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.

The directorial debut of photographer Anton Corbijn, who moved to the UK from Holland to shoot Joy Division in 1979, is a moving tribute to Ian Curtis, but suffers from Corbijn’s proximity to the material. The problems of rock biopics are pretty similar, all told. Limited in terms of the audience they’ll attract – in most cases, it’s going to be the fans – they have a tendency to truncate facts or omit key incidents for narrative expediency. A personal peeve is the clumsy way characters are often introduced, or the shorthand used to move the story on. I remember wincing when Ahmet Erteghun was introduced in Walk The Line with, one character effectively rattling off his CV by way of explaining who he was. Or, in The Doors, when Ray Manzerak comes up with the organ intro to “Light My Fire”. In the latter instance, I guess it’s hard to convey the act of creation, the alchemical moment when a song or a riff is conjured from the air. But, in purely cinematic terms, it’s pretty cheesy, all the same. Corbijn’s biopic of Ian Curtis, based on his widow Deborah’s book, Touching From A Distance, suffers pretty much from all the above faults. There’s no satisfying attempt, for instance, to explain the connection – either musically or even socially – between Curtis and the other members of Joy Division – who, it has to be said, are pretty thinly drawn. What’s the spark that made these four men create all this wonderful music? What’s their shared vision, or their unified sense of purpose? The subject of the film may be Ian Curtis, but you can’t just ignore the crucial elements of his life – the music, which, really, is why most people are going to have any interest in seeing Control. It’s also pretty hard to care about Curtis. I think Corbijn does is try and portray him honestly. There’s none of the mythologizing here you saw with, say, Morrison in The Doors. But he comes over as a rather glum, introverted adulterer, despite the allowance you have to make for his debilitating epileptic condition. He mopes and broods and generally treats his wife pretty badly. He is a Troubled Soul, sure, but not a particularly nice bloke. His affair with Belgian girl Annik suggests she was the free spirit who could offer Curtis a way out of the increasingly claustrophobic life he was trapped in. His failing marriage to Deborah, the pressures put on him by the band’s increasing success, his epilepsy. It at least goes some way to explaining his infidelity, and also serves to underline the eventual tragedy of his suicide. Sam Riley, though, does bring real emotional intensity to his performance. Looking slightly more like Pete Doherty (or even Joy Division’s drummer Stephen Morris), he’s phenomenal in the agonising final ten minutes – just Curtis in his house, on his own – in the lead up to his suicide. It’s not pretty to watch, but Riley goes the distance and Corbijn elicits a fantastic, compelling performance. In terms of the crime of cinematic shorthand, there’s a couple of major offences. First up, after he learns that a fellow epileptic has died during a fit, Corbijn cuts to Curtis writing “She’s Lost Control”. When he tells Deborah he doesn’t love her anymore, we get “Love Will Tear Us Apart” kicking in over the soundtrack. And, finally, when Curtis is in the studio recording the vocals to “Isolation”, everyone else has their back to him. Watching it, I was inevitably reminded of Michael Winterbottom’s 24 Hour Party People. I know that film took a lot of liberties with the facts, but I felt it at least captured the slightly bonkers, held-together-with-gaffer-tape spirit of Factory and the people involved with it. Apart from Toby Kebbell as manager Rob Gretton, who does a fine line in one-liners and put downs, no one else stands out. Even Craig Parkinson’s Tony Wilson – one of the music industry’s most larger-than-life characters – isn’t given full rein. And it’s hard to shake the memory of Paddy Considine and Steve Coogan, who were so charismatic as Gretton and Wilson in the Winterbottom film. Samantha Morton does well as Deborah, conveying a sense of the wife trying to hold everything together and gradually beaten down by Curtis’ illness. But for once of her generation’s best actresses, she’s not best deployed here. You don’t really get a sense of who she was, or even what the connection was, at least initially, between her and Curtis. The film looks fantastic, of course. It resembles Corbijn’s pictures: grainy, sepulchral black and white, each shot as iconic as the last. But I think Corbijn is just too close to the material to have enough distance to tell the story in a way that's going to have a more general appeal. Of course, I realise that I’m not exactly singing Control’s praises. The reception was fairly mixed at the screening I attended. But I know that Jonathan Romney, who’ll be reviewing the film in a future issue of UNCUT, had a very different opinion to me. I’ll certainly be keen to read what his take is. Meanwhile, I’d very much like to know what your views are. Are you excited about seeing Control? And what are your views on rock biopics in general? Let me know your favourites – and the ones you think should never have been greenlit.

To be honest, the success of Rilo Kiley has been pretty bewildering to me up 'til now. Much as I liked Jenny Lewis' country solo album, "Rabbit Fur Coat", I never grasped the appeal of her band. For all her likeable LA snarkiness, their music always sounded like a grey jangle; as if the American mainstream had embraced, what, The Sundays maybe, as the future of music. Quite strange, but in quite a dull way. For the past couple of weeks, though, I've been hammering their new album, "Under The Blacklight", and now I understand. Not that, unless my memory is playing tricks on me, "Under The Blacklight" sounds much like Rilo Kiley's previous records. Instead, it's a bright, wry confection that resembles a clever indie kid's fantasy of LA pop music. Maybe you've never been to California, maybe you can't drive, maybe you're being a touch ironic, but surely this is the sort of record you should listen to while you're motoring along the Pacific Coast Highway? Jenny Lewis, it transpires, is tremendously good at this sort of thing. "Under The Blacklight" is one of those albums which is simultaneously knowing and celebratory. She doesn't have indie guilt, exactly, but she's clearly smart enough to see the richness and the absurdities of her hometown and its signature pop sound. There are vague hints of sleaze and misdemeanour amongst the silvery disco guitars, the dry, finickety funk. "Dreamworld", as you'd imagine, is a Fleetwood Mac homage lustrous enough to sit on "Tango In The Night", though the gently subversive Lewis contrives to sound more like Lindsey Buckingham than Stevie Nicks. And beneath the precision gloss, each listen reveals a few odd things. "Close Call" is one of Lewis' elaborate, compelling narratives, which begins "She Was Born On Brighton Pier", while the guitars chime insouciantly in weird homage to The Stone Roses and "I Wanna Be Adored". There are little melodic echoes of things I don't like that much throughout: "Amazing Grace" on "Silver Lining"; "La Isla Bonita" on "Dejalo"; Rainbow's "Since You Been Gone" on "Breakin' Up". But these vague allusions help to make "Under The Blacklight" sound instantly familiar and ready for the charts - or at least an indie idea of what the charts should be. "Breakin' Up" is especially great, a brash and liberated song about separation with a chorus of, "Oh, it feels good to be free," that at once feels euphoric and calculated. It occurs to me, though, with the American mainstream's current indie fetish (for the Arcade Fire, Modest Mouse, The Shins et al) that Rilo Kiley might have made a theoretically commercial record at precisely the wrong time. Be interesting to see how this one pans out. . .