. There are a bunch of albums due in the next couple of months that plenty of people (including plenty of my colleagues at Uncut, in all probability) will be hailing as brilliant contemporary takes on American tradition, but none of them, to my ears at least, are a patch on “Destroyer Of The Void”. The easiest reference point, I guess, is with Wilco, and the way Jeff Tweedy has consistently refracted a whole range of older music over the years. Consequently, while there are many, say, Beatles and Lennon allusions on “Destroyer…” (the melodic rasp and clang of “Love And Hate”, for instance), much of it feels like it’s gone through some kind of Wilco filter; an immensely skilful mix of power pop and Americana, perhaps. If you’re one of those Wilco fans who particularly fixate on “Summer Teeth”, “Laughing Lover” and “The Tailor” here, in particular, come heartily recommended. In the Blitzen Trapper back catalogue, the biggest clue to how “Destroyer…” has turned out comes on “Furr”, with the unspooling Dylanish narrative, “Black River Killer”. “The Man Who Would Speak True” feels like something of a sequel/upgrade of that song, and I’m reminded too of another contemporary band, The Raconteurs (and especially their “Carolina Drama”), who conflate similar influences so effectively. “The Man Who Would Speak True” also bears some mark of The Grateful Dead, not least the image of a “Brokedown Palace”, aligning Blitzen Trapper to the Dead’s honeyed early ‘70s roots phase. Indeed, the album actually starts with a capella harmonies in the vein of “Uncle John’s Band”, before the title track explodes into a sort of ornate prog-pop reminiscent, to some degree, of Procol Harum. “Evening Star”, meanwhile, reminds me of something like “Bertha”, perhaps. What else? A neat Gram’n’Emmylou-style duet with Alela Diane, “The Tree”, some immensely accomplished folk-rock and piano ballads (“Heaven And Earth” is wonderful), no duffers as far as I can tell. Pretty sold on this one, and I figure a few of you will be, too…

Been pondering this one for a while and, as I possibly implied in the blog about James Murphy’s “Greenberg” soundtrack, it’s hard not to conclude that the third LCD Soundsystem album is a bit of a letdown. A letdown, that is, in the context of “Sound Of Silver” being my favourite album of, what was it, 2007, plus there being a pretty excellent debut album at the back of the racks and a clutch of singles that probably rank with the very best of the last decade. By most measures, “This Is Happening” would look like a pretty good album. It begins quite brilliantly with “Dance Yourself Clean”; archly tumbling percussion, soft vocals and harmonies that package Murphy’s borderline misanthropy in amusingly meek tones, a quietness that betrays this is one of the tracks here that Dave Sardy hasn’t mixed. Then, three minutes in, the beats and synths are radically turned up, Murphy tries on a yowling soul falsetto and we’re off; nine minutes of dynamic, engrossing music. “You’re blowing Marxism to pieces,” I think he’s singing. Great, then, and “This Is Happening” stays that way for a good while. “Drunk Girls” is a broad and tremendously jolly knees-up pitched halfway between Blur’s “Girls And Boys” and Bowie’s “Boys Keep Swinging”. “One Touch” is fabulously intricate acid and redolent of their earlier singles, Murphy using his best Phil Oakey baritone as a counterpoint to Nancy Wang’s yelps. “All I Want” is back on the Bowie jag, being ostensibly “Heroes” bent round a whole load of Eno circa “Another Green World”. Which works for me. “Change” is more or less straight-up synthpop, impeccably rendered. Just over halfway, and it looks good. But where, in the wake of “Sound Of Silver”, you’d be expecting the album’s emotional heart, that brilliant knack that Murphy has of sounding exciting and elegaic, of being tremendously hip while showing his age, instead we get “Hit”. “Hit” takes nine slightly drab minutes to let Murphy whinge about his record label wanting him to, yes, write hits, and while his generally curmudgeonly nature has always been an asset, you’d have expected him to be cleverer than building a record around what is basically an argument with an A&R. It’s certainly churlish to lose faith in an album because of a sour-flavoured lyric, but “This Is Happening” does seem to wander out of focus from “Hit” on. “Pow Pow” is effective David Byrne plus drum science, but “Somebody’s Calling Me” is an immensely pedantic homage to Iggy Pop’s “Nightclubbing” that, after seven minutes, sucks most of the remaining life out of the album. After that, multiple listens have frequently found me completely forgetting that the entirely pretty closer, “What You Need”, is actually playing. Skip “Hit” and “Somebody’s Calling Me”, and it’s just fine. But “This Is Happening” is cursed by lofty expectations: there’s no way James Murphy fluked his earlier successes, little plausibility in the idea that he’s creatively exhausted. He should’ve been on course to make a really wonderful album, and this is mainly a mere good one. Letdowns have been much bigger, I suppose.

