A few weeks ago, I received an email from America that mostly consisted of an encomium from Michael Gira on the subject of his newest signing to Young God, James Blackshaw. I’m more of an admirer than a fan of Gira’s music, and not all of the music on his label has worked for me; Akron/Family, for instance, after countless attempts remain mystifyingly unappealing. When Gira writes about music, however, from the first time he introduced Devendra Banhart to the world, he’s always compelling. Blackshaw, he wrote, “is a virtuoso of the 12 string guitar, but he's anything but showy. He lays out patterns and shapes that subtly shift over time and lead you to a deeply satisfying mental state. Recently, driving around with the car stereo blasting his music I found myself inexplicably weeping. Why??? The music's not sad, or even mournful really. It's just exquisite in an ineffable way, and taps into a place, a dream place, or a pre-thought place, which each of us might recognize was always there inside of us and is suddenly revealed. Like coming home after a painful journey, we suppose...” Regular readers will know that I’ve tried to say similar things, minus the weeping, about Blackshaw pretty much since the Wild Mercury Sound blog began: so evangelically, in fact, that I turned on enough of my colleagues to get last year’s “Litany Of Echoes” up to Number 13 in Uncut’s Albums Of The Year, as well as Number One in the 2008 Wild Mercury Sound chart. It’s a relief, then, to discover that his first Young God album, “The Glass Bead Game”, continues Blackshaw’s hot streak that has stretched for four or five years now. This one has five longish to epic tracks, two of which feature Blackshaw on piano, a development of the work he initiated on “Litany Of Echoes”. The sound this time is a little fuller, a little more orchestrated, a little further away from the folk/Takoma school tag he was first saddled with, but his grace-filled compositional style remains more or less consistent. The opening “Cross”, for instance, finds him backed by strings (from Current 93 members John Contreras and Joolie Wood) and a wordless female vocal, but it’s melodically kin to “Spiralling Skeleton Memorial” from 2006’s “O True Believers”. When Blackshaw played Club Uncut last year, he told one Uncut staffer that he intended singing on this next record. That hasn’t happened, it seems, since the voice he’s used is that of Lavinia Blackwall, the early music scholar I’ve mentioned before and whose own new record with Trembling Bells I’ll be tackling any day now. Anyhow, it’s extraordinarily pretty, and is followed by the magnificent “Bled”, much in the style of last year’s “Echo And Abyss”, where spacious, plangent 12-string guitar strokes evolve into a rippling and complex net of discreetly unravelling melodies. “Key” is notionally folkier, but it’s those two piano pieces, “Fix” and the 18-minute “Arc” that stand out. “Fix” is a gorgeous, pensive study that sits somewhere between minimalism and romanticism in much the same way as some work by Michael Nyman (something specific by him, even, perhaps from “Drowning By Numbers”, though I haven’t gone back and checked). “Arc”, meanwhile, also has a vague affinity with Nyman, but as it progresses from a sombre opening into great clusters and flurries, I’m reminded more of Steve Reich and maybe even Chris Abrahams of The Necks. This time, Blackshaw cedes some of the melodic donkey work to the string players, but there’s still a shape to “Arc” that is immediately recognisable as his work, a shape that’s familiar to so many of his tunes from “Sunshrine” onwards. Here’s Gira again: “The 18 minute-plus gem on this record is ‘Arc’, performed on piano with the sustain peddle on full throttle, and the rush of sound created by the overtones-from-heaven, augmented by strings and wind, when played at proper (full) volume, is one of the most thrilling pieces of music I've heard in years. It takes a rare and single-minded courage and commitment to make music with such a powerfully positive force at its heart, especially in these troubled times.” Wise words, and an extraordinary album. Incidentally, there’s a bunch of guitar soli stretching out in interesting directions at the moment, and I should be blogging soonish about Peter Walker’s flamenco and archival excursions, the new Sir Richard Bishop disc and a great comp from Honest Jon’s called “Open Strings – Early Virtuoso Recordings From The Middle East, And New Responses”. That last comp features Rick Tomlinson, aka Voice Of The Seven Woods, and a UK guitarist who’s often bracketed with Blackshaw (I think they made an album together some time ago that’s still not seen a release). Anyway, rather hopelessly of me, I’ve neglected to mention a live album that Rick sent me a while back. It’s called “Night Time Recordings From Göteborg” and it’s thoughtful, gentle and quite beautiful. Try and pick one up if you can.

