Saturday evening at the last and finest mini-festival of late summer, and Minnesota’s most rock’n’roll Mormons can no longer turn the other cheek. Grinding to a halt between glacially slow riffs, LOW guitarist Alan Sparhawk makes an extraordinary appeal for audience sympathy. “It’s been a crappy day,” he grimaces, voice croaking. “All the people I love told me they hated me today.” Sparhawk’s wife, drummer and co-vocalist, Mimi Parker, shoots him a look of pure poison. “Not all of them,” she hisses. Welcome to End of the Road Festival 2008. Great sounds, magical location, and simmering marital tension live onstage. Only in its third year, Britain’s premiere one stop shop for outdoor indie-folk and left-field Americana is already an established brand and sold-out success story. The setting is idyllic, a peacock-patrolled Victorian pleasure garden overlooking Madonna’s country estate on the verdant uplands between Wiltshire and Dorset. The musical menu may be pretty single-minded, but it is full of rewarding oddities. Backwoods heartache chronicler BON IVER, for one. Wisconsin’s Justin Vernon proves himself worthy of the extravagant praise lavished on him this year with a warm and, given his debut album’s introverted mood, surprisingly lusty folk-rock set. MERCURY REV headline on Saturday, road-testing the Coldplay-tinged sparkles of their new "Snowflake Midnight" album. There is too much blustery bombast in their spangled set, but at least they bring a welcome blast of awestruck cosmic yearning to a weekend heavy with prosaic beard-rockers. AMERICAN MUSIC CLUB are engaging, but not wholly convincing. Mark Eitzel may be a sage-like poet and mordant wit, but his rambling jazz-rock confessionals seem a little smug and self-absorbed here. In baggy trousers and pork-pie hat, he could almost be fronting one of those unfathomably popular Middle American fratboy bands, like Smash Mouth or Bowling For Soup. Sunday night headliners CALEXICO also disappoint, never quite getting into the guts of their potentially rich mongrel mix of saloon-bar Americana and Mexican mariachi sounds. Admittedly the spaghetti western trumpet fanfares sound fantastic after a guitar-heavy weekend, but most of their set is too polished, too clinical, too Crowded House. Thankfully, End of the Road also features plenty of lesser known artists prepared to spike and twist the alt-folk rulebook. Such as the wry Canadian collective WOODPIGEON, who sound like Arcade Fire without the triumphalism. Or sardonic New Yorker JEFFREY LEWIS, who punctuates his DIY clatter with sharp comic monologues. Meanwhile, San Francisco punk-folk duo TWO GALLANTS are plain electrifying, howling their noir-ish vignettes in a semi-feral whine pitched somewhere between Jacques Brel and prime-time Violent Femmes. More than anyone else this weekend, they sound wired, possessed and potentially dangerous. End Of The Road may be the most mellow and uplifting fresh-air festival on the calendar, but a drop of the dark stuff still goes down a treat. STEPHEN DALTON

Turning up at the SonyBMG HQ in London last week to review the new AC/DC album for Uncut, it occurred to me: what on earth am I going to write? I’d heard and blogged already about “Rock’n’Roll Train” and – not for the first time in anticipation of a new AC/DC album – knew what to expect. The challenge would be how to spend 700 words saying little more than, “It sounds the same as all the others, and it’s great.” As it turned out, though, I rather wish now that I’d had that problem. Not to panic you completely, there are hairy great chunks of “Black Ice” that peremptorily and brilliantly recycle the AC/DC formula one more time. Four songs feature either “Rock’n’Roll” or “Rocking” in the title, for a start, and “She Likes Rock’n’Roll” is an especial marvel: a morse code riff in the blessed vein of “Back In Black”, with a fantastic passage where Brian Johnson leads his bandmates in a sort of huddled chant, a rock haka, a neat way of reminding themselves why they’re here. “She likes rock’n’roll,” they note, “She likes rock’n’roll/ She likes rock’n’roll.” Then, the penny drops: “I like rock’n’roll!” This is great, clearly, and there are a bunch more songs that’ll sound just fine in the unlikely event they make it into the setlist for the live shows. As “Rock’n’Roll Train” shows, the general air is of AC/DC at their most monolithic. If 2000’s “Stiff Upper Lip” found a band operating at a slightly more frantic, back-to-basics pace than of late, the likes of “War Machine”, “Smash’n’Grab” and the title track are all fiercely grandiose. The producer this time round is Brendan O’Brien, veteran of numerous Pearl Jam and Springsteen projects, and someone who’s clearly buffed up the patented razor-sharp, ultra-precise AC/DC sound for modern rock radio. This is