A few weeks back, while grappling with the earthshattering business of a new Coldplay album, I kicked off a discussion about Brian Eno’s recent track record. I was confounded by his taste for generally working with giant and, to my ears, fundamentally quite conservative bands. After literally decades of hitching his wagon to the likes of Coldplay, U2 and, lest we forget, James, I found it fascinating that Eno still retained a profound avant-garde cachet. Have we been letting him get away with a lot of mediocre music, just because he talks cleverly about it? Eno, I suspect, finds some kind of experimental gratification in the way he approaches the process of making a record, rather than the way it actually sounds when it's finished: convenient when you’re Guy Hands and need a Coldplay album to sell an eight-figure digit worldwide, but perhaps less important for a cloistered music hack and blogger who treasures the memory of Eno as an innovator, rather than a facilitator. The reunion with his old aesthetic twin, David Byrne, inevitably smells a lot more promising. And reading the way Eno talks about “Everything That Happens Will Happen Today” in the press release, it all looks very alluring, with him musing on the potential of gospel music as “a music of surrender, and the surrendering rather than the worshipping was the part that interested me.” Eno describes the album as “something like electronic gospel”, which should immediately alert you to the fact that we’re not in for a rerun of “My Life In The Bush Of Ghosts”. This one isn’t about using religious samples for subversive ends, it’s about tapping into a faith-powered musical tradition. So Byrne muses, in a calm and familiarly quizzical way, about coming to terms with age, mortality and an accelerating world, while Eno packs the background with his slightly dated array of electronic trickery. It is, to be honest, a lot better than this makes it sound. Again, there’s precious little that could comfortably be described as radical: a fair few of Eno’s purportedly experimental soundscapes could have sat happily on some mid-‘90s armchair electronica record, there’s a fair whiff of latterday Radiohead here and there (notably on “I Feel My Stuff”), and I keep thinking of REM’s “Up” as a comparison, wherein traditional songcraft is mildly subverted by some artful electronic trim. “Poor Boy” is frenetic and jittery in a way which vaguely recalls some of the prickly areas of “Bush Of Ghosts”, but it comes across as rather strained, oddly pedestrian. Perhaps it’s better to focus on Byrne rather than Eno, who doesn’t come saddled with quite such oppressive expectations. We’re told that Eno passed over a bunch of musical ideas to Byrne, for him to work into songs, and he’s done a generally impressive job. Essentially, “Everything That Happens” is an enormously pleasanr, gospel-tinged pop record, with some genteel nods towards funk. “Strange Overtones” is available as a free download here, and is a good indication of Byrne’s form: writing the most graceful and immediate songs he’s done in years; making a strength out of the mournful, encroaching frailty of his voice. That last point really comes to the fore on “The Lighthouse”, the last track and the one that best plays to Eno and Byrne’s talents. Byrne sings beautifully, as if in a lucid dream, but it’s the way that Eno’s dreamlike music complements it – faintly echoing “Another Green World”, perhaps – that finds the two working most harmoniously. A very nice album, but if it had featured ten more songs of the calibre of “The Lighthouse”, we might just be talking about another great one.

