Features

It may be a stretch to call Joanna Newsom’s third album her down-to-earth pop record. "Have One On Me" does, after all, extend across three CDs of generally very long songs, features a harp duelling with a kora, and a dream sequence in which the singer arrives before her lover “on a palanquin made of the many bodies of beautiful women.” On the back of an elephant.

Great start this morning, as I’ve just cracked open the new Prins Thomas album, which seems to carry on right where Lindström & Thomas’ “II” left off. In other goodish news, this long-running dickaround will finally be resolved in the next couple of days. I imagine you’ve all guessed what it is now?

There’s a certain grim obligation, whenever tackling Steve Mason’s music, to harp on about The Beta Band’s first three EPs, and the distinctly spotty work which has followed them in the intervening 13 years. It’s a lot harder, though, to try and explain exactly why that initial clutch of songs are so much better.

Worth mentioning the subtitle of this straight off: “Experimental German Rock And Electronic Musik 1972-83”. “Elektronische Musik” is a 2CD comp that pulls off a fine trick that'll be familiar to those of you who’ve enjoyed other Soul Jazz surveys (not least last year’s amazing “Freedom, Rhythm And Sound” revolutionary jazz comp).

Strange beast, this, since I don’t have details about when and where this new Bill Callahan live album was recorded. Weirdly, the 11 tracks on “Rough Travel For A Rare Thing” don’t include anything from last year’s “Sometimes I Wish We Were An Eagle”, which would suggest that the performances date from between “Woke On A Whaleheart” (“Diamond Dancer” is here) and that exceptional album. But then again, Callahan has long proved he’s much too capricious a performer to make any such obvious assumptions.

Exciting news this week, with the auspicious arrival of three CDs of new music from a big favourite round these parts. Anyone care to hazard a guess who it might be?

A bit of a respite from underground jams today, with a couple of very different takes on folk.

Jack White’s increasingly baroque love of packaging means that it takes more than one review to get to grips with a solitary release. Hence “Under Great White Northern Lights”, a package commemorating The White Stripes’ 2007 tour of Canada which, in its simplest iteration, comes as a live CD and a longform documentary DVD about the ambitious jaunt.

Never personally had much time for Martin Amis’ writing, but I was idling my way through an interview with him in The Guardian the other day, when I came across his predictably splenetic response to The Bookseller’s claim that the new Amis novel, The Pregnant Woman, was a “return to form”.

This is pretty fantastic. A few days ago, Drag City streamed a song from the forthcoming Joanna Newsom album, “Have One On Me”, which I really should’ve flagged up.