When writing about The Necks, it’s easy to end up with more of a timetable than a review. Their pieces traditionally last for around an hour (“Silverwater” stretches to 67 minutes), and are slowly evolving improvisations where the Australian instrumental trio intuitively manoeuvre round each other, subtly adjusting their themes as they go. “Silverwater”, then, begins with a tremulous organ hum and some chimes. At six minutes, a disconcerting percussive rattle arrives. At seven and a half, piano and drum rolls. Ten: double bass. Thirteen: a brief and characteristically minimal drum solo. Fourteen and a half: the bass returns, with a repeating four-notes, and the piece begins to focus. Seventeen: cymbal. Around 18 minutes in, the organ’s back, and the beginning of a sequence of trademark, pensive piano flurries from Chris Abrahams. Here, there’s a sense that The Necks have found the melodic heart of the piece, though sometimes with their improvisations the preliminaries can last indefinitely, aligning the band with ambient music as much as jazz (I’ve written about them a couple of times previously: about a Dalston live show; and their last album, the live “Townsville”). “Silverwater”, though, is something of a departure, with substantially more overdubs than usual. The sound remains spacious and minimal, but Abrahams’ various keyboards are meticulously layered, and at 29 minutes the drummer, Tony Buck, also adds a janglingly propulsive guitar line, which flags up the band’s vaguely post-rocking air. Tortoise is maybe the closest analogue there, an idea compounded when a second guitar line is introduced after 36 minutes, a diffident, laidback one reminiscent of Jeff Parker. Anyway, about 41 minutes in, the melodic passage dissolves into insectoid digital noise and percussive rattle, before Lloyd Swanton’s double bass returns too. Forty-six minutes: the guitar returns, somewhat disconsolately, in the midst of unusually dynamic jazz workouts. The last of these ebbs away at 48 and a half minutes, leaving the synth to provide a Riley-ish loop of uneasy, ebbing ambience. Then, gradually intensifying waves of organ from 53 minutes, and at 57 minutes a stunned reprise of the guitar sound last heard around 29, which pushes “Silverwater” towards its sultry resolution. Maybe they should take a further leaf out of Morton Feldman's book, and keep it rolling for another hour ot two more next time?

As you might have seen by now, Animal Collective’s “Merriweather Post Pavilion” has done rather well in Uncut’s Best Of 2009 poll. “MPP” came out in early January, and a continuously active year has now climaxed with a reissue for “Campfire Songs” and this, “Fall Be Kind”, a fairly extraordinary new EP. Apologies for having teased about this for the past few weeks: there’s been an embargo on early reviewing imposed by the band, presumably as a response to the pre-release feeding frenzy which introduced “Merriweather Post Pavilion” to the world. If one of the stories preceding “MPP” - that it would reflect Noah “Panda Bear” Lennox’s “Person Pitch” solo jam – turned out to be not quite true, the outstanding track on “Fall Be Kind” does, a little, being a lush and intricate web of loops, rooted in a snatch of Phil Lesh’s vocal from The Grateful Dead’s wonderful “Unbroken Chain”. This is “What Would I Want? Sky”, one of the very best songs in Animal Collective’s increasingly substantive catalogue. Like much of “Fall Be Kind”, it’s mellower and more reflective than the ecstatic flurries of “MPP”, but every bit as catchy. The overt dance influence has been toned down, too: if “MPP” was an early harbinger of spring, it’s easy to take the “Fall” reference in the EP title very literally, with all the moods it traditionally signifies. That said, when the opening “Graze” begins with a distant Disney fanfare and (I think) Avey Tare intoning, “Let me begin, feels good ‘cos it’s early,” the atmosphere is dewy and tentative rather than melancholy. Tare has never sounded calmer and less fervid, and the spaciousness which surrounds his unusually mature vocal, the faintly orthodox songcraft, all combine to remind me a bit of Grizzly Bear circa “Yellow House” – until, that is, a typically capricious, jittery panpipe jig arrives to break up the reverie. As the EP progresses into its heart, though, the mood does become glassier, dreamer, more disorienting; reminiscent, perhaps, of some of the “Water Curses” EP. “Bleed” is one of Panda Bear’s almost sacred, aerated sighs-as-songs, while “On A Highway” is a dazed, albeit very catchy standby of the overworked band, the song about touring. Even by the standards of that genre, though, Avey Tare’s lyrics are pointedly banal and confessional, as he admits being neurotic, distracted, stoned, sick from too much reading and jealous of “Noah’s dreaming”. There are times here when AC’s old habit of submerging their vocals has its attractions: “On a highway there are some workers pissing/ It starts my bladder itching/ Can I wait for the exit?” He’s rarely sounded more like Jonathan Donahue, too. Finally, “I Think I Can”, an overlapping chant (shades of “Sung Tongs”, electrified, maybe) that would’ve fitted pretty neatly into the middle section of “Merriweather Post Pavilion”. “Will I get to move on soon?” it ends, with that curious combination of yearning and euphoria that increasingly seems to be an Animal Collective trademark. Incredible music, anyhow, available now I think: let me know what you think when you’ve had a listen. Watch out, too, for the Pantha Du Prince album that’s just arrived, featuring Lennox, which I'll write something about soon.