We’ve been watching the cricket as usual at Uncut today, but even I’ve noticed that the Olympics have kicked off this afternoon. A useful reminder of this is the fact that an embargo has been lifted this morning on reviewing Damon Albarn’s Monkey CD; the studio recalibration of his Chinese opera, “Monkey: Journey To The West”. With those Jamie Hewlett/Albarn idents for the BBC Olympics coverage and all, a cynic might suspect that some pretty calculated commercial exigencies were being chased here – though of course suggesting as much would be disrespecting a high-minded artist like Damon Albarn, who’d never involve himself with anything so commercially tawdry these days, surely? I imagine, though, that Albarn might be amused that such a clever marketing campaign was pushing the most uncommercial album of his career (apart from "Demo Krazy", or whatever that lo-fi thing was called years back) into the spotlight. For the past few years I’ve been loosely admiring, but generally underwhelmed by the records he’s been involved in, from Blur’s “Think Tank” onwards, probably being one of those people who believe that the antagonistic and mercurial presence of Graham Coxon pushed him to his best work, and also curbed some of his more self-indulgent tendencies. “Journey To The West”, though, is unexpectedly fun. The suspicion, among people like me who haven’t seen the stage show in the past year or so, has largely been that the project is written fairly faithfully in the Chinese opera idiom. But the recorded version, at least, is much less straitjacketed than that. The press release helpfully informs me that Albarn stuck to writing in the typically Chinese pentatonic scale. But the music here also draws mischievously from plenty of electronica, from Krautrock on, and there’s a clear debt to the systems operas of Philip Glass and John Adams (notably, I imagine, to “Nixon In China”, though I must admit I haven’t heard that in years). There’s also Albarn’s finessed melodic sensibilities, though apart from the fairground waltz of “I Love Buddha” – the spit of “The Debt Collector” from “Park Life”, amusingly – it’s unusually hard to find affinities with his back catalogue; Albarn, it should be noted, doesn’t join in with the all-Mandarin vocals. My favourites here are “The Living Sea” and “Heavenly Peach Banquet”, both pivoting around female vocals, that have a glassy, delicate prettiness. All in all, though, it’s a captivating listen. Albarn clearly likes working within the rigid parameters of a prescribed project these days, but it’s still surprising that theoretically the strictest format of all should stimulate him to make his most playful and enjoyable record in years. Still don’t like Jamie Hewlett’s artwork, but I suppose it’s better than Banksy, who did “Think Tank”’s sleeve.

It’s been a weird 18 months or so for Richard Swift, ever since he released a major label concept album, “Dressed Up For The Letdown”, about his previous failures to gain recognition, only to see it flop. I suppose Swift has spent the intervening months desperately trying not to write another bunch of songs about this weird career arc. But instead, his career has taken some pretty eccentric diversions. “Dressed Up For The Letdown” and its predecessors, if you were lucky enough to hear them, placed Swift firmly in the tradition of Harry Nilsson and right next to Rufus Wainwright, an exceptionally talented piano balladeer with a taste for Tin Pan Alley arcana. Of late, though, he’s done everything possible to confound expectations, making one album of mediocre instrumental electronica as Instruments Of Science And Technology, and one cute double-EP thing as Onasis, where he recast himself as a sort of lo-fi garage Dion. This new EP, available for free from EMusic, it seems, moves on the Onasis schtick a little, and is clearly the best Swift product since “Dressed Up” – no coincidence, I guess, that it’s the first since then to come out unambiguously under his own name. It still has the whiff of pastiche hovering over it, especially on the first two tracks, “Would You?” and “Lady Luck”, which seem to be some inauthentically crackly homages to Frankie Valli and Motown. Swift, though, is a better songwriter than he is a mimic, and consequently it’s the artful punch of these songs which is most striking. “The Bully” seems to be a schizophrenic face-off between his street-tough Onasis character and this new, falsetto Valli boy persona. But it’s the last couple of songs, “The Original Thought” and “A Song For Milton Feher”, that suggest Swift hasn’t entirely forsaken his original strengths. Wry piano strolls both, there are still some whimsical acts of sabotage here, not least the analogue synth spray that he lets loose on “The Original Strength”. But it’s the self-deprecating swagger, the tricksy melody, the general air of roistering craftsmanship that’s so impressive. Some two or three years ago, I saw Swift play a bunch of truly awesome songs – maybe one was called “I Am The Ocean”? – that have yet to show up anywhere, as far as I can tell. Maybe now, finally, he can get down to recording those ones?

