Always nice to discover your personal enthusiasms are shared by people you respect. The new Trembling Bells album promo comes with a longish encomium from Joe Boyd. Among many wise things, he notes that they, “Incorporate in their music the essence of ‘folk’ without the form that can annoy many listeners. That means that their melodies and lyrics have a sense of history and Britishness that most contemporary bands lack, but without any of the ‘heritage’ atmosphere that clings to even the best revivalists in the folk world.” “Abandoned Love”, happily, lives up to Boyd’s well-considered hype, a bold advance on last year’s already excellent “Carbeth”. The same elements remain – though perhaps less String Bandish whimsy – but this time, Trembling Bells are gutsier, more forthright, glowing with confidence as they pile through their rickety hybrids of folk, rock, Early Music and so on. The jazz influence is less overt, too, and there are times when many of the band’s improv backgrounds somehow coalesce into a more orthodox Scottish indie sound (no coincidence, perhaps, that Belle & Sebastian’s Stevie Jackson seems to have handled production this time out). That said, the strongest innovation on “Abandoned Love” is a sense that Trembling Bells can rock, pretty boisterously, even when grappling it out with what may well be sackbutts. “Love Made An Outlaw Of My Heart” may, for a brief second, sound like it’s setting off on a “Matty Groves”-like trajectory. But almost immediately it resolves into a distinctly Creedence-ish choogle, which picks up fuzz guitar, pedal steel, trombone and some ‘50s rock’n’roll vamping as it goes along, and pivots on a melodic duel between Lavinia Blackwall and Alex Neilson that often resembles a jaunty take on Kristofferson’s “Help Me Make It Through The Night”. If that sounds odd, it sounds even odder when it’s preceded by “September Is The Month Of Death”, a superbly precarious melodrama which, with its druidic invocations and air of a medieval processional, anchors on Blackwall’s ripe, scholarly emoting. The thing is, it all works tremendously well, with a palpable eclectic freedom to the playing and conceptualising; an unusually joyous, roistering take on psychogeography, perhaps. It’s tough to get through this one without invoking Fairport Convention, and there are certainly again plenty of echoes buried in “Abandoned Love”. Curiously, though, parts feel like the Fairports working backwards, from a founding in British tradition towards an idiosyncratic adoption of American folk-rock. “Baby, Lay Your Burden Down” and “All Good Men Come Last”, among others, are reminiscent of those earlyish, full-blooded assaults on the Bob Dylan songbook like “Percy’s Song” and “I’ll Keep It With Mine”. Lovely record, anyhow, and I’m thrilled Trembling Bells will be playing the Uncut stage at The Great Escape next month.

A bit of a plug today for the new issue, not least for the CD that Allan’s compiled to go with our excellent Stooges interview. The CD’s called “Search And Destroy”, and brings together 15 tracks from The MC5, The Stooges, The New York Dolls, The 13th Floor Elevators, The Monks and so on. A particular thrill, personally, to see Death and Simply Saucer on an Uncut CD, but this is one of our best comps in a while, I think. Have a look at the tracklisting and give us some feedback when you’ve had a listen: 1 The MC5 - Sister Anne 2 James Williamson With The Careless Hearts - 1970 3 Johnny Thunders & The Heartbreakers - Born To Lose 4 Death - Keep On Knocking 5 Simply Saucer - Here Come The Cyborgs Pt 2 6 The New York Dolls - Pills [Demo] 7 Sonic’s Rendezvous Band - Slow Down (Take A Look) 8 Figures Of Light - Seething Psychosexual Conflict Blues 9 The Monks - Oh, How To Do Now 10 The Flamin’ Groovies - Slow Death 11 The Red Krayola - Wives In Orbit 12 The Scenics - Do The Wait 13 The 13th Floor Elevators - Fire Engine 14 Ducks Deluxe - I Fought The Law 15 Iggy & The Stooges - Search And Destroy Besides The Stooges interview, our main feature in the new issue is an exhaustively-compiled list of 50 Great Lost Albums: ‘lost albums’ in this case being ones that aren’t legally available to buy new in 2010. Fairly predictably, we’re also soliciting your suggestions for Great Lost Albums we’ve forgotten. The golden rule is that if you can buy the album new in any format – including MP3s – then it doesn’t count. Feel free to bombard me with your suggestions, of course. To give you an idea of the sort of thing, here’s my entry for the first Kraftwerk album: One of 2009’s more disingenuous reissues was "The Catalogue", a thorough-sounding Kraftwerk boxset which actually failed to include their first three albums. Perhaps that early work was deemed too idiosyncratically human, with the mensch-maschine not yet fully operational and a certain freestyling hippy fallibility taking precedence. They remain, however, fascinating records, not least the 1970 debut, where Florian Schneider and Ralf Hütter embarked on four capricious avant-jams. The heavyweight electronics were at a putative stage: Klaus Dinger, soon to form Neu!, contributed live drums; Schneider led, jauntily, with a flute (cf the outstanding opener, “Ruckzuck”). “I’m working on the album tapes,” Hütter told Uncut last year. “It will be Kraftwerk 1 and 2, Ralf & Florian, and maybe one or two live ambient situations, whatever we find in the archive… It needs some more work, redusting and remastering.” One more thing about the issue: apologies that we’ve trailed an apparently invisible Roky Erickson feature on the cover. The piece was spiked at the very last moment, along with my Wild Mercury Sound column, to make room for David Cavanagh’s brilliant obituary of Alex Chilton. We’ll try and squeeze it in the next one, all being well.

