We were listening to the new Elbow album this morning when the first line of Track Four stood out. “I’ve been working on a cocktail called grounds for divorce,” sings Guy Garvey over a ratchety chaingang rhythm, one of those industrial-propulsive beats with which Elbow pepper their Floydian/Talk Talk reveries. Then a crisply distorted guitar cuts through it; far too controlled to be grungy, exactly, but endemic of the way this largely excellent band manage to mix up the grandiose and ethereal with something that’s much more earthy and humane. Elbow are a pretty anomalous band, in many ways. I seem to remember press from around their last album, which suggested Chris Martin was in some awe of them. Plenty of journalists deduced from this that Elbow were the older, proggier brothers of Coldplay, Snow Patrol, Keane and so on; all those ubiquitous bands with a thing for plangent piano ballads and calculating, hugalong stadium melancholy. There’s some truth in this, compounded by the fact that snobs like me have always liked Elbow, and that perhaps consequently the band have never sold quite the bulkloads of product that’s been shifted by those other bands. They’re the kitchen-sink sophisticates at the party, the ones whose subtle complexities have seen their anthemics come with a few little twists which mean they’re not quite so assimilable. Anyway, their fourth album, called “The Seldom Seen Kid”, has been hovering round the Uncut office since just before Christmas, and there’s a ballad on it called “Weather To Fly” which I’ve mentioned a couple of times in passing already, and which, with a prevailing wind, might just be the song which could propel them into the big space occupied by their labelmates at their new home, Fiction, Snow Patrol. It’s not a dilution of the formula, by any stretch: in fact, “Weather To Fly” succeeds because it actually shows up the emotional and melodic paucity of so many of those records. Garvey’s never sounded better, over one of those measured, elegant builds at which the band excel – this one seems to end with a kind of muted brass band taking over the tune, which only adds to that nebulous but palpable sense of warmth which is another of Elbow’s key virtues. “Weather To Fly” is the first track in a mid-album trio which really points up the strengths of the band. First, the gossamer bloke-ballad; then, “The Loneliness Of A Tower Crane Driver”, which pulls off their trick of turning mundane detail into glimmering spacerock – lots of Floyd and Spiritualized orbiting here, and what may well be a Mellotron; and then “The Fix”, a vaguely new direction – a rogueish duet with Richard Hawley with a patter, swing and teeth-jangling catcall harmonies that distinctly recall “Ghost Town”. Not quite all of “The Seldom Seen Kid” feels quite so fresh. It’s one of those albums which features some of the best songs a band has ever recorded, and some that feel so quintessentially of themselves that they’re close to self-parody. I’m thinking especially of the big-hearted singalong epic, “One Day Like This”, which manages to recall at least one song from each of the preceding Elbow albums, and also makes me think of Embrace, too, which isn’t entirely healthy. So, to get over that, I’m going to put “Weather To Fly” on again, and note how, once again, it stops me in my tracks, sends shivers down my spine, and works in exactly the way this moist-eyed, big music is meant to, but so rarely does. Great song, pretty fine album.

Just as I started writing this blog, an email pinged into my inbox to let me know that Juno has now taken $60 million at the US box office and kept the Nic Cage blockbuster National Treasure 2 off the top spot. Juno is, as they say, becoming something of a phenomenon, a low budget underdog that's being widely talked about as a serious Oscar contender – assuming, of course, the current writer's strike that's crippling Hollywood is resolved in time and the Awards do in fact happen next month. Juno is about a sparky suburban 16 year-old (Ellen Page) who gets pregnant and decides to adopt her unborn child out to a picture-perfect couple (Jason Bateman and Jennifer Garner). It’s a coming of age comedy, full of zingy one-liners and a cool soundtrack from Mouldy Peaches’ Kimya Dawson. The film’s spiritual ancestry begins with Ghost World, after which, it seems, all girls in hip-smart teen comedies have to be sardonic, wise beyond their years, grunge/indie types, and certainly Juno McGuff fits into this demographic perfectly. She dispenses flippancies while glugging down litre bottles of Sunny Delight, planting three-piece suites on lawns around her neighbourhood, posing with a granddad-style pipe hanging nonchalantly from her mouth, telling anyone who’ll listen just how cool the Stooges are. Juno is fully formed kidult; 16 going on 30, or at least that’s perhaps how she wants to be seen. In fact, possibly the thing director Jason Reitman does best in the film is the way he delicately shifts Juno from thinking she’s an adult to actually making her one by the time the film finishes. “I want everything to be perfect, I don’t want it to be broken and shitty like everything else,” she explains, close to the film’s end with remarkable self-awareness. You can put a lot of Juno’s success down to Page’s performance. She was formidable in 2005’s Hard Candy, playing a 14 year-old girl who kidnaps and terrorises a suspected paedophile. Here, she’s superb as Juno, her performance frighteningly self-assured, capturing that way than teens overcompensate for their insecurities, her naivety poking through her smart comebacks and arch teen speak. It’s notable that a lot of the weighty, prestige movies vying for awards nominations – There Will Be Blood, The Assassination Of Jesse James By The Coward Robert Ford, No Country For Old Men – have all relegated their female characters to the kitchen. I’m kinda reluctant to start making awards season predictions, but even without the lack of conspicuously strong female performances in movies this year, it seems pretty much a foregone conclusion that Page’s prodigious talent will somehow be recognised. In fact, Juno isn't an indie film, though you could easily be forgiven for thinking that it was. It's bankrolled by Fox Searchlight, the boutique arm of 20th Century Fox. Pretty much all the major studios now have these indie wings; Searchlight have, to their credit, funded movies like Napoleon Dynamite, Garden State, Sideways and Little Miss Sunshine -- movies that feel ineffably indie but, um, aren't really. Anyway, it's good company to be in. Juno's a great film. Juno opens in the UK on February 8 The trailer is here

