Not to stereotype us in any way, but marvellous though Club Uncut is, not much dancing has traditionally gone on there. As a one-stop shop for American songwriters of a certain stripe, we’ve done pretty well. But last night’s show by Fool’s Gold is something else entirely. I raved about the debut album by Fool’s Gold towards the end of last year, a terrific smash-and-grab raid on various African musical styles carried out by a collective of LA scenesters. “Fool’s Gold” sounded like, if the band were up to strength, they could well be a mighty party band. And so it turns out, from the moment their drummer mooches onto the Borderline stage, 15 minutes early, and starts off a rolling break for a minute or two, before he’s joined by his five bandmates. In its own time, the jam crystallises into “Nadine”, when the sax player takes up the song’s smoky, downtown Abbis riff. Like so much Fool’s Gold do, it’s in many ways a facsimile of an old sound – Luke Top’s voice even floats through the mix in a way much like Mahmoud Ahmed. But for much of the gig, Top is singing in Hebrew, and the enthusiastic mixing of traditions feels like a heroic cultural fusion rather than a series of cynical appropriations. I imagine a good few world music stalwarts will regard Fool’s Gold with suspicion, and perhaps a generation notionally turned on to African music by Vampire Weekend might be a little alarmed by what are essentially quite dorky musos stretching out grooves in a way that isn’t particularly indie-friendly. For the rest of us, though, we can marvel at this unstoppable force of a band: at Lewis Pesacov, an exuberant guitarist with a fine selection of Claptonish grimaces, a lot of sweat and hair, and a technique which reminds me very much of going to see Zimbabwean bands like The Four Brothers back in the ‘80s. There’s a drummer, a percussionist, a sax player who does the work of an entire horn section, a keyboardist/guitarist, Pesacov, Top, and a whole load of percussion instruments that get passed around the stage with something approaching abandon. At times, you get the impression that these men could play pretty much anything – and that at some point, in doubtless complex past lives, they may well have done (Is this drummer the guy who played with The Fall, or the one who was in We Are Scientists?). Tonight, though, they turn their hand to desert blues (“Ha Dvash”), rearing gallops (“Night Dancing”) and, mostly, ecstatic township jives that work the audience – and, clearly, themselves – into a frenzy. Finally, they play “The World Is All There Is”, which turns into a beery audience singalong of wordless harmonies. Fool’s Gold troop off in single file, playing their drums into the dressing room, but the singing continues for minutes more, until they return and jam with the crowd on the dancefloor. There is much hugging, a saxophone brandished aloft, a mass sit down and, eventually, another song, until the band take a final collective bow – as if they’ve just headlined the O2 – and work out how to stop playing. You don’t, it’s fair to say, get this sort of thing with Arbouretum.

At times, sifting through a modern record collection, it can feel as if all roads lead eventually to Josh Homme. Entryist indie bands like the Arctic Monkeys employ him to help them pack extra rock muscle. Establishment figures of various generations – Dave Grohl and John Paul Jones, say, in Them Crooked Vultures – form bands with him, and end up being overwhelmed by his musical aesthetic. A historically difficult marginwalker like Mark Lanegan can be reinvented, through Homme’s intercessions, as a maverick voice-for-hire. Side projects, extended families, hairy myths proliferate. Homme’s rock ubiquity in 2010 would be remarkable even if his trademark sound was less distinctive; a blocky, progressive crunch which draws on Neu! and Devo as much as Black Sabbath and Led Zeppelin. Ten years ago, however, many perceived Homme as one more Californian desert boy on the enjoyably parochial stoner rock scene. Homme, of course, had helped to define that scene in the ‘90s as part of Kyuss, before the band disbanded and he marked time as an auxiliary guitarist with the Screaming Trees. The first, self-titled Queens Of The Stone Age album, a mix of psychedelic heavy rock and motorik rhythms, had been released in 1998, to only subcultural acclaim. Homme, though, possessed hitherto disguised levels of ambition and resolve. In one of many subsequent Queens reshuffles, he brought in his old Kyuss bassist, an orc-like berserker called Nick Oliveri, scored a deal with Interscope, and began to reconfigure his music for the mainstream. On its release in 2000, Rated R was already being fussed over in NME as “The best, most important rock album for years.” It did not, though, make Queens Of The Stone Age into the biggest band in America, as many had anticipated. Homme’s influence, it transpired, would be more covert and insidious: as the stern dictator of a musical cohort which everyone from PJ Harvey to ZZ Top would want to be associated with. The work of a man who talked a lot about guilt-free excess, Rated R still comes across as incredibly disciplined. From the opening student boast of “Nicotine valium vicodin marijuana ecstacy and alcohol… Co-co-co-co-co-cocaine,” delivered in such an absurdly authoritarian tone, there’s a sense of hedonism and sleaze given a new, military imperative. Often on Rated R – and throughout his subsequent career – Homme sounds, in the best possible way, like a control freak. There’s an almost mathematical precision to the freak-outs like “Better Living Through Chemistry”. “The Lost Art Of Keeping A Secret” has the kind of groovy insouciance that’s usually reached by rigorous drilling. Even the ‘free jazz’ blowing at the end of “I Think I Lost My Headache” – clearly designed to produce one – is methodically orchestrated. Two songs from Oliveri, “Tension Head” and “Quick And To The Pointless”, are comparatively unhinged, gleeful punk tantrums played out at Motorhead speed. Even these, though, feel calculated; as if General Homme letting his sidekick go crazy was an integral – and ultimately proscribed - part of the grand design. As, no doubt, is the ongoing evolution of the live Queens. Judging by the Reading Festival show that features on CD2, the 2000 lineup was fractionally more ragged than those which followed: perhaps significantly, three linear, Tarmac-pounding jams from the debut (“Avon”, “Regular John” and “You Can’t Quit Me, Baby”) stand out. There are no unreleased tracks on this ‘deluxe’ reissue; two discs seem relatively parsimonious in the face of, say, the imminent 5CD expansion of Station To Station. A clutch of b-sides, though, flaunt rather iconoclastic influences for a hard rock band – covers of The Kinks and San Franciscan new wavers Romeo Void – and, in “You’re So Vague”, there’s a glimpse of the blasted, melodramatic terrain that Homme would visit, two years later, on the next and best Queens album, Songs For The Deaf. Rated R, meanwhile, sounds oddly like a pop record nowadays, notwithstanding its finely-tooled clanks, Lanegan and Rob Halford cameos and Oliveri screams. With hindsight it’s easy – perhaps too easy – to see Homme’s career as a series of fiendish manoeuvres. As part of that masterplan, Rated R sits as the relatively concise, punchy album that bought him commercial clout, and a license to stretch out. An LA album, before he headed back into the Californian desert, with an endless band of acolytes trailing in his dust.

