A couple of records today that I’ve mysteriously failed to write about over the past month or two, both excellent. First up is “An Imaginary Country” by Tim Hecker, a more or less electronic musician from Montreal, whose music on this evidence is distinct kin to that of Christian Fennesz. I always get Tim Hecker and Florian Hecker mixed up, so I’ll have to be rather guarded about what I’ve got of his previous stuff. But “An Imaginary Country” is a gaseous and lovely piece of dense ambience, very much in keeping with that idea of a sentimental avant-garde that I cooked up in the Fennesz blog. Like “Black Sea”, “An Imaginary Country” quietly encourages a bunch of oceanic metaphors, with titles like “Sea Of Pulses”, “The Inner Shore” and so on. If anything, though, these pieces are often lusher than those of Fennesz, and the process doesn’t seem to play quite such an integral part in Hecker’s final sound design. Digitally-adjusted guitar doesn’t have such a prominent role, either, apart from an intense hedge of noise on “Paragon Point”: typical of the album, it’s a highly aestheticised and controlled cacophony, and beneath it lies one of those ghostly submerged melodies favoured by Autechre. Generally, though, Hecker achieves a tremulous, devotional atmosphere, using some reverberant organ tones and, on “Utropics”, what seems to be a choir briefly appearing out of the ether. It’s hard to be certain about specific sounds, of course, but a beautiful record which, in the best traditions of quasi-ambient music, doesn’t just soundtrack an environment but subtly transforms your perceptions of it. Sir Richard Bishop’s “Freak Of Araby”, meanwhile, finds the awesome old Sun City Girls guitarist focusing his talents somewhat. If “Polytheistic Fragments” acted as a kind of de facto sampler of Bishop’s range – moving gracefully from Django Rheinhardt to John Fahey, for instance – “Freak Of Araby” is a much more specific project. It’s explicitly inspired by the Egyptian guitarist Omar Khorshid, who I must admit I’ve never heard, and finds Bishop mixing up his old songs with traditional Arabic material, ending up with a Moroccan chanter freakout called “Blood-Stained Sands” in a Master Musicians Of Joujouka style (which reminds me, there’s a new album from Sun City Girls associates The Master Musicians Of Bukkake kicking around which I need to play). Anyway, “Freak Of Araby”, in the way that it privileges the eastern influences that often sit deep in the mix on Takoma School/Takoma-derived/American primitive jams, is quite a revelation (as is “Open Strings – Early Virtuoso Recordings From The Middle East, And New Responses”, which features Bishop alongside Ben Chasny, MV & EE, Rick Tomlinson and others, and which I’ll write more about soonish). In the meantime, if anyone has any good tips on what to check out by Omar Khorshid or similar, please let me know.

This month's Club Uncut openers, Sparrow And The Workshop, are an interesting beast - a Scottish folk trio on mainly acoustic instruments, there's a real violent attack to their sound. Mesmerising frontwoman Jill O'Sullivan plays guitar and violin and sings, drummer Gregor Donaldson also delivers strong harmonies and Nicholas Packer takes on the electric guitar and bass duties – at one point, he even appears to be playing a guitar with a bass string in place of the lowest E. The Borderline is only half full by the time they begin, but the latecomers are definitely missing a treat. The group's opening track is reminiscent of Calexico in its scurrying Tex-Mex chords, with Donaldson's drums exhibiting a booming Jim White sound. "I Will Break You", dedicated to “London's traffic wardens”, is a menacing Smog-esque ditty, featuring dirty bass guitar and some shockingly loud drum rolls, while Chicago native O'Sullivan's voice at times is almost like a sweeter Polly Harvey on "Devil Song". Some brave influences then, but Sparrow And The Workshop seem to have carved themselves their own – surprisingly rocking - niche. A real treat, and one of the best openers Club Uncut has had. Next up were Django Django, sporting the east London hipster haircut du jour (very short back and sides, longer on top, in case anyone fancies it) and 'wacky' shirts fully buttoned up. Very Hoxton, then – aside from the vintage Juno synth propped up over a chair rather than an actual stand. The four-piece are an interesting mix of electronics and jerky, almost rock'n'roll, chords, occasionally with a Bo Diddley-esque rhythm chucked in. "Fire Water" is probably the highlight, with a gorgeous Beck-like chorus and twisty melody. Not all the set is as memorable, however. Perhaps it was the sound on the night, but the synth, samples and electronic drum pads were far louder than the real drums, electric guitar and bass. It may have been a conscious choice too, but their Fender Mustang sounded weak, clanging away almost unheard. The four-piece aren't short of interesting ideas or ultra-catchy melodies, they may just need to perfect their