I was maybe halfway through the entirely improvised new live album by Ghost, when it occurred to me that I might have been fixating on the new psych/folk/freak jams a bit much this past week or so. It was then that I turned to the new album by Beirut, as I have done for the past two or three weeks when I feel the need for tunes, of all things. "Gulag Orkestar", Beirut’s auspicious debut from last year, was an elaborate and meticulously-realised Balkan fantasy, concocted in a teenager’s bedroom in Albuquerque. It felt incredibly self-conscious, occasionally a bit over-wrought, and yet I really fell for it. That teenager, Zach Condon, seemed to be grappling with big, portentous, passionate and ramshackle anthemics with a skill that many of his contemporaries (and seniors, to be honest) were reaching for, but only The Arcade Fire really grasped. "The Flying Club Cup" is, I think, an even better record. The heavy conceptualising remains, though the co-ordinates have shifted. Now 21, Condon appears to be living in Paris, and has made a record about France, as titles like "Cliquot", "Une Derriere Verre (Pour La Route)" and "Nantes" make clear. So far, so adolescent: reading this, I imagine a few of you may be faintly appalled by some kind of chamber pop Conor Oberst who’s seen a DVD of Amelie and got inspired. Well, there’s an element of that to "The Flying Club Cup", I guess. But it’s also a quite lovely and engrossing record, one which fully transcends some of its more, ahem, gauche pretensions. Condon recorded the album in the Arcade Fire’s church studio, and Owen Pallet (a part-time member of that band, and the man behind Final Fantasy) clearly had a key role in the opulent string arrangements that dominate many of these 13 songs: "Cliquot" is absolutely wonderful, a drunken and lush staggering waltz, of sorts. "The Flying Club Cup" is notionally inspired (he says, frantically regurgitating the press release) by a 1910 hot air balloon race held near the Eiffel Tower, and Condon is gifted enough to have perfectly captured that vibe in a lot of this music: flighty, antique, redolent of sepia glamour and adventure. Initially, that feel seemed to be the key, and I wasn’t sure how strong the songs were. But slowly the melodic richness comes into focus, and the likes of "Forks And Knives", "Cherbourg", the pulsating piano groove of "In The Mausoleum" and the amazing title track start feeling memorable as well as detailed. It reminds me of The Divine Comedy circa "Promenade" a little, though in a very modern American indie context. My colleague Mark has just mentioned Sufjan Stevens, which is very true. Our friends in marketing, meanwhile, who I was trying to placate by putting it on, have just shouted something about "Hungarian psycho music". So maybe Condon’s attempt to move on from the Balkans hasn’t been entirely successful. But whatever: great record.

I’ve just been reading Re-Make/Re-Model, Michael Bracewell’s new book on the formative years of Roxy Music and was particularly struck by an early passage in which Bryan Ferry – thankfully not talking about fox-hunting or the Third Reich – waxes nostalgically about a music shop in Newcastle called Windows, where as a teenager he spent many astonished hours browsing through racks of records he couldn’t always afford, but liked anyway just to spend time poring over. I knew the feeling exactly. When I was growing up in Port Talbot, a small town in South Wales, there was a local record shop called Derrick’s which acted as a kind of lifeline from the humdrum world I knew to an altogether more exotic universe. I used to spend whatever money I had in Derrick’s, which for a shop so remotely located had an incredible stock of the latest albums. Whatever I read about in Melody Maker, I could usually get there. And when I ran out of money or was saving up for something, I used to go there anyway, and spend afternoons just going through the records, gawping at the sleeves, reading the liner notes, checking out production credits, reading anything including the small print. I’m sure a lot of readers have similarly affectionate memories of shops like Windows and Derrick’s and I was about to ask for you for them, when coincidentally I got an email covering the same sort of territory. It’s from Alexi, who lives in Kidderminster – which surely can’t be as bad as he makes out - and it’s a reminder that for all its many conveniences on-line shopping isn’t always a credible alternative to the sense of discovery you might feel when you unexpectedly uncover some previously unimagined gem. Take it away, Alexi. “My main impetus for writing has to be the demise of Fopp records. For many readers of UNCUT, I'm pretty sure this was a hard one to swallow. It was doubly-so for me, as a person living in the cultural desert that is Kidderminster, Worcestershire. Despite the size of our town, we have never had a decent record shop, apart from the appalling Our Price which thankfully bit the dust years ago, and before that, Sounds Around, a non-descript ma-and-pa store during the 80's. When I first discovered Fopp was in our town, I thought I was hallucinating. It was like an UNCUT magazine in the form of a shop - and everything was so bloody cheap! I had to forcibly ration myself, otherwise I was in danger of spending all my wages. Foreign movies, an 'Americana' section, great paperbacks, superb art books... It was exactly what I, as a culturally plugged-in 