First, a quick pointer to Damien’s review of Neil Young in Edinburgh last night, which sounds like it was a pretty incredible night. All being well, I’m going to the first London show, so I’ll try and file something on Thursday morning. Second: this Spiritualized album. As I somewhat sanctimoniously mention here every week or so, I don’t really like slagging things off on Wild Mercury Sound – I have far too many good records to write about to waste time on negativity, and so on. But so many of you have been badgering me for some kind of response to “Songs In A&E”, I figured I should post something. For a start, I should mention that Spiritualized have been one of my favourite bands over the past 15-odd years. I gave “Lazer Guided Melodies” 9.99 recurring out of 10 in NME, and wrote my first NME cover story on the band circa “Medication”. Through the ‘90s, I probably wrote more purple prose on them than on any other band. I suspect that “Songs In A&E” is going to attract a lot more purple prose – if this isn’t proclaimed as one of the albums of the year in most papers and magazines, I’ll be amazed; plenty of other people at Uncut love it. But it’s not working for me, in general. As we might have guessed from those Acoustic Mainline shows, a lot of stuff here follows that slow-motion gospel and strings pattern, privileging Jason Pierce’s idea of soulfulness. I think a lot of people will be drawn to this, to the way Pierce documents fairly brutally the health issues which have affected him in the past few years: “Think I’ll drink myself into a coma,” is his way of starting the best track here, “Death Take Your Fiddle”. But as I’ve mentioned before, I find myself less and less interested in notions of authenticity; I don’t much care whether a singer is reflecting their genuine pain, or totally faking it, just whether it engages me. His language, his imagery are so familiar now that they’ve lost some of their potency for me: three songs here are called “Soul On Fire”, “I Gotta Fire” and “Sitting On Fire”, which strikes me as repetitive rather than thematically skilful. Plus, Pierce’s cracked voice is foregrounded and exposed on a lot of these songs, as if to point up the honesty of the endeavour. This means that we don’t often get the depth and texture of the best Spiritualized music. There are some interesting nuances to a few of the arrangements here, but these are generally orthodox songs, and I personally miss the drones, the trances, the determinedly linear, meticulous brand of psychedelia. There’s a glimpse of the richness he can still summon up on “Baby I’m Just A Fool”, which builds and builds up more and more detail; a freestyling horn section turn up near the climax, reminiscent of the peaks of “Ladies And Gentlemen. . .” Or towards the end of “The Waves Crash In”, one of his see-sawing reveries that could incorporate a snatch of “Can’t Help Falling In Love” without too much trouble. Perhaps I’ve changed my tastes a little, and Spiritualized haven’t as much. Perhaps if I hadn’t heard everything else Pierce has ever recorded, I’d be amazed by his craft, his elaborate way of working through a bunch of ancient gospel and blues tropes and investing them with new, intensely personal, meaning. The sad thing is, though, I’m kind of bored by this album right now. The most provocative track on “Songs In A&E” is “Death Take Your Fiddle”, where Pierce’s near-death experience informs the music as well as the lyrics: the rattle and wheeze of a respirator seems to provide an essential rhythm behind the song. It’s an eerie and clever trick, and one which is weirdly much more affecting than the explicit details – the “morphine, codeine, whisky” - laid out in the lyrics. Does it make me want to play the record again and again, though? Not really. But you’re going to tell me I’m wrong, right?

