In spite of my morbid suspicions about any record which features Har Mar Superstar, I find myself quite taken with the first album by Neon Neon. It's called "Stainless Style", and maybe it's acting as a kind of antidote to all the manly Led Zeppelin love I've indulged in these past few days. "Stainless Style" belongs on another planet to Led Zep, being, as I briefly mentioned yesterday, a concept album about John DeLorean and his beautiful, preposterous cars, set to '80s-vintage synthpop and a hearty dose of contemporary hip hop/R&B. Har Mar - or Sean Tillman as he's renamed here - is mercifully a marginal figure: Neon Neon is ostensibly the project of the mercurial Gruff Rhys and LA producer Boom Bip, whose work (as satellite member of the vastly overrated smart-arse hip hop collective Anticon and as a sort of subs'-bench Dangermouse) has never really done it for me. He does a pretty sterling job here, though, of joining the dots between robotic '80s pop and the randy, innovative R&B that flourished maybe five or six years ago. Gruff Rhys wanders through it all in a sort of imaginative daze, as usual, and I increasingly suspect he might be the strongest creative force in this mad and entertaining album. Which, with a bunch of passing hipster rappers guesting - Yo Majesty, Fatlip, the excellent Spank Rock - sometimes has the air of an updated, superior take on that Handsome Boy Modeling School/Deltron 3030 schtick of Dan The Automator (critical forerunners of the first Gorillaz album, of course, for better or worse). At the risk of making this blog denser than ever with references, I'm currently really taken with a sequence near the start of the album that begins with "I Lust U" (echoes of Visage here, specifically "Fade To Grey", so God knows why I'm enjoying this), runs through the Tillman/Spankrock face-off "Trick For Treat" (a dead ringer for NERD's "Lapdance"), then ends up with some synths on "Raquel" (as in Raquel Welch, who apparently had an affair with DeLorean) that have the luxuriant, kinetic quality of Kraftwerk ("Tour De France" - the original one - maybe?). Some of these tunes have sneaked out as singles over the past few months, but they work a lot better here, slotted into Rhys and Boom Bip's grand design. I say grand design, though the whole thing only lasts half an hour. Perhaps the pastiches work better here because they're contextualised by the odd burst of forward-thinking indie-pop like "I Told Her On Alderaan" and the wonderful"Steel Your Girl", where the melodic brilliance of Super Furry Animals shines through. An interesting and amusing album that's musically good enough to play again and again, though. Especially if you - and you'll notice I'm not using the first person here - fetishistically conflate sex with cars. Take a glimpse into the sweat shop; it's out on Lex at the end of February.

It occurred to me, as I stumbled somewhat exhausted out of last night's screening of Paul Thomas Anderson's epic movie about oil, greed and murder, that both this film and The Assassination Of Jesse James seem to be a return to the kind of filmmaking not seen since Heaven's Gate. By which, of course, I don’t mean Jesse James and There Will Be Blood are likely to bankrupt their respective studios. But these are both lengthy, male-dominated, American art films, as anti-commercial as you can get. And, really, the kind of movies I wish I saw pretty much every time I went to a screening. There Will Be Blood and Jesse James certainly share similarities beyond the Heaven’s Gate comparison. They're both long and set at the start of the American Century, and both adopt the language of myth. They can also been seen as metaphors for our own time. If Jesse is a statement on the corrosive power of celebrity culture, There Will Be Blood is about how modern America is built on oil, rapacity and violence and, as far as Anderson is concerned, is damned as a result. But if Jesse is a more approachable movie, There Will Be Blood wilfully confounds audiences at what feels like every opportunity. You go in expecting, as my guest did, “a Giant for the 21st century,” only to find something far stranger and disorientating. The editing, the soundtrack, the way Anderson’s camera lingers apparently at random on seemingly minor moments, all serve to undermine your assumptions and generate a lingering sense of disquiet. The film's opening 20 minutes, for instance, are almost completely without dialogue, driven by a jarring avant garde score from Radiohead’s Jonny Greenwood. We meet struggling prospector Daniel Plainview (Daniel Day Lewis) in 1898, chipping away in semi-darkness down a mineshaft in some remote South Californian desert. There's an incident, and his leg is broken. He crawls some distance to the nearest town. This is clearly a man with an almost superhuman drive to succeed. As he switches from gold to oil, his business flourishes when he hits the strike of a lifetime. He sets out round California with a boy, HW, who he introduces as his “son and partner”, buying up land leases at bargain rates from ranchers and farmers who are living above oilfields. In one small community, Plainview encounters Eli Sunday (Paul Dano, Little Miss Sunshine), an unctuous, callow lad who believes he’s a healer, and whose Church of the Third Revelation is in the middle of oil-rich land. The relationship between the two men – and, by extension, the relationship between industry and religion that fired the American Century – provides something of the film’s focus. Mostly, though, There Will Be Blood is a character study of Plainview, and provides Day Lewis with a typically meaty role, the kind of performance that inevitably wins awards and high praise from the critics. Fairview is part Charles Foster Kane, part Bill The Butcher, who at one point admits: "I hate most people. I want to earn enough money so I can get away from everyone." It’s a brilliant deconstruction of the kind of role De Niro’s famous for: the larger-than-life sociopath. But by dispensing with any kind of heroic character to balance out Fairview’s unrelenting misanthropy, the film offers nothing in the way of redemption. There’s no chink of light anywhere. In the film’s third act, with the now-reclusive Plainview holed up in a Hollywood mansion in 1927, drunk, embittered, his mood increasingly murderous, Day Lewis unleashes the kind of performance that you either find completely over the top or simply all-consuming. Anyway, all this is something of a departure for Anderson, whose last film, lest we forget, was an idiosyncratic art comedy with Adam Sandler. There Will Be Blood opens in the UK on February 8. You can watch the trailer here.