One of the worst pieces of music I’ve heard this year, I think, would have to be the Manic Street Preachers’ cover version of Rihanna’s “Umbrella”. It’s part of a grisly tradition: guitar bands – usually some plodders like Biffy Clyro, possibly working at the behest of Jo Whiley – indie-fying a pop hit. The idea, I suppose, is to prove that, actually, they have a tremendously post-modern affection for allegedly “disposable” pop music beyond the allegedly “authentic” realities of their seventh-on-the-bill-at-Reading careers. The reality, as it happens, is a band effortlessly showing the prosaic limitations of their sound, in contrast to, say, the excellent gleaming contours of the Rihanna original. Sorry for the rant, but I mention this because I have here the new album from Greg Weeks of Espers. It’s good – which is why I’m writing about it – but it’s briefly spoiled by a cover of Madonna’s “Borderline”. While I like a few things by Rihanna, or by Britney Spears (whose “Hit Me Baby One More Time” has been butchered by guitar ironists more often than most), I’m no fan of Madonna, so I’m not exactly outraged by Weeks desecrating a sacred pop text. But his cover of “Borderline” does him no favours because, in transforming the song into a typically Espers-ish eldritch dirge, Weeks inadvertently reveals the simplicity of his schtick: sing anything slowly enough, in a mournful and slightly dislocated tone, and it’ll sound like this. So much for the idea of mystique and songwriting craft, when you can easily come up with a reductive formula. It’s a shame, because “The Hive” is a nice record. I must admit I haven’t heard any of Weeks’ previous solo albums, but this one – initially, at least – doesn’t seem hugely different from the way that Espers sound. Plenty of Espers actually figureon “The Hive” – with the notable exception, though, of Meg Baird - and apparently the version of “Borderline” was originally slated for another Espers covers record, as yet unscheduled. One difference, maybe, is that these elegant pieces of dronefolk seem to be anchored by keyboards more than guitars; there’s a long list of Arps, Wurlitzers, Fender Rhodes, Korgs and, most prominently, Mellotrons in the credits. Cleverly, though, Weeks and his accomplices manage to make this array of humming, creaky antique kit work in the same way as the thicket of psych guitars on, especially, “Espers II”. As Orion Rigel Dommisse’s flute leads into the opening “You Won’t Be The Same Ever Again”, or the fol-de-rolling “Funhouse”, or Weeks’ acoustic and the Espers cellos navigate a route through the outstanding analogue gloaming of “The Lamb’s Path”, there’s a familiar sense of medieval-tinged otherness. Then “Lay Low” comes along and gently confounds stereotypes, with a languidly groovy fuzz guitar line that’s as close to the Isley Brothers as it is to one of Weeks’ more constant influences, Ghost. Weeks’ voice can be a bit thin at times, and he misses the counterpoint of Meg Baird, but this is still a fine album, “Borderline” notwithstanding. Weeks is clearly trying to expand his range and sound – “Not Meant For Light”, for instance, is delicately-handled Laurel Canyon folk-pop – while sticking with the atmospherics and pacing that have served him so well thus far. Evidently, there’s life in acid-folk yet. . .

Trying to cover the entirety of Neil Young’s tempestuous 40 year career in a documentary film lasting not much more than 60 minutes is a bit like trying to pour the Atlantic into a bucket, an impossible task, however noble the intentions. Don’t Be Denied – “a documentary film about the life and times of Neil Young” – makes a sometimes brilliant stab at telling Neil’s story in the aforementioned hour and is full of fascinating moments and boasts some great archive footage of Buffalo Springfield, Crazy Horse and solo performances. There’s also terrific interview content with the legendary contrarian, filmed over nine months in New York and California, Neil living up entirely to his reputation as someone you would be ill-advised to mess with, on any level you might care to consider. “I only care about the music,” he says early on with uncompromising conviction. “It’s sad. I’m brutal,” he adds later with a worryingly steely resolve. “I only do it for the music. People are secondary.” “Neil’s like a force of nature. It’s like having the wind in your band. He was the nitro-glycerine in the mix,” observes David Crosby, who with Graham Nash and Stephen Stills is here to bear witness to the havoc Young’s monumental bloody-mindedness has frequently wrought. “My first job is to follow my musical course and it’s always detrimental to people around me,” Young subsequently says, reinforcing the point. “There’s always a lot of collateral damage.” Directed by Ben Whalley for BBC 4, the film, which was previewed last night in a swanky West End Hotel, moves at break-neck speed through Young’s life and music, which it tackles chronologically. Longstanding Neil fans will therefore find a lot of inevitably familiar ground covered here. We have, for instance, the Winnipeg adolescence, fondly recalled by former members of his first notable band, The Squires, the hearse trip from Toronto to LA, where he runs again into Stephen Stills, his fractious history with The