Twenty minutes before they come on, the crowd’s excitement becomes increasingly palpable, an audible hum, an impatient restlessness swarming through the massed ranks of Drive-By Truckers die-hards pressed hard against the front of the stage and spreading quite contagiously through the serried ranks of the people craning their necks for a better view on the outer perimeter of an impressive turn-out, even thought here’s nothing yet to see, apart from a few scurrying roadies, bumping into things in the dark. I’m standing myself on the fringes of the heaving crowd at this point, and find myself in serial conversation with a number of Uncut readers, some of whom are here not so much because they are veteran fans of The Drive-By Truckers’ back catalogue and great albums like Southern Rock Opera, Decoration Day, The Dirty South and A Blessing And A Curse. Interestingly, they’ve come to the DBTs via the recent Brighter Than Creation’s Dark, several of them mentioning Andrew Muller’s Album Of The Month review in Uncut and how his claims for the record made them want to test his contention that, among other things, here was a synthesis of Lynryrd Skynyrd’s authenticity and virtuosity, The Replacement’s whiskey-sodden wit, the social conscience of Bruce Springsteen and the righteous fury of Neil Young and Crazy Horse. Unanimously, they’ve been amazed that the record lived up to the advance billing, which they had probably suspected was bluster and hyperbole. They now can’t wait to see if the band can deliver live, which when I bump into some of the same people on the way out, they all, grinningly, agree they do, spectacularly. This is the first time out for the Truckers since the departure of guitarist Jason Isbell, who for a lot of people had become the group’s creative focus, providing some of their best recent songs – the classic “Danko/Manuel” probably my own favourite among them. It was more than a little feared that the departure of such a talented player and songwriter would have impacted fairly calamitously on the band, which point of view in the event has proved entirely unfounded. Founder members Patterson Hood and Mike Cooley rallied brilliantly in Isbell’s absence, and with bassist Shonna Tucker also contributing a number of surprisingly terrific songs, Brighter Than Creation’s Dark contains some of the band’s best-ever recorded work. Live, too, Isbell, good as he was, is barely missed, with John Neff on guitar and pedal steel a more than adequate replacement and the band’s fabled three guitar line-up as ferocious tonight as it has ever been, while pianist Jay Gonzalez adds layers to their sound that weren’t previously there, by turns rocking hot and soulful, making you think more than once of Little Feat in their swampy prime. It takes them only a couple of numbers to get into a fearsome stride, the opening “Putting People On the Moon” giving quickly way to “Self- Destructive Zones”, a vintage Cooley romp, by which time they are on all fronts positively blazing. “The Man I Shot” – one of their angriest responses to the war in Iraq, and a highlight of Brighter Than Creation’s Dark - finds the chain-smoking Cooley again in the spotlight, wailing furiously like Neil Young at his most combustible before Hood weighs in with a terrific solo of his own, the pair of them combining again with incendiary consequences on roaring versions of “Where The Devil Don’t Say” and “Carl Perkins’ Cadillac”, before Shonna delivers an exquisitely-wrought “I’m Sorry Houston”. “The Opening Act” and “A Ghost To Most”, meanwhile are aching laments, rueful and sultry, stately and composed compared to the raucously unhinged “The Living Bubba”, brilliantly exhumed from 1998’s Gangstabilly album, and a rowdily delirious run of songs that includes “Dead, Drunk And Naked”, Guitar Man Upstairs”, a howling “Ronnie And Neil”, a version of “3 Dimes Down” that would have sat proudly alongside anything on Exile On Main St, “Homefield Advantage” and a thunderous “Lookout Mountain”. They go off after that, everyone in the room probably deafened, and are gone for so long I wonder if there’s been for some reason not evident in the performance so far some tempestuous falling out backstage. For nigh on what seems like 10 minutes, the crowd, no one really wanting to go home yet, chants for their return, the band finally reappearing for five more songs that keep them onstage for another half-hour, a rugged “Mean Old Highway” melting into a swaggering “The Righteous Path”, which in turn gives way to an unfettered “Shut Your Mouth And Get On The Plane”, a searing “World Of Pain” and, finally, a truly demented version of Jim Carroll’s “People Who Died” that closes with something approaching the Truckers’ equivalent of My Bloody Valentine’s fabled guitar holocaust on “You Made Me Realise”. This time when they finally quit the stage, Cooley the last of them to go, a bottle of Jack in one hand, the other raised in acknowledgement of the crowd’s chanting roar, there’s no calling them back. They’re gone, now, and so, baby, are we. The Drive-By Truckers played Putting People On The Moon Self-Destructive Zones The Man I Shot Where The Devil Don’t Stay The Company I Keep Carl Perkins' Cadillac I'm Sorry Huston The Opening Act A Ghost To Most The Living Bubba Women Without Whiskey Dead, Drunk And Naked Guitar Man Upstairs Ronnie & Neil 3 Dimes Down Homefield Advantage Lookout Mountain ENCORES Mean Old Highway The Righteous Path Shut Your Mouth And Get On the Plane World Of Hurt People Who Died