A little over a month into 2012 and great new albums seem to be a-popping up all over the shop, something arriving in the post every day almost that either thrills or beguiles, demanding our attention and more often than not handsomely rewarding it. Leonard Cohen’s Old Ideas was rightly applauded in last month's Uncut, and in the current issue similar praise is lavished on Lambchop’s Mr M, which reminds us why we have loved them for so long and also what it was in the first place that got us so excited about Kurt Wagner’s Nashville country-soul collective. When I see something referred to as a ‘return to form’, I usually can’t control an impulse to wince uncomfortably. But Mr M is quietly glorious in the ways Nixon was, and in all its most endearing respects is quite the best thing Wagner’s done since that earlier career peak. There are also four star reviews in the issue for Mark Lanegan’s impressive Blues Funeral, and the new album from a less familiar name - Anais Mitchell, whose brilliant Young Man In America, the follow-up to 2010’s Hadestown, is located in a mythical American landscape comparable to the allegorical frontiers of Dylan’s John Wesley Harding, with added fiddles and mandolins. I’ve already written about the new Simone Felice album, due out next month, and Craig Finn’s first solo album, Clear Heart Full Eyes has turned out to be a slow-burning treasure, his temporary break from The Hold Steady clearly a liberating influence on his song-writing. Elsewhere, I’ve been enjoying notable debut albums from Beth Jeans Houghton and Django Django, First Aid Kit’s The Lion’s Roar, Andrew Bird’s Break It Yourself, and I’m kicking myself for only just catching up with Sharon Van Etten’s Tramp, a tardy response to a terrific record. I have John’s Wild Mercury Blog to thank for alerting me to one of my current favourite records – Elephant Micah’s Louder Than Thou, a record that had been recommended to John by MC Taylor of Hiss Golden Messenger. Taylor apparently found comparisons between Louder Than Thou and the John Martyn of Inside Out and Richard & Linda Thompson. John heard something of Will Oldham on the album, which also reminded me in parts of Neil Young – a hint here of Harvest, a glowering suggestion there of On The Beach. Another small gem that reached me last week was the debut album by another unfamiliar name, the eponymous debut of Sweet Lights. Turns out Sweet Lights is Shai Halperin [pictured], who played guitar alongside Kurt Vile and Adam Granduciel in an early line-up of The War On Drugs – “a brief Clapton/Page/Beck-like period” in that band’s history, as the press release I was sent subsequently amusingly puts it. The Sweet Lights album has probably more things in common with Kurt Vile’s Smoke Rings For My Halo than War On Drugs’ Wagonwheel Blues or Slave Ambient, and among its several stand-out tracks I currently can’t stop playing the hazily beautiful “Ballad Of Kurt Vile #2” with its sparkling layers of guitars and wispy vocal. The album’s released by Highline Records on April 30, but you can hear some music now if you go to sweetlights.tumblr, where you should find covers of Sharron Van Etten’s “One Day” and The Traveling Wilburys “Handle With Care”. Anyway, the clock’s ticking and I have to vamoose. Have a good week.

