Bit of a catch-up, today. These are a bunch of records that’ve figured in a good few Uncut playlists, and that I’ve been meaning to write about for weeks – in some cases months – but haven’t managed to tackle properly. In a bid to tidy up a little, here’s a fast round-up of some worthwhile stuff. First off, fairly inevitably, a couple of guitar soli. C Joynes and Nick Jonah Davis are two British players (Joynes is Cambridge-based I think; Davis is described by his label, Tompkins Square, somewhat amusingly as, “A reclusive figure on the Notts music scene.”) both with at least a residual interest in Takoma. Joynes even comes up with a very Fahey-esque title for his latest album (the first I’ve come across), “Revenants, Prodigies And The Restless Dead”, but an experimental imperative means that he brings some newish ideas to a familiarly satisfying stew. Meanwhile, Davis’ album is given the soberly reductive title of “Guitar Recordings Vol 1” and is less expansive, but perhaps slightly superior; Davis has a lovely, bell-like clarity to his playing, which puts him right up there with Tompkins Square’s other 2009 British discovery, Ben Reynolds. A couple more folk-related things worth mentioning. The excellent Numero Group label are persevering with their “Wayfaring Strangers” series of outsider folk recordings that’ve generally been harvested from private press or super-rare ‘70s albums. After the “Guitar Soli” volume from last year, the latest edition is titled “Lonesome Heroes” and features 17 impressively blasted singer-songwriters very much in the Tims tradition. Heavy obscurantism here – I’ve only come across Tucker Zimmerman before, I think – but the standard is pretty awesome. J Tillman is, of course, a bit better known, being the drummer in the Fleet Foxes and an increasingly prolific singer-songwriter in his own right. I’ve never been much of a fan of his previous albums – pretty down-the-line Americana as far as I recall – but “Year In The Kingdom” is nice, thanks in no small part to the spacey, reverberant, marginally ethereal settings Tillman places his songs in. A lot of hammer dulcimer, which I’m not sure will figure in his live show, but we’ll soon find out: Josh Tillman is headlining Club Uncut next week (October 7) at London’s Relentless Garage. One more today. Adam Forkner’s last White Rainbow album, “Prism Of Eternal Now”, was a terrific kosmische jam, with plenty of nods to Terry Riley as well as the usual Krautrock suspects. The follow-up, “New Clouds”, is good, too, with Forkner stretching out into a more maximalist, full-on style that maybe moves him closer – inadvertently, I’m sure – to the likes of Spiritualized at their most immersive. Usefully transporting, though two tracks with the word “boogie” in their titles may be a little misleading…

I’ve been working my way through a shedload of new releases from Thurston Moore’s Ecstatic Peace! label this past week or so, including ones from a few Wild Mercury Sound regulars like Sunburned Hand Of The Man with Kieran Hebden and MV & EE, as well as some less familiar things, like Little Claw and a pretty fierce free jam from White Out in the company of Moore and Jim O’Rourke. My favourite, though, is the latest from Hush Arbors, “Yankee Reality”. Keith Wood’s main project is something I’ve written about here a couple of times previously, in a live review of a Club Uncut show from the back end of last year, and in a piece on the last Hush Arbors album on Ecstatic Peace! That record, called “Hush Arbors”, suggested that Wood was gracefully expanding on his fuzzy, avant-folk roots and embracing a more orthodox, though still somewhat other-worldly, tradition of American rock and roots music. “Yankee Reality” compounds that idea in style. Produced by J Mascis (who also contributes some deep riffs and drums), it finds Wood with a full band lineup, moving closer to a rich, rock sound. The folk influences are generally downplayed, and in their place comes a renewed affiliation to classic folk-rock, with “Day Before” and the fantastic “For While You Slept” echoing the dappled jangle of The Byrds. It’s only a partial similarity, for Wood’s thin vocals never try, wisely, any complex harmonies. It’s an endearing voice, a little like his fellow traveller Ben Chasny, but maybe one that stops Hush Arbors from being a really powerful band; listening to “For While You Slept”, there’s a mild sense of frustration that such an excellent song isn’t quite getting the treatment it deserves. But chiefly, “Yankee Reality” works just fine. Some sweet and clever notes that come with the album have been written by James Jackson Toth, and Toth’s latterday albums (as Wooden Wand and under his own name) certainly share a feel; that of two outsider musicians coming in from the wilderness and channelling the more accessible parts of their mighty record collections, maybe. Consequently, “Yankee Reality” features that standby, the exquisite Americana dirge that faintly recalls “Knockin’ On Heaven’s Door” (“So They Say” here) and another that reminds me of “The Bollweevil Song” (“Take It Easy”). There’s a nice confection of brokeback piano and distantly Motown drums (“One Way Ticket”; check all these artfully cliched song titles, by the way), plus a Mellotron-powered boogie (“Coming Home”) which prompts Toth to suggest, wryly, it “Oughta have the girls in Band Of Horses t-shirts swooning in no time.” Finally, there’s “Devil Made You High”, where the dust gets properly kicked up, there’s a roaring wind tunnel guitar, and the distinct spectres of Dinosaur Jr. J Mascis, perhaps inevitably, didn’t play on that one.