arrangements. Headlining the night were Stephen McBean's Black Mountain spin-off Pink Mountaintops, who recently released their third album, "Outside Love", on Jagjaguwar. Their clear signature sound is a chugging three-chord Velvet Underground drone-rock, with a dose of country-rock harmonies and some mystical-sexual lyrics sprinkled in – definitely in the same ballpark as their parent band, just a bit more reined-in, a little more in thrall to classic rock. "Sweet '69" and "The Gayest Of Sunbeams" are sexually-charged gallops through Jesus And Mary Chain territory, with driving Motorhead bass and the kind of vocal delivery so beloved of The Brian Jonestown Massacre and Black Rebel Motorcycle Club. Organ, messy John Cale violin (rather than the Velvets' viola, of course) and a myriad of percussion contribute to the massive, dense noise. It's a powerful sound, but it's their only sound. Too many songs are based on the same three or four chords, and after a while it's pretty easy to guess where the changes are going to come. For a band so obviously in thrall to psychedelia, there's a distinct lack of solos from any instrument too, which would perhaps have helped sustain interest over the full hour of their set. But hey, an audience member next to us kept proclaiming Pink Mountaintops, “genius...genius” in between their songs, and the six-piece were forced to return for a hasty encore after the crowd's enthusiastic reception. Breaking the curfew - now that's rock and roll.

It says something, though I’m not sure what, about the strange place Evan Dando occupies in the culture, that the new Lemonheads album seems to actively involve both Gibby Haynes and Kate Moss, as well as Liv Tyler and John Perry from The Only Ones. This unlikely band come together for “Varshons”, a selection of cover versions partially chosen by Butthole Surfer Haynes. Like the company he keeps, it shows that – all these years after the brief media phenomenon of “Dippy Dando”, grunge pin-up – Evan can still pull off a precarious balancing act between the mainstream and punk/psych arcana. “Varshons”, then, manages to contain both a Christina Aguilera/Linda Perry song, “Beautiful”, and a GG Allin one (“Layin’ Up With Linda”). And it’s testimony to Dando’s strong, calm way with a song that he makes both sound great: “Beautiful” is handled in lovely, straight, understated fashion, while “Layin’ Up With Linda” reveals, more surprisingly, that beyond all the shit-throwing Allin was capable of writing a structured and pretty song, albeit one about drunkenly killing your girlfriend out of boredom. I must admit I don’t know whether the original Allin version sounded like battered outlaw country, but Dando’s take on it sits very neatly just next to a great stab at Townes Van Zandt’s “Waiting Around To Die”. His voice is a little more cracked and lived-in than it used to be, which adds a certain visceral poignancy to these songs, and to Gram Parsons’ “I Just Can’t Take It Anymore”. Dando used to cover “Brass Buttons” and “$1,000 Wedding” back in the day, and I once wrote a cover story for NME that involved a lot of Parsons allusions – including Dando recreating the cover photo of “GP” in the Chateau Marmont – as well as some substantially messier business. The whole farce ended up inspiring the Lemonheads’ “If I Could Talk I’d Tell You”, but that’s another story. Anyway, again and again through “Varshons”, Dando shows an unerring knack for turning any song into a wounded country setpiece, most notably on, of all things, Wire’s “Fragile”. What’s new here, though, besides that increasingly battered, reflective tone, is a taste – presumably encouraged by Haynes – for highly damaged psych. Among a lot of fine tracks, maybe my favourite right now is Dando’s take on Sam Gopal’s “Yesterlove”, a drifting tabla meditation plucked from the late ‘60s Ladbroke Grove squats and written by an uncharacteristically tender Lemmy Kilmister. We’ve been playing the original a fair bit here - one of those rare record collector albums that actually deserves some of its reputation, if not some of its price tags - and the Lemonheads’ take is actually quite faithful; If “Varshons” has the general atmosphere of a mature man taking stock of his life and his generally excellent record collection, it’s also rather satisfying to discover that Dando is still capable of doing tremendously daft things. In this case it’s destroying the beatific vibes of “Yesterlove” by following it with some preternaturally crass electropop – Arling & Cameron’s “Dirty Robot”, sung here with her usual flat charmlessness by Kate Moss. “Dirty Robot” is awful – Moss must be an amazing friend to these people, because it’s certainly not talent or a proven commercial track record that keeps getting her singing gigs. But as an object lesson in reminding us how not to get too caught up in po-faced, hardbitten songs of frontier mortality and so on, it’s exemplary. And, like me, you can skip it after the first couple of listens anyhow.