Buffalo Springfield (“that wasn’t my band, but I was in it”), his takeover and transformation of The Rockets into Crazy Horse, the superstardom that followed After the Goldrush, Harvest, and his enlistment by Crosby, Stills and Nash. Young is characteristically terse about why he contested his own popularity after Harvest made him briefly the most popular solo star in the world, his audience at the time clamouring for more of the same. “I’m determined to avoid repetition,” he says. “I didn’t want to do another album like Harvest. How many sensitive songs can you write before it’s not a sensitive song? After Harvest, I could have made an album just like it. I could have made an album that everybody wanted. Instead, I made an album that nobody wanted.” He’s talking now about Time Fades Away, the first instalment of what later became known as ‘The Doom Trilogy’ – which subsequently included On The Beach and Tonight’s The Night, whose raw derangements cost him a goodly portion of the audience that had only recently swooned over the winsome Harvest. He’s gruffly funny about the infamous “Revolution Blues” (“they say that Laurel Canyon is full of famous stars/I hate them worst than lepers and I’ll kill them in their cars”), a song from On The Beach inspired by Charlie Manson. “I played it to Crosby,” he recalls, “and he said, ‘Don’t sing about that. It’s not funny.’ It spooked people. But then, they were spooky times. I knew Charles Manson and he spooked the hell out of me.” It says a lot about how much history the film has to pack in that by now we’re 45 minutes into Don’t Be Denied, which in its hectic final 15 minutes hurtles through the next 25 years, from Rust Never Sleeps to Living With War and the last CSNY tour, which took that album’s songs to an often hostile audience, pausing briefly to consider Young’s brief flirtation with synthesisers on Trans, at which time, we might be astonished to learn, his favourite groups were the Human league and, er, A Flock Of Seagulls. “You’re going to go up and down,” he says, looking back finally at who and what he has been “Sometimes you get lost in a trough and no one can see you and no one cares. They’re just looking at the whitecaps,” he observes vividly, seeing his career as a series of cresting and receding waves. “Then you come up again. You just have to hang in there and keep going.” This is all compelling stuff, but the problem is there simply isn’t enough of it. Another half hour would have helped, but what Neil’s life and times clearly beg for is the kind of treatment Scorsese afforded Dylan in No Direction Home. Still, you won’t want to miss it and I’ll be watching again when the film is broadcast on BBC 4 on October 31 at 10.00pm.

OK so I might get sick of this one after a while, but we’re not blogging for posterity here. Chairlift are yet another band from Brooklyn (though originally from Boulder), and their debut album, “Does You Inspire You”, is another record that’s making me rethink my long-nurtured antipathy towards ‘80s revivalism. Ostensibly, a lot of this enormously – perhaps transiently – beguiling album is fixated on a certain kind of glacial synthpop. There are some pretty obvious influences at the root of a good few Chairlift songs; “Planet Health”, for instance, has the nebulously oriental synth chimes and fretless bass that must surely have been inspired by Japan circa “Tin Drum”. As one of the relatively few ‘80s New Pop types I can stomach, the Japan comparison is fine by me, though some of the other names I’ve seen thrown about in relation to Chairlift are a bit alarming – Yazoo, even Berlin, amazingly. The thing is, though, they’re good enough – and discreetly arty enough, too – to suggest an entirely different set of reference points. So while, “Territory” is a borderline preposterous piece of synth bombast, it’s still engaging thanks to Caroline Polachek’s sternly ethereal vocals and a series of melodic shifts that may call to mind “TNT”-era Tortoise (like another superficially ‘80s band, The Week That Was). And plenty of the droll, precise musical settings remind me of a bunch of mid-‘90s German bands, like Tarwater and Kreidler, who were a satellite of the post-rock scene and who made cerebral pop music out of avant-electronica. The opening “Garbage” is especially terrific in this way, also recalling a synth rescoring of Sonic Youth’s “Experimental Jet Set”, with Polachek’s still, opulent croon a distinct relative of Kim Gordon. And the record ends with an odd and striking sequence that runs through arch country (“Don’t Give A Damn”) to dislocated ambience (“Chameleon Closet” and “Ceiling Wax”), the latter finding Polachek noting, “I will never return from that scary place”. I guess I should stress, though, that a good part of what Chairlift do is vigorously hip and catchy – so catchy, in fact, that I’m wary a few of these songs will become irritants once they become ubiquitous. “Evident Utensil” is actually irritating from the off, being a wryly bouncy cousin of “Barbie Girl” after a fashion. But “Bruises” is the one that’s going to make Chairlift, a mighty successful negotiation between poise and cuteness that’s an infallibly perfect successor to Feist as the iPod soundtrack. Let’s count how many weeks before it drives us mad. . .