At first glance, it might seem strange to find Shane Meadows shooting a “legacy project” recording Eurostar’s move from Waterloo to St Pancras. Meadows, after all, is best known for a raft of movies that’ve chronicled suburban working class life in and around his native Nottingham. He’s hardly, you’d think, the obvious candidate to shoot a promo film intended to, ah, push the boundaries of brand communications. And for a company whose most memorable contribution to advertising featured Kylie skipping gaily round Paris. Still, according to a lengthy piece about the film in Campaign I’ve just been sent, the story goes that Eurostar wanted to harness something called the “power of unbranding”. Which means, basically, they were happy to bring Meadows on board the project and let him have free reign. Apparently, Eurostar didn’t even see Somers Town until it screened earlier this year at the Berlin Film Festival. There is, as you might imagine, plenty of marketing speak in the Campaign feature – “the real secret will be finding enlightened clients who see that branded content does not have to be full of logos and messages,” says one exec. Amusingly, though, you can’t help but spot product placement in the film – however artfully Meadows’ disguises it. There’s plenty of shots of trains, the station site itself, and even a fantastic scene with one character leaning against a hoarding that informs us: “St Pancras – opening November 2007”. Still, however engaging these digressions may be, what’s important here, I guess, is whether the film itself is any good, and quite where it fits in Meadows’ canon. It certainly dovetails with Meadows’ usual narrative interests: in this case, the relationship that develops between two kids, the subject of A Room For Romeo Brass and, to some extent, This Is England. Here, it’s a Polish lad, Marek (Piotr Jagiello), whose father Mariusz is – yes – working on the Eurostar rail terminal. (In one unintentionally hilarious piece of less-than-subliminal advertising, Mariusz tells Marek, “Today I went under the sea on a train. It only takes a couple of hours each way.”) Marek spends his days drifting round Somers Town, the area directly behind the railway station, where he falls in with local wheeler-dealer Graham (Perry Benson, from This Is England, who, with his knock-off Arsenal t-shirts with “Terry Henry” emblazoned on the back, provides much of the film’s humour). Marek meets Tomo (Thomas Turgoose), who’s run away from home in Nottingham, and the two strike up a friendship predicated, initially, by mutual loneliness. Soon, they both develop a competitive crush on a French café worker, Maria (Elisa Lasowski). So far, so very Shane Meadows. But what’s missing here is the psychotic antagonist – traditionally played by Paddy Considine – to throw a spanner in the works and create some kind of narrative tension. What we have, then, is a very sweet story of friendship that, at 65 minutes long, just about gets away without the need of much dramatic conflict. In fact, the most dramatic event in the film is when Tomo is beaten up by the local yoot on his first night in London and his bag is nicked. But even this provides some of Meadows’ typically warm-hearted humour, as Tomo and Marek lift a bag of clothes from a laundrette to replace the stolen ones -– only to find it’s full of women’s garments. “I look like a female golfer,” he protests. Turgoose (and to some extent, Benson) provide some clear links to Meadows’ other films. It’s interesting to see Turgoose, two years on from This Is England, having lost some of his puppy fat, his voice now broken. It’s like meeting a seldom-seen nephew at a wedding and spotting how much they've grown. Turgoose, you'll be pleased to note, seems to be carrying on the potential he showed in This Is England -- and props, too, to Jagiello. Clearly, English isn't his first language, and he does a really good job here as the gangly, awkward Marek. That it’s shot in black and white and features, for the first time since 1997’s Twenty Four Seven, significant contributions to the soundtrack from Gavin Clark and Clayhill, make it feel like one of Meadows’ earlier movies. After all, it’s only 10 minutes longer than 1996’s Small Time, his first film. Where it might suggest Meadows is going next isn’t entirely clear. Although it’s his first film set outside Nottingham, there’s very little indication that any great artistic developments are forthcoming. It feels, in fact, like a stop-gap; but one, however brief, that’s full of charm. Somers Town opens in the UK on August 22