30-something, wanted. I gorged myself on books (buying multiple copies of Paul Auster's fantastic True Tales of American Life for all my mates), and CDs such as Dream Theater's voluminous back-catalogue, Laura Veirs, Murder By Death, Ry Cooder... Soon, I was encouraging my friends to meet me for what we called a Fopp-fest, where we'd spend an hour or two browsing. My mate James said that it was the first time he's bought anything from a real shop in five years, after having spent the last half a decade shopping online. And he basically underlined what was so great about FOPP: the browse factor - something you really do not get from online shopping. You'd go in looking for Ray LaMontagne, and come out with a book on Brazilian graffiti, the new Megadeth CD, a Fellini DVD, and a remastered Doors album. All for less than £25! And yet, at the back of my mind, I knew it was too good to last. Every time I went in, I'd check with the guy behind the counter how business was doing, and the answer was always 'very good'. Even in a shit-hole like Kidder, the shop was always packed with people who weren't grannies, chavs, or mail-order-goths, but discerning folk who knew good stuff when they saw it. A short while after that, it mysteriously closed. Unable to contain my paranoia, I rang the shop to see if anyone was in. The manager answered, and for a moment I thought they were open again. My hopes were completely dashed when he told me that some suit high up at Fopp had the bright idea of buying the ailing Music Zone chain, and unfortunately, it sank the whole company. The manager and his staff hadn't even been paid their last wages. Now, whenever my mates get together, we talk about the good old days of Kidderminster's Fopp (all seven months of them), about what we had planned to buy (I'm still finding lists around my house ), and share stories of great purchases we made. I know that, to outside observers (eg. our women-folk ), we probably take male rock autism to a level not seen since the (superior to the book ) adaptation of High Fidelity. But the fact is, it illustrated how on-line shopping is not the panacea that we think it is. I've lived here twenty years, and Fopp was the first time I actually had a reason to go into my own town. Now, it's back to being like any other provincial backwater: a sink-hole containing nothing but shitty markets, charity shops and low-common-denominator super-sheds like Matalan. Kidderminster needed an establishment like Fopp. I really hope that someone at Fopp manages to recover the company. I have heard that HMV have bought six stores, and are re-opening them. Well, I for one don't trust their motives, but we'll have to wait and see.”

Around the turn of the decade, I used to go and see a Brooklyn band called Les Savy Fav every time they played London. They were a fantastic night out. The singer, Tim Harrington, occasionally behaved like a cross between Iggy Pop, Salvador Dali and Captain Birdseye. I remember one show where he spent most of the show stalking the dancefloor with a monitor on his shoulder, another that probably involved quite a lot of shoe throwing, and a third where the entire crowd were compelled to sit on the floor of the Dublin Castle while he passed among us. Harrington was always very funny, and it helped that he had such a tight band backing him up. Because before their New York/Brooklyn contemporaries made post-punk hip, Les Savy Fav understood that there was a continuum from punk, to the Gang Of Four and Public Image and Talking Heads, to US hardcore and American underground bands like Fugazi, right on through the likes of Sleater-Kinney. Difficult rhythms, cheesewire guitars, literate words; none of this ever went away, it just stopped selling itself to the fashionable kids. The weird thing about Les Savy Fav, though, is that their records never had the same impact. I'm pretty sure I have them all at home, I remember enjoying them briefly, but I couldn't name you a single song. For me, it was all about the shows. The arrival of "Let's Stay Friends" makes me wonder, though: have their records radically improved, or should I go back and play the old ones again? My hunch (though I will check out "The Cat & The Cobra" etc again) is that it's mostly the former. "Let's Stay Friends" is the first Savy Fav album in six years, apparently, and God, it's great. In the interim, the band kept running their Frenchkiss label and, amongst other things, released the first two Hold Steady albums on it. If you're a fan of those wordy, anthemic records, you should definitely have a go with this; "The Year Before The Year 2000" and "Patty Lee", especially, have a similar feel to them of a kind of post-punk bar band. Imagine The Hold Steady, though, if the Husker Du love had been replaced by a powerful Fugazi influence; the fantastic "Brace Yourself" has the same taut, dub structure of something like "Waiting Room", I think. Or imagine The Hold Steady if, instead of parties and Catholicism and ordinary street-hustling lives, they sang about medieval monarchs ("Being the king was pretty cool," observes Harrington in "Raging In The Plague Age"). Of course, judging Les Savy Fav purely by comparing them with The Hold Steady is pretty unfair. "Let's Stay Friends" is simply a great record by a great rock'n'roll band who have, I think, finally found the great tunes to match their great ideas. Have a listen at myspace.com/lessavyfav and let me know what you think.