Over the next few days, we'll be running full transcripts of the judges' meeting to decide the winner of 2009's Uncut Music Award. Today we begin with their thouhts on the winner, Tinariwen's "Imidiwan: Companions". Billy Bragg: The Tins, yeah, I really liked the Tinariwen album. It seems to be a bit more pulsating than their last one. I could put this on and listen to it all day, it takes me to a place where nothing else I’m hearing these days does. I’m not really sure how to explain it. I listen to a lot of African music, and the stuff I generally like has more classical African instrumentation. They get right to the roots of the music, not just African music, but they’ve really got it down to that pulsating rhythm. Maybe it’s because you don’t know what they’re singing about, you don’t focus on the lyrical content, so you’re more focused on the rhythmic power of it and the way it all comes together. Allan Jones: It kind of helps you realise what a great rock ‘n’ roll band they are. Bob Harris: They’re a great rock ‘n’ roll band, almost like an old school R&B band. Billy: Exactly! It’s not like they’ve gone back to the delta – well, they have, they’ve gone back to the Nile delta! – but they’ve gone back to the wellspring of the music that we love, and the fact that they’re using electric guitars in that way adds to it. Allan: It’s such an exciting guitar sound. Billy: Amazing. I think this band will be hugely influential; in the next couple of years we’ll be hearing young bands lifting the tensions and the rhythms of Tinariwen. You find yourself reaching back to the blues to explain what they do, it’s like they’ve turned the whole bloody thing upside down. Bob Harris: They were in the studio with me, and as we usually do we asked them to bring in a couple of tracks they might want us to play. They brought in John Lee Hooker and Jimi Hendrix. I mentioned earlier how I like an artist’s lifestyle to inform the music, and this is the definitive example of lifestyle spilling into music. Their story is so fascinating, the way that Ibrahim Ag Alhabib grew up into music. He was literally a wild four-year-old, his parents had been killed, and he’d never heard guitar before. He saw a guitar being played on a film being projected up against the wall of a building when he was seven years old, and couldn’t believe it what this thing was. So he made his own guitar, and he subsequently became known just as “Guitar” among everyone who knew him – he was the only person who had one of these things. It’s a very rebel background, as we know, but it’s much more than that. There are layers and layers here that I don’t think we will ever completely understand, there’s flavours and hints of so much in this music. If we’re talking about what’s the most amazing, creative, forward-looking, political record we’re discussing, then this album is very, very special. There’s a lot of words here, the language, that don’t completely or properly translate into English. There’s so much to discover, to know about this record, but you find yourself asking how much do I want to know, or how much do I just want to be entranced by it. Rachel Unthank: It’s hypnotic, isn’t it? It’s almost trance-inducing. I saw them at the Cambridge Folk Festival one year, I had a hangover and wasn’t really paying attention but it just took me over. Every time I put this album on the quality just shines through. It’s just so dark and brooding, and genuinely rock ‘n’ roll, compared to the gloss of Kings Of Leon. Billy: Well, the Kings Of Leon is where rock ‘n’ roll is, where it finds itself today, whereas Tinariwen are something more primal. Rachel: It’s quite easy to be enchanted by their story, because it’s exciting, but it’s not just some kind of world fusion where they’re playing some kind of world music and just stuck some electric guitars over the top of it. This is the way they’ve learned to play music, it’s from them, and you can hear that and it’s powerful. Dave Robinson: I loved this. I was very pleased you asked me to be on this panel, because I didn’t know much about a lot of these artists. When I go into a record shop it’s to buy something I’ve got in my mind, but trying to avoid the casual purchase that you take home and have to dump very quickly. I’d not heard Tinariwen before, and I just found this