The first show by James Blackshaw with additional musicians begins a little oddly. A man plays a brief tuba solo, then settles down to some concerted texting on his phone. It turns out that this is a false start, however. The James Blackshaw Ensemble might contain a cellist, two violin players and a flautist, but the tuba player – warming up, it transpires – is here to accompany the support act, guitarist/pianist Tom James Scott, through a series of hushed, minimal pieces. Blackshaw, meanwhile, is a little nervous upfront of the show: finally, he has a sizeable following, and the Vortex (in Dalston) is rammed. I’ve written many times before about this fine British musician – you can find a blog about his most recent album, “The Glass Bead Game” and links to previous pieces here – so it’s great to see he now can pull a decent audience, and one that’s prepared to go along with his musical explorations. This show, I guess, ostensibly pushes his skills as a composer to the fore. While you can still hear his dextrous way with 12-strings on the opening “Arc”, it’s the arrangement that’s most striking: how it sits so comfortably alongside the discreet strings; how a flute and recorder pair up to provide what was, on the recorded version, Lavinia Blackwall’s vocal line (Blackwall, though, billed to appear as part of the ensemble, is absent; maybe busy with Trembling Bells?) It’s quite lovely, a meticulous reconstruction of the expanded sound of “The Glass Bead Game”, propelled but never totally dominated by Blackshaw’s egoless, aesthetically-charged playing. For “Arc”, he switches to grand piano, and while his gentle flurries sit in the mix very similarly to those he creates on guitar, I’m also reminded of Chris Abrahams from The Necks, though this may be, in part, because The Necks were the last band I saw at the Vortex. It’s interesting, though, that the two solo guitar pieces which Blackshaw plays at the end are perhaps the most satisfying. A full band show might be an often brilliant departure, and it’s a very useful way of pointing out the differences between Blackshaw, as a composer, and some of the new folk/post-Fahey guitarists with whom he was initially classified. But solo, you can hear best the full range of his strengths; not just his melodic gifts, but his immense, unshowy virtuosity on the 12-string, as he provides all the harmonic layering needed for these complex and mesmeric pieces all by himself. It’s one of those cases where music can have such a meditative aspect that you stop noticing the vast technical skill needed to create it - forget about the musician themselves, to some degree - and, instead, focus on its stealthy but profound emotional impact.

It’s been a bit quiet on the blog for a while – apologies, but I’ve been embargoed from writing about a couple of films I’ve seen recently. Anyway, one film I have seen, which I am allowed to write about, is Wes Anderson’s latest, Fantastic Mr Fox. Fox is a marvellous stop-motion adaptation of the Roald Dahl story, and Anderson very much claims it for himself. Anyone expecting his to go way off-message will be, I hope, pleasantly surprised to learn that it is definitely a Wes Anderson film – except one with puppets, that is. I’m going to save my powder on this, as I’ve just reviewed it for a forthcoming issue of UNCUT. But it has made me think: with Anderson’s Fantastic Mr Fox and Spike Jonze’s Where The Wild Things Are due later in the year, are we on the cusp of a sea-change in the way children’s films are made? Of course, Pixar and DreamWorks have pretty much led the way in terms of how children’s films have been made over the last decade. That is to say, they’ve functioned on two levels: state of the art animation for the kids and A-list acting cast and jokes for the grow-d-ups. But as undeniably good fun as Shrek, Finding Nemo, Toy Story and the rest of them are, they all broadly suffer (perhaps inevitably) from the Disneyfication of childhood. It’s a condition that’s been around since the days of Bambi and Dumbo – even a film as complex and grim as WALL-E is ameliorated by the big-eyed cutesiness of WALL-E himself. So, you might wonder, what will Anderson and Jonze achieve with their respective films? I’d like to think they’re the kind of directors who’d be ready to tackle head on the traumas and complexities of growing up without covering it over with a bland, generic saccharine finish. Anderson’s film is full of typically droll one-liners and idiosyncratic characters; even the Fox’s cub, Ash, is far away from the usual portrayal of child characters in this kind of film. He is sarky, neurotic, and angry – rather like, you might think, a child of a certain age would be in real life. Meanwhile, the trailers for Jonze’s film hints at some kind of family dysfunction for the story’s boy hero, Max; and the subsequent liberation he experiences when cavorting among the Wild Things. “This is your world,” explains Wild Thing Carol (James Gandolfini) – and what young boy doesn’t dream of having a world all of his own to rule? You’d hope most kids probably wouldn’t have much of a problem with either film. Indeed, you’d hope they’d willingly embrace these strange new takes on their bedtime reading. It strikes me, the people most likely to be concerned about either film are the studios – who presumably can watch their third-party merchandise franchises go up in smoke the minute they hear, say, Gandolfini’s broad Noo Joisey accent voicing a potential soft toy hit. Equally, what must the studio have thought when Jonze suggested that the soundtrack for ...Wild Things be done by Karen O, singer with New York’s finest alt-disco punkers, Yeah Yeah Yeahs? But I’m not sure, on reflection, whether these films are even meant for children. They might be based on children’s books, sure – but I suspect there’s as many adults keen to see new films from Anderson and Jonze regardless of what subjects they cover.

