We've just been playing the excellent forthcoming Kelley Stoltz album to start the week (I'll write about it soon), which reminded me of another Sub Pop album I've liked in the past few weeks. This is "Wild Mountain Nation", the third - I think - album from a Portland, Oregon band called Blitzen Trapper. I first came across them maybe 18 months ago, when "Field Rexx" turned up in the UK and struck me as being one of the most successful attempts at catching the vibe of Pavement circa "Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain" that I'd heard in years. Blitzen Trapper had mastered that offhand, rogeuishly bent take on classic rock, particularly the sort of frayed country-rock songs like "Range Life". The keeper was called "Asleep For Years", if I remember right, and I played it to death for a few weeks and promptly forgot about the band. "Wild Mountain Nation" is a very forceful return, though - a fuller, more confident if no less fractious development of their schtick. There's a whole chunk of Beatlesy powerpop flung into the mix this time (check out "Miss Spiritual Tramp" if you can), but the skronk quotient has been upped, too, so that the opening "Devil's A-Go-Go" has some vaguely Beefheartish cranks to send it off on bloody-minded tangents, while still sticking fairly close to the trail. The Pavement thing is still pretty pronounced, and the crackly melodic sense marks them out as distinct fellow travellers to Stoltz: "Sci-Fi Kid" is a great little fuzzy pop song, insidious in a hip, self-effacing kind of way. But the band they remind me most of now is one of my favourite groups from that early '90s awkward indie-pop school, also by coincidence on Sub Pop, The Grifters. The Grifters had a superb, drunken roll to their songs, with a palpable love of the roots music which had informed their southern upbringing shining through the staggers and glitches which their detractors always mistook as incompetence. It's a nightmarish thing to try and articulate - mostly because writing about it makes you look as much of a dick as those hacks who call anything manly and a bit anguished as "Soulful" - but The Grifters were a fine band because they had a loose, slack-assed but infectious "feel" to everything they did. Blitzen Trapper have that, too. With the benefit of age and a much-expanded record collection, it's easier to see how those shakey bands from the early '90s US underground were wired into an American tradition, not just an indie one: we were playing The Grateful Dead's "Doing That Rag" the other day, and the Reviews Editor mentioned how it sounded exactly like Pavement. Back in the day, we were so busy parsing for Fall references and, I guess, scared of the Dead, that we had no idea. Now, though, this seems to be the best way of enjoying Blitzen Trapper; as a way of understanding that bands can have confounding, contradictory taste, too.

Some interesting things turned up from you this week, not least a couple of impassioned defences of the Robert Plant & Alison Krauss album, which seemed to be getting a rough ride from some unreconstructed old Led Zep fans. The second link goes to a message from a visitor called Steve Shaw, whose pleasure at "Raising Sand" and simultaneous excitement about the Led Zep reunion pretty much echoes my own. "Plant's opinion of the O2 gig seems to have changed markedly since last month's Uncut," Steve reports. "He's now hoping he enjoys it and saying how much the rush for tickets has humbled him. If I were a betting man, my money would be on us all getting the oportunity to see LZ before the end of next year. As long as O2 goes well. Will he really want to be seen as the man that denied the world it's LZ reunion tour?" Maybe Plant could take Krauss along with them, if only to do "Battle Of Evermore"? Over at the blog on Mog, someone called Grooveminded has filed a rant about the Plant/Krauss hook-up which I don't agree with, but which certainly makes a change from the whingeing Zep fans: "Robert Plant is lucky that such a Talent as Alison Krauss would even look his way…...I mean c’mon, the last 4 Plant Albums have sold , what, 15 copies each?.....And the last 4 Krauss Albums have sold what, like 40 million?......So, the reality check is, Alison has been very gracious in allowing Robert any of her esteemable time, coz her time is FINE whereas Robert's time is history......this is how it is….. and i’m certainly glad to see that Robert is now lauding the praises of Alison and this CD in his interviews, as before it was released he was reticent, non committed, and lacking in serious enthusiasm, but he has learned, along with John Waite, Brad Paisley, Alan Jackson, and many others, that whatever Alison favors with her angelic vocals, incredible violin playing, and immense talent = turns to gold….....Ditto this “Plant” album….." More good stuff on the Boredoms blog, which suggests that the band were every bit as astonishing in Aberdeen as they were in London. And after this blog about Japrocksampler, I've now got hold and am working my way through the impressive back catalogue of the Flower Travellin' Band - that's the nude bikers seen on the cover of Julian Cope's book, if you didn't know. Like Cope, I can totally recommend the imperial ur-metal of "Satori", which Mark in