stunning. The mood washes over you, it’s a remarkable record. In the wake of all these other records it really stands out as something unique. I don’t care what he’s singing about, but I get a vibe of what he’s singing about. It’s probably the most impressive record of this bunch. We’ve talked about Kings Of Leon and I really think that it’s a really professional record where everything falls into place, it’s what you might expect from a career in western music, but this is in entirely a different class. Mark Cooper: The Kings Of Leon analogy is interesting, because this is Tinariwen’s third record, they’ve been touring since 2004. We’ve supported them a lot on Later..., but as sometimes happens with bands you think you know you let it pass you by, you think you already know the score. I didn’t listen to this when it first came out, I just thought it was going to be another Tinariwen record that’ll be great and I’ll catch up with it when I can. But I think it’s a quantum leap, it’s their best-produced record, it’s got the strongest songs. It distills Tinariwen and takes them to another level, and I’m really glad I did this panel because I probably would have otherwise taken them for granted because I considered myself a convert already. I love the first song [“Imidiwan Afrik Tendam”], I think it genuinely should be a single in the world I live in. It’s lighter, it’s a bit country-ish. When I first heard Tinariwen it helped me revive the word “heavy”, which I hadn’t been able to use since I first heard the Edgar Broughton Band! I also love the fact that this is a world music record that saves world music from the liberals. That’s really cool, I think a rock audience can like it, it’s not precious or worthy. It’s real. Tony Wadsworth: I find myself agreeing with what everyone else is saying, so I’ll try not to repeat anything. I think the guitar sound is probably the best I’ve heard in years, and it also makes it judge it in a different way, in much more real terms. I just think it’s mega, it’s so powerful. You know how with early rock ‘n’ roll records there’s only a few instruments but everything just sounds bigger? That’s what I get from this. Mark: They’re a band that everybody should and could love, given a chance. Talking about radio and the music industry, it’s hard not to believe that a couple of tracks here if they were given even half a chance could really hit big. Billy: No problem. Black geezers, don’t speak English, probably Muslim – easy sell! Who’s doing the promo on this one?! Mark: But I do think that the minute people get a chance to hear this stuff they’ll get it. It’s not hard to get. Allan: It speaks a common language, I think. You don’t have to have the lyrics translated to know what they’re talking about. You don’t need to listen to the words of rock ‘n’ roll to be excited by it. Billy: Well, this is very encouraging. I didn’t think they’d even get on the shortlist, but for them to emerge as the favourites is great. I really do think they are an Uncut band.

I imagine that when Dave Grohl, John Paul Jones and Josh Homme talk about Them Crooked Vultures (and there’s the first interview in tomorrow’s NME, apparently), there’ll be much talk of a creative partnership, a meeting of equals and so on. The truth about this sprawling, impressive debut album, though, is that, once you get past the marquee names, it’s ostensibly another Homme vehicle, with an all-star conceit not that much different from Queens Of The Stone Age’s career-topping “Songs For The Deaf” , on which Grohl also played drums. There’s little arguing with the vigour and pace of this rhythm section, of course – as Grohl thunders his way through, say, the accelerated motorik chugger “Dead End Friends”, it’s hard not to think of how much more fun he must be having here than in the increasingly mellow Foo Fighters. But “Them Crooked Vultures” comes frontloaded with Homme’s musical DNA: it’s his knotted, blocky sense of melody, his guitar sound – a fierce mathematical hybrid of ZZ Top and Devo, very roughly - which dominates these 13 songs. While weaker spirits, in the company of John Paul Jones, would automatically default to Led Zeppelin pastiches, Homme is, mostly, heroically incapable of straying too far from his chosen path. When he echoes an old song, it’s usually one of his: the