The arrival yesterday of a remix of “Heathen Child”, with added Robert Fripp, reminded me that I’d somehow neglected to write anything about “Grinderman 2”, even with Nick Cave on the cover of the current Uncut. These past few months, I’ve actually had some fairly fluctuating responses to Cave’s records: a bunch of reissues of albums I’d long loved sounded oddly unsatisfying, and what you could pejoratively term the panto aspect of Cave’s schtick (and, actually, his attitudes, however 'literary', to women) seemed harder than usual to ignore. Something similar happened the first time I listened to this second album by the Grinderman project. Two things happened, though. One: an awareness that Cave’s music, more than most at the moment, appears to be vulnerable to my moods. And two: an understanding, repeatedly drilled into us, that Grinderman are a band that just happen to feature Nick Cave, rather than a Nick Cave project. It’s a delicate nuance, but in that context “Grinderman 2” starts sounding rather differently; as, perhaps, a terrific new project from the guy from The Dirty Three. Consequently, it’s Warren Ellis who starts to dominate these nine immensely rackety and entertaining songs. Cave told David Quantick in the Uncut interview that “Half the time we don’t know what they [the sounds] are,” but it’s likely that a fair few of them are generated by Ellis’ electric bouzouki, a weapon of considerable aggression and potential for distortion. Presumably, it’s that which makes the noise loosely comparable to Ron Asheton wrestling a Hoover on “Heathen Child”. Cave is plenty audible here, backed as he is by a great Martyn Casey bassline and the blokey call-and-response harmonies of his bandmates (on “Palaces Of Montezuma”, incidentally, they attain an elevated sort of rugby club soulfulness). Often, though, he uncharacteristically sinks into the mix, as if the democracy-in-action spirit of Grinderman is being muscularly asserted over the mixing desk. When he’s foregrounded on “Palaces Of Montezuma”, a grand, droll and verbose rumination on the dimensions of love that’d fit neatly on the last couple of Bad Seeds albums, it’s quite a shock. That said, “Palaces Of Montezuma” is the not the only song to recall The Bad Seeds. “Grinderman 2” is a substantially more wide-ranging effort than its predecessor. At its centre sits a looming marvel called “When My Baby Comes”, which has a similar fluttering anxiety, as Ellis’ violin loops and loops, to “Moonland” on “Dig, Lazarus, Dig!!!” (Just checked the title of “Moonland”, incidentally, and noticed that its songwriting credit is Cave/Ellis/Casey/Sclavunos – Grinderman, in other words). About halfway through, “When My Baby Comes” explodes into a cycle of bigger and bigger riffs. Quoting Cave again from the Uncut interview, he says, “Jason Spaceman came into the studio and we played him ‘Worm Tamer’. He Said, ‘Are you guys aware of just how fucked up this sounds?’” Spaceman had a point about the excellent “Worm Tamer” (Bo Diddley beat, wave after wave of noise, sexually-charged reference to the Loch Ness Monster). If he’d been commenting on “When My Baby Comes”, however, he’d perhaps be less disconcerted: that long passage of crescendos is not a million miles away from the sound of peak Spiritualized. And while “Evil” is a fervid throwback to the first Grinderman album, “What I Know” is something else again: parched and vulnerable near-ambience which again emphasises the ambitions of Warren Ellis in the post-Mick Harvey era, evidently keen on using the studio as an instrument rather than relying on the unsullied sounds of these very bad men and their instruments. Finally, there’s “Bellringer Blues”, conceivably the best track on “Grinderman 2”, which begins with a flare of backwards psych, and maintains a reverse Ellis riff throughout, over an intensely groovy organ vamp. Grinderman are currently playing an interesting game with their own reputations – the daft dressing-up game of the “Heathen Child” clip being a case in point – but on “Bellringer Blues”, the brilliance of the band really comes to the fore: the incipient menace doesn’t come from Cave, but from the trippy, claustrophobic funk conjured up by his accomplices.