no bad thing: AC/DC don’t suit sludge, and the needling clarity of the Young brothers’ guitar tones has always been the band’s greatest strength. But if we’re looking for a villain here, chances are that many AC/DC hardliners – I can probably count myself as one of them – will round on O’Brien. “Black Ice” is clearly an aggressive statement by one of the biggest bands in the world keen to impose themselves on 2008. But uncharacteristically, that desire to reassert dominance seems to have resulted in a few weird compromises. The hints come in tracks two and three, “Skies On Fire” and “Big Jack”, where the guitar textures sound a bit softer, a bit more modern, a bit perilously like U2 in places. Track four, though, is destined to be a point of extreme stress: “Anything Goes” is unambiguously a pop song, that reminded me of Laura Brannigan’s “Gloria” (and by extension Pulp’s “Disco 2000”) and Slade’s “Run Run Away”. It’s evidence, as if we needed it, that AC/DC’s genius has been founded in their imperturbable, stubborn resilience to change. And “Rock’n’Roll Dream”, a ballad, more or less, only accentuates the problem. There is, though, a silver lining of sorts, in that two more departures from the norm – into Led Zeppelin territory, specifically - are actually pretty great: “Stormy May Day”, a fraught melodrama driven by Angus on slide, of all things; and “Money Made”, which has a stomp comparable to “When The Levee Breaks” and which might just be the best thing on “Black Ice”. Plenty to write about, then, as you’ll see in the next issue of Uncut. But how strange that AC/DC should start trying to evolve at this late date. The tour, of course, will be the same as ever. Won’t it?

Very nice Club Uncut last night, headlined by Kurt Wagner. Allan will be blogging about Wagner’s lovely set later, I think, though I have to mention that: a) the “OH (Ohio)” songs that made up virtually the entire set stood up great to solo treatment; b) his guitar playing, all languid southern soul licks, seems much improved than I can recall from long-ago solo shows; and c) in the event that modesty prevents Allan from reporting this, he gave thanks and provoked applause for our editor. So he can come back. Good. Anyway, my beat last night concerned the two support acts, James Blackshaw and Cate Le Bon. As I’ve mentioned before, I’m concerned that my love of Blackshaw’s music might look a bit stalkerish from a distance. Still, it was great to have him play the club, and his brief set was terrific: just hunched over his 12-string acoustic, meticulously drawing affinities between folk, raga, classical composition and so on. As he burrowed deep into what I think may have been “Echo And Abyss” from “Litany Of Echoes”, it’s fascinating how such intricate and discreet music can hold a room. Watching and listening to Blackshaw, I’m conscious of a critical shortfall on my part, in that after a certain point, the impressionistic hyperbole runs out and my complete lack of technical knowledge means that I can’t really explain what it is about Blackshaw that makes his combination of virtuosity and compositional skill so graceful. Afterwards, our Production Ed was talking a lot about open tunings, which I didn’t entirely understand. Maybe next time, I should try and get him to pin down Blackshaw’s slippery excellence into more concrete terms. In the meantime, apologies for the plug, but you can hear James play on this month’s free Uncut CD. Cate Le Bon might be a new name to many of you, since her solo career thus far consists to my knowledge of just one rare EP, “Edrych Yn Ilygaid Ceffyl Benthyg”. Le Bon, though, is part of Gruff Rhys’ team, and consequently spent the other night at the Mercury Prize shindig performing as part of Neon Neon. I don’t want to make Laura Marling-bashing a constant part of this blog; as we’re constantly, slightly creepily reminded by her admirers, she’s VERY YOUNG. But God, how mediocre does Marling’s schtick look in comparison to Le Bon’s performance here? She only sings one song in Welsh tonight, and a good few of her songs seem to be about dead animals, but there’s a warmth and quiet potency throughout, which never slips into anything so banal as melodrama. Comparisons? Someone suggested she sounded like an owl, which isn’t bad. We were reminded a little of Sandy Denny, but the tunes weren’t quite like that – more in the vein of “After The Goldrush” maybe, or (though making comparisons to another Welsh act is a bit invidious) Gorky’s Zygotic Mynci, perhaps what they were up to around the time of “The Blue Trees” in particular. That post-Gorky’s Richard James album, “The Seven Sleepers Den” (one that’s been neglected and is well worth checking out, by the way) might be another reference, to Le Bon’s solo live show at least. Let’s hear more.