malevolent stop-start dynamics of “Elephants”, for instance, is not a million miles away from “Song For The Dead”. When he resembles another singer, as on “Bandoliers”, it’s his old sparring partner Mark Lanegan, rather than Robert Plant. That said, Homme goes a bit goth Bowie on “Gunman”’s chorus, and he does manage a pretty good stab at Eric Clapton on “Scumbag Blues”, a faint relative of “Strange Brew” that confirms, after the Arctic Monkeys suggested as much, that Cream are much favoured at Rancho De La Luna. “Scumbag Blues” also features a needly, overdriven keyboard solo from Jones, very much in the vein of “Trampled Underfoot”. If there is a Led Zep side to “Them Crooked Vultures”, it’s definitely weighted towards “Physical Graffiti”, the odd “Communication Breakdown” hurtle apart. The monolithic, clod-hopping funk of, say, “Custard Pie” and “Houses Of The Holy” can occasionally be detected – though it’s as easy to compare “No One Loves Me” or “Reptiles” to Homme’s antics in the Eagles Of Death Metal. Like that last band, Homme can be a touch geeky; a song title like “Caligulove” might be funny with Jesse Hughes, but it feels somewhat gauche in the company of John Paul Jones. Also, while my appetite for eight-minute algebraic jams like “Warsaw Or The First Breath You Take” is unusually strong, “Them Crooked Vultures” is slightly, hairily long – as if Homme, thrilled by the opportunity to flex his muscles in such exalted company, wasn’t quite so assiduous in his editing. But this isn’t a new problem for him; maybe part of the richness of “Songs For The Deaf” is its excess. Whether the longueurs of “Them Crooked Vultures” turn out to be so rewarding remains to be seen. Still, not bad for a supergroup…

A strange experience this morning. As I write, I’m listening to what seems to be a perfect recording of the Mountains show I saw last night at Club Uncut. As with a previous tour, which resulted in the superb “Etching” album, Brendon Anderegg and Koen Holtkamp rehearsed a new piece for the tour, recorded an early take on it, then produced CD-Rs to sell after each show. Feels a bit like cheating, really, as if I’m reviewing the album rather than the excellent 40-minute piece that the duo played at the Slaughtered Lamb last night. But that said, it’s not exactly identical: for this tour, Mountains are working without computers, firing up the old time-lag accumulator pedals and building a dense, immersive music live from scratch. So it begins with melodica and bells to create the requisite low drone tones and cosmic rustle, then gradually accrues momentum through another melodica, a couple of acoustic guitars (including some very deft and fulsome Fahey-ish picking that locates Mountains closer to folk music than the avant-garde, incidentally) and a meticulously deployed whisk; a bit of precise micro-detailing reminiscent of some of Matmos’ live sampling. The layering that goes on for the next 20 minutes is so intense that any thought of Mountains as an ambient band, or as minimalists, seems pretty laughable. One thing that’s apparent, though, is that even at their noisiest, there’s a highly resilient prettiness to the duo’s music which separates them, to a degree, from some fellow travellers with edgier or more ironised agendas, such as Emeralds, Ducktails or James Ferraro, maybe). After 20 minutes there’s a gentle hiatus of drones and wave sounds, a quick removal of actual physical layers (jumpers, jackets) as well as metaphorical ones, then they’re off again, rapidly ramping up the acoustic guitar loops into a vigorously aestheticised cacophony that recalls My Bloody Valentine and Seefeel as much as it does more common Mountains reference points like Fennesz and Popol Vuh. Forty minutes, and they’re through. Great show, and it sounded great again just now. Opening up the night – our first in the crashpad-like environment of The Slaughtered Lamb’s basement – were Pausal, who were fine, too: two men from London sat on the floor with a laptop and a guitar, a few projections on the sheet behind them, playing a blissed, neo-classical kind of ambience that occasionally reminded me of something like The Irresistible Force as well as the hipper reference points I used last time. Thanks to them, Mountains and everyone else who came down for another excellent show.

