It’s quite a good time for new bands at the moment in our corner of the world, what with Bon Iver and Fleet Foxes riding a mild wave of critical acclaim in the wake of South By Southwest and so on. To that list we can add White Denim, another hit at SXSW that I’ve already written about here a while back. “Let’s Talk About It”, the Austin trio’s debut single, has been played so much in the Uncut office that I could plausibly call it our Single Of The Year thus far. Now, happily, we have “Workout Holiday”, their messy and entertaining first album. It is not, music industry mavens will be gutted to hear, a record that’s likely to sell millions: the Devo-esque garage jerk of “Let’s Talk About It” is very much the obvious ‘hit’ here. In fact, the album takes more of a cue from the deranged spin-out of that single, the rather bracing sound of a band unravelling. So “Shake Shake Shake” is a febrile, frenzied workout where song, lyrics and such are incidental to a sort of disintegrating riff, while “Look That Way At It” and “WDA” are heroically malnourished instrumental skronk-outs. Detractors will doubtless have a go at tracks like this as haphazard jams that should’ve been left in the rehearsal space. But it’s the dynamic energy which is so gripping – White Denim strike me as one of those great bands who, marvellously and mystifyingly, seem to be both loose and tight at the same time. Anyway, I’m playing “Workout Holiday” for the third or fourth time now, and it’s all falling into place. “Mess Your Hair Up” I mentioned last time I blogged on the band, and it remains one of their best tracks, starting off like an auspicious hook-up between Rob Tyner and Sonic Youth and then spiralling off into another long, fraught, wiry freak-out that, as I probably said before, really reminds me of the mighty and underrated Love As Laughter. “All You Really Have To Do” is stuttering lo-fi soul-punk that clings close to The MC5, too. There’s a curiously skewed piano ballad called “Sitting” which has a little more conventional melody, but still that wild-eyed and diffident approach to form which is so appealing. A bit like Nilsson, maybe, but a precise reference for it keeps evading me. “Heart From Us All” chugs along gloriously, in the mood of “Loaded”-era Velvets, but with some clang and twang that gives it a countryish edge. "Don't Look That Way At It", meanwhile, is faintly reminiscent of Talking Heads and, as someone here mentioned, the leftfield end of the new Brooklyn scene like The Dirty Projectors. But as a whole, “Workout Holiday” at least affects to be tremendously indisciplined, and you get the impression that most A&R droids would spend exasperated sessions trying to get the band to focus their energies into more concise garage rock – the concise hits which “Let’s Talk About It” and fragments of several other songs here prove that they’re capable of. But then “Workout Holiday” works best for me precisely because it is so wayward, precisely because it sounds like a band pushing a rudimentary rock’n’roll model so far that it begins to fall apart, then revelling in the chaos they’ve created. Really annoyed that I missed them live the other week, incidentally: if anyone managed to catch the shows, how about posting a report here?

Leafing through last week's edition of Entertainment Weekly during a quiet moment in the office, I came across a three-quarter page spread devoted to a new band called She & Him. The "Him" here is M Ward while -- and this is what piqued my curiousity -- the "She" is Zooey Deschanel, the American indie actress who made her rep in David Gordon Green's brilliant All The Real Girls. It struck me, following on from Scarlett Johannson's album of Tom Waits' covers, that this is the second time in as many months an alt-Hollywood "It" Girl has made a record. Which, inevitably, led me to wonder why exactly the good ladies and gentlemen of the movie industry feel the need to divert their talents out of their immediate comfort zone and into the world of music. It might seem like a strange career digression, for sure. You don't, for instance, find many plumbers trying their hand at dentistry between fitting washing machines. Nor do many vets, at least to the best of my knowledge, embark on a second career as airline pilots when they're not rummaging around in the backsides of cows. But there's a greater correlation between music and movies. There's a shared artistic mileu, for one, conspicuously in places like London, Paris, New York and Los Angeles, where, you might assume, pale and interesting types sit in coffee shops reading Lester Bangs anthologies or discussing the tenents of French New Wave cinema over a vanilla latte before embarking on a career in music or movies. Bars and such where, you imagine, people like Chloe Sevigny hang out with The Strokes and discuss limited edition Converse trainers. Sure, there's a fairly lengthy history of movie stars making records. Of an older generation, Richard Harris, David McCallum, Edward Woodward, Albert Finney, Robert Mitchum and David Hemmings all cut discs. Mark Bentley, our production editor, swears by Woodward's This Man Alone, but I'm pretty intrigued by David Hemmings Happens, recorded with Roger McGuinn and Chris Hillman, produced by Jim Dickson and featuring a previously unreleased Gene Clark song. I await with something approaching baited breath the imminent arrival of my eBay purchase, some weeks, presumably, after ordering it, delayed as I'm sure it will be in the eldritch parallel Universe that passes for the British postal service these days. Kris Kristofferson successfully turned his hand to both acting and music, while Harry Dean Stanton fronts, as you'd expect, the Harry Dean Stanton Band (a minor digression here: as good as Willie Nelson's version of "Signor" was on the I'm Not There soundtrack, I'd have loved to hear Stanton take a pass at it). And on we go: Billy Bob Thornton, Joe Pesci, Dan Aykroyd and John Belushi... To the best of my knowledge, Bill Murray has never recorded an album of Roxy Music covers. Which brings us to the once thrusting young bucks of Hollywood -- Keanu Reeves and Johnny Depp. Now, I like Keanu; I feel sorry for him, saddled with a speaking voice that sounds like it drops several dozen IQ points between the thought originating somewhere in his cerebral cortex and leaving his mouth. He had the moderately unremarkable Dogstar, but Depp has played with everyone from Gibby Haynes to Shane MacGowan and Oasis, the latter before they became a karaoke version of themselves. Feel, as they say, the quality. In a great moment of pop culture meta-textuality, Depp even "played" Keith Richards with Keith returning the compliment in the otherwise wretched third Pirates Of The Caribbean movie by playing his dad. So, why am I interested in what Scarlett and Zooey are doing? I guess initially because they're smart, hip folks, presumably the kind of people who don't employ a stylist to programme their iPods for them. Their records aren't the obvious choices if you're looking to top the hit parade; rather, they display a textured knowledge and understanding of our kind of music, off to the left somewhere. Which is no bad thing at all.

