Just a quick note to say that I'll be heading off to deepest East Anglia tomorrow to report on the Latitude Festival, which we're sponsoring. Instead of posting here, I'll be active all day and night on our special Latitude blog. I'm vaguely planning to see, amongst other things, Wilco, Tinariwen, The Hold Steady, CSS, Gruff Rhys and the Arcade Fire. And if you're coming along, please say hi: I'll be the one trying to interest a noisy ginger three-year-old in watching Rickie Lee Jones. Wish me luck. . .

Looking back over the past few months of writing Wild Mercury Sound, it does seem like I go on again and again about Sonic Youth and Thurston Moore's Ecstatic Peace label. I guess I can be a bit fanboyish over the whole business, but then there are few bands who've shaped my musical aesthetics as profoundly as the Youth, and the wild and varied music that Moore has been putting out on his imprint of late (from Wooden Wand to Turbo Fruits, from MV + EE And The Bummer Road to Sunburned Hand Of Man, to Awesome Color) means they've kept me excited and engaged more, perhaps, than any other label in 2007. The latest thing that's turned up from them is especially good. "Trees Outside The Academy" is a solo album from Thurston Moore himself, in some ways the first since "Psychic Hearts" in '95. Moore, of course, is always working on extra-curricular projects outside the confines of Sonic Youth, so various and often extreme that even groupies like me have trouble keeping up with them. "Trees Outside The Academy", though, is what some might call a "proper" album, if a "proper" album necessarily contains neat little songs rather than sprawling, frictional skronk-outs. It's composed, rather than improvised, I think. And it's also extraordinarily pretty. Essentially, much here is a showcase for Thurston Moore's gifted songwriting. I guess a lot that has been written about Sonic Youth over the decades, even when they're at their most accessible, has focused on their tunings, the radical guitar techniques which they habitually use. On "Trees Outside The Academy", Moore mainly plays acoustic. Instead of Lee Ranaldo as a sparring partner, he's mainly matched up against Samara Lubelski, a very good violinist who's added texture to plenty of the East Coast avant-folk scenesters, notably The Bummer Road. Nevertheless, Moore's driving, slightly distracted style is immediately recognisable. It's interesting to discover that the genius is not in the treatment, but in the substance. The other thing that "Trees Outside The Academy" tells us about Sonic Youth is how critical Steve Shelley is to their sound. One of the reasons why songs like "Frozen Gtr" and the title track here are so immediately familiar is because of Shelley's presence on drums, adding that pattering motorik that pushes them away from pastoral dawdling and into something more dynamic and edgy. Moore, Lubelski and Shelley are the core trio, but there are some very cool guests sitting in, too. "Frozen Gtr" is punctuated by a mighty solo from J Mascis: the album was recorded in Mascis' home studio, and like some of the best work on Dinosaur Jr's "Beyond", he gives the impression of playing a solo non-stop during his waking hours, occasionally wandering into the vicinity of a microphone. "Wonderful Witches" is a great, pointed little punk pop song that's a throwback to the Youth's "Goo" era, only with John Moloney (from Sunburned and the first line-up of my beloved Howlin' Rain) at the kit. But maybe my favourite this morning is "Honest James": just Moore on his acoustic, laid-back and ornate in a kind of Takoma style, then joined in a duet by Christina Carter, who sounds much friendlier here than on her ethereal and other-worldly solo records and work fronting Charalambides. Oh, and at the end there's a hilarious sound collage recorded by Thurston when he was 13 and either auditioning for Fluxus, or being bored in an engagingly arty way. "What you're about to hear is me banging a pencil against the table," he says. There is a banging. "There!" he says. "Now to add a little 'Honky Tonk Women' to the beat of the pencil on the table," he says. There is a fractionally more rhythmic banging. "There!" he says. Eventually, he is forced to admit, "What you have heard is me wasting time." It's cute.

A few interesting posts turned up on the blogs these past few days. The Super Furry Animals love continues, and Harri writes, "On first listen it sounded good, but maybe little bland by SFA's lofty standards; by the 4th or 5th listen I realised how much depth it actually has. Another SFA classic then, in my opinion - here's hoping one of the two on the way is the long lost techno record!" Meanwhile, there's some indie vs mainstream battlelines being drawn over the new Rilo Kiley album. Jess Harris writes, "Rilo Kiley might not be ashamed of "Under the Blacklight," but as a long-time fan of the band, I truly am. Instead of just being distributed under Brute/Beaute Records through Warner Brothers, they've now signed directly with Warner, using Mike Elizondo as a producer - the same Elizondo who has worked with 50 Cent and Jay-Z." Well I love Jay-Z, so that's a good thing to me (though - easy! - "Under The Blacklight" is far from a hip hop record). More saliently, it's worth mentioning that Elizondo produced Fiona Apple's fine "Extraordinary Machine". And surely Warner Brothers is Warner Brothers? Who cares what it says on the label? Nick R wants some Boredoms recommendations. I'd start with "Vision Create Newsun", then "Super AE", then "Seadrum/House Of Sun". I also wrote about the reissue of "Super Roots 7" here. "Super Roots 9" is out in Japan - a live album, by all accounts. When I track it down, I'll let you all know. Since yesterday, we've been pretty immersed in a fantastic 4CD box set from Rhino called "Love Is The Song We Sing: San Francisco Nuggets 1965-1970". It's a brilliant history of the city's music, as raw garage bands and folk-rockers gradually evolve into something more psychedelic and outre. Fabulous music notwithstanding, it's interesting to note how societal change and the birth of the hippies actually outpaced the musical revolution: while their gigs were transcendent events, The Grateful Dead were still recording punchy, economical ramalams like "The Golden Road". Even "Dark Star", customarily a 20-minute quicksilver freak-out, managed to be condensed into an airy, pithy single. Listening to this amazing comp, it seems as if Grace Slick's Great Society might have been the first band to move into something thicker, eastern-influenced and definably psychedelic, although Country Joe's instrumental "Section 43" is a revelation. We can safely call that one trippy, I think. It's going to take a while to digest everything here, so I'll try and come back to it in the next week or two. This morning, though, I'm enjoying Fifty Foot Hose's "Red The Sign Post" and Blue Cheer's "Fool", as you might imagine, plus strange new finds like The Vejtables' ghostly, muted take on garage rock, "Anything", and The Otherside's frantic, overdriven "Sidecar". Oh and "Omaha", and "White Rabbit" and "Get Together". . .