A packed Borderline gets suitably rowdy later on, when Port O’Brien turn in a surprisingly rocking set. For the moment, though, the crowd’s hushed. Walking in on Laura Gibson, mid-song, you could have heard the proverbial pin drop. People are hanging on her every word, their muted quiet close to something like reverence. It’s just as well they’re not making a noise. The slightest murmur from them would very likely have drowned her out completely. Gibson has a voice of such gossamer delicacy she makes Joanna Newsom sound like David Coverdale. “Sweet Deception”, from her 2009 album, Beast Of Seasons, is a particular highlight, enhanced by the discreet support of Sean Ogilvie and Micah Rabwin, from Portland band Musee Mecanique, who between them play drums and other percussive bits and bobs, saw, ukelin, melodica and banjo. Fans of Newsom’s folky exotica and the pared country of Gillian Welch, one of whose old little-house-on-the-prairie frocks Gibson seems to be wearing tonight, should investigate immediately. Port O’Brien hove into Uncut’s view with 2007’s All We Could Do Was Sing, an album inspired in part by the Alaskan sea-faring adventures of singer-songwriter Van Pierszalowski, whose father is a commercial fisherman with whom Pierszalowski spends his summers working on a salmon schooner in often remote locations and sometimes tough weather. The record, then, had its share of windswept moments and stirring, communal sea-shanty sing-a-longs that at times had the euphoric sweep of Arcade Fire, but was also notable for several wistful ballads, usually sung by Pierszalowski’s partner, Cambria Goodwin. The music on All We Could Do Was Sing and to a perhaps lesser extent on last year’s equally good Threadbare was inclined to the folky end of things, appealingly ramshackle in some instances, with a preference for loudly thrashed acoustic instruments, clattering drums and a generally wayfaring air. Elsewhere, there were more measured orchestrations, sombre string sections that hinted at the gravity of, say, The Decemberists or The Acorn, with whom on record at least they have more than a little in common. Tonight, we are faced with a hastily reconfigured Port O’Brien line-up. Goodwin, they knew, would be unavailable for their current run of European dates. Then, less than a week before the tour, the drummer and guitarist who had lately been playing with Pierszalowski also bailed out, for unspecified reasons that cause Pierszalowski to nevertheless seethe when he mentions all this. Talk about turning potential disaster to your advantage, though! The new line-up may have been thrown together in fairly calamitous circumstances, but the inevitable rough edges perfectly suit a lot of the band’s material and there’s a thrilling seat-of-the-pants excitement about their playing that may not have survived any more rehearsal time. With nothing, you imagine, to lose, the band tonight just cut loose noisily at every opportunity, sounding at times like Zuma-era Crazy Horse, country rock played with stinging intensity, uninhibited, frequently raucous and often quite grand. Opener “Don’t Take My Advice”, for instance, sounds here like an uncanny echo of “Don’t Cry No Tears”, a laconic stroll. More urgent are versions that follow of “Oslo Campfire”, “Fisherman’s Son” and the Dylanesque tumble of “Sour Milk/Salt Water”. Elsewhere, “Calm Me Down”, which sounds reasonably measured on Threadbare, is turned into an agitated epic, Pierszakowski sounding like a man at the end of his anguished tether, or somewhere close to it, drenched in torrential guitars. It gets the biggest cheers of the night so far, although the reception for “Stuck On A Boat”, “Pigeonhole” and “Will Has Gone” quickly run it close. Things don’t get much better, though, than the rousing late version of “I Woke Up Today”, with its exclamatory chorus, the kind of rousing noise associated with the best of Arcade Fire, inspiring a communal singsong and a fair amount of mayhem onstage, where Pierszakowski has worked himself into a state of considerable excitement. Another great night at Club uncut, in other words.

