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?