Just remembered today that I should post this: my column from the last issue of the mag, devoted to Wooden Shjips and Ripley's awesome spin-off, Moon Duo. The new issue of Uncut is out this week, though my column on Sir Richard Bishop was necessarily spiked to make room for the Alex Chilton tribute; I'll run that here in the next day or two. In the rather arcane world which this column inhabits, you could just about describe San Francisco’s Wooden Shjips as superstars. Unlike Natural Snow Buildings, the French duo I focused on last month, Wooden Shjips’ records have been heard by more than a couple of dozen people. In fact, they’ve become one of those underground bands adopted, to some cautious degree, by the indie mainstream. Bobby Gillespie used their music to soundtrack a fashion show, incongruously enough, while Alex Turner was recently moved to tell NME, “I like them because they’re, well, quite good. Their music is perfect to leave on while you go about your business.” Faint praise, seemingly, but then a typical Wooden Shjips song has an inexorable, rolling momentum that can ebb in and out of your consciousness; a deep psychedelic locked groove that works insidiously. Hypnotically, you could even say, if you were to use one of the fallback signifiers of dronerock that seems particularly apposite here. If you’ve not heard the quartet before, last year’s second album proper, "Dos" (Holy Mountain), is a decent place to start. But the formula doesn’t vary hugely – or, some might say, at all: their latest compilation of limited-edition singles and so on, "Vol. 2" (on Sick Thirst), is very nearly as good. Ostensibly, Wooden Shjips have worked out a brilliant way of updating late ‘60s psychedelia and subterranean garage rock. A typical song – let’s say “Down By The Sea”, from Dos – seems to draw on the energies of both The Doors and The Velvet Underground, while maintaining a springy dance imperative that could’ve been transported from a 1966 Family Dog happening in their hometown. As their songs drive on remorselessly, the Shjips seem to be the last point on a continuum which also includes The Stooges, Neu! and La Dusseldorf, Suicide, Loop and Spacemen 3 (Wooden Shjips covered that last band’s “I Hear It” on a 2009 single, incidentally; presumably that one’ll turn up on "Vol. 3"). Unlike most of those bands, however, Wooden Shjips’ modus operandi also has room for some trad rock allusions (that CSN-mutating name, a lyrical wink to The Band in “Motorbike”) and many expansive guitar solos from frontman Ripley Johnson – hence an eyes-on-stalks cover of Neil’s “Vampire Blues” on Vol 2, also a highlight of their sell-out Club Uncut show last August. Ripley Johnson’s intensely focused productivity has also resulted in a first album by his other band, Moon Duo. It’s a fairly safe bet that Wooden Shjips won’t be entirely alienated by Moon Duo’s "Escape" (Woodsist), since Johnson doesn’t radically change his aesthetic between projects. Earlier singles suggested Moon Duo were treading a fractionally woozier path, or at least plugging in a drum machine and privileging that Suicide influence. The four tracks on "Escape", though, repeatedly find Johnson cueing up the trancebeat then embarking on yet another fuzzy voyage of discovery: “Motorcycle, I Love You”, “Stumbling 22nd St” and the swinging “In The Trees” are as generous and oceanic guitar jams as anything he’s served up in Wooden Shjips. As these songs stretch out towards the event horizon, there’s a sense – just as there is with Wooden Shjips, of course – that sometimes, all a band needs is one great idea. Their parameters might be narrow, but the possibilities contained within give every indication of being infinite.

From the lofty vantage point of SE1, I haven’t heard much buzz from South By Southwest this year, or at least very little in the way of real surprises and completely new discoveries (If you know different, of course, please share). One thing that has come my way from the Austin scrum, though, is a band from Cleveland called Cloud Nothings, who we’ve been pretty taken with this week. Looking at Cloud Nothings’ Myspace, one particular gig listing stands out to locate where their music fits in – a forthcoming Lawrence, Kansas show with Woods and Real Estate. Their sweet and ramshackle debut, “Turning On”, definitely fits in with that newish lo-fi aesthetic perpetuated by Woodsist et al, and occasionally I can hear the requisite throwbacks to Flying Nun, very early Go-Betweens and so on. There’s an affinity to Wavves, too, though generally Dylan Baldi (who made the album all by himself, it seems) is more plaintive than bratty. It doesn’t all quite work, sometimes being a little bit too shambling and indie for me. But at the very least check out “Hey Cool Kid” on the Myspace, which is one of the most bashfully insidious songs I’ve heard in a while. And while you’re around, another new band worth checking out, I think, is Forest Swords, from The Wirral. Forest Swords’ Myspace claims they sound like “River hymns + damp woods + dry leaves + sea winds,” which looks alright. More prosaically, though, I’d venture to pitch them as a kind of Liverpudlian analogue to Sun Araw; a sort of dank, addictive psych-dub band, who occasionally throw in some R&B and vague ethnological forgery vibes, and at other times seem to be jamming, dislocatedly, over an old Burial track. Judging by these tracks, it actually works really well: check out the pretty amazing “Miarches”, especially, and let me know what you think.