There are a few records around the Uncut office at the moment that I think I could responsibly class as disappointing, not least the new Mercury Rev album, which ambitiously finds them trying to reinvent themselves as whimsical cosmic ravers. It’s certainly not a pale retread of “Deserter’s Songs”, like the last couple, but it’s not hugely successful either. And the final track, “A Squirrel And I”, is so oppressively cute that it has the awful effect of making me wary of their earlier records, which I loved; as if this knowledge about squirrels will somehow reveal their old fantasias to be just as twee. I mention this because “Snowflake/Midnight” prompted a modicum of fuss on a playlist blog a couple of weeks ago – the same one on which Calexico’s “Carried To Dust” first surfaced. One worried poster asked me whether this was one of the billed “disappointments”, to which I replied rapidly and briefly that it wasn’t. A few days later, I got an email from an old fan of the band. “Interested to see that you embraced the new Calexico album on your blog without reference to the last one,” they wrote. “I think the words ‘desperately required return to form’ are appropriate.” Harsh words, I think. But it’s true that “Garden Ruin” marginally alienated a bunch of faithful Calexico fans, by dropping a lot of the South-Western set dressing and making a more straightforward singer-songwriterish album. It was probably a sensible move; a mildly anxious assertion that the core musicality of the band had a life beyond all the regional colour. But the end product, if memory serves, felt somehow unresolved: yes, Calexico were not entirely dependent on the border country schtick – but for sure, their music was so much more rich and atmospheric when the mariachi flourishes and so on were present in the mix. The good news, then, is that “Carried To Dust” is a quiet retreat into older territory. Rather than focusing on Joey Burns’ voice exclusively, this Calexico album has that deep, variegated texture of their best work, with Wavelab technician Craig Schumacher back on production duty. Different voices and languages share the microphone, instrumental passages are as important as the vocal tracks; the album feels more like a vivid musical tapestry than a formal collection of songs – an egoless expression of musical community, rather than a mere band doing their work. Even the sleeve of “Carried To Dust” looks like it’s been created by Victor Gastelum, the artist who did their earliest records. I wonder if this retrenchment is in any way grudging, as if returning to a clichéd notion of Calexico is a kind of admission of failure? It doesn’t sound it, happily. Burns and John Convertino are, of course, far too artful and respectful to make their records into some kind of aural Mexican theme park (for that, can I direct you to Brian Wilson’s excruciating “Mexican Girl” on the forthcoming “That Lucky Old Sun”?), and “Carried To Dust” is, perhaps, a subtler appropriation of those themes, techniques and textures than, say, “Feast Of Wire”. It’s not as good a record as the magisterial “Feast Of Wire”, either – though Calexico albums can be insidious things, so I’ll reserve absolute judgment for a while yet. “Carried To Dust” purports to be a concept album of sorts, tracking a film writer during the 2007 Hollywood strike as he goes travelling. There is a wonderful moment about a minute into the opening track, “Victor Jara’s Hand”, when Burns delicately picks his way to the chorus and the horns burst into the song. For the next verse, Burns drops out to be replaced by a Spanish singer, Jairo Zavala. Zavala is part of “Carried To Dust”’s weighty cast, which also includes Pieta Brown, Amparo Sanchez from Amparanoia (I have to admit my knowledge of these people is sketchy, to say the least), Doug McCombs from Tortoise and Sam Beam from Iron And Wine, whose reverent whisper gracefully tracks Burns on the exceptional “House Of Valparaiso” (another Chilean reference there). As I write this morning, I’m listening to the album for the first time on headphones, and its depths are beginning to reveal themselves. Joey Burns is a great one for balancing widescreen melodrama with a calm, humane presence; check how elegantly he navigates the string-washed “The News About William”, while Convertino’s imaginative rhythms give the song a further, winning awkwardness. There are charming little pop songs here: the familiar twang of “Writer’s Minor Holiday”, which reminds me of something indistinct from “The Hot Rail”; and “Two Silver Trees” which, as one of my colleagues has gleefully pointed out, has a chorus that’s oddly – and not unhappily – reminiscent of Abba. But again, what’s most striking about “Carried To Dust” is the vivid, textured ambience - especially the slow fade at the close of "Contention City" - and the sense of a creative democracy in action. So “Inspiracion” finds the band’s excellent trumpeter Jacob Valenzuela taking the mic for a duet with Sanchez, while the prickly backing seems like a subtly treated rethink of traditional Mexican music. Even when the odd song seems to slip into something of a generic holding pattern, there’s always detailing to admire: a rattle of percussive keys in the cracks between trumpet and steel on “Hole In Your Hand (Bend In The Road)”; the echo of dub on “Tornado Watch”. Let me know what you think, anyway, when you get a chance to hear it.

