I’m not, as a rule, fixated on the idea of ‘summer’ and ‘winter’ music, but still, the arrival of the third Brightblack Morning Light album last Friday was incredibly well-timed. I can’t think of a band who make such profoundly horizontal music, who create a soundtrack for being happily paralysed by extreme heat. Or, I suppose, by other stuff. “Motion To Rejoin” got hammered all last weekend, and we’ve been playing this wonderful record in the office all week, too. When Brightblack's last, eponymous album came out in the UK, in the unusually sticky summer of 2006, we would play it at around 3pm every day in the old Uncut offices, where the capricious aircon, the crammed-in computers and the cruel angle of the windows combined to make the whole space unbearably hot. “Brightblack Morning Light” didn’t make it any more physically comfortable, but I guess it helped us mentally adjust to the heat. To slow down, really. Around that time, I interviewed Rachael Hughes from the band on the phone, while she hiked around the national park just outside San Francisco where she and Naybob Shineywater were camping at the time. Now, these notoriously free spirits appear to have fetched up in New Mexico: “Motion To Rejoin”, we are told, was recorded at their adobe hut on the mesa, with the electric energy provided by solar power. Brightblack, as you may be piecing together if you didn’t know already, are serious hippies, of a kind who’ve sporadically tried to ban military personnel from their gigs, and who’ve been known to have a large, sleepy dog as part of their onstage line-up. What’s more important, though, is that they make some of the most lazily, discreetly meticulous music I’ve heard in the past few years, and provide some deep solace for those of us who feel Spiritualized have strayed from the just path of late. I think that, in some review of the last album, I mentioned that Brightblack follow through on the possibilities presented by Jason Pierce on “Ladies And Gentlemen”s “Cop Shoot Cop”. That still holds here. Ostensibly, I guess this is a skilful underground-rock extrapolation of Dr John circa “Gris Gris”: drained, ethereal vocals from Shineywater, anchored by Hughes’ emotionally responsive Fender Rhodes. There are fantastically leisurely, bluesy horn sections flitting in and out of the heat haze, gospel-tinged choruses, and some extraordinarily lethargic calls for insurrection: “Oppressions Each” seems to have a chorus of “Police oppression!”. The general dazed sloth of it all is infectiously psychedelic, but it’d be a mistake to assume that this music was haphazard and wasted. There’s a sense that everything has been meticulously charted, that the soulful swells of the horns on, say, “Another Reclaimation” know exactly where they have to go. “Motion To Rejoin” is a record of great measure and intuitive consideration, I suspect the result of sustained and focused jams, and it has a great stealthy dynamic as well, so that by “Past A Weatherbeaten Fencepost” there’s a cumulative intensity which has increased the pace to something like urgency. Anyway, you can grab an MP3 of the mighty “Hologram Buffalo” over at the Matador site, and behold a striking picture of the duo in their natural environment. One thing, though: without getting too hung up on this weather business, it seems strange we have to wait until November for this to be released in the UK?