I'm starting today with "Strawberry Jam", the new album by the Animal Collective, and it's quite a thing of joy. "For Reverend Green" is playing as I write (the Reverend Al, perhaps?), and it's pretty typical of the album (their seventh, perhaps). Over rippling noise and tribal patter, they lay a kind of kindergarten sing-song that has a passionate, ingenuous, euphoric quality. It's a pop song, born out of the avant-garde, and the Animal Collective are a pop group who've kept an experimental imperative. I love them. Over the past year or so, it seems a heartening number of people do, too. They play fairly big venues in London now when they visit, and the amount of blog heat on "Strawberry Jam" two months upfront of its release suggests they've become one of those bands that excite people (OK, putative music hacks) who are always on the lookout for new music which pushes that little bit further. What I think Animal Collective deserve, though, is to be embraced by all those Flaming Lips fans. I never really see the appeal of groups who copy the Lips with some ersatz notion of the weird, but the Animal Collective move those ideas on a good few steps. Again, this is music which is self-consciously out-there, often rather cute in its pursuit of a wide-eyed childlike state, unafraid of electronic business and, still, accessible pop music; what's not to love? If you've been following the band's trajectory these past few years, "Strawberry Jam" continues on a fairly lucid trajectory from the dissolute strums of "Campfire Songs", through to the manic folk-pop of "Sung Tongs", onto the fractionally more electronic "Feels". This one has a lot more disorienting synth textures and distortion underpinning the tunes, occasionally recalling their earlier and more abrasive records like "Here Comes The Indian" as well as main guy Panda Bear's recent solo album, "Person Pitch" (The Beach Boys gone ambient techno, crudely). But at the same time, as the seasick noise has been ramped up, these are the brashest and most immediate pop songs the Collective have yet come up with. "Peacebone" and the album might begin with skittering, insectivorous electronic skree, but a heady thump ushers in a fantastically catchy tune, albeit one that's more capricious and charmed than what we're normally used to. By the end of "Chores", as they urge us to "take a walk out in the light drizzle", it feels as if the Animal Collective are oscillating between rapacious energy and a hazy dream state, between pop hyperactivity and leftfield dislocation. It is, I think, a lovely place to hang out.

A lot of festival activity this weekend, and Uncut's legions have reported back from T In The Park, Live Earth and Cornbury over at our Festivals Blog. Every time I switched on Live Earth, I managed to catch something worse and worse: Paolo Nutini singing "What A Wonderful World" with what sounded like most of his internal organs rattling around the back of his throat; James Blunt joylessly dying on his arse; Madonna cavorting with the prize dicks of Gogol Bordello in the manner of a geography teacher after her annual joint at Glastonbury. My thoughts, really, were in New York. At some park under one of the bridges on Saturday, my favourite live band in the world played what sounds like an astonishing gig, even by their standards. The Boredoms have been making insane and levitating records for about 20 years now, but for the past five or six, they've been configured as three drummers and Eye Yamatsuka on howls, lightbulbs and FX, playing in a circle non-stop for 90 minutes or so. On Saturday, as the sun set over Brooklyn, they became 77 Boadrum, a significantly expanded outfit that involved 77 extra drummers (featuring a bunch of ace leftfield hitters like Brian Chippendale from Lightning Bolt, John Moloney from Sunburned Hand Of The Man and so on). I've spent this morning drooling with jealousy over a bunch of Youtube clips of this massive tribal freak-out: on this clip and this one, too you can spot the Boredoms themselves in the middle of it all. If anyone who went can send me a report, that'd be great. In other psychedelic news, a brief shout-out to the new edition of Galactic Zoo Dossier, a very irregular and very enjoyable fanzine out of Chicago. There's a great double CD with this issue, too. CD1 is called "Teenage Meadows Of Infinity: Rare Psychs And Stomps" and seems to be the product of an insane and fantastic record collection - lots of the tracks come from Chicago private press albums. One is so obscure they can't find the name of the band, though the notes describe it accurately as "a fledgling Malcolm Mooney fronting The Shaggs". A nice Stooges track ("Cock In My Pocket") is the big name amongst Gollum, the fantastic Sixth Station, The Ukuleles Of Halifax etc. My favourite, though, comes from The Wheeling High School Jazz Band, who sound like a cross between Sun Ra and Gil Evans and absolutely nothing like a school band. CD2 is "From The Ashes: Perfect Attainment Shall Be Modern Freaked Sounds" and is all-new. The Stooges reappear - or at least their sax player does, in the shape of Steve Mackay & The Radon Ensemble. There's a blamming Troggs cover band called The Trawgs featuring that ubiquitous San Francisco guy from The Coachwhips, and cosmic sludge from my new Bay Area favourites, Assemble Head In Sunburst Sound. Oh and a great strung-out woodland jam from Devendra Banhart (we're hearing good things about his new one, incidentally). Hunt this down if you can, anyway.