Joe Pug? No, I hadn’t heard of him either, before he opened tonight for The Low Anthem. Count me as a fan now, though. Pug’s a potentially major song-writing talent, as evidenced on his Nation Of Heat EP, available online and really quite brilliant. But who exactly is he? Well, turns out he’s a 23-year old former student of the University Of North Carolina, where he studied playwriting before dropping out and moving to Chicago. There, he worked as a carpenter when there were jobs going, otherwise starved, and also wrote the scorching songs on Nation Of Heat that in delivery and content will make you think of John Prine, Paul Seibel and, inevitably, Dylan. You will therefore also think of, say Josh Ritter and AA Bondy, two other terrific younger writers of thoughtful, literate, moving songs. Tonight he’s on briefly and early, which means a lot of people miss his opening couple of songs. But as the central hall of this Notting Hill venue fills up towards the end of his set, you can feel a buzz of collective acknowledgement that something special’s going on. By then, he would have been playing either “Hymn 101”, a stand-out track on the EP, or the more recent anti-war song, “Bury Me Far From My Uniform”, an angry lament whose clear-eyed fury would have won approval from Phil Ochs. Not long after this, as the house lights fall, shadowy appear figures on stage, and something that sounds like the distant skirl of bagpipes or something similarly ancient but which turns out in fact to be a sombre harmonium or pump organ drone, initially shapeless, a passing mood, begins to fill the hall, the audience immediately hushed and attentive. This is The Low Anthem, of course – Ben Knox Miller on, for the moment at least, guitar, harmonica and vocals, Jeff Prystowky on double bass, Jocie Adams on whatever she’s playing, plus newly-enlisted fourth member Matt Davidson – and what they’re now playing is “To The Ghosts Who Write History Books”, one of several great songs from this year’s breakout album, Oh My God, Charlie Darwin, a runner-up in this year’s Uncut Music Award. The evening’s musical template is established early, and is familiar from said album. What the Low Anthem deliver is largely hushed, unhurried, mesmerising and quietly delirious. The mood, more often than not, is low-key and tends towards the sombre, as a rule, on songs like “This God Damn House” and “Senorita”, from 2006’s What the Crow Brings LP, and Charlie Darwin favourites like the breathtaking “Ticket Taker”, “To Ohio” – “our hit single!” - the astonishingly fragile “Cage The Songbird, new songs like “Smoke Myself To Sleep”, and, of course, the album’s supernaturally beautiful title track. People who haven’t seen them live may be forgiven for thinking of The Low Anthem as precious, somewhat serious types, straitlaced and even perhaps humourless. They are, of course, nothing of the sort. There’s a lot of wry humour about what they do and who they are and tonight there’s much hilarity when after the opening song, Miller suddenly quits the stage, followed by a baffled look from Prystowsky. Miller returns wearing the kind of 70’s wraparound shades you may remember Keith Richards or Lou Reed wearing back then, or maybe even Elton John in his coked-up heyday, an accessory for which he immediately apologises. He’s had to put them on because, he says, laughing at his own predicament – a first as far as I can remember - he’s suffering an allergic reaction to some carrots he’s eaten backstage. Some things, clearly, you just couldn’t make up, and Miller relishes the moment’s surreal cast. Elsewhere, they indulge a fondness for rowdy gospel mayhem on the rollicking “Home I’ll Never Be” (words: Jack Kerouac, music: Tom Waits) and the apocalyptic hootenanny barn-burner “The Horizon Is A Beltway”. They have a taste, also, for the bawdy end of the blues, given voice here, particularly, on a rousing version of the Reverend Gary Davis’s “Sally, Where You Get Your Liquor From?”, which recalls the raucous fatalism of Dylan’s Together Through Life. “What a band,” someone shouts hoarsely in one brief lull between transcendent moments. “What a fucking band!” He had a point. Book your tickets now for next February’s Shepherd’s Bush Empire and see you there.