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. . .

A bit snowed under with auspicious new things today, amongst them the CSNY live album, Damon Albarn’s “Monkey: Journey To The West”, a new Bonnie Prince Billy live set and, perfect for this heat, Brightblack Morning Light’s superb “Motion To Rejoin”. While I get my head round all these, a mention for a couple of very fine records I’ve neglected to write about in the past few weeks. One is by James Jackson Toth, who’s figured here in the past when he was known as Wooden Wand. To recap: Wooden Wand originally fronted a ragged and delirious collective called The Vanishing Voice, who operated vaguely in the interstices between folk, jazz, rock and general clattery leftfield improv in much the same way as, say, Sunburned Hand Of The Man. All well and good. Of late, however, Wand has been heading down a more orthodox, and surprisingly more satisfying route, showcased on 2006’s “Second Guessing” and last year’s Lee Ranaldo-produced “James And The Quiet”. This time out, with “Waiting In Vain”, Toth has reclaimed his real name and made his straightest record yet. Like those last couple of records, the influence of Dylan hangs heavy over parts of this, especially the rackety faster tracks like the Rolling Thunder-ish “Beulah The Good”. But Toth is shaping more of an individual sonic character to match his myth-heavy lyrics – even if that character seems firmly and purposefully stuck in a deep 1975 singer-songwriter place. In this, he’s recruited another stellar crew, with Andy Cabic and Otto Hauser of the Vetiver/Devendra family, Carla Bozulich, one of Deerhoof and, most pronouncedly, the mighty Nels Cline, currently embedded in Wilco. It’s Cline, I suspect, who shreds up the climax of “The Banquet Styx” in the style, as Phil here pointed out this morning, of Robert Quine. There’s a countryish lilt to some of Toth’s writing, too, which he shares with TK Webb. Webb first made it onto my radar a couple of years back with “Phantom Parade”, a decently grimy stab at Americana which betrayed vague sympathies with people like William Elliot Whitmore and Mark Lanegan. Now, it seems, Webb is taking the reverse path to Lanegan, since TK Webb & The Visions’ “Ancestor” finds him trying on the sort of rootsy grunge that isn’t dissimilar to how those early/mid ‘90s Screaming Trees albums sounded. It’s a good fit for Webb, and his new band – featuring various bits of Love As Laughter, whose new record I should write about, too – sound cool: very heavy, discreetly psychedelic. The essence of his songwriting – earthy, measured, possibly the product of hearing one or two Neil Young albums at a formative point in time – hasn’t really changed that much. But this thick, seething makeover really suits him. A great opening track, “Teen Is Still Shaking”, sets the agenda very clearly.

Welcome to Waitsville. A place where bad jokes are good, Vaudeville never died, and the talk is of smoking monkeys, weasels and the mating habits of the preying mantis. Few musicians have built their own world as resolutely and completely as Tom Waits– that twilight carny town, pitched on a scrapheap in some flickering no-man’s land between Beat generation Manhattan and the Weimar Republic. Entering the theatre in a sweltering Edinburgh tonight, though, the sense of crossing some kind of border into another place, with its own laws, is more intense than ever. In the same way that “free earplugs” became one of the most common talking points surrounding My Bloody Valentine’s recent tour, the ultra-stringent anti-touting measures in place for Waits’s two nights in Edinburgh, his only UK shows, have already provoked endless pre-show chatter. Outside the Playhouse, we line up like patient refugees while a man with a bullhorn orders us to have not merely our tickets, but also our photographic ID and credit cards ready for inspection. The fact that a great many are actually producing their passports at the door heightens the feeling of shuffling through some weird Checkpoint Charlie. Inside, the faded Victorian grandeur of the Playhouse somehow seems a little grander, a little more faded than usual. The waiting stage lies bathed in a mix of deep blue, hard gold and intense red light that lets you take in the impressive amount of percussion instruments at the ready, as well as the weird, mushroomy assemblages of 1940s-era loudspeakers. The PA plays a sublime mix of music that suggests old radio waves bouncing back off satellites - jump blues, country, R&B, early rock ‘n’ roll, garage rock, gut bucket gospel. Still, it doesn’t distract from the fact that heat is already tropical, and by the time Waits has kept us waiting 30 minutes past the strictly appointed 8pm start, the buzzing, sweating crowd is growing restless. Slow handclaps break out, minds perhaps beginning to turn to the average £100 ticket prices. (An unconfirmed, but plausible story: when, off the record, a representative of the agency behind the tour was asked why tickets were so expensive, the reply came: “That’s just Tom Waits having a laugh.”) Any hint of ill will, though, is instantly dispelled when Waits finally appears and mounts his private little dais at the centre of the stage while his five-man band take positions around him. Before he’s even opened his mouth, he’s accorded an ovation, which he shamelessly milks and orchestrates, standing in the spotlight and raising his trembling arms like a sideshow conjurer, directing the applause. As he kicks into a ferocious bastard blend of “Lucinda” and “Ain’t Goin’ Down The Well,” the crowd is already fully hypnotised. And “kicking-off” is right. From the first, the lead percussion instrument is Waits’s stomping motorcycle boot. As he pounds the beat out, you realise the podium he’s standing on is coated in a layer of white powder – flour, perhaps, or talcum powder, or maybe ground-up bones - so that a cloud of pale dust rises around him as he stamps. In his weather-beaten black suit and bowler hat, he’s part silent movie slapstick