I can’t off the top of my head think of another instance where you’ll find a former US President queuing up alongside the head of the Hell’s Angels to dispense hosannas on one man. But that, perhaps, says much about Hunter S Thompson’s influence on American culture – particularly during the late Sixties and early Seventies when, as Alex Gibney’s brilliant documentary rightly identifies, Thompson was, unbelievably, one of the most influential men in the country. Gibney’s film opens though with 9/11 and fast-tracks to Thompson’s suicide in 2005. Gibney draws parallels between George W Bush and Thompson’s bete noir, Richard Nixon. Several of Thompson’s best-known quotes, originally directed at Nixon, could easily be applied to Bush Jr: “He was a cheap crook and a merciless war criminal”, or “He speaks to the werewolf in us all.” You’d think that Bush would be just the person to get Thompson’s bile flowing, but, as many contributors to this film observe, by 9/11, Thompson was a spent force. It is, perhaps, Thompson’s awareness of his own diminished talent, that he could no longer make a difference, that drove him to suicide. “Hunter had lost his edge,” remarks one friend. The decline is swiftly dealt with by Gibney, who instead focuses on Thompson’s incredible peak. So we get Thompson and the Hell’s Angels, Thompson running for sherrif in Aspen, the lysergic road trip to Las Vegas and, forming the centre piece of Gibney’s film, Thompson’s antics covering the ’72 Presidential campaign. From today’s perspective, it’s extraordinary to think that anyone, let alone someone as dissolute as Thompson, could get as close as he did to Richard Nixon and Democratic candidate George McGovern. One of the many high-ranking American politicians from that era who appear here, McGovern tells a story about having dinner with Thompson, who arrived at the restaurant and ordered three margueritas and six beers, for himself. To give you some indication of Thompson’s influence, we get the story of how he all but brought down Democratic nominee Edmund Muskie by suggesting in a Rolling Stone piece that the senator was addicted to Ibogaine, a drug Thompson made up; a story that the press happily ran with. It makes Chris Morris and “cake” look like a rag week prank. By the mid-Seventies, Thompson appeared less concerned with writing, more concerned with indulging himself in a rock star lifestyle. Covering the 1974 Ali-Fraser Rumble In The Jungle, he gave away his tickets to a drug dealer and spent one of the most important sporting events of all time lounging around in the hotel pool. Gibney’s film attempts to try and find some motivation for Thompson’s behaviour. We find a man capable of warmth and kindness, as well as great bursts of anger. “He was aware of both, but not sure he knew how to control them,” says his second wife, Anita. Various talking heads – from Rolling Stone founder Jaan Wenner (resembling a particularly prosperous real estate developer) to author Tom Wolfe and Thompson’s conspirator, illustrator Ralph Steadman – add anecdote and personal insight. Along side the archive footage, Johnny Depp, sitting at a bar in what looks like Thompson’s office, reads from the author’s books and articles. As a documentary, Gonzo is endlessly fascinating. Gibney, who was Oscar nominated for Enron: The Smartest Guys In The Room, marshals his extensive footage well, and despite a two hour running time, the film doesn’t drift. Partly, of course, that’s due to Thompson himself. Whether in his prime, discussing taking acid on the press corps plane in ’72, or later, his skin mottled and his speech slurring but still with a twinkle in his eye, he’s an extraordinary presence. Gonzo will screen in this year’s London Film Festival, and gets a nationwide release in the UK on December 19

As is always the way, I suppose, I finish one compilation of newish psych acts, then a load more records start turning up. For a good 30 minutes now, my new favourite band has been some shady punks from Long Beach who allegedly travel in “a vegetable oil-powered school bus”, and have a percussionist called, well, Sexual Chocolate. This is Crystal Antlers, and they sound to these ears like bratty young brothers of Comets On Fire – ie totally hotwired and fried psychedelic punks – only with a little of the noise removed for fractional extra clarity. From a quick trip round Google, Crystal Antlers seem to have a snarky, anarcho-hipster sense of humour – they claim to be chimney sweeps, quaintly - which is more in keeping with LA antecedents like The Icarus Line than the New Weird America/Underground Psych cabal. Or, perhaps, it aligns them to the droll likes of Mudhoney, whose molten garage drones also have some affinity with bits of this debut release. The “Crystal Antlers EP”, produced by Ikey Owens of The Mars Volta, seems to have been out a while in the States, but is getting a bigger push with a November reissue on Touch &Go. And, I think, it’s awesome. The “Crystal Antlers” EO begins with a squall of high-end feedback, a frantically overheated Farfisa (slight hints of Wooden Shjips here), and the singer rasping urgently. The speed of this song, “Until The Sun Dies (Part 2)”, accelerates and decelerates quixotically, so that you’re never sure whether you’re going to hit a hardcore thrash or a sequence of flotation-tank prog. There’s some