Just remembered today that I should post this: my column from the last issue of the mag, devoted to Wooden Shjips and Ripley's awesome spin-off, Moon Duo. The new issue of Uncut is out this week, though my column on Sir Richard Bishop was necessarily spiked to make room for the Alex Chilton tribute; I'll run that here in the next day or two. In the rather arcane world which this column inhabits, you could just about describe San Francisco’s Wooden Shjips as superstars. Unlike Natural Snow Buildings, the French duo I focused on last month, Wooden Shjips’ records have been heard by more than a couple of dozen people. In fact, they’ve become one of those underground bands adopted, to some cautious degree, by the indie mainstream. Bobby Gillespie used their music to soundtrack a fashion show, incongruously enough, while Alex Turner was recently moved to tell NME, “I like them because they’re, well, quite good. Their music is perfect to leave on while you go about your business.” Faint praise, seemingly, but then a typical Wooden Shjips song has an inexorable, rolling momentum that can ebb in and out of your consciousness; a deep psychedelic locked groove that works insidiously. Hypnotically, you could even say, if you were to use one of the fallback signifiers of dronerock that seems particularly apposite here. If you’ve not heard the quartet before, last year’s second album proper, "Dos" (Holy Mountain), is a decent place to start. But the formula doesn’t vary hugely – or, some might say, at all: their latest compilation of limited-edition singles and so on, "Vol. 2" (on Sick Thirst), is very nearly as good. Ostensibly, Wooden Shjips have worked out a brilliant way of updating late ‘60s psychedelia and subterranean garage rock. A typical song – let’s say “Down By The Sea”, from Dos – seems to draw on the energies of both The Doors and The Velvet Underground, while maintaining a springy dance imperative that could’ve been transported from a 1966 Family Dog happening in their hometown. As their songs drive on remorselessly, the Shjips seem to be the last point on a continuum which also includes The Stooges, Neu! and La Dusseldorf, Suicide, Loop and Spacemen 3 (Wooden Shjips covered that last band’s “I Hear It” on a 2009 single, incidentally; presumably that one’ll turn up on "Vol. 3"). Unlike most of those bands, however, Wooden Shjips’ modus operandi also has room for some trad rock allusions (that CSN-mutating name, a lyrical wink to The Band in “Motorbike”) and many expansive guitar solos from frontman Ripley Johnson – hence an eyes-on-stalks cover of Neil’s “Vampire Blues” on Vol 2, also a highlight of their sell-out Club Uncut show last August. Ripley Johnson’s intensely focused productivity has also resulted in a first album by his other band, Moon Duo. It’s a fairly safe bet that Wooden Shjips won’t be entirely alienated by Moon Duo’s "Escape" (Woodsist), since Johnson doesn’t radically change his aesthetic between projects. Earlier singles suggested Moon Duo were treading a fractionally woozier path, or at least plugging in a drum machine and privileging that Suicide influence. The four tracks on "Escape", though, repeatedly find Johnson cueing up the trancebeat then embarking on yet another fuzzy voyage of discovery: “Motorcycle, I Love You”, “Stumbling 22nd St” and the swinging “In The Trees” are as generous and oceanic guitar jams as anything he’s served up in Wooden Shjips. As these songs stretch out towards the event horizon, there’s a sense – just as there is with Wooden Shjips, of course – that sometimes, all a band needs is one great idea. Their parameters might be narrow, but the possibilities contained within give every indication of being infinite.

