Judging by the activity on the blog about “Golden Age”, there’s a fair amount of excitement about TV On The Radio’s “Dear Science”. And, now that I’ve heard the album properly a few times, I reckon it’s pretty justified: this is the best record the band have made by a mile. I’m going to start by quoting our regular French penfriend, Baptiste, who posted this about “Dear Science” on the “Golden Age” blog. “ It is way more ambitious and broad than ‘Return’... (which I liked btw),” he writes. “Strings and horns, more concise songs, a fuller band , more grief than anger I'd say (even though anger is kind of grief), more soul-ish, I guess, less martial (still, there's a sort of drum'n'bass song). They move on, that's for sure.” I’d agree with most of that, though it seems a hugely angry album to me, and I wasn’t personally a huge fan of “Return To Cookie Mountain”. That record seemed to me prey to David Sitek’s worst excesses: the obsessive layering, a certain overdone aesthetic which often came close to smothering the songs. While the rich complexities of TV On The Radio are still vividly apparent on “Dear Science”, there’s also some space there. You can pick out individual instruments much more easily this time, which as Baptiste points out, heightens our awareness of the fantastic musicianship; there isn’t so much of that glutinous, super-processed merging of sounds. Then of course there’s the increased funkiness, which’ll be readily apparent to anyone who’s heard “Golden Age”. In his fascinating interview with the band in the current Uncut, Peter Shapiro describes “Dear Science” as the work of an Afro-punk-disco band with axes to grind and butts to shake,” which is very good. What’s striking, though, is the way they re-invent various bits of the ‘80s in ways that are not quite like their other Brooklyn/discopunk contemporaries – like, for instance, how they graft Michael Jackson’s “Don’t Stop Til You Get Enough” onto a Bowie vamp for “Golden Age”. Their old chum Bowie is a prized influence here, so much so that the usual Peter Gabriel reference that has haunted TV On The Radio from day one seems rather superseded. “Stork & Owl” is a tremulous, opulent ballad that could just about have fitted on to “Scary Monsters”. But even there, there’s so much else going on: as my colleague Phil points out, there’s something of Prince’s freaked balladry circa “Sign O’ The Times” here, too. The first three tracks of “Dear Science”, meanwhile, are just about as strong as any start to an album I’ve heard this year. “Halfway Home” has barbershop harmonies that conjure up a sort of gothic, gilded “Surfin’ Bird”, but the overheated synths and voluptuous chorus melody remind me vaguely of one of their predecessors at 4AD, Ultra Vivid Scene. “Crying” is one of the album’s most potent funk tracks (up there with the vibrant mix of Stax horns, Afrobeat rhythms, wiry New York punk-funk guitars and righteous invective that is “Red Dress”), where the weak – in a good way – rhythm guitar is pitched somewhere between the Family Stone and, since it’s more clipped and less sloppy, someone like A Certain Ratio or Quando Quango, maybe. Finally, track three, “Dancing Choose”, fires up an overdriven, drum’n’bass-related breakbeat, then finds one of the singers – Tunde Adebimpe, I think, but he and Kyp Malone flit round each other so much this time round that it’s not always easy for me to identify who’s taking the lead – spit-rapping in the style of a hyper-modernised “Subterranean Homesick Blues” or, perhaps more accurately, “It’s The End Of The World As We Know It”. Superb, exciting music. In this context, baroque ballad constructs like “Family Tree” take longer to bed in. But this is an album with myriad nuances and details to investigate once the initial dazzling punch has worn off. As “Dear Science” goes on, it sometimes feels like the patented Sitek mist is descending again. But on, say, “DLZ”, the intimidating closeness is undercut with a new ferocity and focus. They’ve been in this territory before, but never so successfully. Ditto the finale, “Lover’s Day”, which revisits that martial vibe that Baptiste suggested was played down this time. Sitek really piles it on here, so that it seems like a marching band of Brooklyn bohemians are heading, enraged but with deadly purpose, towards the Whitehouse. But again, the definition is sharper, the tune stronger (a touch of “When Doves Cry”, maybe?), the cumulative effect overwhelming in a dynamic rather than delirious way. It makes “Dear Science” feel like a fabulously ambitious call to arms, rather than an over-elaborate trinket. One for the end-of-year lists, I reckon, then. . .

