Features

More 2010 goodness this week, kicking off with the fierce new jams from Voice Of The Seven Woods, newly renamed. A glut of stoner spacerock here, actually, with the new White Hills album and a real find, Carlton Melton (thanks, Simon), who record in a geodesic dome in Mendocino County.

Find out what we think the greatest records of the Noughties are here

We count down from 100 to 51...

We count down from 150 to 101...see our choices here

A note on last week’s playlist from Nick, praising the new Cluster album in the face of what he descibes as “kosmische-light” (lite? leit?). Quite tempted, actually, to use that as part of some self-sabotaging branding project. Wild Mercury Sound: Hyping Kosmische-Lite Since 2007.

When writing about The Necks, it’s easy to end up with more of a timetable than a review. Their pieces traditionally last for around an hour (“Silverwater” stretches to 67 minutes), and are slowly evolving improvisations where the Australian instrumental trio intuitively manoeuvre round each other, subtly adjusting their themes as they go.

As you might have seen by now, Animal Collective’s “Merriweather Post Pavilion” has done rather well in Uncut’s Best Of 2009 poll. “MPP” came out in early January, and a continuously active year has now climaxed with a reissue for “Campfire Songs” and this, “Fall Be Kind”, a fairly extraordinary new EP.

After a slight lull last week, another clutch of good new 2010 things here, overshadowed slightly by the news at the Durtro website that Bill Fay’s new album – and featuring his first released recordings from the past three decades, more or less – is just about ready to go.

The new issue of Uncut should be out any day now, featuring our thoroughly extensive Best Of 2009 coverage: the Top 50 albums of the year, best reissues, best comps/boxsets, films, DVDs, books and so on.

Joe Pug? No, I hadn’t heard of him either, before he opened tonight for The Low Anthem. Count me as a fan now, though. Pug’s a potentially major song-writing talent, as evidenced on his Nation Of Heat EP, available online and really quite brilliant. But who exactly is he?