I was making some notes on the new Sonic Youth album, “The Eternal”, this morning, when it occurred to me that writing “pop” down again and again was pretty absurd – one of those delusional fallacies that people who don’t listen to too much actual pop have, I guess, when a rock band starts working in a notionally punchy way. It’d be a bit daft, then, to call “The Eternal” a pop record. But for the Youth’s first indie “official” album in a couple of decades, there’s a pointed irony that it finds the band in one of their more accessible and economical moods. On the first few listens, “The Eternal” seems immediate, but not quite as engaging as recent Sonic Youth albums. It has a very crisp, uncluttered sound in general, and doesn’t seem like it has many secrets to discover over time. Then, a dozen or so listens in, it starts repaying the work put in. Like “Sonic Nurse” and “Rather Ripped” before it, “The Eternal” is a nice way into the sometimes intimidating world of this great band. But while those two records moved elegantly towards a sort of negotiation with more orthodox rock, “The Eternal” favours a compacted, tight reiteration of their old, clanging and surging schtick. In some ways, it reminds me a bit of “Dirty”, with a similar sense of discipline, of wilder instincts being reined in, and with the presence of a mainstream indie-rock producer, in this case John Agnello (in “Dirty”’s case, Butch Vig) behind the desk. On songs like Kim Gordon’s “Malibu Gas Station”, you can sense the band moving towards one of their trademark squalls, but when it comes, it’s ruthlessly brief, as if they’re revelling in self-denial, ancient punk strictures, rather than billowing freedom. The band’s notes to each track are littered with references – to Noise Nomads, Sonic’s Rendezvous Band, The Dead C, The MC5, Neu!, The Wipers, The Germs and so on. Generally, though, Sonic Youth have rarely sounded so utterly like themselves, or even, maybe, how both fans and critics of the band imagine Sonic Youth to sound. As a fan, it’s still wonderful to hear them take flight, as they do during Lee Ranaldo’s “What We Know”, though those repeated listens reveal more about the new enhanced focus of the band: there’s a certain clarity to the vocals, mixed uncharacteristically high, which, for better or worse, pushes the lyrics to the fore. There’s also a tighter rhythmic base, with Mark Ibold settling alongside Steve Shelley into basslines that often feel a touch more linear and conventional than sometimes in the past. Again, this serves to make “The Eternal” less of a freewheeling trip, but one which motors along with a pleasing directness; Ibold is notably brilliant on another Kim Gordon song, “Calming The Snake” (one vaguely reminiscent, perhaps simply because of the line “Come on down”, of “Death Valley ‘69”) It is Gordon, in fact, who seems to dominate “The Eternal”: her songs “Sacred Trickster” and “Massage The History” bookend the album, and her words provide a charged mission statement, not least when the record begins with her intoning, “I want you to levitate me.” One of the last things you hear, deep into the ten minutes of “Massage The History” (a beautiful oceanic swoon that may be distant kin to “The Diamond Sea”) is her singing, in a brilliantly expressive whisper, “Come with me to the other side… Not everyone makes it out alive…” Perhaps it’s endemic of my personal Sonic Youth biases that, amidst all these short sharp songs, it’s the more pensive and unravelling “Massage The History” and “Antenna” which stand out here, the latter being an elegaic Thurston Moore chugger closer in spirit to some “Sonic Nurse” tracks. There’s also, though, a Ranaldo song called “Walkin Blue” which, surely inadvertently, conjures up one of the unlikeliest Sonic Youth references I can think of, melodically recalling Blur’s “There’s No Other Way”. A bit late to go baggy, perhaps…