There’s an interesting snippet in the next issue of Uncut, when the Flaming Lips’ Wayne Coyne talks about Portishead’s “Third”. “It got under my skin,” he says. “From the standpoint of being in a band, they do some fun production things, it’s pretty inspiring. I liked how they embraced more stranger elements of prog-rock, and Silver Apples-influenced drum loops and things like that.” Re-reading this quote the other day, it helped crystallise a few ideas I’d been having about the new Flaming Lips album, “Embryonic”, and also about the self-titled debut album by Beak>, a new group featuring Portishead’s Geoff Barrow. Both “Beak>” and “Embryonic” are plainly rooted in a very loose, jamming aesthetic, and if “Third” betrayed a preoccupation with Krautrock and The Silver Apples, it has nothing on Barrow’s work here with Billy Fuller and Matt Williams (two more Bristol musicians, from Fuzz Against Junk and Team Brick respectively, acts in Barrow’s Invada stable who’ve never made much of an impact on me, to be honest). The stated design of “Beak>” seems to involve 12 days of writing and recording last January, with all tracks “recorded live in one room with no overdubs or repair”. The results involve lots of pleasantly skewed old synths, rackety beats much indebted to Can and early Kraftwerk (I’m thinking “Ruckzuck”, specifically), and an often dank atmosphere, increased by one of the band occasionally moaning in the distance and, consequently, recalling the stentorian misery of Ian Curtis; “I Know” does this especially effectively, while being a rich Silver Apples nod, too. Plenty more of the influences which threaded through “Third” are pushed right to the fore on “Beak>”, with Barrow clearly unencumbered by the vaguely orthodox songforms that Portishead still favour. “Ham Green” showcases his love of booming, staccato, stoner doom, while the uncharacteristically pretty “Battery Point” is reminiscent of someone like Mogwai’s more rippling, pastoral moments. The overall feel is very off-the-cuff, and consequently it can wander off on some slightly lost trajectories from time to time. But the spontaneity and rough-and-ready nature of the whole operation also feels like a necessary palliative to Portishead’s somewhat lengthier – tortured, perhaps – working practises. That’s a feeling which pervades the Flaming Lips’ “Embryonic”, too. If their recent albums have been, for the most part, over-wrought in a good way, “Embryonic”, according to Coyne, was conceived as a double album as a means of forcing the band to become more free and uninhibited. “I believe I was stuck thinking of us as being a group of reckless, sloppy freaks,” he says in some characteristically illuminating press notes, “and that, if we weren’t constantly trying to be more disciplined or more refined or more together, maybe our creative luck would elude us.” “Embryonic”, then, is a bunch of generally untethered jams, again much in thrall to Can, The Silver Apples and so on, as well as a fair bit of electric-period Miles Davis. Again, as with Beak>, it feels like something the band absolutely needed to do, to escape from a certain closed perspective. But while Beak> very much seems to be an end in itself, there’s something about “Embryonic” that doesn’t quite gel. As the title implies, it has an air of being a work in progress rather than a completed action. Of course, that can make for some very exciting and liberating music, and there are points amidst these 18 tracks where you sense the Lips have intuitively stumbled on something rather impressive: the glissandos and skronk of “Aquarius Sabotage”, say, where they manage to imbue general freeform chaos with the grandeur of their finest latterday records; the frail, stuttering guitar solo on “Powerless” that sounds like an attempt at Sonny Sharrock, possibly; the passage in “The Ego’s Last Stand” which drives rather than drifts, and the similarly pulsating “Silver Trembling Hands”. But then again, there are plenty of other points where the pieces sound less dynamic and exploratory, more straightforwardly unfinished (“Your Bats”, playing now, for instance). It’s frustrating, not least because it suggests that the Flaming Lips, nowadays, might be more effective if they erred on the side of conservatism: that perhaps their greatest strengths are being able to take semi-outré psychedelic ideas and transform into songs saturated with melody, ambitionn and accessibility. Though it galls me to admit it, I might like “Embryonic” more if they’d worked on these tracks more and made them more conventional. A lot to absorb, though, and it’s a record that demands to be played again and again, even when it’s not totally working.

