Funny that on the same day the new Robert Wyatt album turns up, the post brings three reissues by one of the British bands who learned most from him, Gorky's Zygotic Mynci. We went straight to 1995's "Bwyd Time", and it still sounds amazingly fresh. I guess Gorkys have never really been given the credit they deserve. In the mid-'90s, at the height of Britpop, it's hard to overstate how incongruous they were. Here were a bunch of Welsh teenagers dressed as wizards, conjuring up precisely the sort of psychedelic folk blend that became so hip in the hands of Devendra Banhart and his extended family a few years later. The first three Gorkys albums are now being reissued by Sanctuary and have aged tremendously well. "Bwyd Time" is my favourite, because it begins to move away from cranky whimsy and towards a rich pastoral psych like "Miss Trudy" and "Gewn Ni Gorffen". It's a lovely record, and it reminds me of how disappointing Euros Childs' solo albums have been since Gorkys split up. What is worth tracking down, though, is "The Seven Sleepers Den" by Richard James, where James - the shyest member of an extremely unassumiing band - finesses the discreet folk style that he brought to Gorkys. Next week, I should have got my thoughts in order about that Wyatt album (sounded good again this morning), plus I'll try and finally get around to doing something on the Jason Isbell solo set, and the terrific Mike Wexler album. I've also been promised the new Julian Cope thing any day now. And I imagine there'll be some more Smashing Pumpkins fun, fingers crossed. Have a good weekend: it's all about Ryan Sidebottom for me.

One last contribution to the Smashing Pumpkins war, which I promise I won't write about indefinitely. In response to some comments about my review here. "Funny lot the Pumpkins fans, aren;t they?" writes Chads. "Could never understand why people take it so personally when you don't like a band they do." Seeing as he also shows a keenness for the exuberant freak-outs of Raccoo-oo-oon, he might also be interested in the "Psychedelic Phinland" comp with which I'm testing the fantastic new Uncut stereo and the patience of my workmates. "Psychedelic Phinland" is a handy 2CD history of the Finnish psych scene of the late '60s and early '70s - though when I say handy, I'm not sure many of us realised that such a thing would be remotely useful to us. Anyway, the first CD contains interesting if straightforward attempts by a country's bands to appropriate psychedelia, garage rock and prog. CD2 is awesome, though, because it locates a bunch of electronic avant-garde types like Pekka Airaksinen and, better still, some very free and lovely nature jams involving recorders, children and, frequently, a terrific band called Those Lovely Hula Hands. Finnish bands, amazingly, are still carrying on this very far-out tradition - check out Avarus at their Myspace for stuff in a very similar tradition. Finally, the new Robert Wyatt album, "Comicopera", turned up today and sounded great on first listen. No radical change of style, though maybe a bit more trumpet, some Cuban-influenced stuff, a voice that's become fractionally deeper with age. I'll write a lot more about this one after a few more listens. Bear with me.

A brief dispatch, since I'm fending off hordes of enraged Smashing Pumpkins fans, some of them Argentinian. My crimes are many, but involve bad grammar, liking Zwan and, OK, disrespecting the the untouchable genius of Billy Corgan. Obviously, I don't want to get in a pissing war about "Zeitgeist", and it seems churlish to mention again here that I actually rather like the record. But I must admit this comment riled me, from Hyperstar: "NME and its by-products always put a guy that hates a band to comment on their album so he/she can rip it to shreds in disregards of us the fans." Well, Uncut isn't a by-product of NME, it's a magazine that occupies the office next door. Neither magazine wastes much space on slagging off bands, and this blog is specifically about records I like. But Hyperstar is right in one respect: I'm not a fan of the Smashing Pumpkins, but then I like too much music to be that kind of obsessive fan of any one band. Anyway, here's a report by our corporate chums about the Smashing Pumpkins' live show in Paris last night. Looks like it was very good, and very long. In more tranquil news, I had a chat to Robert Forster on the phone yesterday, mainly about the forthcoming "Intermission" comp that collects the work he and Grant McLennan did solo when The Go-Betweens went on hiatus in the '90s. Forster told me that he's now working as a journalist in Australia, and so I had a mooch about online and found this interesting piece by him on Bob Dylan's "Modern Times". This point is especially provocative, I think: "A typical Dylan-produced song, in the studio or on stage, consists of all the musicians starting together, playing together and finishing when Dylan gives them the nod. No one sits out. No one comes in just for a chorus. It’s all pretty flat, and that’s fine when the songs are top-notch and we listen to Bob sing. But as soon as they slip – as they surprisingly do on much of this album – you realise that someone else is needed to push Dylan on his material and the way it might sound." I don't quite agree - I'd rather Dylan never went near Daniel Lanois again, for a start - but I do know what he means.

It may not be the most wholly misunderstood album since Bob Dylan's Planet Waves, but as John pointed out in his Wild Mercury Sound blog yesterday, Wilco's new Sky Blue Sky has split their traditionally loyal critical fanbase. Planet Waves was famously dismissed on release - like New Morning - as a largely vapid celebration of Dylan's Woodstock domesticity, Bob on the old homestead with the missus, bringing up the kids. Which, when you think about it, is a baffling response to an album with songs as terrifyingly dark as "Dirge" and "Wedding Song". Blue Sky Blue has been seen by some of its critics as a retreat from Wilco's recent sonic experiments, much as Dylan after John Wesley Harding was thought at the time to have abandoned the reckless creativity of Blonde On Blonde and Highway 61 Revisited. It's true Sky Blue Sky sounds more conservative on initial listenings than A Ghost Is Born or Yankee Hotel Foxtrot- and in places sounds passably like '70s country rock, impeccably played but not quite as earth-shattering as you might have wanted. This all all camouflage. Listen more closely and the emotional restlessness of Tweedy's songwriting is amply present, as is the musical invention that ran through the previous couple of albums. As John pointed out, the new songs fit brilliantly alongside the more familiar highlights and Monday's show at Shepherd's Bush Empire was every bit as good as the Sunday night John wrote about yesterday. I may take issue with Jeff Tweedy's truculent opinions on Babyshambles and whether it is acceptable at a certain age to be listening to them and singing the praises of the delinquent Doherty, but I've no arguement with him as a songwriter and performer and this was probably the best I've ever seen Wilco. There was no sign of Bill Fay, however. You might have thought that after appearing on stage for the first time 30 years, his brief cameo with Tweedy on the Sunday night would have given him a taste for the limelight. Sadly, he couldn't make it. He was visiting his brother in Dorset, Tweedy told us, sounding slightly baffled. It was the only disappointment of a blindingly good gig. Don't miss them when they come back to play at the Latitude festival in July.