A couple or so months ago, I was grappling with Bonnie “Prince” Billy’s “Lie Down In The Light”, and wrote about Will Oldham’s increasing penchant for setting his voice up against more conventionally mellifluous female foils. That point seems worth making even more today, with the arrival of a new live album by the great man, “Is It The Sea”. To be specific, this one’s precise billing is Bonnie “Prince” Billy With Harem Scarem And Alex Neilson, and the action was captured by the BBC at an Edinburgh gig in 2006, on one of those tours where Oldham seeks to rethink his back catalogue by recruiting a fresh bunch of musicians. Neilson is a fairly obvious choice, since the Scottish drummer has a pretty elevated reputation in leftfield and improv circles, and has accompanied the likes of Jandek, among others, in the past. The really interesting development here, though, is the involvement of Harem Scarem, a Scottish folk group who, I must admit, I haven’t come across before, and who feature four female singers, also armed with fiddles, flutes, banjos and so on. It’s these four voices that provide a lavish, hand-knitted cushion for Oldham’s edges, turning “Ain’t You Wealthy? Ain’t You Wise?” into something of a tender lullaby. As usual, I’m tempted to dust down the Dylan analogy here, and go on about Oldham’s restless treatment of his own songs. But I can’t recall Dylan ever straying quite so far as this – though of course, musicologists would doubtless point to the historical ties between Celtic and Appalachian music. The most important thing here is how well these rethinks work: “Cursed Sleep” might be a tremendous relative of Nick Drake on record, but here it’s transformed into a great brooding, bristling epic. There’s a similarly potent version of the traditional “Molly Bawn”, arranged for the occasion by Alasdair Roberts, who’s often been compartmentalised – by me, for a start – as a kind of Scottish folk equivalent to Oldham. If there’s an obvious Scottish counterpart to a lot of this music, though, I’d lean more towards James Yorkston, thanks to the windy propulsion, the gathering majesty of much of this music, not least when Neilson rustles up a sort of breakbeat to drive “Arise Therefore” on to mighty heights. Oldham sounds hugely energised by the whole thing, as he teases audience members making requests, and matches Harem Scarem for their vivacity and warmth. There are a few capricious discoveries: one of the best things here is something I can’t recall noticing before, a Superwolf-era b-side called “Birch Ballad”. And one mild disappointment: a fractionally misfiring version of one of my favourite Oldham songs, “New Partner” (redone better by the Nashville all-stars band on “Greatest Palace Music, if memory serves). Nevertheless, another lovely record to add to an astonishing catalogue, and if anyone can tell me more about Harem Scarem, so impressive here, please don’t be a stranger.

Not for the first time, a new record involving Neil Young arrives for review, and it strikes me yet again how much this man gets away with. Here, on “Déjà Vu Live”, his curmudgeonly vim has compelled David Crosby, Stephen Stills and Graham Nash to perform a bunch of songs from his “Living With War” album; presumably, this must have been one of his demands before he signed up for the 2006 CSNY tour. The thought occurs that Crosby, Stills and Nash would probably sing a setful of Sesame Street songs if it meant they could get Neil’s name on the ticket. But still, it’s a surprise to find that, on the album of the film of the tour, half of the 14 songs are from “Living With War” (there are actually 16 tracks, but three of them are versions of “Living With War” itself; two are piano instrumental takes in the studio, weirdly). Surely, those bandmates must have lobbied hard for a more commercial selection from their lucrative back catalogues? Or should we just assume that this is just another of Young’s conditions, a desire to memorialise the whole project as a polemical jaunt rather than a lucrative reunion? I guess so. The weird thing is, for all Young’s just-about-plausible logic – that his harmonious old sparring partners would effectively fill in for the 100-strong choir on “Living With War” – the live versions here of “Let’s Impeach The President” and so on don’t entirely work, bugle notwithstanding. What’s apparent is the sheer truculent oddness of Young’s songwriting on these songs, how these brilliantly rickety, semi-spontaneous compositions are too rough-hewn for his bandmates. Young takes many of these songs fractionally more slowly than he did on the original record, but the chorus vocalists are still left sounding ragged, disoriented and way out of their comfort zone. Young, almost certainly, must have taken a fair amount of pleasure in leaving his bandmates flailing. And there’s plenty of perverse mischief when he retains the crowd’s booing of “Let’s Impeach The President” on the disc. “Thank you. Freedom of speech,” he responds, rebel credentials satisfyingly reasserted. “Shock & Awe” works better, if only because the vocalists sound least like themselves, and most like the choir they replaced. The best actual music on “Déjà Vu Live”, however, comes from notionally safer fare, when the four men seem to be on more or less the same page. On a tremendous version of “Déjà Vu” itself, a guitarist who sounds like Stills has a go at facing up to Young, with impressively fiery results; the contest is even feistier on “Wooden Ships”, as you might expect. Young, though, inevitably makes the most telling instrumental contribution, when he knocks a rollicking version of Nash’s “Military Madness” on its head with a brief and tempestuous holocaust of a solo. It all makes for a tense and fascinating new chapter in Young’s extraordinary career, though probably not one of its most musically distinguished. What next? Logic dictates Archives, finally. But who’d bet against another new album materialising before that massive endeavour actually turns up. As long as he gets the damned thing out before Blu-Ray technology becomes obsolete, I suppose. . .