The movie career of Steve Coogan has so far proved to be a fascinatingly erratic subject. Sure, it’s not unusual to find a successful British TV comedian struggle to establish himself in movies, particularly in Hollywood. For every Dudley Moore, who became a huge movie star in the States with Arthur and 10, you only have to look at Peter Cook - the true genius in that partnership - whose transatlantic film career barely made it beyond Supergirl. Coogan has so far proven himself a lot better in smaller American movies: he’s brilliant as pompous English actor called Steve Coogan in Jim Jarmusch’s Coffee & Cigarettes (2003), and light but good in a rare dramatic role, as Count Mercy d’Anjou in Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette (2006). Put him in something like Around The World In 80 Days (2004) or Night At The Museum (2006), and he just flounders. You could argue, perhaps, that the famously forensic attention to detail he puts into building his TV characters gets lost in the noise and spectacle of a Hollywood production. But then, having seen Tropic Thunder, where Coogan plays a pompous English director, it’s possible for him hit the mark in a big budget movie. Maybe, too, there’s an argument that Coogan works better in British movies because his particular talents are instinctively familiar to a UK creative team. So far, the two best pieces of cinema on his CV are conspicuously homegrown: 24 Hour Party People (2002) and A Cock And Bull Story (2005), both directed by Michael Winterbottom. I think why Coogan shines in Coffee & Cigarettes, 24 Hour Party People, A Cock And Bull Story and Tropic Thunder is because his characters are insufferable egomaniacs, and he's very good at those. Which is also true of Dana Marschz, Coogan’s character in Hamlet 2. Marschz is a failed actor who now teaches drama at a high school in Tucson, Arizona. His pomposity masks a deep-rooted self-loathing and there’s issues with his father buried not-so-deeply too. He’s a failure who thinks he’s a misunderstood genius. There is certainly the makings of a classic Coogan creation, but Hamlet 2 is too broad and too lazy to make best use of its star’s talents. As an actor, Marschz’s credits included a string of late-night commercials for herpes medication (which, like Tropic Thunder’s fake commercials we see at the film’s opening), an extra in an Al Jazeera TV movie and a weeks’ work as a stand-in for Robin Williams on Patch Adams. The supposed highlights of the school drama calendar are Marschz bi-yearly adaptations of Hollywood movies. We get to see his Erin Brockovich, and we learn he mounted a production of Mississippi Burning the previous year. But they’re awful, playing to a handful of bored looking parents, and routinely savaged by the pimply drama critic on the school paper. When the principal decides to axe drama, Marschz is spurred into action, writing, directing and starring in a rock’n’roll musical sequel to Hamlet in order to try and save his department. Hamlet 2 involves time travel, Jesus, Star Wars and much public exorcising of Marschz’s own Oedipal issues. It is, needless to say, mind-numbingly bad. But not for the right reasons. One of the subjects Hamlet 2 swipes at is inspiration teacher movies like Dead Poet’s Society, Mr Holland’s Opus and Dangerous Minds. But the idea that someone as punchable and probably deranged as Marschz could somehow bring out the best in his class of Hispanic gangbangers is a major flaw. As is the production of Hamlet 2 itself, which looks like it has the budget of the entire school behind it. Thinking of Christopher Guest’s Waiting For Guffman, another movie that similarly sent up the awfulness of talentless amateur dramatics, I’m struck by how little genuine wit there is in Hamlet 2. Coogan himself mugs and leers and crows, and certainly Marschz’s towering self-belief is occasionally reminiscent of Alan Partridge. “I just wondered why in Hamlet everyone had to die,” he says, by way of explaining why he wanted to write his sequel, which he later grandly describes as “a controversial piece of socialist agit-prop theatre.” But beyond these admittedly fantastic glimpses into Marschz’s delusional mind, everything else feels a little flat. Even Catherine Keener, as Marschz’s scathing wife, doesn’t quite elevate the material. Still, at least there’s Tropic Thunder... Hamlet 2 opens in the UK in November; you can see the trailer here

