I’ve just finished reading the second bunch of extracts from Mark E Smith’s autobiography in this morning’s Guardian, and I must confess to being a bit disappointed. I guess “Renegade: The Lives And Tales Of Mark E Smith” could have gone two ways: a dense and profoundly untrustworthy surrealist tract that followed on from those vividly impenetrable things he used to write for NME as Roman Totale back in the ‘80s; or a massively extended Smith rant, the contents of which we’ll be generally familiar with after three decades of admittedly entertaining interviews. Foolish as it may be to judge a book by a bunch of extracts – and extracts, at that, which barely touch on the specifics of The Fall – it seems that “Renegade” falls squarely into the latter category, reading like tidied-up saloon bar rambles, with Smith optimistically pitched by the publishers as a kind of pseudo-countercultural Jeremy Clarkson. Among some stuff we already know Smith believes – smoking and speed are quite nice, journalists are “youngish blokes who can’t handle their drink”, band members are expendable, especially guitarists – there’s one insight that caught my attention. Smith claims – exaggerates, perhaps – that he can’t stand clutter and only has “three chairs in the house: one for the wife, one for me and one for a guest.” Interesting, but I’d rather hoped that “Renegade” would be a kind of extension of Smith’s lyrical voice – in the same way, I suppose, that the fluent, elliptical style of “Chronicles” so evidently complemented the music and lyrics of Bob Dylan. Traditional succour, I guess, arrives around the same time as “Renegade” in the shape of “Imperial Wax Solvent”, something like the 27th studio album released by The Fall. The American band who figured on “Reformation Post TLC”, and the psychedelic tang they brought with them, have predictably been given the boot. In their place comes another bunch of mysterious musicians, men whose names even the most devoted fans will struggle to remember. They have, though, become involved in one of the more ambitious albums produced by the latterday Fall. It starts well, with some shambolic jazz and curdled muttering about “James Loaded Brown” on “Alton Towers”, then rolls into the terrific “Wolf Kidult Man”, that could just about pass for something off “Bend Sinister”. As could the thumping bits of Smith’s agitated epic of self-justification, “50 Year Old Man”, though the sprawling collage of this one also takes in some clattery Faustian improv and a spectacularly damaged banjo interlude before resolving itself into at least another two good vintage Fall tunes. Seemingly the only way Smith can work out how to end “50 Year Old Man” is by shouting “Fade out” and after that, as is traditional with Fall records, things get a bit spotty. There’s a capricious cover (The Groundhogs’ “Strange Town”), a lead vocal by Elena Poulou on the chundering, indignant singalong “I’ve Been Duped” and some pound shop acid house (“Taurig”) in the next three tracks. The second half of the album hasn’t captured my attention quite as strongly, though today, as I make a proper effort to concentrate, it definitely sounds better than usual. “Can Can Summer” has an uncharacteristically airy swing to it, beneath the overlapping mutters. “I like to relax with tobacco and sugar,” Smith snarls on “Latch Key Kid”, representative of a particularly unpleasant new, deeper, rancorous voice that he keeps trying out here. There’s a danger, as “Is This New” bats along with unusual clarity, that I might get traditionally carried away and say that “Imperial Wax Solvent” is the best Fall album since, oh, sometime when they had members whose names I could remember. I’m beginning to think it may be better than the last one I really liked, “The Real New Fall LP”, but in truth it’s so long since I played that, it’s impossible to make that judgment. The Von Sudenfed album is the Smith product that I’ve found most enduring in the past decade or so, which possibly suggests that he’d be more consistent working with musicians of a certain, um, pedigree. But then maybe such orthodoxy defeats the point of The Fall, and would make them lose some of the idiosyncracies that I think may be missing from “Renegade”. And maybe later Fall albums aren’t things to treasure forever, but to perpetually renew. That in the same way Smith uses and discards bandmembers, we should do the same with his records. I doubt I’ll ever choose to play “Imperial Wax Solvent” ahead of, say, “This Nation’s Saving Grace”. But for the next fortnight or so, it’ll do just fine.

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.