From this year's Sundance Film Festival in snowy Utah, here's our verdict on The Doors documentary, When You're Strange, from Living In Oblivion director Tom DiCillo. It’s perhaps strange that unlike, say, The Beatles or the Stones, The Doors – and Jim Morrison, in particular – have been left relatively alone when it comes to documentary treatments. On film, of course, there’s Oliver Stone’s Doors biopic, and in some ways director Tom DiCillo’s documentary owes some stylistic debt to Stone’s movie, even though the end result is perhaps understandably more restrained. DiCillo’s greatest achievement here, arguably, is the great care with which he’s assembled a coherent narrative exclusively from archive footage shot between 1966 and 1971. You might find the absence of contemporaneous interviews means there’s no talking heads to guide you through the story. In fact, it works to DiCillo’s advantage, giving the material space to flow naturally. And, perhaps more importantly, it means we’re spared from woolly armchair psychoanalysis of Morrison. As a framing device, DiCillo uses outtakes from Morrison's aborted 1969 film project, Highway. When You’re Strange opens with the singer emerging from a crashed car. He starts hitchhiking. Suddenly, he's driving another car crazily. On the radio, DiCillo overdubs a news broadcast that enables Morrison to hear the coverage of his own death in July 1971. Suddenly, we're whisked back in time and Morrison and his newfound friend Ray Manzarek are plotting to form a band and, almost by accident, land a residency at the Whiskey A Go Go. The narration here is quite perfunctory, and for a while the film threatens to be simply an aural and visual scrapbook, or a catch-up for those unfamiliar with the band. One wonders, for example, whether we'll ever hear a song or performance in its entirety, and whether, if we will, it's going to interrupt the breakneck pace. Over time, DiCillo lets the pace settle and the footage breathe. What’s most remarkable here is the extraordinary live material, particularly DiCello’s meticulous reconstruction of The Doors’ 1969 concert at the Dinner Key auditorium in Coconut Grove, Miami. Morrison, consumed by alcohol and disillusion, is confronted by a crowd baying for nothing more than their latest hit (“LIGHT MY FIRE! LIGHT MY FIRE! LIGHT MY FIRE!”), and he just flips. But, for once, you see the chaos through Morrison's eyes: he's thinking, ‘I'm trying. We're trying. Why aren't you?' The film climaxes as the band's 1970 performance at the Isle Of Wight festival, where n overweight, bearded Morrison croons through a surprisingly effective rendition of “The End”. DiCillo uses the song as a death knell for the ‘60s – Charlies Manson makes his appearance right on cue – with Morrison fully aware that the optimism that characterised the birth of the California hippie dream no longer exists. It's rare that a documentary seems to evolve with its subject, and by the time it ends, When You're Strange will confound you: how did it all come together? Did DiCillo write the story first and find the clips, or vice-versa? Either way, it's quite an achievement. But perhaps most of all it might remind you what a great band The Doors were, and, refreshingly, DiCillo keeps a distance from the band's daily soap opera, refusing to analyse, as many have, Morrison's personal demons. The last images of the band show holiday footage of a smiling, skinny-dipping Morrison as “The Crystal Ship” plays. “Deliver me from reasons why,” sings Morrison. This movie, like that lyric, is perhaps the closest we'll ever get to him. DAMON WISE

A couple of weeks ago, I posted this blog which, in a slightly bewildered-old-man way, wondered why a raft of electropop types like La Roux and Little Boots were being tipped so enthusiastically for success in 2009. As something of a palate-cleanser, I recommended the artier synthpop of Telepathe, and today let’s add Fever Ray into the mix. Fever Ray is the solo project of Karin Dreijer Andersson, who normally works as half of Sweden’s The Knife. More so than most spin-offs, the sound of “Fever Ray” is uncannily similar to that of The Knife – crisp minimal music, heavily treated but still intimate vocals – though overt techno flourishes are generally avoided on these ten crafted and compelling songs. Essentially, Andersson makes a kind of synthpop which, while still referencing certain ‘80s (and ‘70s) things, is palpably made in the wake of all number of minimal house and techno references. If Telepathe have a sort of austere witchiness, juxtaposed with de-evolved R&B and grime textures, Fever Ray is more domestic, if still somewhat spooked, and grown out of a leftfield clubbing environment. The closing “Coconut”, for instance, reminds me of a post-Kompakt take on Vangelis (“China”, maybe, though it’s a long time since I heard those records), while “When I Grow Up” is something like a very rough cross between Kate Bush circa “The Dreaming” and the delicate memory games of Mum. Andersson frequently shifts the pitch of her voice – on “Dry And Dusty” it assumes a manly husk – but at the same time there’s a curious, odd celebration of the mundane; a blend of the processed and human which is far more effective than, say, the autotuned self-pity of Kanye West on “808s And Heartbreak”; the tunes are a lot more memorable, for a start ("I'm Not Done", this graceful album's one moment of relative urgency is playing now, and it's amazing). Perhaps it’s novelty value, but there seems to be something much more affecting about Andersson sombrely detailing how good she is at looking after plants. This all reaches its apotheosis on the fantastic “Seven”, which strikes me as ostensibly a modernist fusion of Kraftwerk’s “The Robots” and Abba’s “The Day Before You Came” (“The Man-Machine” and “The Visitors” both seem to be touchstones for the album, actually). Andersson is talking about a childhood friend, and the telephone conversations they continue to have. “We talk about love,” she intones, “We talk about dishwasher tablets.” Profound and moving, in its odd little way.