Not exactly a Great Lost Column or anything, but here, as promised, is the piece on Sir Richard Bishop that fell out of the current issue of Uncut to make room for David Cavanagh's superb piece on Alex Chilton. Talking of the issue, by the way, thanks for your Great Lost Albums suggestions here; please keep them coming, and we'll feature as many as we can in a forthcoming issue of the mag. Most interesting musicians, perhaps understandably, tend to avoid defining themselves and what they do. Julian Cope, though, is one who has made a lucrative side career out of parsing genres for himself and others, coining a bunch of variously absurd-to-useful terms in the process. One came to mind the other week at Club Uncut, during an engrossing set by the guitarist Sir Richard Bishop. Cope has talked up an idea of gnostic rock’n’roll – an exploration of zones where esoteric beliefs and musics intersect, very roughly – which seems a lot more apposite to Bishop’s work rather than Cope’s own current protozoic jams, his spiritual quests notwithstanding. For a good 20 or 30 years now, for a long time as one-third of the Sun City Girls and latterly solo, Bishop – from Phoenix, but now based in Seattle - has pursued an idea of music which is fearless and adventurous, which collapses the boundaries between musics, cultures and faiths. His guitar playing betrays an astonishing virtuosity, whether he’s channelling Sandy Bull, Django Rheinhardt, the Egyptian maestro Omar Khorshid, or Dick Dale. With every unostentatious flourish, Bishop betrays a vast knowledge, but he carries it lightly. Maybe think of him as a repository of occultist thought, with a pranksterish approach to serious study. Between songs, Bishop will occasionally trigger a muffled loop of Tibetan monks he recorded himself in Dharamsala, India. “In case you didn’t get the message the first time,” he says, “I think they’ve just purified all your ritual objects.” This follows a song he describes as a Black-Eyed Peas cover, which is actually his own “Black Eyed Blue” (from 2006’s "Fingering The Devil". If you’re looking for a way in, 2007’s "Polytheistic Fragments" is a pretty great primer). He does, though, conjure up a ravishing improvisation out of The Beatles’ “She Loves You”, and twice advises Uncut, “If you run out of rock’n’roll icons, put me on the cover.” Bishop’s claims on rock posterity, albeit of an underground kind, are generally rather strong. Sun City Girls emerged out of a distinctly eccentric punk milieu in the early ‘80s, embarking on a haphazard career – 60 or 70 albums, many self-released on cassette – that’s offered potent inspiration to a scad of DIY, avant-rock and free folk artists. Their investigations of world music, meanwhile, had a lively irreverence, manifested not just in their own ethnological forgeries (of which a current favourite new band, Sheffield’s Harappian Night Recordings, are clearly keen scholars), but in the Sublime Frequencies label run by Bishop’s brother and Sun City bandmate, Alan (Check out Group Doueh, from the western Sahara, or something like the "Streets Of Lhasa" field recordings). Richard Bishop, meanwhile, also has a new band, Rangda, with Ben Chasny (Six Organs Of Admittance) and the many-tentacled free jazz drummer, Chris Corsano. Rangda release their first album, "False Flag", in May, and it’s a belter: a mix of, oh, boggle-eyed jazznik surf-hardcore, terrifying fire music jams, and some immensely lyrical passages (the epic raga of “Plain Of Jars”, say) that present the band as one not quite a million miles from orthodox rock tradition. And one, we should also note, named after a Balinese demon queen purported to eat children.