Neon

Full line-ups for this year's festival main stages has leaked!

The playlist comes a bit earlier than usual this week, since we've been finishing the next issue today, and I haven't had a chance to write a proper preview. You probably should know, though, that the new Fall album on first listen appears to include, besides the usual murky paranoia, a faintly jazzy song about crows (and possibly "J-Loaded Brown", though we could have misheard that) called "Alton Towers".

The stars put aside their troubles to perform at ceremony

A welcome return to the playlist this week for Howlin' Rain, whose "Magnificent Fiend" has finally got a UK release date in April. I know I've been promising to blog on this for over six months, but I'll get there in the next few days; it still sounds great, fortunately.

After all the mature, relatively sedate stuff I’ve been writing about recently like Roedelius and the Imaginational Anthems “Primitive American Guitar” comp, something a bit livelier today.

A couple of things that have been hanging around for a few weeks now, and deserve some love here. One is “Rosemarie”, the debut album by an authentically fragrant Cornish band of Pre-Raphaelite damsels and dazed troubadours called Thistletown. Give me any excuse, and I’ll go into a comically apoplectic rant about the uselessness of most contemporary British bands who style themselves as acid-folk.

An office playlist today, since I've been putting the finishing touches to the next issue of Uncut and writing another - more coherent, hopefully - review of Led Zeppelin for the mag. John Robinson, our Reviews Ed, has mainly been at the controls this afternoon, running through a few new releases and currently dusting down The Beastie Boys' "Check Your Head", which is fine by me. Neon Neon, incidentally, is yet another new album from Gruff Rhys, this time a synthpop/hip hop/R&B concept album about John DeLorean, in collaboration with Boom Bip, a kind of substitute Danger Mouse. Sounds pretty good, anyway.

6 days to go and there’s a whole lotta crazy Zep stuff on offer online

The band kick off Ally Pally treble with tributes to The Smiths and New Order too

The new Cat Power album just arrived - or at least a stream of it arrived onto my computer - so that's playing as I write this morning. Sounds pretty good, with a remarkable version of "New York New York" to kick things off, but I'll blog about it properly in the next few days.