the Uncut office likened to a band with Darth Vader on guitar. The guitarist is amazing, actually: regal, effectless, with a style that somehow incorporates grand Eastern elements into his highly-disciplined freak-outs. Check out the extraordinary epic that is "Louisiana Blues" on their "Anywhere" debut, too, if you can. One more thing today. I'm a bit wary of those end-of-year things where music hacks tip a bunch of new bands whose CDs they've just been sent by crafty PRs (who will be the Mika of 2008? Do you care, folks?). Nevertheless, I'd love Wild Beasts to break through next year. I've written about their last single here and their live show at Latitude here (links galore today, it seems). Anyway, the new single is called "Assembly", is on the estimable Domino label, and has been produced by Tore Johanson who I think did Franz Ferdinand, if memory serves. It's hardly glossy, mind. As I wrote before, Wild Beasts have this phenomenally lopsided gait, a circuitous way with a melody which totally recalls Orange Juice, a singer whose hiccuping meanders suggest Billy Mackenzie in the throes of an excruciating puberty, and - as "Assembly" proves - a general quicksilver excellence which means that, out of so many vacilllating and collapsible elements, their songs stagger out in quite amazingly memorable fashion. Here's their MySpace: they're from "Leeds via Kendal", apparently

I’m standing at the bar of the swanky Indigo2 annexe to the O2 Arena when someone over the PA tells me to take my seat and stay there. The Eagles, playing for them what must be the equivalent of someone’s front room - an intimate show to promote Long Road Out Of Eden, their first album of new material for 28 years - are about to come on and we are apparently not going to be allowed to leave our seats during any of the numbers they are playing, on point, no doubt, of a slow and painful death. They’re already closing the bars and the lights are going down. Tonight’s show in the 1300 capacity high-tech venue is somewhat odd in that tickets have not been made generally available to Eagles fans, who would doubtless have paid small fortunes to see them at such close hand, the band’s more natural habitat being the stadium, arena and enormodome where in their heyday they were most at home, the biggest band of their time playing the kind of places appropriate to their popularity, the scale of which, to many of us, was simply mystifying. There are some competition winners here, apparently, fans who got lucky, but the bulk of the crowd is made up, I’m given to understand, of specially invited media types, among whose company I suppose I must count myself, here to witness the band launching the new album with a full-blown, two hours-plus show. It’s an elaborate conceit, I suppose, and at least guarantees them a ton of publicity and plenty of headlines to accompany the record’s release, which they would hardly seem to need when you hear the album’s is a virtually guaranteed number one in every territory known to man and a few more besides. I suppose what I’m brooding over as I take a seat among enough fellow veterans of the UK music oppress to have an editorial meeting is the point of all this, which escapes pretty much everyone I speak to, none of them entirely sure why the band are even doing this, the new album already a guaranteed success and all that. And it’s this what you might call vagueness of purpose that does much to define the evening’s subdued and somewhat stilted mood, the curiously muted atmosphere not much helped by an audience that appears to have been largely sedated upon entry. You got to see, say the Stones and the crowd’s on its feet in an instant. Tonight when The Eagles, mostly portly, apart from gaunt bassist Timothy B Schmit, walk out onstage they aren’t so much hysterically received as warmly welcomed, like a batsman walking to the crease in a game of cricket. There’s an astonishing level of politeness in everything that follows, including the group’s wary affability and what seems like a rather shrill camaraderie between the formerly warring veterans, and a lot of rather specious joshing. The singing and playing, it probably goes without saying, are supernaturally impeccable, but everything seems rehearsed to within and inch of its life, the burnished gleam of everything they do eventually becoming an empty dazzle. Before long I’m sitting like most of the people around me in silent admiration for their breathtaking craft, but no love at all for what I’m listening to, which is by now basically a greatest hits set, all the old favourites wheeled out in stately procession – “Peaceful Easy feeling”, “One Of These Nights”, “Lyin’ Eyes”, “Take It Easy” and “Desperado” at the death. I have long-since started to drift off, however, and have to be reminded later that they had also played “Hotel California”, which evidently had passed me by completely. The Eagles’ Indigo2 set list How Long Busy Being Fabulous I Don't Want To Hear It Anymore Guilty Of The Crime Hotel California Peaceful Easy Feeling One Of These Nights Lyin' Eyes Boys Of Summer In The City Long Run Life's Been Good Dirty Laundry Funk 49 Heartache Tonight Life In The Fast Lane First encore Rocky Mountain way All She Wants To Do Is Dance Second encore Take It Easy Desperado