It begins with a flutter of guitar, a dusting of cymbals. Then a female, faintly ethereal vocal arrives, accompanied by bells. At first, it sounds like she might be distant kin to the acid folk scene which still percolates away in the US; there’s a very vague resemblance to Meg Baird and Espers, perhaps. But then again, she’s not singing in English, and there’s something discreetly exotic about the song, “Dawn Over The Clouds”. That’s the English translation of the song’s title, I should say. Actually, it – and its parent album – are called “Fajar Di Atas Awan” – and they are the work of a bunch of ethnomusicologists from Sumatra called Suarasama. Since it turned up about a week ago, I’ve been obsessing over “Fajar Di Atas Awan”, and also wondering how I would describe this incredible, tranquil, deep record on Wild Mercury Sound. Given my dilettante-ish knowledge of global music, I can’t pretend to have much experience of the sounds of Indonesia, let alone the specific ones of Sumatra. I could say, in a generally rather crude way, that the beauty of this record is that it has a mystique, a spiritual imperative, that aligns it to other ‘world music’ (rotten patronising phrase, but you know what I mean) which can be appreciated by fans of psychedelia; I’m thinking of Tinariwen here, for a start. According to the sleevenotes, “Irwansyah Harahap is the main composer in the group. In his compositions he has explored various different musical concepts and aesthetics in world music, such as African, Middle Eastern, Indian, Sufi Pakistani, Eastern European, Southeast Asian, as well as North Sumatran (the Bataks and Malay) traditional music.” Again, I’m struggling to parse this. I can spot a little of the Sufi Pakistani tradition in there – if that refers to qawwali singers like Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan. But the acoustic guitar leads, the graceful melodies and so on, seem incredibly close to Western folk tradition, at times, though it’s impossible to tell whether that’s by accident or design. But in general, the whole thing blends so harmoniously that trying to separate the trace elements seems not only unnecessary, but even a little vulgar. The Drag City press release references Sandy Bull (who we’ve been listening to a lot of late), John Fahey and the collaborations of Ravi Shankar and Andre Previn, which all make certain sense: there’s that same elegant elision of Eastern and Western scales and techniques, providing a really enveloping, devotional music. I’m reminded, too, of some of the Anatolian psych collected on the Turkish edition of the “Love, Peace And Poetry” compilation series; artists who delicately adjust Eastern melodic and rhythmic strategies, rather than the appropriation of them that we’re more used to. The press release also references Ghost and Six Organs Of Admittance, and I can definitely see affinities with the latter. It should be noted, though, that “Fajar Di Atas Awan” was first released ten years ago, and that this reissue is coming out on the same label as Six Organs. Knowing Ben Chasny’s voracious appetite for music, it’s certainly plausible that Suarasama might have been a potent, semi-secret influence on the whole generation of fingerpickers, underground mystics and so on in the free folk/psych world. But I can’t recommend this record enough. I’ve just taken a cursory trip round the web to try and find anywhere where you can hear Suarasama, with no joy. But if you do manage to track it down (the reissue isn’t due ‘til August), let me know what you think, as ever.