I'm not sure what kind of symmetry this represents, but Richard Swift's new album begins with the sound of tapdancing and nears a close with him crooning, rather sweetly, "I wish I were dead most of the time." "Dressed Up For The Letdown" is Swift's third album, and is a concept album of sorts. It's about a singer-songwriter - let's call him Richard Swift - who struggles for years without success, cursing the ignorance of the labels who refuse to sign him.

I worry, occasionally, that this blog has started to give the impression we spend our days at Uncut listening to nothing but serious, respectable artists with a good decade or two of critical acclaim under their belts. Of course, we do listen to Cave, and Bowie, and Neil Young, and Cat Power, and a hell of a lot of Grateful Dead at the moment. You might not believe this, but Allan even digs out a dusty Dylan CD from time to time.

Looking for facts in Nick Cave lyrics is a bit of a dumb game. If you were to take everything he's said at face value, he'd have been dead long ago: hanged for murder, perhaps, at some point in the 19th Century.

It's not often, I must admit, that I have a reason to visit Chanel's website. But there's a great video on there at the moment that amounts to an unveiling of Cat Power's new live line-up. It's quite a shock.

Hard to know what to play this morning. My ears are still ringing from a massive night in the company of The Hold Steady, who played an astonishing gig in a Hoxton bar. As I left, Allan was deep in conversation with their singer, Craig Finn. I'm sure he'll be writing something on his blog about it later. In the meantime, I've found a new David Bowie comp called "The Best Of Bowie 1980/1987" in this morning's post and, perhaps out of wilful perversity, I'm playing it now.

Faintly astonishing news the other day, when it emerged that the new Bloc Party album had entered the American charts at Number 12. I'm personally a bit underwhelmed by that record - Jacknife Lee's production is really bloated and distracting, I think - but it's interesting that arty-ish indie-rock now has serious commercial clout in the States.

If you're American, brandish an acoustic guitar and look a bit feral, chances are your publicist will flog you as a close personal chum of Devendra Banhart.

I've never really had the patience to collect bootlegs, so I'd never heard Neil Young's "Live At Massey Hall", 1971 until the official version turned up the other day.

Looking back over the past month and a bit, I think the two records I've played most in the Uncut office have been a new Grateful Dead live set from 1976, and the forthcoming second album from New York's LCD Soundsystem. Not sure what this says about my taste or my state of mind.

There's a great, contentious review in the next issue of Uncut by Peter Shapiro. Addressing the expanded reissues of their first seven albums, Peter asserts, "Sly & the Family Stone were the quintessential artists of the 1960s - the only ones who actually put the rhetoric of ‘60s idealism into practice"