clown, part Samuel Beckett ghost, part New Orleans voodoo funeral director. He never breaks from his patented “Tom Waits” character, but his ragged stagecraft is flawless. Sometimes he jerks like a machine-man; sometimes he rattle about like a zombified bag full of bones; often, he stretches and moves inside his music with the languid grace of a ballet dancer, walking between raindrops. The hammering industrial polka is maintained into “Raindogs,” before he shifts gears abruptly with an unspeakably gorgeous “Falling Down.” On songs like this – and, later, a similarly bruised and beautiful “Bottom Of The World” – Waits and his band suggest the kind of music The Rolling Stones might have made if they’d ever allowed themselves to grow up. But, as they remind you by lurching straight into a delirious “Cemetery Polka,” crashing from marching mutant oompah into lyrical, looping, drunken sweeps and back, the Stones never took anyone on a trip like this. Waits’s band – Larry Taylor (bass), Patrick Warren (keyboards), Omar Torrez (guitar), Vincent Henry (sax, harmonica) and Casey Waits (Tom’s son, on percussion, and sometimes joined by his younger sibling, Sullivan) – define the term “sidemen.” They settle into the shadows, anonymous figures almost, but their instruments become lead characters, storytellers as spellbinding as Waits himself. Together, they lead you through the backstreets, bars, junk shops, jazz dives, civic halls, cafes and fleapit theatres of a mongrel city, a place where the German, Italian, Spanish, Jewish and Gypsy neighbourhoods all merge into one. A place where Mariachi bands invite klezmer clarinettists to sit in for wedding gigs in Harlem, where guitars can sound like zithers, and where Lester Young or Lightnin’ Hopkins might stop by any minute, looking for help on a spaghetti western soundtrack. Meanwhile, in his dusty halo, their leader is singing, growling, roaring, hissing and whispering as if, after years of distressing it, he’s finally got his voice the way he always wanted it, sounding like Louis Armstrong and Captain Beefheart getting together with a failed opera singer to sing Billie Holiday in 1930s Berlin. Picking up his guitar to thumb out the thick, itching groove of “Get Behind The Mule,” Waits takes us from cabaret to roadhouse, with Henry wailing out waves of distorted mouth harp that would have astonished Howlin’ Wolf. A grotesque, meandering tale of circus freaks resolves itself into “Table Top Joe.” For “Jesus Gonna Be Here,” we’re in a tent by the muddy river, listening to a rogue preacher testify his customised gospel. Then, moving to the piano with only Taylor’s stand-up bass for support, the mood shifts again, the theatre transformed into a tiny, late-night barroom, as Waits begins to ramble and rasp out more and more of his trademark showbiz-barfly shaggy dog stories: • “Y’know what annoys me? When people say, ‘My cell-phone is a camera, too.’ I mean – why can’t something just be what it is and be happy about it? Makes me want to say, ‘My sunglasses are also a tricycle.’ Yeah, but I never do.” • “Y’know why shrimp never give money to charity?” (“Why?” comes the crowd's foolish cry) “Yeah. Well, basically – they’re shellfish. (Pause.) My wife told me never to tell that joke again.” • “I met someone who’d been there, and he told me what the moon smells like. Y’know what the moon smells like? Fireworks. Makes perfect sense. I mean, that’s where they all end up.” And on and on he goes, dishing out patter like a washed-up Catskills entertainer. Of course, in between all the non sequiturs, he’s busy breaking hearts, breathing out exquisitely tender readings of some of his loneliest, most beautiful songs: “Picture In A Frame”; “Invitation To The Blues”; “House Where Nobody Lives”. During “Innocent When You Dream,” he leads the audience through a mass sing-along, the place sounding like a wartime music hall. As he rises from the piano and makes his way back to his little stage, you can see that Wait’s thick black suit is drenched through in sweat. There’s just time to register the fact that, all around, people are sitting forward, literally on the edge of their seats, before he pushes the pace again, the group slamming into bone-shaking “Lie to Me,” and an immense “Hoist That Rag,” a long, fast, snaking, hard mamba. “Hang Your Head” is burning blue soul. “Green Grass” manages to be sinister and gentle at once and finds room for a great whistling solo. On “Way Down In The Hole,” Waits mounts a successful, swampy campaign to reclaim his song from The Wire soundtrack, nailing down the beat by stamping on a fire bell and beatboxing like an asthmatic Rolf Harris. “Make It Rain,” follows, the band hammering out a slow, jagged pneumatic funk groove that builds mercilessly while Waits jerks and cries for his rain. It finally comes, when, in a flourish of pure, old school showbiz, a cascading shower of golden glitter suddenly pours down upon him from the rafters. With the crowd on its feet again, baying again, Waits returns for a too-brief encore, laying out the sinister comic-book rumble of “Goin’ Out West,” and a weary, looping end-of-the-night waltz through “All The World Is Green”. Then, after two-and-and-half hours of booglarizing, beguiling and binding us in his unique spell, he’s gone, taking his world with him, and leaving us trying to find our way back to ours. Astonishing, simply. And, in case you were wondering, worth every penny, and all the problems of passport control. Nights like this, performers like this, are as rare as rocking horse dung. DAMIEN LOVE SETLIST Lucinda/ Ain’t Goin’ Down To The Well Raindogs Falling Down On The Other Side Of The World Shoot The Moon Cemetery Polka Get Behind The Mule Cold Cold Ground Table Top Joe Jesus Gonna Be Here Piano set: Picture In A Frame Invitation To The Blues House Where Nobody Lives Innocent When You Dream Lie to Me Make It Rain Bottom Of The World Hang Your Head Green Grass Way Down In The Hole Dirt In The Ground Make It Rain ENCORE: Goin’ Out West All The World Is Green