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. But a big favourite these past couple of weeks has been "The Radiant Mirror", a giant cosmic freak-out by the duo of Chris Corsano and Mick Flower. Those who keep an eye on the psychedelic underground scene documented on Uncut's "Comets, Ghosts And Sunburned Hands" comp from last December may have come across Corsano before. He's a hyperactive, intuitive drummer who emerged from the sprawling Sunburned Hand Of The Man collective, and has played on a lot of free jazz, folk and psych stuff with the likes of Thurston Moore and Six Organs Of Admittance. Mick Flower, meanwhile, is a member of the shadowy Vibracathedral Orchestra, who come from Leeds and who make wild, levitating drones in the style of Sunburned, Jackie-O-Motherfucker. That kind of thing. I first saw them years ago supporting Steve Malkmus and didn't know what hit me. Anyway, "The Radiant Mirror" (on a little French label called Textile) is their first album together, and it's a monster. Three vast tracks ("Earth", "Wind" and "Fire") featuring Corsano clambering spiritedly over his kit and Flower cranking up a shahi baaja - which, the press-release informs me, is a "Japanese electric dulcimer/autoharp". One one level, it's a pretty free racket, fuzzed-out and heavily improvised with heavy echoes of '60s jazz radicals like Sonny Sharrock. But at the same time, there's something about this one that makes it accessible to a bigger audience than pure improv fans. It's a quality, maybe, that's inherent in the shahi-baaja's temple drone being played with such aggression, while Corsano's clatter is always dynamic rather than meandering. Basically, "The Radiant Mirror" is kind of meditative, but totally rocks.

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. Nevertheless, a bit of this new song, "Love Bomb", really rings true. Cave is talking, I think, about the struggle for inspiration. He wants to make a noisy record that sounds debauched, irresponsible and unhinged, but he's not really debauched and irresponsible any more. What does he write about? The answer, it seems, is Radio 4. "Love Bomb" is a great clanging freak-out, and Cave sounds vigorously mad on it. But he's singing, "I’ve been listening to Woman's Hour, I've been listening to Gardeners’ Question Time." Cave is a seasoned connoisseur of the perverse, for sure, but it seems even he can't bring himself to listen to You & Yours. Anyway, this is one of the things that makes Cave's new project, Grinderman, so enjoyable. Grinderman is essentially an excuse for Cave and three more Bad Seeds - Warren Ellis, Jim Sclavunos and Martyn Casey - to grow beards, dump the stately dignity of recent albums and make a nasty old garage band racket. They sound like they're having a fantastic time on these buzzing, unpleasant blues grooves, wired back into the Australian punk scene of the late '70s and early '80s, returning to The Stooges for malign inspiration - only with a fuzzed -out electric bouzouki to the fore. But Cave is too self-aware an operator to pretend to be a delinquent junkie these days. To a greater degree than Iggy on the Stooges' comeback, he knows that what was once adolescent misanthropy is now likely to come across as the ravings of a grumpy old man. So, cleverly, he revels in the role: driven to distraction by women, the exigencies of the modern world, and the dearth of good comedies on Radio 4 in the early evening. Oh, and bad men who drink "panther piss", obviously. Enjoy at Grinderman's Myspace.

Thanks to everyone who wrote in to identify the clip of Dylan playing “Mr Tambourine Man” that I posted. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3O-8P2IxSyc

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. I'm something of a veteran of Chan Marshall's eccentric live shows. I remember the first time she played in London, when she prepared for going onstage by crawling into the venue's DJ booth and curling up under the decks for 45 minutes. I remember shows where she could barely finish a song, and another where her stagefright became so profound, she ordered the stage lights to be switched off and the house lights to be switched on. Still, though, like so many others, I've kept going back for more. I've been prepared to put up with 90 minutes of stumbling, giggling, often excruciating behaviour because there's always a few moments when it all falls together, and those frail and gorgeous songs emerge intact. In those rare moments, Marshall has always been an authentically great performer. But notwithstanding her improved recent showings with the Memphis Rhythm Band, I'd still never gamble on her playing to order. The Chanel show proves otherwise. While the models work the floor, Marshall and her new band are behind the crowd, providing a sleek and bluesy soundtrack. It takes quite some discipline to play to order like this. But away from the spotlight, Marshall seems liberated and imperious. Plenty of people have mythologised her onstage breakdowns as somehow validating the 'realness' of her art. This show, though, illustrates that she doesn't have to be a wreck to be charismatic. The new band are called The Dirty Delta Blues: a rotten name predicated on the impressive CVs of core members Jim White (drums, The Dirty Three), Greg Foreman (organ, The Delta 72) and Judah Bauer (guitar, Blues Explosion). They take Marshall's rolling, open-ended approach to song and give it new clout, so that versions of Moby Grape's ace "Naked If I Want To", "Satisfaction" and "Tracks Of My Tears" - propelled by Foreman's Booker T-ish Hammond - sound like they could go on forever. Or at least until the models stop moving. Oh, the address. Go to here, then click on SPRING-SUMMER 2007 HAUTE COUTURE. Next, click on VIDEOS in the bottom right-hand corner, then click on the video of the SHOW. There's a bit more in the Karl Lagerfeld interview, after Lagerfeld (a surprisingly tasteful man, though you wouldn't know from what he's wearing) raves about Cat Power for a bit. There's a very good mix CD he put out the other month, where he reveals himself to be Black Mountain's unlikeliest fan. Weird, but great.