I posted this yesterday, but our blogs are misbehaving at the moment and it's seemed to have disappeared. So again: Bruce Springsteen, "Working On A Dream". Apologies for the day-old Obama stuff. There’s a certain grand, neat inevitability to the new Bruce Springsteen album turning up online on the day Barack Obama is inaugurated as President. There’s a certain perverse irony, too, in the Springsteen camp claiming that “Working On A Dream” is not actually a political record. After a couple of listens, a couple of weeks apart, it doesn’t, for sure, appear to be explicitly political. But unlike its recent predecessors, “Working On A Dream” does seem suffused with hope. Perhaps abstracted optimism is the best way of reflecting the energy and possibilities presented by the start of the Obama era, rather than addressing issues directly and being forced to face up to the heinous situation that America and the planet in general currently face. “Working On A Dream”, then, from the title track on, presents something of an ideal soundtrack to this auspicious day – “My Lucky Day”, as Track Two calls it. It’s a maturely positive record, rooted in domestic contentment, reverberant with Springsteen’s supercharged brand of sentimentality. Although the record was predominantly written and recorded during last year’s tour, it doesn’t feel anything like a rushed-off, road-hardened bunch of jams. Instead, as the epic opener “Outlaw Pete” signals so graphically, much of “Working On A Dream” is a sort of blousy, ornate pop. Cloaked in billowing strings (or more likely synthesised strings), it’s a gallop that someone here at Uncut has just described as “Latterday Bob Dylan playing ‘Paint It Black’, but a lot better than if Dylan actually did play ‘Paint It Black’.” There’s a hint of The Beach Boys in there too, specifically the bass harmonica wail that closes “Pet Sounds”. A more overt Beach Boys influence comes on the outstanding “This Life”, a chiming chamber classic that compounds the idea that the trigger for a good few of these songs was “Girls In Their Summer Clothes” on “Magic”. Towards the end, Springsteen melts away and leaves the band to multi-track themselves into an ecstatic “God Only Knows”-style chorale, eventually joined by a clipped and equally euphoric Clarence Clemons solo. That sax solo, of course, means that for all the airy pop and polish, there remains a rockish swagger to “Working On A Dream”. “This Life” is followed by “Good Eye”, a grungy blues identified by Andrew Mueller (in his much more thorough and authoritative album review in the next issue of Uncut) as a relative of the E Street Band’s recent live revamp of “Reason To Believe”. There’s a bit of Springsteen’s Suicide love in there, too. And while Andrew is keen to point up the relative weirdness of “Working On A Dream” (not least “Queen Of The Supermarket”, a schmaltzy love song of mundane epiphanies that eventually dissolves into spacey orchestration), it’s distinctly relative. Essentially, these are big, unabashed pop songs with fearsome hooks – “This Life”, “My Lucky Day”, “What Love Can Do”, “Surprise Surprise”, the title track, “Kingdom Of Days” - that are broad, proud, teary and memorable. Even the country stroll of “Tomorrow Never Knows” and the comparatively downbeat “Life Itself” (with a guitar line that discreetly carries on where Roger McGuinn left off on “Eight Miles High”) stick quickly in the head. Not being an expert, I’d struggle to accurately place this one in the Springsteen canon. But today, it sounds excellent – as you can hear for yourself at NPR. Once you’ve had a go, let us know what you think.