I must admit, I never thought I'd end up at the Cross Kings pub in King's Cross, North London. It used to be a place called The Backpackers, and every time I drove past it there appeared to be 200 Australians in a heap outside. Very macho, very rugby. Not really for me. Last night, though, the place was taken over by my colleague Pat, who books a folk night called In The Pines and who had secured a couple of people I've been dying to see for a couple of years now, James Blackshaw and PG Six. Blackshaw, as I mentioned here the other day, is a quite fantastic guitarist, and having seen him live I can definitely assert that he's a match for one obvious contemporary, Jack Rose. Unlike Rose, Blackshaw (from somewhere on the outskirts of London I think, though he spends most of his time touring the States as far as I can tell) favours a 12-string acoustic, which he hunches over so low that his head sometimes rests on it. Like I said last time, the closest analogue I can find for his rich, mystical playing is probably Robbie Basho. He starts with a new, untitled song dedicated to someone called Dusty, and it stretches out for something like 15 minutes of interlocking, recurring, bewitching melodies. It's quite extraordinary. Then he plays something from last year's awesome "O True Believers" album, which is very nearly as good. I think it may have been "Transient Life In Twilight": right now I'm playing that song on a live CD I bought at the show, "Waking Into Sleep". Really, I can't recommend this man highly enough. After Blackshaw, New York resident Pat Gubler, aka PG Six, played a pretty wonderful set, too. According to the stats on my iPod, it seems like I've played his second album, "The Well Of Memory", more than anything else in the past couple of years, and there are plenty of selections from that tonight. In case you haven't come across Gubler's music (we've featured a couple of his tunes on Uncut CDs in the past year), he's currently moving away from the Janschish acid folk of his earlier records, towards a very woody, early '70s canyon craftsmanship. When he plays "Bless These Blues" tonight, he self-deprecatingly notes that he always imagines Al Green singing it, though in its stripped-down incarnation tonight it feels closer to an unlikely Jackson Browne/Davey Graham hybrid. Where Blackshaw is a fluid, meditative player, Gubler is much more clipped, fastidious. I get the impression he's maybe a bit nervous, even in as relaxed and intimate a setting as this, and that the reveries of his records may take a lot more effort than they betray. He told me a few months ago that this year's "Slightly Sorry" LP, for all its air of open-hearted mellowness, was actually written by following the exercises set out in a songwriting manual by Jimmy Webb. It's a neat conceit, and Gubler never sounds clinical, thanks to the pervading warmth of his tone; he does a great version of Jerry Garcia's "Loser". Lying on the floor, gently enraptured, it's the best thing like this I've seen for a while.

The first time I heard Devendra Banhart, I remember thinking that there was something ineffably creepy about him. I loved "Oh Me Oh My. . .", but it felt an eerie, almost malign record, and the impression was compounded at his first London show, supporting Michael Gira. Banhart didn't seem dangerous, exactly, but his otherness was somehow disturbing, as well as compelling. It's funny thinking back, because in the interim Banhart seems to have become the indie world's pet hippy, a benign prankster who radiates love for music, spiders, humanity, his beard, and the vast array of fine artists he has nurtured, played with and championed over the past five years. I can't think of many other musicians in that time who have informed my taste so much, whose proselytizing have turned me on to so much great music. There's a danger, though, that maybe people don't take Banhart seriously enough now. That his open-hearted cheerleading and kindergarten flights of fantasy leave him looking substantially more lightweight than he really is. Hopefully, "Smokey Rolls Down Thunder Canyon" should remedy that. It's a very long record, and there's still a fair bit of mucking about on it. But at heart, this is a beautifully-realised piece of work: an album recorded in LA's Topanga Canyon that taps into the local vibes (the airy, dislocated majesty of David Crosby's "If I Could Only Remember My Name" is a key text here) and Banhart's South American heritage (on the likes of "Samba Vexillographica", he emerges as a potent heir to Caetano Veloso) to describe the end of a love affair. "Smokey Rolls" isn't really an acid-folk album: it's much grander and more complicated than that, as the "Seahorse" track I linked to yesterday proves. At its best, there's a stately, stoned grace to it all, with woody acoustics and chamber strings weaving around Banhart's frank confessions of romantic dislocation. In this vein, "Bad Girl", "I Remember", "My Dearest Friend" and "Freely" are some of the best songs Banhart has ever written. Elsewhere, his attempts to stretch out are pretty successful - even the rabbinical doo-wop number, "Shabop Shalom". Only a run of stylistic flip-flops - gospel ("Saved"), Jackson 5 pop ("Lover"), salsa ("Carmensita"), reggae ("The Other Woman") - though individually brilliant, feel a bit like exercises in pastiche when they're bunched together. But this is a minor gripe, really, about such an absorbing record. It reveals that Devendra Banhart is a good enough songwriter to transcend the eccentricities which have, thus far into his career, been most prominent. And now he's claimed, in the current issue of Uncut, that he's not really a hippy, then you don't even have to be put off by that. . .

I remembered to bring in some Lee Hazlewood this morning, so we're starting the day with "Requiem For An Almost Lady". John Robinson, our Reviews Editor, just told me how he once received a "hate fax" from the great man, after calling him, affectionately, a "prickly old bastard" in a live preview. "Dear John," Hazlewood wrote, "referring to someone as a prickly old bastard may be fine and proper where you come from, but in Texas it could be a call for the loosening of some, if not all, of your teeth." On to "Cowboy In Sweden" now, and the fantastic "Leather & Lace", and it occurs me that Hazlewood could be seen as a kind of American Serge Gainsbourg; a lugubrious prankster, embedded in his country's cultural traditions but wryly subverting them at the same time. Both of them liked playing the beast in theatrical, sexually fraught duets, too, of course. The big difference between the two, I guess, is that Gainsbourg is revered in France, while Hazlewood's influence in America has been more covert. Hazlewood, let's not forget, helped sire the careers of Duane Eddy, Phil Spector and Gram Parsons, as well as authoring his own rich narratives. We'll play some more as the day goes on. Couple of other things to have a look at today. One is a big teaser for the Devendra Banhart album, which, yes, I really will try and preview before the end of the week. This is a lovely video for "Seahorse", which shows Banhart and his chums (the one without the beard is Gael Garcia Bernal, incidentally) pottering about their Topanga Canyon home studio while one of the highlights from "Smokey Rolls Down Thunder Canyon" reveals itself to be yet another epic David Crosby/"Golden Brown"/Jim Morrison & Crazy Horse hybrid. Next up, check out this ridiculous new video from Kanye West. It's not the "Stronger" tune which features Daft Punk, but a much weaker, I-am-famous whinge called "Can't Tell Me Nothing" which might just be the worst thing West has ever done (I might try and hear the new album next week, so bear with me on this one). Never mind the music, though. The video doesn't feature West, but instead stars some American comic called Zach Galifianakis who I must admit I've never heard of. Galifianakis, is a hairy redneck farmer with a chainsaw, who mimes along to West's portentous waffle while cavorting over some heavy agricultural machinery. As is traditional with rap videos, Galifianakis has some mean-looking guy loitering behind him as moral support, who turns up to be Will Oldham, hamming brilliantly. If you've ever longed to see Bonnie Prince Billy booty dancing near some cows, or dry-humping a digger - and come on, haven't we all? - here's your chance.