I've been gently kicking myself for the past few days after discovering The Necks were playing a couple of shows just down the road from me in Dalston. By the time I tried to get tickets on Sunday afternoon, they'd long sold out. Their new album, "Townsville", is compensation of a kind, but it also makes me regret missing them more than ever. The Necks, I should explain, are a bass/drums/piano trio from Sydney who are usually referred to as jazz, though they strike me as being far too mystical and evasive a band for such a reductive label. As far as I can tell, they turn up at a venue or a studio, set up and then roll out an improvised piece that usually lasts for about an hour. This one, "Townsville", is a live recording from a place of the same name in Thuringowa, Northern Queensland. I guess the idea of totally improvised music usually suggests freeform abstractions, but one of the many things that's fascinating about The Necks is their absolute rigour and restraint. Like some of the other music by them that I have (there are loads of albums, but "Mosquito/See Through" and "Drive By" are ones I can authoritatively recommend), this is gentle and insidious music that's not a million miles away from an acoustic rendering of something ambient: Eno circa "Music For Airports", maybe. But what drives it are the rapturous piano flurries of Chris Abrahams, that remind me of some of Alice Coltrane's sparser playing. I was going to compare them, too, to repeatedly breaking waves in a slightly cliched fashion, then I read the press release use the same metaphor very elegantly. "It's like watching the ocean as wave follows wave," someone from the label, ReR Megacorp, notes, "each the same; each different - assymmetric." In an office just behind the Tate Modern, on a cold November morning, it provides a very restful beginning to the day: one of those records which has a truly captivating subtlety, that initially suggests predominantly ambient uses, but draws you in. After a while, I find myself distracted and entranced by it, concentrating on how Abrahams minutely alters his playing at every pass, how he heads towards a kind of resolution that can take an age to finally arrive. It's incredibly controlled, intuitive and absorbing music, and I can't recommend it enough. Sink in.

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.