Thanks for all your suggestions regarding your favourite blogs. I’ve finally got around to putting together a list here - not 100 per cent sold on all of these, but they’re pretty good. Again, if you know any nice ones we’ve missed, please let us know in the comment box at the bottom of the blog. Blimey, everyone likes Wavves at the moment, don’t they (I think he’s alright too, apropos nothing)? And So On. . . As It Was Arthur Attic Plan Demob Happy Destination: OUT Expecting Rain Glowing Raw Gorilla Vs Bear In League With Paton In The Pines Mapsadaisical Microphones In The Trees! Mountain*7 Nialler9 The Old, Weird America Raven Sings The Blues The Rest Is Noise Root Blog Said The Gramophone Sasha Frere Jones Singer-Saints Slow Listening Movement Something Excellent Song, By Toad Sunflower Chakra Milk Thrasher’s Wheat Time Has Told Me To Die By Your Side When You Awake You Ain’t No Picasso

“I’ve been thinking a lot about dying recently,” says Philip Seymour Hoffman’s neurotic theatre director Caden Cotard early on. And, certainly, you could be forgiven for thinking that the odds were stacked against him. Within the first half hour of Synecdoche, New York, there are enough portents of doom lurking around you’d think you were watching a tragedy, were it all not so funny. He finds a magazine, Attending To Your Illness, in his mailbox; the milk in the fridge is off; he reads about Harold Pinter’s death in the paper. “This is the start of something awful,” he mutters. In couple’s therapy, his artist wife, Adele (Catherine Keener) admits she’s fantasised about Caden dying, so she can start again, “guilt free”. He develops a mystery ailment. He’s referred to an opthologist, then a neurologist. His dentist recommends gum surgery. He’s also fumbling towards an affair with Hazel (Samantha Morton), who works in the box office of his local theatre. Meanwhile, with days to go before opening night, rehearsals for his production of Arthur Miller’s Death Of A Salesman are “awful”. Caden’s got 560 lighting cues. “I don’t know why I make it so complicated,” he grumbles to Adele. “Because that’s what you do,” she says. She leaves him shortly after, relocating to Berlin with their daughter. Then, when it looks like things can’t get much worse, he receives what looks like a gift from above. It’s a grant to do something creative for the community. Seizing the opportunity to turn his life around, Caden decides to mount “a massive theatre piece”, the point of which partly will be to help him discover his “real self”. So Caden rents a massive theatre space, inside which he builds full-size replicas of New York streets. It’s an enormous undertaking – “When are we going to get an audience in here?” asks one of his actors. “It’s been 17 years.” Caden casts to play himself a man called Sammy (Tom Noonan), who’s been secretly following him for 20 years. Soon, there is an actor playing Sammy playing Caden. He builds a replica of the rehearsal space inside the rehearsal space. “Fictional” versions of the characters begin relationships with the people they’re playing. As anyone familiar with Charlie Kaufman’s previous films will presumably have gathered by now, Synecdoche, New York is a vast and quite extraordinary piece of meta-fiction, far more ambitious than his previous screenplays for Being John Malkovich or Adaptation. Here, Kaufman strives to comment on big issues. There are ongoing themes you may recognise from Adaptation, particularly about the all-consuming nature of obsession and the undignified struggle of the creative process. And how some great works of art collapse under their own weight; a criticism you could perhaps level at Synecdoche, New York itself. It is, as you might gather, quite exhausting trying to keep up with Kaufman. And it’s easy to be sidetracked by what appear to be absurdist digressions. Books start directly addressing incidents in Caden’s own life. He learns of his daughter’s current activities in Berlin through her childhood diary, which seems to be writing itself. The colourful flower tattoos on one character’s body wilt and die as that person’s own health deteriorates. Hazel lives in a house that perpetually seems to be on fire. Early on, Caden catches a glimpse of Sammy following him in a television cartoon, before he’s even met him. It’s entirely possible that one character – Millicent Weems (Dianne Wiest), who’s introduced in the film’s final act – doesn’t actually exist, and when she starts delivering prompts and directions to Caden through a hearing aid as he walks round what’s become the stage set of his life, you wonder whether she might be God. There's even the tacit suggestion Caden himself is dead; Cotard's syndrome, for those looking for clues, is a rare neuropsychological condition where the sufferer believes they're dead. It’s hard to find appropriate points of comparison for all this – perhaps Grant Morrison’s run on the Animal Man comic or Borges’ short story, “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius”. Whatever, Kaufman’s ambition is tremendous. Certainly, it’s hard to work out whether to like Synecdoche, New York, or to admire it as a creative exercise. Structurally, it’s a considerable achievement; gradually building – like Caden’s rehearsal space – a complex, self-referential plot that convincingly adheres to its own logic. Looking back at my notes from last night’s screening, there’s nothing to suggest that Kaufman has arbitrarily created weird-for-the-sake-of-weird scenarios. Everything works. Meanwhile, Hoffman does loneliness, despair and heartbreak brilliantly, as the series of relationships he embarks on in the film gradually fall by the wayside. And Hoffman is well served by a formidable female cast – apart from Keener, Morton and Wiest, there’s Hope Davis, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Michelle Williams and Emily Watson. It’d be a churl who wasn’t moved by the sight of the elderly Caden, bent over a walking stick, hobbling alone through his now-derelict replica of Synecdoche, New York in the film’s closing minutes. Quite how you respond to all this is up to you, of course. Although you need to buy in to Kaufman’s vision, be reassured that, in fact, Synecdoche, New York is actually a very simple story of one man’s life. Caden lives in the real Schenectady, New York; synecdoche is a figure of speech denoting a part of something that’s used to refer to the whole. Caden is all of us, then. “There are no extras here,” one extra says. “Everyone’s a lead.” You can watch the trailer here Synecdoche, New York opens in the UK on May 15

