The first Monday morning of spring seems a good time to finally tackle the new Grizzly Bear album, “Veckatimest”, which I know I’ve been promising for a while. Without getting into some blog hype thing in the tradition of the Animal Collective (it was Grizzly Bear who reputedly leaked a couple of AC tracks and caused a lot of the fuss, if I remember right), “Veckatimest” is looking from here like the best album of this bit of 2009, at the very least. The comparison with Animal Collective is apposite, of course, because Grizzly Bear are another band out of Brooklyn, and another one who specialise in a kind of ethereally-adjusted close harmony singing. Grizzly Bear, though, aren’t quite as untethered as AC; there’s a distant kinship with Fleet Foxes, too, and Robin Pecknold has already been vocal in his support for “Veckatimest”. But if the last Grizzly Bear album, 2006’s “Yellow House”, contained distinct trace elements of folk, “Veckatimest” is a subtly different beast. From the shuffling, jazzy chords that open “Southern Point”, there’s another kind of ghostly retro-futurism that inflects these lovely and saturated pop songs. At heart, for sure, Grizzly Bear are four scholarly young men with a taste for a sort of melodic, fey music which is at once both intimate and expansive. But repeatedly in these 12 songs, you can just detect an odd hint of soul. It’s most evident in “Two Weeks”, a song which has been around for a while on Youtube. Ostensibly, it’s a street corner doo-wop song, something like Dion & The Belmonts, given an unearthly, even angelic sheen by the curious dynamics and effects which seem to be a speciality of Grizzly Bear. The song’s anchored by a constant piano plonk, which sounds creaky and weathered, as if sampled from a record recorded long ago in a distant New York. “Two Weeks” has a fabulous melody, too, but it’s this harmonious tension between vintage sounds, massed voices and contemporary disorientation which makes “Veckatimest” so dreamy. “Cheerleader” works similarly, with a thin guitar sound that could’ve sloped in from Motown working as a prelude to a rapturous, yearning “Pet Sounds” chorus (no mention of The Beach Boys ‘til the sixth paragraph is something to be moderately proud of here, I’d say). Even on songs fronted by Daniel Rossen, that echo the genteel McCartneyisms of his lovely Department Of Eagles record from the end of last year, there are moments that tap into an alternative soulfulness: at the end of the discreet chamber fantasia, “All We Ask”, Rossen leads the band in an agonisingly sweet chant of “I can’t get out of what I’m into with you” over handclaps, loose beats and unsteady hum. It’s one of the most striking sections of a constantly surprising and beautiful record. “Veckatimest” isn’t one of those over-compressed albums, and the dynamic field in which the sounds move about is another one of its pleasures. It’s not always clear what you’re actually hearing – not through muffled sound, but because the atmosphere is so strong it sometimes distracts you from picking out individual instruments. Intricate baroque chorales appear in unexpected pockets, while there are passages of Nico Muhly’s orchestrations, often mixed low and cut short, which add an unexpected texture. But the real dynamic weapon is the brittle, buccaneering guitar sound, which looms up and down with quite a swagger. “Fine For Now” might start as a churchy chorale, but by the end, Rossen’s guitar has become actively abrasive, even going so far as to form a wiry, teeth-rattling solo. It would be – and will be, as they become better-known – easy to stereotype Grizzly Bear as precious, but that would underestimate the gristle and punch there, too. That becomes most potent in “While You Wait For The Others” (the other song that’s been around for a while), where Rossen’s cranked guitar nails down Ed Droste’s lovely song with heft and tension. I’m reminded for some reason of Radiohead, maybe “There There” or something, compounded by the vivid invention of the next track, “I Live With You”, which begins with Disney orchestras and choirs, and artfully wanders into a series of clattering Technicolor crescendos. It’s exhilarating, and the whole package, from the album’s evocative name (that Veckatimest is an uninhabited island off the coast of Cape Cod, is incidental) to the beautiful sleeve. I think this is going to be a biggish record in our world this year, and I’m sure the love it’s going to receive around the internet in the next couple of months will wind a fair few people up. But when you get a chance to hear, let me know, as ever, what you think.

Well, this is a surprise. The White Stripes might have made their comeback on American TV the other week, but it seems Jack White's most pressing engagement right now is yet another band, pleasingly called The Dead Weather. Oddly, White apparently cedes lead vocal and guitar responsibilities in The Dead Weather, with Alison Mosshart of The Kills fronting the project and Dean Fertita on guitar (Fertita is currently multi-instrumentalist in Queens Of The Stone Age and, if memory serves, was the first touring keyboard player for The Raconteurs). Little Jack Lawrence, from The Raconteurs and The Greenhornes, fills out the line-up on bass. The good news, though, is that the single which has magically turned up on iTunes - and is announced here on Jack White's Third Man Records site - is way better than, say, The Kills. “Hang You From The Heavens” might share that band’s aspirations to create a sort of buzzing blues menace, but there’s a fine tune here, novelly. A tune that wouldn’t sound entirely out of place next to, say, “Icky Thump” or “Salute Your Solution”, actually. Mosshart actually seems to be mimicking White’s vocal style at times; that pinched, sulky indignation that can suddenly transform itself into eruptive spleen. There are no comparable guitar peaks, though – instead, Fertita keeps within a narrow, low range of evil hum and crunch. And the fireworks come from – guess where? – the drumkit, with White employing stark rolls and clatter in much the same way as he punctuates songs in his other bands with those staticky, high end guitar solos. Just great. Not quite as sold on the b-side, an unusually rollicking take on Gary Numan’s “Are Friends Electric”. It’s fun, for sure, and it has a sort of loose funkiness that Numan can never have dreamed of. But Mosshart’s a bit forced, back in that drama school gothic zone that she’s overused for years in The Kills. An album’s coming in June called “Horehound”, anyway. Should be interesting, at the very least. If you get hold of the single, let me know what you think. And apologies to anyone who’s here looking for the promised blog on Grizzly Bear’s “Veckatimest”. That’ll come next week.