I guess it’s become a cliché over the years that, when a Bristol band affiliated to trip-hop make a comeback, they should be somehow darker, and heavier, as if the magisterial doom that they all conjured up from the start somehow wasn’t enough. To read the full review, please head over to our daily Wild Mercury Sound blog.

I guess it’s become a cliché over the years that, when a Bristol band affiliated to trip-hop make a comeback, they should be somehow darker, and heavier, as if the magisterial doom that they all conjured up from the start somehow wasn’t enough. It can be a pretty boring strategy, to be honest – as anyone who, like me, witnessed Massive Attack trying to play live the hamfisted paranoia of “10,000 Windows”, or watched Tricky stumbling round the stage of Hackney Empire in entire darkness at some point in the late ‘90s. I mention this because, of course, Portishead’s long-awaited “Third” has been acclaimed, not least by me, as some kind of stark, awful masterpiece – perhaps the most creatively successful record any of these artists have made since their early ‘90s heyday, but a pretty grim listen if you’re not in the right mood. Coupled with the fact that Portishead have hardly been the most forthcoming of this already secretive clique – Beth Gibbons, famously, doesn’t do interviews, for a start – and the first London date of their comeback tour begins surprisingly. Far from hiding in near-darkness, the six members are bathed in a harsh white light that makes the stage look like either a rehearsal room or an operating theatre, depending on your state of mind. There are screens behind them, showing the band close-up, too, though since they mostly focus on a bit of drumkit, you’re unlikely to catch a glimpse of Gibbons’ soul quite so easily. It is, though, an interestingly artless way to present a band who have thrived on mystery, a mystery often generated by their absence rather than their active participation. The gist, I suppose, is the same as how Geoff Barrow and Adrian Utley present themselves in interviews: we’re musicians, this is what we do and you can read into it what you like, we’re just getting on – slowly, fastidiously – with our job. So anyway, here’s Portishead, and they’re playing “Silence”, the immense opening track of “Third”. Barrow has some kind of synthdrum kit next to his decks, and is locked into an urgent motorik thump with the drummer, a mighty double propulsion that reminds me a little of Tortoise. Gibbons has her back to the crowd, swaying. After a while, the beats pause, and she starts singing with a precise, exquisite agony. It’s superb, if nowhere near loud enough. As the show progresses, I find myself in the unusual situation of wanting to hear the new songs while the audience – though hardly the prim dinner party set habitually stereotyped as Portishead fans – are understandably pleased when those mournful old favourites are wheeled out. There’s a strange mass singalong of “Nobody loves me” during a note-perfect “Sour Times”. But the most curious thing about hearing songs like this, and “Numb” and “Glory Box” (where Beth Gibbons’ crotchety, Holiday-ish vocal on the verse seems incredibly mannered these days), after such a long time is how they have a patina of authentic nostalgia now, as well as all those affectations of dust and crackle. They have, basically, aged well. Towards the end of “Glory Box”, the song falls down into a black hole of psychedelic dub, and I’m left wondering, embarrassed: was this always there? I need to play some old Portishead records this weekend. Of the old songs, however, a clanging “Cowboys” is the most satisfying, because it’s closest in tone and spirit to the new stuff. If something like “Over” has an atmosphere of approaching menace, then on the likes of “Machine Gun” and “Threads”, the menace has arrived, and it’s exhilarating. “Machine Gun” is exceptionally brutal, with Barrow sending out martial volleys on his synthdrums, facing off against Utley on a beautiful old analogue synth. “Threads”, meanwhile, resembles a devastated rethink of the old style, with a piercing, sustained string sample gradually being overwhelmed by Utley’s doom chords until, finally, they miraculously resemble Sunn 0))). It’s still not loud enough, mind, and technical problems with Barrow’s mystifying rig mean that there’s a ten minute hiatus early in the set, a neat reminder that you have to wait a while for Portishead songs. When they return, “The Rip” starts with a beautiful pastoral passage reminiscent of Gibbons’ album with Rustin Man, before driving away into a gorgeous motorik passage, Barrow putting down his guitar for another terrific passage of dual drums. By the end, “We Carry On” has ramped up the intensity even further, the Silver Apples synth being assailed by Utley’s slashing guitar. The restless Gibbons, who engagingly never seems to know what to do with herself when she’s not singing, has given up stalking the stage and is now down with the audience, admiring her band. Not a slick, untouchable bunch of musos, as erroneous reputation might suggest, but a human and fallible group who have spent a decade absorbing some heroically extreme noise, worked out a way of incorporating it into their own sound, and come up with some of the best music of 2008 thus far. Not all gloom, then, clearly.