It occurred to me, some time after filing the AC/DC blog on Friday, that I’ve been a bit slack at covering underground stuff (“Interstellar Overdrive” notwithstanding) for the past week or two. Checking through the psych/free-folk things around my desk to try and fix that, I’m tempted by a new Jackie O Motherfucker jam (more fractious than the last couple of theirs that have crossed my path), Josephine Foster’s “This Coming Gladness” and, especially, by Helena Espvall & Masaki Batoh’s duo album, which is a lovely investigation of affinities between various folk traditions (especially Swedish and Japanese) by Espers’ cellist and the mainstay of Ghost. The one record from this sector that I’ve been playing most of late, though, is the self-titled album by Hush Arbors. God knows how many albums Keith Wood – aka Hush Arbors, generally – has made thus far; if I remember rightly, I don’t actually have any of them, in spite of having seen him play a good few gigs – sometimes in the company of Sunburned Hand Of The Man, a band which he occasionally figures in. Wood also seems to be a player these days in Current 93, a band whose revolving cast of characters are almost invariably up my street, but whose own actual music never really works for me, chiefly I suppose because I can never quite get on with David Tibet’s voice and the faintly gothic/industrial tradition from which he comes (I’ve always struggled with Tibet’s kindred spirits, most notably Coil, for much the same reasons). Anyway, Ben Chasny – Six Organs Of Admittance, of course – also figures in Current 93, and it emerges that Chasny is Wood’s champion, collaborator and most obvious musical reference point. The customarily erudite and appetising biog from Ecstatic Peace that comes with “Hush Arbors”, drops plenty of tantalising comparisons; to John Phillips, Neil Young, The Byrds, Bert Jansch, Mazzy Star and, regarding “Water II”, to “A Wire subscriber’s ‘Siamese Dream’, ‘Isn’t Anything’ as raised on a diet of wolves and Whitman.” All valid, more or less (though that last one is a bit obtuse), but the combination of eldritch, circling acid-folk and some rockier, if still nimble, adventures, topped off with the thin incantations of Wood, are inescapably reminiscent of Six Organs – in a very fine way, I should hastily add. There’s a notable moment when the jangly folk-rock of “Follow Closely” gets knocked sideways by a fiercely snaking solo. That’s Chasny. Then a couple of songs later, in “Gone”, there’s a real freak-out that matches it blow for blow. This time, it’s Wood himself. “Gone”, as it happens, shows that Hush Arbors, for all their dimly-lit subterranean rep, are actually a rather accessible proposition. “Light”, for instance, is excitingly straightforwardish fuzzpop, while “Sand” is as uncomplicatedly pretty as this sort of psych-folk gets, right up there with my own personal favourite, PG Six (there’s a big echo of Pat Gubler’s style on “Rue Hollow”, incidentally). One more comparison: Alexander Tucker, especially the mix of voice and looping riffs on “Bless You”. All good.

A quick one today, as Brian Johnson might say. I was subbing some copy for the next issue this morning, where a rock star who shall remain nameless for another four weeks revealed that he’d choose the Benny Hill theme as seduction music. AC/DC always seem like the rock equivalent of that, in many ways – so squalid, so repetitive. And yet, as I may have mentioned before, I can’t think of many bands I’ve seen live and enjoyed so much. I’m a sucker for the records, too, so the arrival of “Rock’n’Roll Train” is an enormous pleasure. The practicalities of trying to review this fine song are not new ones: what else is there to say about an AC/DC song other than it sounds like all their other ones, and it’s great? Perusing the tracklisting for the parent album, “Black Ice” (which I should be hearing next week, incidentally), I could have sworn that they’ve used some of these titles before, too. I was going to quote one or two to prove this, but it strikes me that every track on the album is like that – "Rock’n’Roll Train” "Skies On Fire" "Big Jack" "Anything Goes" "War Machine" "Smash 'n' Grab" "Spoilin' For a Fight" "Wheels" "Decibel" "Stormy May Day" "She Likes Rock 'n' Roll" "Money Made" "Rock 'n' Roll Dream" "Rocking All the Way" "Black Ice" Only three with “rock’n’roll” in the title, parsimoniously. Someone in the office mentioned how far they’ve gone with three chords. Their vocabulary hasn’t needed to be much bigger, either. Anyway, some salient facts. “Rock’n’Roll Train” is produced by Brendan O’Brien, and unlike some of his work with Springsteen and Neil Young, it’s suitably clean, crisp and massive. I’ve regularly argued about how, while Angus Young always gets the attention for his shredding, it’s Malcolm Young’s steady, mathematical riffing that is AC/DC’s greatest strength. Unlike most of “Stiff Upper Lip”, this one finds the band doing their patented Herculean plod rather than priapic boogie. As a guide, I’d pitch it somewhere between “You Shook Me All Night Long” and “For Those About To Rock”. We can marvel endlessly about how this took them eight years to come up with, but maybe AC/DC begin with complication and then slowly and ruthlessly pare everything down until there’s nothing left but a riff, a chant, a crude sexual metaphor. Or perhaps they just knock this stuff out in a brief hiatus between three-year holidays. Whatever: fabulous. And it’s here for you to sample. Sceptics, of course, should stay well away. UPDATE: I've now filed a preview of the whole album here.