There were so many people packed last night into the Scala to see Okkervil River that if I’d arrived any later, I probably would have had to watch the show from across the street, on the concourse of King’s Cross Station. As it is, by the time the band came on to a throaty roar from a rowdy crowd, I’m pinned by a press of bodies to a wall at the back for much of what follows, all of which is great. They get off to a surprisingly subdued start, though, I should tell you that. The sound’s a little too low, not the crisp wallop a song like “A Hand To Take Hold Of The Scene” surely demands. There are niggling technical problems on more than a few subsequent occasions, in fact, which Will Sheff copes with admirably, his exasperation showing through only in flashes when some people in his position may have thrown a complete hissy fit or been tempted to storm off in an attention-seeking strop. It’s unfortunate, though, that the one song that’s most effected is usually the show-stopping “John Allyn Smith Sails” with its now-famous – among Okkervil fans, anyway – appropriation of “Sloop John B”. It starts fantastically, with Sheff’s vivid spoken description, a kind of speed rap over frantically strummed guitar, of the song’s subject, the great American poet John Berryman, walking through a college campus to the bridge in Minneapolis from which he jumped to his death (Craig Finn tells the same story in The Hold Steady’s “Stuck Between Stations”). Unfortunately, the sight of guitarist Lauren Gurgiolo and a harassed technician trying to get Lauren’s guitar to work and in the process wrapping themselves up in endless lengths of leads and wires is, while a moment of high comedy, something of a distraction for both the rest of the band and at least one member of the audience, namely me. It’s quickly forgotten, though, in all the surrounding excitement and great music. Most of the set’s taken from the band’s last two albums, The Stage Names and The Stand-Ins and includes early on a very sharp version of the venomous “Singer Songwriter”, a lovely, drifting “Girl In Port” and a riotous “Pop Lie”. As it did last year at Shepherd’s Bush Empire, Will’s mostly solo version of “A Stone”, from Black Sheep Boy, that brings the place to an absolute standstill, everyone for a moment hushed, taking a moment to recover when finally, after what seems like at least 10 minutes, it’s over, some lovely playing by Gurgiolo taking it out. The next 30 minutes or so are a non-stop blast, with “Lost Coastlines” followed by “Our Life Is Not A Movie Or Maybe” and, inevitably, “Unless It’s Kicks”, which ends with Sheff doing his hillbilly preacher thing – “Show me your hands!” – and generally looking wild and transported. We’re by now at that point in the show where people are shouting out for songs they’re afraid won’t otherwise get played – a chap a few feet away from me makes me laugh out loud when after much nervous throat-clearing finally pipes up with a request for the cheerfully-titled “The War Criminal Rises And Speaks”. In the evnt, we get the witty “Plus Ones”, a beautiful “Last Love Song For Now”, from The Black Sheep Boy Appendix and the whole thing ends with the Appalachian hymnal of “Westfall” with Guglio on trilling mandolin and everyone coming on like one of The Carter Family.