A great line in the press release that comes with this third full album from Espers. “The band attempted to create something that would be perhaps cheery at times,” it reads, “though that mark may have been missed.” “Cheery” is certainly stretching it, but from the start of “III”, it seems like Espers, historically one of the most dirge-favouring – and, just maybe, one of the best – of the acid-folk revivalists , have changed tack a little. “I Can’t See Clear” has a relatively mournful atmosphere – Meg Baird’s lovely voice makes that fairly inevitable – but there’s something akin to jauntiness in the way the song progresses. More of a waltz than a jig, a new lightness of touch is fractionally palpable, a sense that Espers are partially emerging, blinking, from their Philadelphia hedge. On his last solo album, “The Hive”, Espers pivot Greg Weeks turned in a typically funereal version of Madonna’s “Borderline”. Apparently, it was originally planned for an Espers record, but didn’t fit into the aesthetic which was forming. Now “III” is here, you can see why. The hazy folk moods are generally recognisable; the fuzzy, needling riffs from Brooke Sietinson retain that courtly, beguiling take on psychedelia; Baird and Weeks remain an engagingly doleful twin focus. But mostly, the drones have been dropped, so that these songs move at, relatively speaking, a new clip. It’s probably a clever move; in that piece on “The Hive” linked in the previous paragraph, I mentioned how reductive their dronefolk schtick could be; one more album fully committed to that style and maybe Espers could’ve started turning into a kind of hipster All About Eve. Nevertheless, the first half-dozen or so plays of “III” suggest that, while it’s a frequently terrific album, it’s not quite in the same class as “II”, that it’s missing a little of that sustained intensity. Perhaps I’m fussing too much. “III” is a hugely airy and beguiling album, beautifully sequenced: a current favourite passage runs from the prickly, psychedelic instrumental coda of “The Road Of Golden Dust”, through the sparkling duet, “Caroline”, into the Baird-fronted “The Pearl”, a song much in the same, Linda Perhacs-esque vein as the outstanding “Riverhouse In Tinicum” from her solo album, “Dear Companion”. “That Which Darkly Thrives” seems to revert to the gloomy style of “II”, as the title might suggest. But then, the drummer – I’m not sure whether it’s still Otto Hauser – starts playing a kind of breakbeat, of all things, which subtly tips the song off its more predictable axis. “III” is full of nice, clever touches like this. The whole album, the way the strings and guitars are augmented by delicately burbling old keyboards (an analogue to “The Hive”, this), is familiar but refreshed. When they roll into “Another Moon Song”, it even seems as if Espers have taken their traditionally dolorous vibes, their faintly menacing Mellotron, and stuck them onto something like a blues progression, albeit a musty, quasi-medieval one. Then “Colony” starts, and it sounds like it could’ve sat very moodily and effectively on “II”. Possibly some over-nuanced distinctions in this preview, I’m beginning to suspect…

Disregarding Jeff Tweedy for a moment, one way of mapping the diverse influences of Wilco is by having a look at the side projects of the various members. So on the one side, you have the fairly mild-mannered and conventional chamber pop produced by John Stirratt and Pat Sansone in The Autumn Defense. Then, on the other, you’re confronted by the fairly bewildering array of avant-garde jams disseminated by Nels Cline. And then there’s the drummer Glenn Kotche, both solo and as one half of On Fillmore. I think Kotche came to Tweedy’s attention thanks to his involvement with Jim O’Rourke, and On Fillmore’s other member, the bassist Darin Gray, is/was a regular part of O’Rourke’s gifted entourage during the latter’s frantically busy period around the turn of the century. “Extended Vacation” is, I think, the fourth On Fillmore album, though I must admit I can only recall hearing the last one, “Sleeps With Fishes”. “Extended Vacation” is not what you might first imagine; maybe