Very nice Club Uncut last night, headlined by Kurt Wagner. Allan will be blogging about Wagner’s lovely set later, I think, though I have to mention that: a) the “OH (Ohio)” songs that made up virtually the entire set stood up great to solo treatment; b) his guitar playing, all languid southern soul licks, seems much improved than I can recall from long-ago solo shows; and c) in the event that modesty prevents Allan from reporting this, he gave thanks and provoked applause for our editor. So he can come back. The full review is over at our Wild Mercury Sound blog.

Washed up fighters make great movie characters. Think of Robert De Niro as Jake La Motta in Raging Bull, Marlon Brando’s “I coulda been a contender” speech in On the Waterfront, Clint Eastwood in Million Dollar Baby and Stacy Keach, pissing blood in John Huston’s underrated Fat City. Add to their ranks Randy “The Ram” Robinson, played here by Mickey Rourke in the role that's justifiably attracting much talk of an Oscar. Rourke, more than most actors, knows about the ring. Anyone who lost track of him in the 1990s (and frankly you’re not missing much if you did) might not be surprised to learn he dedicated more time to the gym than he did to reading scripts. He went undefeated in seven professional bouts between 1991 and 1994, when he retired from boxing. He kept on making movies, most of them trash, but occasionally found some of the old spark that made him such an exciting prospect in the early 80s, in films like Diner and Rumblefish. (He was terrific as Jan the Actress in Animal Factory, and of course as Marv in Sin City, but virtually unrecognizable in either.) Maybe that’s why Darren Aronofsky makes us wait before we can see his face in The Wrestler. First of all we get glimpses of The Ram’s glory days, press clippings from the late 80s when he was in his prime. Then we see him from the back, sitting on a stool in the corner of a nursery class – like a dunce. He’s reduced to fighting in school gyms now. His hair is long and rinsed blonde, reaching down below his shoulders; his arms and chest are bodybuilder pumped… But the face, when we do see it, is bloated and battle-scarred, his skin waxy, his eyes in retreat. Rourke’s once beautifully chiseled features seem to have lost all their definition. (He’s 51, 52 on Tuesday.) It’s enough to make you cry – or it would be, if Rourke didn’t imbue this guy with so much of the old charm and charisma. Randy is still fighting the good fight, still dreaming the dream despite everything that happens in a movie that’s structured as a long-delayed wake up call. Aronofsky’s The Wrestler arrived at the Toronto International Film Festival just a couple of days after winning the Golden Lion at Venice, and two years after Aronofsky’s The Fountain was laughed off the screen at both events. Maybe ridicule was good for the soul. There is something humble and back-to-basics about this flick – or maybe Arofonsky figured Dardenne brothers’ style naturalism was the path to critical redemption. Either way it pays off. The Ram learns the hard way that he can’t keep fighting forever (the movie casts a sympathetic light on sham wrestling bouts as just an extremely punishing branch of show business), but his options remain severely circumscribed in a country still hooked on its own fixation with youth and glory. (Not for nothing is Randy’s climactic bout a rematch with his old foe, The Ayatollah.) A subplot about Randy trying to reconnect with his angry daughter (Evan Rachel Wood) tastes pretty stale, and it doesn’t take long to see which direction this is spiraling, but The Wrestler is a poignant slice of barroom blues transported to a whole other level by Mickey Rourke, the right actor in the right place at the right time. This could prove to be his indelible performance, the role of a lifetime you might say. Tom Charity The Wrestler opens in the UK later in the year