That’s DOOM in capitals, by the way, as the necessarily didactic press release is keen to inform us. Before he was DOOM, though, he was merely MF DOOM, or Viktor Vaughn, or Zev Love X or, briefly and memorably, a three-headed alien dinosaur called King Geedorah. Maybe you know all that. Whatever, DOOM is one of the most interesting rappers operating somewhere between the hip-hop underground and the mainstream. It’s not so much that his music is particularly difficult to assimilate – there’s none of the self-consciously quirky stuff you might find on an Anticon release, for a start, and there are plenty of similarities with fellow mythologisers like The Wu-Tang Clan (Raekwon and Ghostface Killah in his Tony Starks guise both guest here). But I guess DOOM’s outlook, if not all his music, is defiantly awkward; a man who never takes off his Supervillain mask and shies away from the spotlight; whose meaty music, often self-produced, operates in a similar world of paranoia, sci-fi re-imaginings of urban realities and verbose mental disintegration as Kool Keith. DOOM also shares elements of gynaecological fervour and homophobia with Kool Keith, but fortunately his records (even the Danger Doom collaboration with the mightily overrated Dangermouse) are far more consistent. “BORN LIKE THIS” (caps obligation again) is his first in a few years, but nothing much has changed. The tunes are clipped, punchily and sometimes abruptly edited, densely packed with imagery, soundtracked by high-tension thriller soundtracks predominantly from the ‘70s, and book-ended by excitable dialogue samples that hammer home the character of DOOM. Ostensibly, that’s a man who sees street crime and performance refracted through the language of old superhero comics. In the same way as the Wu mine old kung fu movies, DOOM treats Marvel Comics as his Apocrypha, as founts of sacred and arcane knowledge. This time, he also draws on Charles Bukowski, whose “Dinosaur, We” is featured here, to emphasise the general post-apocalyptic dystopian vibe of “BORN LIKE THIS”. The whole package might sound hokey on paper, but DOOM is brilliant at sustaining a gripping, neurotic atmosphere – check the way he rides the edgy stabs of ESG’s “UFO” on “Yessir!”, or makes something sinister out of a piece of Raymond Scott kitsch, “Lightworks”. Not everything’s ideal: “Batty Boyz” is an extended riff on the homoerotic subtexts of Batman that isn’t exactly the most enlightened treatment of a familiar subject I’ve ever come across. But when DOOM really lets rip, on “Ballskin”, “Gazillion Ear” (to be remixed by Thom Yorke, curiously) or the fantastic “Angelz”, this sounds like the best hip-hop album I’ve come across in a while. “Angelz” finds him indulging in a knockabout Charlie’s Angels fantasy in the company of Ghostface Killah (DOOM produced some of “Fishscale”, if memory serves) and also serves to remind that the pair promised a joint record a few years back. There’s a Great Lost Album to add to the pantheon, for sure.

A nice surprise, last week, when Julian Cope sent over his new double vinyl album, “Kiss My Sweet Apocalypse”. A surprise, because I thought I might have been blackballed after struggling with some of the attitudes that came to the surface on last year’s musically excellent “Black Sheep”. I don’t want to get into all that again, particularly after the rather edgy thread that followed the blog (hit the “Black Sheep” link above if you want a look). Fortunately, “Kiss My Sweet Apocalypse” – credited, significantly, to a band named Black Sheep - doesn’t have any songs criticising “blowing-themselves-up motherfuckers”. Instead, Black Sheep (who look to have more or less the same personnel as on that last Cope album) have a tune named after a Palestinian freedom fighter, Leila Khaled, and generally seem to be indulging in a sort of rural terrorist chic: milk churns painted as bombs on the cover; a track called “We’re The Baa-aa-aader Meinhof!”; some German found tapes which mention Ulrike Meinhof. Khaled also figures on the gatefold calendar of “Hebbs’ Outsider Icons”, alongside Jung, Yoko Ono, Einstein, Eddie Cochran, Patti Smith, Emily Pankhurst, Jim Morrison, TC Lethbridge, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Vachel Lindsay and, not to my taste, Joe Strummer. Since there’s none of the customary sleevenotes from Cope, it’s hard to make out how this all fits together, short of implying that his attitudes may have softened towards the fetishising of revolutionary cults. But there’s no privileging “indigenous” gods this time. . . Anyway, music. It’s great again: windswept, organic, raggedly militaristic, often hugely daft. The credits announce, “Project directed by Julian Cope” and on Sides Three and Four two of his accomplices, Holy McGrail and Christophe F, take the lead. Generally, though, the music follows the path set out on much of last year’s “Black Sheep”. Cope’s first two tracks, “Ernesto” (Guevera?) and “Leila Khaled”, are epic (18 and 15 minutes respectively) instrumental soundscapes of brooding strummed acoustics, Mellotron creaks and thunderstorm effects. The band sound endearingly battered and windswept, as if heard way in the distance, like some kind of outsider marching band, stoically out on manoeuvres across the blasted heath. By the beautiful last track, “Heathen Frontiers In Sound” (a Cope/Christophe F co-write), they’ve come into focus somewhat: a soothing, melodic resolution to it all that features Cope gently chanting the title. Earlier chants, though, are less calming. “War! Peace!” is ten minutes of gruff men bawling the title over staticky buzz , a needly guitar line and the odd explosion. The rickety jangle of “We’re The Baa-aa-aader Meinhof” features someone (Christophe F maybe? Not Cope, though) singing unsteadily, “We’re The Baa-aa-aader Meinhof and we’ve come to blow your balls off” (I think). “Kiss My Sweet Apocalypse” (the Holy McGrail lead), meanwhile, begins with the title repeated in a roistering yeoman chant before dissolving into a bleak ambient piece. It recalls some of the Queen Elizabeth stuff Cope used to do with Thighpaulsandra, on the outer limits of Krautrock, with an added morris dancing jig towards the death. How you can deal with that stuff will affect how long you last of its 24 and a half minutes. Fine by me these days, though. As is the whole of the album, more or less (the stridency of “War! Peace!” grates a bit after five minutes or so). There’s a comradely, jovial air to these hums and strummed meditations, these rain-spattered imprecations of doom. It asserts, perhaps, something we always knew about Julian Cope: that no matter how isolated he becomes, regardless of how far beyond the non-heathen frontiers of sound that he strays, he remains as indestructible as a cockroach. Now, what’s all this about terrorism?