I heard the other day that a brand new Animal Collective single was purportedly on its way, which samples Phil Lesh’s mighty “Unbroken Chain” one of my favourite Dead songs. First, though, there’s a reissue of 2003’s ghostly “Campfire Songs”; an album which, I guess, may come as something of a shock to people who’ve only been exposed to Animal Collective’s last couple of albums. Checking through the archives, it seems it was just over a year ago that I blogged about “Merriweather Post Pavilion”, which rapidly became one of the most viewed posts out of the 592 I’ve managed on Wild Mercury Sound, and maybe signalled to us how popular this extraordinary band were becoming. But where that album is fully-saturated and electrified, “Campfire Songs” reduces the Animal Collective sound to its bare, spindly bones. For a good while, this was actually my favourite AC album, and it still sounds great: Avey Tare and Panda Bear on a Maryland porch, strumming and harmonising in very dislocated, beatific fashion, while Geologist uses field recording techniques to capture not just their playing, but the ambience of their environment. If Animal Collective were once aligned to the whole freak-folk thing, it’s due in no small part to this album. Much of the five tracks seems loosely improvised on the spot, as one sigh and slither of melody gently coalesces into another. It’s interesting, though, listening to it with the knowledge of what the band have done since. Somehow, the tunes become more accessible, as a result, I guess, of our increasing familiarity with how Dave Portner and Noah Lennox construct songs. So while “Queen In My Pictures” opens “Campfire Songs” with nine-odd minutes of hesitant, strung-out acoustic ambience, it turns into “Doggy” (and there’s a title, rich with infantilism, that now looks programmed to wind up those who criticise AC as insufferably twee); a song which, treated differently, wouldn’t be much less striking than something like “My Girls”. It’s a lovely, intimate, immersive record, if you haven’t heard it before, and one which, while “Merriweather” seems very much of its precise time, feels comparatively ageless. Soon enough, Animal Collective would revisit these gaseous ideas, in more structured form, on “Sung Tongs” and, especially, the “Prospect Hummer” EP with Vashti Bunyan. In some ways, though, they were never gentler, or wilder, than here.

Reading the odd review of BBC’s Electric Proms the other week, and the default concept of chucking in orchestra/choir to create an “event”, I started wondering whether the pairing of Grizzly Bear with the London Symphony Orchestra was such a good idea. After all, the songs on “Veckatimest”, even the ones with strings, are so airy and lacking in bombast. Sometimes, I find myself barely noticing the instrumentation, with the focus so intently on those ornate vocal melodies. Remarkably, Saturday’s show at the Barbican manages to pull off a similar trick; thanks, I guess, to the superb harmony singing of the four Grizzly Bear members and the orchestrations of Nico Muhly, tucked away in the corner of a very crowded stage behind a grand piano. I’m struggling to think of a band+orchestra show where the orchestra has been used in such a subtle way. In fact, Muhly’s arrangements are sometimes so discreet, it seems an even more decadent event. From “Easier” on, as Chris Taylor crouches on the floor with a flute, Daniel Rossen takes the lead and Edward Droste lets out his first levitating sigh of the evening, Muhly’s deft and intricate arrangements are bewitching rather than intrusive. The spaciousness remains, for the most part, with the band, artfully, playing a long game. The build-up to crescendos lasts over several songs rather than the odd minute or so, which makes the fireworks - the quixotic swell of “Southern Point”; a bit of feisty atonalism at the end of “Fine For Now”; the opulent menace of The Crystals’ “He Hit Me (And It Felt Like A Kiss)” – all the more impressive. Only on the grand romance of “I Live With You”, perhaps, does it feel as if the orchestra are roaring at full strength; coming as this does a good hour, 75 minutes, into the show, the impact is huge. Unlike many of these kind of events, then, where the core band get somewhat drowned out, their individual talents really shine here, and not just the twin frontmen, Droste and Rossen. It’s Chris Taylor, for instance, who provides the Frankie Valli falsetto on the ethereal doo-wop of “Knife”, in between multi-tasking on bass, flute, sax and shortwave radio. And it’s the bow-tied drummer, Chris Bear, dwarfing his compact kit, who turns out to be the evening’s musical scene-stealer, giving everything a roll, snap and swish that’s much jazzier than the records sometimes suggest. Bear is in his element on “Two Weeks”, one of two songs (the other being the other hit from “Veckatimest”, “While You Wait For The Others” – sung by Rossen rather than Michael McDonald, unfortunately) played by Grizzly Bear accompanied only by Muhly and the LSO’s harpist. The fact that these two receive more or less the biggest receptions of the night is probably due to familiarity more than the more parsimonious arrangements. But in a way, as conductor Jim Holmes leans on his podium centre-stage and looks on approvingly, they only heighten the extravagance of the evening. What audacious proflicacy, to hire all those musicians, and use them, relatively, so sparingly.