To paraphrase Dolly Parton, it must take a lot of care to look as chaotic as this. I’m referring not to Neil Young himself, not exactly, but to the astonishingly cluttered stage around him, dressed to look like – well, backstage, really, behind the scenes at some lost old-time opry. There are klieg lights and spots strewn around, cables and stands everywhere, a huge, antique wind-machine with wooden blades, variously battered musical instruments apparently abandoned at random, and a single, ominous, baffling red house telephone of roughly 1974 vintage. Everything looking worn and used and tested and true, and in no need of replacement. Oh, and, obviously, there is a man standing way at the back, turned away from the audience, silently painting amid a stack of large canvas backdrops. It’s a stage-set, of course, and the first clue that, whatever he’s engaged upon amid the red-velvet splendour of Edinburgh’s venerable Playhouse theatre for his first UK gig in five years, Young, who makes his bizarre entrance trying to hide behind the painter as he carries a large canvas bearing a single “N” to an easel at the front of the stage, sees it as a performance in every sense of the word. The drama’s precise meaning will remain unclear to all but him, but it’s as compellingly weird, as hauntingly beautiful, as stormy and electrifying as anything he’s ever done. Even by his own considerable standards, Young, wearing the kind of loose, off-white suit a US Defence Secretary might favour for a field visit to Iraq, appears to be in a strange mood. The audience bays but he ignores them, utters not a word. Sometimes, when the shouting gets too loud, he throws his arms over his face, warding it off in a manner that suggests Marcel Marceau being spooked by a horse; at one point, he actually falls cowering to his knees. He sits alone inside a circle of acoustic guitars – seven of them, plus a banjo – absently, fondly, touching one and then the other, as though waiting for them to tell him which one wants to go first. He dips his harmonica in a china teacup of water like a man dunking biscuits in a rest home. He looks shambling, distracted; and then he starts to play, and his focus and intensity sucks the breath from you. The facts are that we get a solo acoustic set followed by an electric set, and anyone who has glanced at setlists from earlier in this tour will know that he has been throwing in songs from some of the most obscure corners of his catalogue. Knowing that in advance, though, does nothing to dilute the impact when, after a gorgeously warm “From Hank to Hendrix,” Young begins “Ambulance Blues.” The abandoned closer to 1974’s desolate "On The Beach" is song he has barely, if ever, played live before this tour, but one that certain fans have tattooed on their minds. All the same, tonight, as he hunches over the ever-dying thing, it feels almost as though he is creating it on the spot, sucking each stray chorus out of the air, forever fading away, forever coming back in with one more last thought. He follows it with three more songs you thought you would never hear him play: the unreleased “Sad Movies,” then, shambling to one of the pianos, a truly astonishing “A Man Needs A Maid” (substituting the recorded version’s orchestral fills with chilling, Dr Phibes-meets-"Trans" blasts on an aged electric keyboard), and “Try,” another unreleased song from the legendary aborted "Homegrown" album. Lurching from these into some of his most iconic “Neil Young” songs – “Harvest”, “After The Gold Rush”, “Don't Let It Bring You Down”, “Heart Of Gold” – the impression is of an iPod on shuffle, and on fire. That frayed falsetto sounds as strong, as pure, as distressed as it ever has; close your eyes, you could be listening to an Archive recording from three, four decades ago. Listening, watching, I’m struck by a thought: will Bob Dylan ever take the chance to go so naked before an audience again? Between songs, he keeps up his silent, shambling routine, wandering the stage like a man who doesn’t know where he is or why, sometimes standing and staring vacantly off at what the painter is painting, still working away at the rear of the stage. At one point, Young stands and holds his hands up to one of the little purple standing spotlights, warming them on the light – at first I think it’s a comment on the bitingly cold night leaking into the theatre from outside. An hour later, I’m not so sure. We’re coming toward the end of a colossal electric set. Backed by veteran associates Ralph Molina, Rick Rosas and Ben Keith, Young, changed into a paint-splattered black suit, has been wailing and whaling away at the guitar he calls Old Black as if he might never get the chance to play her again. Dropping the stumbling gait he affected for the acoustic half, he’s leaning, grooving, stepping ass-shaking and almost pogoing as he tears out damn-near definitive workings of mangled warhorses including “Down By the River”, “Hey Hey, My My” and a towering “Powderfinger.” He’s climaxing, though, with a voyage through one of his newest songs, “Hidden Path.” Largely written off as a meandering lowpoint on the "Chrome Dreams II" album, the song is transformed into a long, classic, violent stone jam to stand alongside any of the above. 