A strange night at St Giles-In-The-Fields with Tim Hecker, which turned out to be something more like a real-time sound installation rather than a concert. This, I guess, is not a new problem with organ recitals: Hecker is sat in the organ loft, playing the church’s venerable instrument while the audience sit below, with their backs to him, in complete darkness, looking at the altar, and the silhouettes of two large speaker stacks. To many who’ve enjoyed Hecker’s last album, “Ravedeath 1972” (and indeed fair chunks of his back catalogue), this must seem like a pretty appealing conceit. “Ravedeath 1972”, which he plays here more or less straight, is at once gaseous and magisterial, with a sepulchral gravity that its fundaments – as music played on a church organ, then manipulated through various computer patches and effects pedals – only emphasise. To sit silently in a church and absorb the totality of this music seems only logical. It is, undeniably, impressive. Hecker’s reverberant music is often described as ambient, or at least quasi-ambient, but here it’s amped up to a serious volume. Sat as I am next to a pulpit once preached in by Wesley, however, the immensity of the noise turns out to be a little distracting rather than immersive. I start thinking about the nature of ambient music, about how volume and environment impact upon the music just as much as the music impacts upon its environment. And about how ambient music, when it’s turned up really high, also has the potential to sound rather industrial; that a casual flick of the knob, without altering the actual nature of the music, can so profoundly lessen my engagement with it. Even though the mix is clear, it seems to me that loudness, at least in this case, somehow obscures the subtleties of some of Hecker’s music: that while, as with the obvious antecedent of My Bloody Valentine, the secret harmonies which emerge are beautiful of themselves, the essence of this music is at times obliterated by the forcefulness of the delivery. Perhaps it defeats the object of “Ravedeath”, but it would’ve been nice to get a sense of the air moving through the organ pipes, say, before all the billowing fx take over. As it is, the biggest difference from the recorded version of the album is more frictional interference from the bank of effects pedals, adding a frisson of the spontaneous to something which otherwise could’ve been an unusually grandiose playback. But the feel of improvisation, the unexpected that you can find at a show by a comparable artist like Christian Fennesz, say, wasn’t so palpable. As an event, it was quite something; as a concert, I think I left impressed, but maybe a little disappointed, too. Anyone else there? Follow me on Twitter: www.twitter.com/JohnRMulvey

For the past couple of years, I’ve been writing a Wild Mercury Sound column in the print edition of Uncut; a slightly awkward thing that I’m genuinely happy to be done with. I should say that the same kind of music will continue to be featured in the mag, starting next month with a piece about the Jamaican adventures of Sun Araw, who ended up recording with the venerable vocal group The Congos. This, though, is my last column, archived here for dubious posterity. A couple of new records seem to provide a rather serendipitous conclusion to Wild Mercury Sound in Uncut, not least because they reiterate a persistent theme round these parts: an idea of traditional American music being deployed and expanded in adventurous new ways. The patron saint of this scene, and a recurring touchstone in this column, has been the late guitarist Jack Rose, and Steve Gunn and Chris Forsyth were two guitarisrs who first came to my attention on a massive tribute project to Rose called “Honest Strings”. Unlike many of Rose’s fellow travellers, Gunn and Forsyth focus on electric more than acoustic guitars, with pretty fierce results on two new duo records they’re involved with. “Ocean Parkway” (Three-Lobed Recordings) is the second album Gunn has made with the drummer John Truscinski, following up 2010’s fine “Sand City”. Gunn plays a kind of charged, smudged folk-blues, losing himself in serpentine ragas that nevertheless keep up a rollicking momentum. Truscinski, meanwhile, is one of those freestyling drummers, like Chris Corsano, with a restless jazz invention and a habit of suddenly forcing the music to surge violently forward. The combination makes for a thrillingly unstable listen akin to Sandy Bull and Billy Higgins’ ‘60s jams, and one that recently left me, on a bumpy bus ride, a little seasick as well as exhilarated. Chris Forsyth’s “New Pharmacist Boogie” appeared on our Creedence tribute CD last month, showcasing the sort of downhome elaborations that graced his “Paranoid Cat” album last year. “Early Astral”, though, is a hook-up with Koen Holtkamp, one half of the mostly electronic improvising unit, Mountains, whose music normally skews towards the atmospheric, even the ambient. “Early Astral”, then, seems to be the perfect place to close this column. It features a meditative folk guitarist sliding into heavier and more psychedelic territory, while a technician/aesthete piles on the loops, drones, deep space interference and generally levitational kosmische vibes. It features just two tracks, each 17 minutes long. And, of course, it is only available as a download or as a heinously limited edition vinyl record (on the Blackest Rainbow label, that's the sleeve pictured above): strongly recommended. Follow me on Twitter: www.twitter.com/JohnRMulvey