A bit of a rush today, since we're trying to finish the next issue of Uncut. But I've been revisiting the MGMT record that turned up last year, and which features fairly prominently in the New Brooklyn Bands feature in the current issue. I must admit that I'm not completely sold on the whole album, "Oracular Spectacular", but the single, "Time To Pretend", is excellent: a snarky, syrupy cosmic pop trifle that recasts The Flaming Lips as jaded young hipsters rather than mature humanists. "Time To Pretend" is a wry, cutely quotable pisstake of rock star ambition, with Andrew VanWyngarden claiming, "Let's make some music, make some money, find some models for wives. I'll move to Paris, shoot some heroin and fuck with the stars," before briefly mourning a loss of childhood innocence and wanting his mummy. There are a lot of shifting planes of irony and ambivalence here, and I'm sure plenty of bands will probably take, "This is our decision to live fast and die young, we've got the vision, now let's have some fun," as a manifesto rather than an indictment. MGMT - it's pronounced 'Management', apparently - would probably argue that you can have fun while being aware of the process, which is fair enough. I'm going to get very irritated by this song after a few dozen more plays, but for now - fittingly for a record predicated on the idea of subverting transient, shallow, pop posturing - it works. Next week, by the way, I should get round to writing about the Elbow record, which I can hear even now drifting into the office from NME next door, plus there's some rumour that we may hear the Portishead album which, if the post-ATP stories are to be believed, should be interesting.

A couple of records I’ve been meaning to blog about for weeks today. One is the new album by Earth, “The Bees Made Honey In The Lion’s Skull”, which further confirms Dylan Carlson’s drift away from absolute minimalist metal drone to a kind of slow, but surprisingly melodious desert rock. I wrote a review of this for the magazine the other day, which suggested – perhaps fancifully – that there was no reason why Calexico fans shouldn’t enjoy this as much as more typical acolytes of doom; those of us who’ve faithfully followed Carlson’s pained journey from grunge outrider (and, notoriously, Kurt Cobain’s gun club buddy) into a godhead for any number of monolithic noise artists, most notably Sunn 0))). But still, “The Bees. . .” has that distinct blasted Morricone aspect, a parched and reverberant twang that locates it as a heavy interloper in the world of Americana. It’s curious that Carlson’s music once felt utterly disconnected from the idea of a grand tradition, an absolute negation of the rock continuum, but now it seems, ostensibly, to be the blues; a music wired into the culture, rather than the product of some backwoods avant-garde. There are similarities, I think, with Savage Republic, and the early Scenic albums, expansive landscape music that sought to evoke the American wilderness without resorting to the easy clichés. Anyway, if you’ve been mortally afraid of Earth records since those grim – though compelling, to me at least – blots on the early Sub Pop catalogue, maybe give them another go? Bill Frisell, bizarrely, guests here, if that makes a difference. A quick mention today, too, to “Invitation Songs” by The Cave Singers, a more conventional take on Americana by some Seattle associates of the mighty Black Mountain. American readers have probably come across this one already – I remember someone recommending it in the comments here a few months ago – though it’s only just got a release date in the UK. It’s growing on me, though. There’s something of The Violent Femmes about the band, though none of the manic eccentricity – maybe it’s the pinched, sometimes pretty shrill, nasal vocals of Pete Quirk, which I suspect might be a stumbling block for some people. Instead, there’s a homely, mildly eerie folk intimacy to these songs which would probably work for old Iron & Wine fans. The links with the Black Mountain Army are revealing, too, since there’s a similar vibe to the underrated Lightning Dust album that came out last year (Amber Webber contributes backing vocals here), and a primitive synth hum under a few tunes (most notably “Helen”) which sends these earthy little songs towards a woody, handcrafted take on spacerock. Nice record.