From the lofty vantage point of SE1, I haven’t heard much buzz from South By Southwest this year, or at least very little in the way of real surprises and completely new discoveries (If you know different, of course, please share). One thing that has come my way from the Austin scrum, though, is a band from Cleveland called Cloud Nothings, who we’ve been pretty taken with this week. Looking at Cloud Nothings’ Myspace, one particular gig listing stands out to locate where their music fits in – a forthcoming Lawrence, Kansas show with Woods and Real Estate. Their sweet and ramshackle debut, “Turning On”, definitely fits in with that newish lo-fi aesthetic perpetuated by Woodsist et al, and occasionally I can hear the requisite throwbacks to Flying Nun, very early Go-Betweens and so on. There’s an affinity to Wavves, too, though generally Dylan Baldi (who made the album all by himself, it seems) is more plaintive than bratty. It doesn’t all quite work, sometimes being a little bit too shambling and indie for me. But at the very least check out “Hey Cool Kid” on the Myspace, which is one of the most bashfully insidious songs I’ve heard in a while. And while you’re around, another new band worth checking out, I think, is Forest Swords, from The Wirral. Forest Swords’ Myspace claims they sound like “River hymns + damp woods + dry leaves + sea winds,” which looks alright. More prosaically, though, I’d venture to pitch them as a kind of Liverpudlian analogue to Sun Araw; a sort of dank, addictive psych-dub band, who occasionally throw in some R&B and vague ethnological forgery vibes, and at other times seem to be jamming, dislocatedly, over an old Burial track. Judging by these tracks, it actually works really well: check out the pretty amazing “Miarches”, especially, and let me know what you think.

Around the release of his last studio album, "Beware", Will Oldham embarked on a small project. According to the writer Kelefa Sanneh, in a New Yorker profile published in January 2009, Oldham intended, “To promote the album with singles, a photo shoot, and a handful of interviews, if only to prove that record promotion doesn’t really work, at least not for him.” When it arrived in March 2009, "Beware" turned out to be among Oldham’s heartier records, but not conspicuously one to attract thousands of new fans. Domino are cagey about precise sales figures, leading one to assume that, having made his point, Oldham will now continue on his elliptical career path. Bearing in mind his cantankerous integrity, it’s easy to imagine him taking satisfaction from the fact that his appeal remains, shall we say, reassuringly selective. You do wonder, though, if he is ever frustrated by his lot. Journalists (mea culpa) persistently suggest that Oldham, 40 this year and with roughly 15 albums behind him, will be remembered as one of this era’s very greatest singer-songwriters. Wouldn’t it be nice to see some of that acclaim transformed into actual - rather than merely critical - capital, right now? Part of the problem, oddly, is Oldham’s consistency and productivity. Among the vast weight of music he releases – one album, one live album, one capricious "Best Of", two 10-inch EPs, three seven-inches, one iTunes single, six tracks on compilations and four appearances on other people’s records in 2009 alone – there are hardly any disappointments, but also precious few records that have been unanimously acclaimed as high points (1999’s "I See A Darkness" is usually the canonical pick). Some complex economic theorem might suggest that Oldham could sell more records if he made fewer of them. But that would potentially rob us of tremendous efforts like "The Wonder Show Of The World". It comes billed as a collaboration with The Cairo Gang, otherwise known as Emmett Kelly, a guitarist who has frequently accompanied Oldham of late (The original Cairo Gang, incidentally, were British spies operating against the IRA in 1920; quite a contrast to the Catholic rebellion implied by Oldham’s “Bonnie Prince” nomenclature). Compared with the rumbustious "Beware", "The Wonder Show Of The World" initially feels rather low-key. Arrangements are spare, spectral even. Mostly, Kelly tracks Oldham with voice and either acoustic or delicate electric guitar. Bass and drums appear intermittently, as do a choir of sorts. The starkness recalls 2005’s "Superwolf", albeit without the clanging interventions of Matt Sweeney. At times, a sacred air accumulates around the songs, so that “Someone Coming Through” betrays closer affinities to medieval church music than Oldham’s usual country references. But there’s a certain warmth and ‘70s classicism, too: a hint of "After The Goldrush" to the frail hymnal of “With Cornstalks Or Among Them”; something of Eric Clapton’s “woman tone” to Kelly’s keening solo on “Teach Me To Bear You”. Slowly, these immensely crafted songs bed in, emerging as some of the best and most accessible that Oldham has ever written. “That’s What Our Love Is” is remarkable, a tender crystallisation of the album’s principal theme; the enduring consolations of love, both spiritual and physical. For nearly five minutes, Oldham and Kelly indulge in some gentle come-hithering, before tablas arrive and the pace and intensity picks up. “I believe these are end times,” exclaims Oldham. “Wouldn’t it be best to be together then? The smell of your box on my moustache...” It’s an absurd image, delivered touchingly, that is typical of Oldham’s eccentric ribaldry, and of how he has spent the past few years writing about love and contentment in unorthodox, unsentimental ways. The tone of The Wonder Show Of The World (does the title refer to love itself?) might often be austere, but most of the songs are blessed with happy endings. “My chest swells and my nose snores; it’s all OK by you. I’ve never felt this welcome,” he observes on “Go Folks, Go”. In “The Sounds Are Always Begging”, the narrator’s wife goes crazy and starts “chopping up the bed”. She leaves, and Oldham tames his unruly children with the gift of music – which also “kept their mom away”. “Always choose the noise of music. Always end the day in singing!” he pontificates, and long experience of Will Oldham might counsel against taking his lyrics at face value. Still, it’s tempting to conclude that wonderful music and a loving home are much more important than the vagaries of commercial success. When The Palace Brothers first played London, Oldham covered Dolly Parton’s “I Will Always Love You”, and it seemed like an ironic gesture. Seventeen years on, experience suggests he may well have meant every word.

A funny year for music so far, personally speaking. It seems that, despite the many albums I’ve liked, there have been a good few that’ve been, one way or another, kind of disappointing: albums I’ve looked forward to very much, then neurotically restrained myself from writing about, due to my self-imposed rule about negative criticism generally wasting time and space. There’s still too much stuff to enthuse about, after all. I’ve been sat on James Murphy’s “Greenberg” soundtrack for a while now, and it’s only recently that I’ve started to really like it. Initially, Murphy’s extra-curricular business sounded oddly self-conscious, an academic satire on the sort of music that stereotypically accompanies a notionally indie-ish movie: could the xylophone-and-strum conjunctions of “Dear You” sound any more twee? That might still be true, but the strengths of these sketchy songs are becoming ever more apparent, I think. A bunch of them, it transpires, are co-written and performed with Al Doyle from Hot Chip (a peripatetic member of LCD Soundsystem, if memory serves), who evidently shares Murphy’s penchant for a kind of obsessively clever record-collector rock. Consequently, the superb “People” finds Murphy essaying his clenched falsetto (as heard on a section of “45:33”, though his voice sounds strikingly less adenoidal this year) on a piece of skinny electro-soul that’s one part Suicide, one part Lee Perry, and about 18 parts Timmy Thomas’ “Why Can’t We Live Together?”. “Photographs”, meanwhile, is a frail and affecting piano ballad that has something of The Kinks about it. And so it goes on, charmingly. “Sleepy Baby”: “Another Green World”-era Eno. “Birthday Song”: ingenuous indie-folk, with squeaking guitar strings for added lo-fi credibility. “Thumbs”: gamelan-ish homebaked Glass systems. “Gente”: flamenco! It’s all good, climaxing with “Please Don’t Follow Me”, one of Murphy’s fabulously awkward stabs at being plaintive, built on a needling piano line that reminds me indistinctly of something from “Berlin”, or “Hunky Dory”, maybe. There are also smart/droll selections from Galaxie 500, Steve Miller, The Sonics and Duran Duran mixed in, and a song credited to LCD Soundsystem, “Oh You (Christmas Song)”, which hits the jackpot for reference-hunters by being, ostensibly, an NYC post-punk rescoring of Pink Floyd’s “Money”. In the hands of most other musicians, this sort of intensive magpie-pop would get bogged down by its own cleverness, but Murphy can process this stuff with a wit and sleight-of-hand that makes it satisfying beyond providing sport for his fellow trainspotters. And none of it, for what it’s worth, sounds much like the forthcoming LCD Soundsystem album…