I don’t want to simplify a harrowing business. But when, in the middle of this concert with his Spatial AKA Orchestra, Jerry Dammers has a go at “Ghost Town”, the idea that this man would ever rejoin The Specials seems, frankly, insane. Sorry to be a tease, but the full review's at our Wild Mercury Sound blog.

I don’t want to simplify a harrowing business. But when, in the middle of this concert with his Spatial AKA Orchestra, Jerry Dammers has a go at “Ghost Town”, the idea that this man would ever rejoin The Specials seems, frankly, insane. Tonight, “Ghost Town” begins with Dammers gargling the riff, with the forced assistance of the audience. His 19-piece big band, meanwhile, are playing the song like Duke Ellington’s orchestra transported to Studio One. Eventually, one of the vocalists, Anthony Josep, steps up to the mic, then proceeds to chant, Last Poets style, the lyrics of “Nuclear War” by Sun Ra. After five or ten minutes of this, Dammers scuttles offstage and harries another vocalist, Space Ape (best known as Kode 9’s MC), back to the mic. Returned to his throbbing bank of keyboards, Dammers sets up a menacing synth hum, over which Space Ape solemnly intones the lyrics to “Ghost Town”, until he is overwhelmed by a cacophonous effort from the eight-strong horn section. Not the way, perhaps, that most Specials fans – or indeed, most Specials members – would like to hear the song. Great, though, and perfectly in tune with the two and a half hour show. This is Cosmic Engineering: A Tribute To Sun Ra And Other Musical Mavericks, and a chance for Dammers, in the wake of The Specials reunion, to show the esoteric path he has travelled on in the years since their split. Mostly, the crack band of UK jazz illuminati – from veterans like Larry Stabbins (a personal hero, thanks to his involvement alongside the likes of Robert Wyatt and Julie Tippetts on those great early Working Week singles) to new stars like Nathaniel Facey from Empirical – not a band I’ve particularly liked, to be honest, but it’s Facey on sax who takes the best solo of the night, leaping off from the original Pharaoh Sanders riff in Alice Coltrane’s “Journey In Satchidanda”. There are, though, relatively few solos here and, apart from a rousing jam during another Coltrane tune, “Om Armageddon”, Dammers’ band are more orchestrated than the wild reputation of Sun Ra might suggest. That said, when I saw the Arkestra itself a few years ago, lead at that time by Marshall Allen, they played it pretty straight. And perhaps part of Dammers’ excellent vision is to show how accessible Sun Ra’s music actually is, very much in the Ellington tradition. He’s also good at showing up some of Sun Ra’s hokeyness. For all of the cosmic implications, the realities of 19 British musicians in tie-dye robes, masks and Egyptian headgear, playing amongst various bits of sci-fi tat, looks sweetly daft rather than unearthly in the flesh. He draws links between Sun Ra and exotica, playing a Martin Denny tune (“Jungle Madness”) to illustrate his point. This is fun music, is the general idea, and the prospect of presenting Dammers as a supernatural magus, as he fumbles with his mic and makes endearing announcements between songs, is touchingly implausible. Dammers, though, is clearly having a great, if slightly nervous time. His half-hearted attempts to conduct the well-drilled band are pretty unnecessary, but his keyboard playing – from the Louis & Bebe Barron style retro-futurist skronk he unleashes as his band troop into the venue – is terrific. He really comes into his own during “I’ll Wait For You”, a beautiful, ethereal slow blues by Sun Ra, with Dammers on organ sparring gracefully with the excellent pianist, Zoe Rahman and the vocalist, Francine Luce. There is one more relative lull; the sombre, angry processional of Sun Ra’s “Discipline In Retrospect” which Dammers pointedly suggests expresses his feelings towards his “six former bandmates”. You could also sense an assertion of Dammers’ own independent spirit in the Sun Ra poems recited by himself and Josep, not least when Dammers declaims, ““Abandon them, abandon them." Josep follows suit: “A man wants to be a natural free, so he can be.” Not when he’s playing cabaret versions of “Too Much Too Young” he can’t. It’s curious, though, that Dammers finds creative liberation by subtly updating these strange old jazz songs: adding a slithery funk undertow – courtesy of the breaks-fixated drummer, Patrick Illingworth – to “It’s After The End Of The World” and a superb “Soul Vibrations Of Man” (with an eruptive solo from Stabbins); playing a “Bird’s Lament” that’s closer to Mr Scruff’s version than the Moondog original; finding a way through “Journey In Satchinanda” (one of my favourite pieces of music, apropos nothing) without the aid of a harp. I suppose there’s a slight sadness here, in that Dammers, for whatever reason, has presented so little of his own music over the past two decades or so. In a perfect world, perhaps he’d be playing new songs inspired by Sun Ra, rather than cover versions. But that seems a petty whinge in the face of such an exultant night of music. By the end, the band have trooped out of the auditorium and are playing “Space Is The Place” by the Barbican’s toilets. Dammers, meanwhile, is on his own, levering great blats of noise out of his console. The Ricoh Arena, you feel, is truly light years away.