furious psych shredding in there at the death, too, and a bit of atonal sax honk. “Vexation” has that hoarse surging energy of the Comets circa “Blue Cathedral”, minus several degrees of fuzz but plus some more prominent unhinged “Funhouse” sax. At this point, it’s hard not to be thrilled by what on earth Crystal Antlers must be like live. “A Thousand Eyes” and “Owl” then repeat the trick at slightly more considered gallops – Comets circa “Avatar” perhaps – with the latter especially being a kind of flaming, preposterous punk-prog ballad (that also maybe shows the faintest connection to The Mars Volta, without the algebraic time signatures, of course). “Parting Song For The Torn Sky” (oh yes), though, is possibly the best of the lot: a hollering, psychedelically deranged sludge trawl, hinged around a gargantuan freak-out solo, that really evokes the Mudhoney comparisons. It’s tremendous. But you should check them out for yourself, of course: here’s the Crystal Antlers Myspace, where “Owl”, “A Thousand Eyes” and “Until The Sun Dies” are all playing. Let me know what you think. . .

Over the weekend, I watched one of the best music documentaries I’ve seen in an age. “Wild Combination” is subtitled “A Portrait Of Arthur Russell”, and I can only defer to The New Yorker for a start, who noted about the film, “This story begins, as many good ones do, with a gay man from Oskaloosa, Iowa, playing cello in a closet in a Buddhist seminary.” It’s a lovely film, and a rare one in that it manages to precisely but subtly analyse both the music and the personality of Russell – understanding that both are obviously interdependent – through a bunch of very intimately-handled interviews. The director, Matt Wolf, resorts to that old trick of wavering landscape shots to complement the archive clips of Russell. But even the tracking shots of Midwestern cornfields, or of generic “solitary man on the Staten Island ferry in headphones” are executed with a grace that’s much more evocative than these sort of things usually are. Cornfields apart, anyway, Russell emerges from the movie as a fascinating figure, consumed by music to such a degree that he seems in part too paralysed to be able to finish and release much of it. Wolf doesn’t fixate on one of Russell’s myriad styles in particular, but discreetly makes connections between the different strands he pursued: the avant-garde compositions; the plaintive voice-and-cello experiments; the kinetic disco tracks he pursued; the tentative forays into singer-songwriter territory. As sundry auspicious talking heads – including Allen Ginsberg (archival, obviously) and Philip Glass - make clear, Russell’s constant and dogged blurring of the margins between pop and the avant-garde were one of his greatest strengths. David Toop (the only journo featured, mercifully) points out at one stage something like, if you listen to your music in a certain way, the noises start displaying affinities that transcend apparently oppositional genres. If that’s overly theoretical, even a cursory listen to Russell’s music – or a listen in the movie to the powerful testimonies of his parents and his lover, Tom Lee (Russell died in 1992) – should make clear that what he did was actually immensely humane. That warmth and vulnerability comes across very strongly on “Love Is Overtaking Me”, the latest batch of Russell’s unreleased material (there’s something like 800 reels of the stuff) to see the light of day. This lot privileges Russell’s most accessible side, ostensibly rooted in a tradition of singer-songwriting that one suspects must have been anathema to some of his stricter leftfield cohorts. “Love Is Overtaking Me” apparently draws on material from the early ‘70s right up to his death, and involves a bunch of his rapidly-aborted “band” projects (The Flying Hearts, plus some I’ve never heard of; The Sailboats, Bright & Early, the excellently-named Turbo Sporty). Some of the stuff was purportedly recorded by John Hammond, of all people, but I don’t have the details on which is which. No matter. Everything kind of fits together here, from the tiny, beautiful country-folk sketches where Russell sounds a little like James Taylor, through to marginally sturdier band pieces, where his connections with The Modern Lovers are fairly apparent. Occasionally, he sounds unnervingly like Jose Gonzales, which can be a bit disconcerting, but unlike Gonzales, these songs don’t feel like rote exercises in heart-on-sleeve folksy songwriting. And constantly, there’s that blurring of genres: the way “Goodbye Old Paint” begins like one of his “Instrumentals” fragments (as collected on “First Thought, Best Thought”, my favourite Russell music), then evolves into a perfect little country song; or how “What It’s Like” has a languidly soulful undertow, as a horn section artfully manoeuvres into the space between the electric guitar, the organ and Russell’s wry, semi-spoken vocal about loving a preacher in the tall grass (someone’s just said it sounds like “Wonderful Tonight”, actually). There are songs which recall some of “Calling Out Of Context”, maybe, like “Planted A Thought” where his voice and cello are tentatively tracked by dance machine beats. And then there’s "Eli", which features his frail high voice and cello, and appears to be about a dog. This one’s in “Wild Combination”, and it’s extraordinary.