Of course the practicalities of listening to music in the Uncut office shouldn’t concern you much, but it’s worth noting that for some weeks, possibly months now, we’ve been grappling with the new Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy album, “Beware”, widely proclaimed as one of his best ever and yet, round these parts at least, treacherously hard to hear properly. There’s some clever scheming going on around “Beware”, which I’ll get to shortly, and which conceivably was behind our first copy of the album being rendered unlistenable by security announcements every couple of minutes totally interrupting the songs. Then we received a watermarked copy, which our capricious stereo chose to spit out after about three tracks. A bit of a pain. Now I’ve managed to play it properly, however, I can see that all the wry hype around “Beware” is justified; it’s one of the most consistent, crafted and immediate records that Will Oldham has made in his exceptional career. In his superb New Yorker profile of Oldham last month, Kelefa Sanneh reported, “He intends to promote the album with singles, a photo shoot, and a handful of interviews, if only to prove that record promotion doesn’t really work, at least not for him.” With the security-heavy CDs and comparatively hyperbolic press releases privileging the accessibility of “Beware”, it began to look as if Drag City/Domino were calling Oldham’s bluff, doing everything in their power to point up the new record as distinct from his vast catalogue. It was as if they were marketing it as a major statement to ensure that it would sell more than, say, 2008’s “Lie Down In The Light” (a record which was not even promoed to journalists ahead of release) and consequently prove Oldham, so sceptical of marketing, wrong. The thing is, “Beware” really does feel like a major statement from this most elusive of brilliant songwriters. In terms of sound, it’s something of a return to country, with a richness that verges on the territory of 2004’s “Sings Greatest Palace Music” and a confident roll that recalls “Ease Down The Road” from 2001. On the past few albums, Oldham’s gradually strengthening voice has been countered by potent female singers like Dawn The Faun, Meg Baird and Ashley Webber. Here, on songs like the triumphal opening “Beware Your Only Friend” the whooping "I Am Goodbye" or “My Life’s Work”, Oldham fronts up alongside a swelling Nashville choir of sorts, while there’s a hint of the McGarrigles, perhaps, to “I Won’t Ask Again”. “My Life’s Work”, incidentally, has a brief saxophone solo that betrays the jazz backgrounds of many of the players on these Chicago sessions. By the final and extraordinary “Afraid Ain’t Me”, there’s an airy, orbital feel to the music that’s vaguely reminiscent, in places, of Van Morrison’s “Astral Weeks”. As part of his calculated press offensive, Oldham crops up in the new Uncut, talking through his best albums (though not, weirdly, “Days In The Wake”). There’s some talk of Dillard & Clark in relation to “Beware”, which seems apposite. In The New Yorker piece, Sanneh calls the record “deeply satisfying” and notes how it “conjures a mood of resolution, maybe even finality.” That’s palpable in some truly beautiful songs here, “Death Final” and “I Don’t Love Anyone” (a distant cousin of Dylan’s “Senor”, perhaps), which are just about as good as Oldham has ever written. “Beware” is more rueful than morbid, though (this is far from a sequel to “I See A Darkness”), and there are some very funny moments. The roistering “You Don’t Love Me” presents the Prince as a somewhat unlikely sex object, confronted with a woman who only wants him for his body. “Sometimes you like the smell of me or how my stomach jiggles,” he sings, as horns contribute to the generally uproarious atmosphere. “You don’t love me, but that’s alright/’Cos you bring to me, all through the night.”

Sad news this morning, inevitably overshadowed in the UK by all the Brits bullshit, that Touch & Go Records are to cease putting out new music (not sure where that leaves, say, the forthcoming Crystal Antlers album, for a start). A slight unhappy coincidence, in that this morning I was playing a new record which has distinct ties to the ‘80s post-hardcore from which Touch & Go emerged, allbeit closer ones to the SST sound of that time. The record is “Organ”, the first solo album by Adam Payne, who’s relatively better known as frontman of Residual Echoes, a super-gungy freak-out band from San Francisco. Residual Echoes are usually categorised as being in the psychedelic slipstream of Comets On Fire, and you could more or less classify “Organ” as being Payne’s equivalent to Howlin Rain, or at least the first Howlin Rain album, minus the Southern boogie – a cleaner, defuzzed sound. It begins with “The One After Eyes”, and a riff uncannily like that of The Only Ones’ “Another Girl, Another Planet”. Soon enough, though, it locks into something of a default tone: broadly, exuberant power-pop as played by The Meat Puppets. There are distinct echoes of early Dinosaur Jr too in songs like “Never See You Anymore”, thanks to Payne’s pinched vocals and his pugnacious, ambulatory solos – though the guitar sound throughout “Organ” is skinnier, much less laden with effects than that of J Mascis, or of Payne in his work with Residual Echoes. There’s another slightly weird affinity with Comets On Fire side projects on “In Hell”, which is a lop-sided piano number that recalls Utrillo Kushner’s Colossal Yes. Kushner has a new album, “Charlemagne’s Big Thaw”, incidentally, which is worth checking out, if not quite as good as the Colossal Yes debut. It was produced by Kelley Stoltz, whose own gnarly take on power-pop is probably quite a good analogue to Adam Payne’s record, too. Stoltz has never, to my knowledge, recorded anything like “Incidental Arrangement”, however, a lengthy guitar instrumental that begins as a fractious, unstructured jam and then gradually acquires shape and momentum. It reminds me a lot of those unravelling epics favoured by mid-period Yo La Tengo like “Blue Line Swinger” and “I Heard you Looking”: free, heady, ecstatic guitar freak-outs. Works for me, needless to say.