There’s a telling clip buried somewhere in “Archives Volume One”, where Neil Young is poring over a tableful of photographs and clippings with Joel Bernstein. Here, it seems, everything is ready for this release. Young talks enthusiastically about the recording of the Massey Hall show he’s been listening to – and then you notice the date of the footage. It is 1997. Not only has Young been talking up this project for decades, he also seems to have had most of the material sorted and to hand for most of that time. Spending yesterday in the company of “Archives”, a couple of things crossed my mind. One, it may be churlish to complain about the endless prevarication surrounding it, now “Archives” has finally arrived, but the epic build-up to this release now seems critical to its legend – as Young himself clearly understands by including such clips. And two, the somewhat ridiculous notion that Young was holding back the release until technology caught up with his vision does, surprisingly, seem to make sense. I’ve been working here with the DVD version, which can be a frustrating business, as you can’t view all the archival pictures, lyric scrawls, reviews, badges and so on while playing the music. It does seem most suited to a more flexible format like the much-vaunted (by Young himself) Blu-Ray. Or to a less flexible format, like simple old CDs. That’s how I, more or less, treat “Archives” on my first pass through, just focusing on the beautifully-sequenced audio tracks. There’s a very obvious problem here in that, as has been discussed at length, relatively little unheard music turns up. While it’s not exactly a hardship to hear great swathes of, say, “Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere”, many of us hoped for something a little less familiar. Now, I think that may be based on a misunderstanding of “Archives”. It’s not a rarities set for obsessives, it’s more of a multi-media cultural autobiography that must necessarily include definitive recordings alongside all the ephemera. For completists, Disc 00 will probably be the most gripping, covering as it does the putative efforts of Young, first in the Ventures-ish Squires, then with Comrie Smith, then finally by himself, unveiling uncanny versions of “Sugar Mountain” (in a less quavering lower register), “Nowadays Clancy Can’t Even Sing” and some serviceable lost songs. From there we zip through Buffalo Springfield (and two more unheard songs, not hugely memorable on first listen), onto the early solo years and, with Disc 03, the “Live At The Riverboat” solo set from 1969. The vibe here is very similar to that of the “Sugar Mountain” 1968 album released a few months ago (and mystifyingly not included in “Archives”; was it uncovered too late for the deadline, perhaps? As late as 2001, say?), right down to the amiable, lengthy chatter and showstopping “Last Trip To Tulsa”. Disc 04 includes maybe the one really essential unheard song on the whole set, a merrily wracked Crazy Horse track called “Everybody’s Alone”, before artfully plotting the crossover between Young’s solo work and his engagements with CSNY. That point’s made even more forcefully on Disc 05, where a run of “After The Gold Rush” songs dovetail into “Ohio”, CSNY live versions of “Only Love Can Break Your Heart” and "Tell Me Why" and, brilliantly, “Music Is Love” from Crosby’s “If I Could Only Remember My Name”. Disc 8 heads into “Harvest” country and salvages the mightily extended "Words (Between The Lines Of Age)" from the “Journey Through The Past” soundtrack, plus the “War Song” single with Graham Nash. Throw in the Massey Hall and Fillmore East live sets that we already know, plus the “Journey Through The Past” film which, I must admit, I haven’t yet watched, and that seems to be your lot. Which is great, really, and which works exceptionally well as an early career retrospective. A second pass through the DVDs, however, starts revealing some of the riches that justify the bells-and-whistles treatment. It’s the dept of detail that intrigues: the poster for the Riverboat date, for example, that shows Young’s gigs were between ones by Mike Seeger, Doc Watson, Spider John Koerner and Jerry Jeff Walker. Or, better still, the film clips hidden in the timelines on each disc. A Johnny Cash TV special, where Cash delivers an anti-drugs homily before cutting to Young playing “The Needle And The Damage Done”. A Dutch TV doc where the camera crew follow Young and Elliott Roberts on the former’s ranch and meet up with the titular “Old Man” and his son, fresh back from the army. A session with the LSO in Barking Town Hall, with Jack Nitzsche swigging heartily from a can of Long Life. There’s a fingerpicking solo café show from 1970, with an intently fingerpicked version of “The Loner” segueing into “Cinnamon Girl”, and a finale of Young teaching the latter song to a fan in a park (quite effectively, seeing how our Production Editor was playing it a few minutes after watching the clip). And best of all, a 1969 TV show with CSNY playing an absolutely glorious “Down By The River”, with a great Stills/Young duel (could’ve done with this one as an audio track, too). I’m sure there’s more here. Let me play some other records for a day or two, then take another look.