some post-post-rock manoeuvres, with some improvisational flash here and there. Instead, it consists of a bunch of ineffably delicate instrumentals that locate the experimental impetus within Martin Denny’s exotica and run with it, allbeit at a very easygoing pace. These seven tracks are predominantly vibes-driven and recorded with a beautiful clarity and crispness, though that doesn’t make the discreet rustling instruments – apart from Gray’s upright bass – any more identifiable in the main. Like Denny, “Extended Vacation” seems to try and conjure up an ethereal, unreal, idealised jungle soundtrack, fitted out with an array of bird sounds – some maybe field recordings, some provided by Dede Sampaio, a Brazilian jazz percussionist. It’s immensely beguiling, pretty much following through on the possibilities suggested by Stereolab, The High Llamas and a good few Chicago bands in the mid ‘90s when they sought to tease out the avant-garde potential of records – like Denny’s – which had long been relegated to the category of kitsch. Part of the charm and effectiveness of “Extended Vacation” is how Kotche and Gray subtly add more radical textures into the melting pot: the vigorously edited horn voluntaries and marching band drums that clatter into the finale of “Daydreaming So Early”, for instance. All of these sonic adjustments remain fairly mellow in effect, however, until the latter part of the title track, when a cranky, tinny, feedbacking instrument barrels in, completely at odds with the prevailing feel. It’s interesting (what is that sound? A shahi baaja, maybe, like the one used by the Flower/Corsano Duo? I’m stumped), though there’s an argument that such a perverse obligation to disrupt the mood isn’t totally necessary.

The last time I wrote about Mountains, the sole comment I received at the bottom of the blog read, “No offense dude, but that review was kind of useless” – a warning maybe, not to try it again. And a fair point, probably, but whatever. Last week a new album arrived from Mountains that confirms the duo as one of the best kosmische/deep listening groups operating in the states right now. There’s a glimpse of this on “Map Table”, the Mountains track we included on the “Seeing For Miles” comp that came free with the current issue of Uncut (thanks again for all the kind words about that, by the way). But “Etching” showcases their strengths much better, being a rippling, micro-detailed but expansive single piece which lasts around 38 minutes. Apparently, “Etching” originally surfaced, in a slightly different form, as a limited edition CDR sold at gigs. The press release claims, also, that it’s a live recording, though closer reading reveals it’s not a gig performance (though many of their subsequent gigs were apparently based on this model), but a piece recorded “in Brendon's studio. The whole recording is in real time with no overdubs.” In other words, I guess it’s a studio jam, but one that unravels at such a composed and meditative pace that you’d be hard-pressed, as silvery acoustic guitar lines thread a path through the general enveloping hum, to identify it as such. Instead, “Etching” feels a lot like a culmination of what Mountains were shooting for on “Choral” from earlier this year. Consequently, a lot of the references I wheeled out last time are still relevant; Cluster’s “Sowiesoso”, Popol Vuh; contemporaries like White Rainbow (who has a new one on Kranky I should write about, actually) and Arp. This time, though, the drift is definitely towards ambience, and so you could also see them as fellow travellers of this (necessarily) nebulous new school of new age thing which seems to be coalescing around people like James Ferraro. And as it gracefully, stealthily reaches some pretty elevated, ecstatic peaks, “Etching” also reminds me of one of my favourite records in this vein, Growing’s “Soul Of The Rainbow And The Harmony Of Light”. The sort of record that seems to be ideal background music, but has an insidious presence that gradually looms into the foreground and becomes unignorable – significantly powerful, even – as it progresses. Must be amazing live, I think.