As some of you have probably deduced, I’ve had a copy of Bill Callahan’s excellent “Apocalypse” for a couple of months or so now. It’s a lovely perk of the job, getting an album like this so early, compromised a little by Drag City insisting I didn’t mention its existence on the blog for what seemed like an age. To be honest, negotiations about when I could or couldn’t write about “Apocalypse” became so complicated that I ended up forgetting to blog about it at all. I was reminded yesterday, though, when I noticed that Michael had posted Graeme Thomson’s Uncut review of “Apocalypse” on the website. Given Graeme’s thorough job, I’m not going to spend too much time here. “Apocalypse” is presented by Callahan, gnomically of course, as a kind of concept album, though musically it feels less tightly defined than 2009’s wonderful “Sometimes I Wish We Were An Eagle”. Unlike the scattershot “Woke On A Whaleheart”, though, it still finds Callahan playing to his mature strengths: “Riding For The Feeling” and “One Fine Morning” have the rueful, elegaic, understated grandeur of songs from “A River Ain’t Too Much To Love”, which I increasingly suspect might be my favourite Callahan/Smog record. Elsewhere, the opening “Drover” expands on the trick of producing widescreen imagery with subtly deployed tools; a touch of Scarlet Rivera-ish fiddle makes me think of Rolling Thunder, too, while the jazz flute on “Free’s” points up the playfulness and lightness of touch which preconceptions about Callahan’s lugubriousness - or worse - can sometimes obscure. Graeme writes plenty and wisely about “America!”, which I initially thought may be kin to “Natural Decline” from “Rain On Lens”, though I’m now wondering whether it might be closer to something on “Dongs Of Sevotion”. Anyhow; edgier and harsher than most else here, it still fits into “Apocalypse”, which generally showcases a real master with a complete confidence in his vision. There’s an eye for detail, too – the ravishing cover, the sung catalogue number at close (a schtick that reminds me distantly of Marvin Gaye reciting the credits at the end of “Midnight Love”) – which betrays a loving, craftsmanlike aesthetic. Undermining, again, the chill Callahan stereotype. Great record.

I believe this new album by Metronomy, “The English Riviera”, may well be out today, which means I’m pretty late at getting round to it. Truth be told, I didn’t pick it up for a while; not having hugely positive, or even particularly clear, memories of their previous records. “The English Riviera”, though, is actually pretty lovely. It’s achingly self-conscious in that rarely appealing British indie/electropop way, for sure, but here Joseph Mount and his band seem to have hit on a nicely-crafted concept, of sorts. “The English Riviera” refers to Mount’s West Country homeland (Torbay and so on, I think), and seeks to invoke it while at the same time drawing on the blue skies and rich ironies of ‘70s Californian rock. As a consequence, the press release talks some about Fleetwood Mac and The Eagles, which is stretching it a bit, and also Steely Dan, which makes more sense in the sunny, anal precision of it all, albeit a very Anglicised, prissy, synthesised reboot of Steely Dan. Perhaps this doesn’t sound that appealing. Better to see “The English Riviera”, perhaps, as an English equivalent to some of Phoenix’s earlier records; as a rather fey, indie, surprisingly successful channelling of those lush West Coast vibes. Once the opening seagulls and waves have passed, Mount sets off on a run of hugely engaging little songs. “We Broke Free” has that tentative rush familiar from Phoenix’s early records in particular, while “Everything Goes My Way”, co-fronted by drummer Anna Prior, is a fragile and lovely duet, that works as a kind of dappled correlative to the xx album. Best of all, there’s “The Look”, surfing in on a wave of seaside organ and initially sounding like a coda to “Everything Goes My Way”, before locking into a sort of genteel re-imagining of a techno build, which climaxes with an ecstatic solo on something which might just be a keytar. By this point, the slightly dreamy mood is established, which rolls on in an entirely likeable way for the rest of the record. There are odd little touches, mostly pleasant: “She Wants”, for instance, is the track that draws more or less inevitably on the ‘80s most prominently, but has the good grace to base its sound – in the verses, at least – on Japan circa “Gentlemen Take Polaroids”, or maybe “Quiet Life”. “The Bay”, meanwhile, is another gushing flashback to Phoenix, perhaps specifically to my favourite of their albums, “Alphabetical”. That record is one I routinely turn to when the sun comes out, and I get the feeling that “The English Riviera” might work in much the same way. Suspect it’s going to be pretty ubiquitous, insidiously, too: if you’ve spent the last 18 months cueing up tracks from the xx album to soundtrack every other trailer, ad, TV scene and so on, now might be the time to move on…