15 burning minutes in, it’s seemingly endless, and you don’t want it to end. And, at its most intense, as he pulls at the howling riff, Young wanders to a massive klieg light that drenches the theatre in a blinding golden glow and stares into it, bathes in it, as though trying to climb inside the light. Thinking back to this little pantomime with the smaller light, I wonder, is there a connection here? What is he trying to say? Who could ever say? Rummaging through the backstage of his mind, Neil Young, at 62, is, quite thrillingly, as vitally unknowable, as far out there and as far inside himself as he ever has been. I doubt even God knows what he has in mind for his six-night stand in London. DAMIEN LOVE ACOUSTIC SET From Hank To Hendrix Ambulance Blues Sad Movies A Man Needs a Maid Try Harvest After the Gold Rush Mellow My Mind Love Art Blues Don't Let it Bring You Down Heart Of Gold Old Man ELECTRIC SET Mr. Soul Dirty Old Man Spirit Road Down By the River Hey Hey, My My Too Far Gone Oh, Lonesome Me The Believer Powderfinger No Hidden Path Fuckin' Up Cinnamon Girl

A couple of things I played rather a lot over the weekend: the second Brightblack Morning Light album from 2006, which reminds me of unbearably hot afternoons in our old office, and which still sounds gorgeous on a windy Saturday afternoon in March; and “Supreme Balloon”, the 24-minute title track of the new album from Matmos. “Supreme Balloon” – the album, that is – initially seems like something of a departure for the Matmos duo. As the thoroughly eloquent press release explains (I wonder if Drew Daniel himself wrote it?), the album was entirely constructed on antique synths: Moogs, Arps, Korgs and so on, plus a very grand Coupigny modular synth housed at Radio France and previously utilised by, and I quote, “some of the titans of musique concrete”. “Supreme Balloon”, we’re told, is not such a conceptual piece as its predecessors: the traditional Matmos technique of sampling odd sounds, then making thematically consistent music out of them (most famously, I guess, on the operating theatre squelches which became 2001’s A Chance To Cut Is A Chance To Cure), is abandoned here. I’m usually a little suspicious of music which seeks to ellide form and content in this way, suspecting that it’s more akin to stunt art than aesthetically satisfying music. But the rigorous, vigorous smartness of Matmos, and the playful music which comes out of their intellectual processes, has never failed to be enjoyable as well as satisfying. The same goes for “Supreme Balloon”, which is far from just a bunch of tracks made out of synths. In some ways, I think it’s a celebration of how electronic music has a history: that this music, so doggedly presented as futuristic, has a backstory that can match rock for richness. It’s a celebration, too, of how synthesisers have been the tools that powered both the classical avant-garde and the notionally disposable, kitsch extremes of pop and dance music. Matmos, it seems, are intent on collapsing the barriers between high and low art – or maybe I’m overthinking all this, and they’re just having fun with some cool old toys. Listen to the squelching epiphanies of “Polychords”, anyway, and you’ll find something that’s as rooted as much in the work of Chicory Tip as, um, granular synthesists. And while “Mister Mouth” may feature Marshall Allen from the Sun Ra Arkestra on, yep, a breath-controlled oscillator, its frantic squiggles aren’t a million miles from the stuff being made by all those hotwired Gameboy jockeys riding the underside of the nu-rave boom. Matmos are better, mind. “Les Folies Francaises”, meanwhile, is a baroque trinket by Francois Couperin which the press release has the good grace to admit has been “given the Wendy Carlos treatment”. But it’s that title track I’m fixated on: a gently undulating electronic meditation, which floats into the same rapturous airspace as any number of early ‘70s kosmische types (the admitted reference is Cluster, which is a good starting point). I’m reminded too, though, of something fractionally earlier – the salute-the-sun ecstatic wobble of Terry Riley’s “A Rainbow In Curved Air” (Riley apparently turns up himself on a vinyl bonus track, “Hashish Master”, which I don’t have here). It’s compellingly beautiful. A historical recreation, I guess, but one imbued with such love and melodic sophistication that it demands to be treated as the equal of its influences, not as their derivative. It’s an irony that might amuse them, hopefully, that while Matmos have made some fabulous and genuinely innovative records in the past (“A Chance To Cut”, “The Civil War” and “The West” are all terrific), this expansively lovely, historically resonant epic of synth-psych might just be my favourite thing they’ve ever done.