Perhaps as a response to the American psych-folk scene, over the past few years there’ve been a handful of British bands who’ve sought to channel the late-‘60s/early-‘70s folk-rock scene. Most of them, unfortunately, have been more or less worthy but misfiring. Trembling Bells, though, are a big exception. One good reason for this, maybe, is the core presence of Alex Neilson, a Scottish drummer whose loose, inventive playing has accompanied Bonnie Prince Billy, Six Organs Of Admittance and Josephine Foster, as well as records by local contemporaries like the excellent Alasdair Roberts. Neilson also has a background in improvised music, and the Glasgow underground scene, and the rickety spirit of various Pastels/Bill Wells affiliates can be heard occasionally on the Trembling Bells debut, “Carbeth”, as well as a hint of wayward jazz. “The End Is The Beginning Norn Knowing”, for instance, rattles along like “Maypole Song” from “The Wicker Man” soundtrack as reinterpreted, with chants, horns and needling organ, by the Sun Ra Arkestra. As befits a band whose avowed aim is to “Reanimate the hidden, mythic landscapes of Yorkshire and Glasgow (in particular) via a love of canonical rock, Earlie Musik and traditional folk,” there are a few roistering nods to the Incredible String Band, too (chiefly in “Your Head Is The House Of Your Tongue”). Curiously, though, it’s when Trembling Bells shoot for a sort of classic folk-rock orthodoxy that they really prove themselves to be one of the best new British bands of any genre that I’ve come across in a while. The finest songs on “Carbeth” are fronted by Lavinia Blackwall, a classically-trained singer who I caught solo last year supporting Peter Walker, who figures on the James Blackshaw album I raved about the other day, and who also played with Neilson in Directing Hand, a band I somewhat shamefully haven't heard. Three songs, especially, stand out; “When I Was Young”, “Willows Of Carbeth” and “Garlands Of Stars”. The sound here is often rich and full, reminding me a little of the Albion Country Band’s mighty “No Roses”, though Blackwall’s big warble is maybe closer to Maddy Prior than Shirley Collins in this context. “Willows Of Carbeth” is the most conventionally pretty, with a lilt to it comparable to “Wild Mountain Thyme” (the Fotheringay version, perhaps). But “Garlands Of Stars” is the real standout, where the old ways (plenty of people here in the office keep thinking “Carbeth” is 30-odd years old) are gradually transformed into a rearing, capricious jam that’s fractionally closer to the tradition of Sonic Youth than Fairport Convention. Bodes well for the live shows starting next week (London Café Oto on Easter Sunday, appealingly).

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.