Apologies for not posting much new stuff over the past few days; we’ve been wrapping up the next issue of Uncut. One thing I have written, though, is this piece about, sort of, Raphael Saadiq, which was destined to be my Wild Mercury Sound column in the mag until various advertising movements rendered it, perhaps fortunately, surplus to requirements. A pretty convoluted path to “Stone Rollin’”, but just about worth posting, I think… A strange month, this one, considering that the most forward-thinking music I played turned out to be nearly two decades old. "EPs 1991-2002" by Autechre packs five CDs of synapse-knotting electronica into an austere grey box that could be passed off as a 2001 monolith. Countless moonlighting physicists may have subsequently had a go at replicating Autechre’s granular processes, but much of "EPs 1991-2002" still sounds fiendishly, uncompromisingly alien. In contrast, a lot of new electronic releases feel comfortingly familiar, envisioning the future in a very old-fashioned way. There have been plenty of recommendations in this column over the past year or so for music indebted to the throbbing ‘70s ambience of Cluster, Tangerine Dream, Manuel Gottsching and so on. This month, it feels as if the kosmische revival has reached some kind of critical mass, with decent to excellent releases from Mountains, Rene Hell, Roll The Dice, Mark McGuire, Mist, Forma and Hatchback, plus a bunch of things in the same zone that I haven’t checked out yet. Science-fiction nostalgia, it seems, is the default setting for a good few avant-garde musicians at the moment. It’d be churlish of me to complain about this, of course. A neurotic pursuit of the new hardly guarantees great records, and I’d struggle to hold down a job at Uncut if I only wrote about musicians who actively strived to distance themselves from the possibilities offered by history and tradition. Nevertheless, plenty of people would argue that the past, ultimately, might prove to be an evolutionary dead end. It’s a criticism which has been fired at Raphael Saadiq frequently over the years, and one which I must admit I’ve used myself against a bunch of his backwards-looking soul contemporaries like Eli ‘Paperboy’ Reed, Aloe Blacc and Sharon Jones. Evidently, and not a little hypocritically, I must prefer retro-futurism to mere revivalism. Saadiq is not an obvious fit for a column that purports to focus on underground music: he was first seen in the multi-million-selling ‘80s R&B group, Tony! Toni! Toné!, and was recently spotted playing a Solomon Burke song at the Grammys alongside Mick Jagger. I last saw him onstage in London a few years back, sheepishly leading the band behind a mentally disintegrating Joss Stone. To be honest, I’ve sketchy coherent argument for including Saadiq here – I guess one or two tracks on his new album, Stone Rollin’, have a notionally psychedelic shimmer – or for privileging him over those aforementioned soul revivalists. Other than to say that "Stone Rollin’" is tremendous. Saadiq’s recent solo records have positioned him as a kind of vigorous archivist, assiduously referencing vintage, sharp-suited soul in his impeccable new songs, climaxing with 2008’s terrific and Motown-rich "The Way I See It". "Stone Rollin’" doesn’t exactly find Saadiq abandoning this remit, but he does spread the net a little wider to draw conscious inspiration from Sly Stone, Curtis Mayfield, “What’s Goin’ On”, The Temptations and southern soul (the burnished slouch of “Good Man” would work pretty nicely as a soundbed for a Ghostface Killah rap). Saadiq plays most everything on the album, but this time he pushes his guitar to the fore, so that a few frenetically twanging tracks (chiefly “Radio”, oddly redolent of The Surfaris’ “Wipeout”) also suggest he’s taken to studying The White Stripes as much as Stevie Wonder. Perhaps he’s re-imagining the past rather than creating a pastiche of it? Or perhaps I’m just struggling to explain why "Stone Rollin’" is such an uncomplicated pleasure, derivative or otherwise?