Coming to work this morning past the giant Budweiser posters of William Tyler, it occurred to me it was really high time I wrote about “OH (Ohio)”. I guess there may have been some reluctance on my part to commit to this one, possibly because I’ve found the last couple – maybe more – Lambchop albums so disappointing, and also because, clearly, none of their slowly insinuating records merit rushed judgments. But anyway, “OH (Ohio)” seems to be a quietly re-energised – though I’m not sure that’s ever quite the right word for Lambchop – album. Of late, they’ve seemed weary; a tentative, beaten musical treatment might have fitted the tales of illness on “Damaged”, but the record still sounded exhausted beyond thematic usefulness. And while I became infatuated with “Is A Woman” (usefully, since I was writing an extensive piece on the band for Uncut at the time), I can’t pretend I’ve played it much in the intervening years. It’s hard to identify exactly what makes “OH (Ohio)” such a (dread phrase) return to form – after all, Kurt Wagner and his bandmates deal in such microscopic nuances that I guess a lot of casual listeners would be struggling to spot the differences. Often, though, this one reminds me of that very first album, “Jack’s Tulips”, in that it rekindles the freshness, even the discreet playfulness, of Lambchop. There’s a lightness of touch rediscovered here, from the opening supper-club shuffle of “Ohio” on. Perhaps one of the problems with recent records has been that the sheer strangeness of Lambchop’s original sound – the hazy, lightly-sketched, characterful synthesis of country, soul and so on – seemed to become over-familiar, even oppressive. This time, though, it works again, as Wagner navigates his rueful way through excellent songs like “Slipped Dissolved And Loosed”, “Popeye” (such a beautiful phased, dynamic coda to this one) and the gorgeously horn-flecked “Of Raymond” with, if not vigour, then a good deal more purpose. Apparently, Wagner has finally come to terms with the fact that Lambchop is ostensibly a vehicle for his songs, which might explain the heightened focus. But it’s weird, because the remorseless spotlight on his disintegrating voice, as on “Damaged” and “Is A Woman” especially, doesn’t feel quite so discomforting on “OH (Ohio)”. The personnel around him have almost completely changed since Lambchop’s early days, but the way they track his ambulatory melodies has all the customary subtlety, but perhaps not the virtual invisibility of those problem records. We can speculate about renewed vigour in the wake of life-threatening illness, of course, and the gentle humour that feeds through “National Talk Like A Pirate Day” may well be evidence of that. But maybe there is no great secret to why a band return to form sometimes, other than that the muse haphazardly drives them to create a batch of better songs. And while I went off on some mild anti-tune rant the other day (check the comments at the bottom), it’s nice to have a Lambchop album with some hooks again, perhaps most strikingly “A Hold Of You”. There’s a palpable, albeit suitably mature, desire to flex muscle on parts of “OH (Ohio)”: along with “National Talk Like A Pirate Day”, “Sharing A Gibson With Martin Luther King Jr” is one of Lambchop’s rare – and more successful than most – attempts to pick up a bit of speed. It’s not “Up With People”, but it’s not bad, either. A grower, then. It’ll be interesting to see how these songs turn out when Wagner plays them solo at his Club Uncut gig next Wednesday, on September 10. James Blackshaw and Cate Le Bon supporting, remember.