Animal collective

One of those professional obligation sessions in the Uncut office right now: we’re on Track Eight of the Panic At The Disco album, “Pretty. Odd”. Interest piqued by some frothing and slightly dubious suggestions that “Pretty. Odd” is a landmark of WEIRD! and AMBITIOUS! rock music, imagine our surprise when it seems to sound a bit like The Feeling and those shabby Beatles pastiches that Tears For Fears came up with in the ‘80s. We do, however, have new records by Paul Weller, Peter Walker and James Blackshaw.

A load of new stuff again this week, much of it pretty interesting. The Brethren Of The Free Spirit, incidentally, are a duo featuring the guitarist James Blackshaw, who's received much love here over the past year.

With the Texan flag pinned proudly to their stage amp, post-grunge instrumental four-piece Explosions In The Sky played a solid hour-long set to a rammed London Astoria, to finish up their long delayed UK tour last night...

Kraftwerk, Spiritualized, The Verve and The Raconteurs join him at California festival

As I get older, I find it harder and harder to do these charts - maybe because there are so many records I like, it seems churlish to organise them so crudely. Nevertheless, it's fun having a go - as, hopefully, you're discovering with our Best Of 2007 supplement with the new issue, and the Rate the albums of the year thing on www.uncut.co.uk. I'll try and post my favourite reissues and comps later, but please let me know your picks, too.

We just had one of those weirdly serendipitous moments on the stereo, accidentally finding affinities, as you don't, between Kanye West and Jackie O Motherfucker.

One record that’s definitely been growing on me this past couple of weeks is the debut by a Brooklyn band called Yeasayer. At first, “All Hour Cymbals” seemed to be a nice but generic close relative to the TV On The Radio albums – insofar as anything that mixes tribal thump, dreampop textures and barbershop harmonies could be referred to as generic, of course.

Dylan, Babyshambles, Carbon/Silicon + Releases round-up

There are times when I receive a reissue of a record that I've never heard of, and begin to wonder whether some massive and elaborate hoax is being perpetrated. I had that feeling about 45 minutes ago, when I put on "Iron Curtain Innocence" by Bobb Trimble for the first time.

I haven't done one of these playlists for a week or so, and there are plenty of interesting things that have arrived here in the interim. So these are the records that have put us off work on the next issue thus far today. I'll be writing about a few of them over the next few days, apart from one which sounded pretty dull and which I won't mention here to try and retain the, y'know, positive vibes. . .