Very taken with this one at the moment. Kurt Vile – real name, apparently – is from Philadelphia, and seems to be emerging as my favourite of the current wave of new lo-fi/garage rock auteurs, possibly because he’s the one who appears to be unafraid of cranking out some pretty fierce, relatively orthodox rock’n’roll, amidst all the warped vibes. I can’t pretend to have kept up with all of Vile’s releases before this Matador debut, “Childish Prodigy”, but I do know he is/was guitarist in The War On Drugs, a band, much loved by my boss, that played Club Uncut about a year ago. The War On Drugs are typically described as melding classic, Dylanish guts with a kind of pulsating dronerock, which sounds nice on paper, though they’ve never quite worked for me. “Childish Prodigy”, however, pulls a comparable trick in the way it mixes fraught, bluesy garage rock with some rugged classicism (I keep reading mentions of Tom Petty and Bob Seger, though I have to say I’m not enough of an expert on those two to say whether this makes sense or not), then treats them to some soupy, ethereal effects. If Ariel Pink turned his attention to misremembering/transforming more rocking ‘70s radio fare than he usually favours, maybe that would be a decent reference point. Other comparisons I keep coming back to include the ragged, blasting blues of Entrance, Roky Erickson and, on the weirdly gleaming, looping likes of “Overnite Religion” and “Blackberry Song”, Lindsey Buckingham. Vile soaks himself in echo and generally sounds pretty fried, especially on the beatless, woozy reveries like “Dead Alive” and the beautiful, though still spiky “Heart Attack”. But part of “Childish Prodigy”’s potency is how these drifting, folkish pieces fit so seamlessly alongside rackety, borderline unhinged garage jams like the pretty self-explanatory “Freak Train”, which stretches a runaway chug, over seven minutes, into a trance-out that borders on the hallucinatory. Or how Vile has the rare taste to dig out that old Dim Stars record (a short-lived band featuring Richard Hell, Thurston Moore, Steve Shelley, Don Fleming and, Wikipedia alleges, Robert Quine, though I can’t remember that detail personally; it’s been a while) and cover the terrific downtown power-pop “Monkey”.

The first show by James Blackshaw with additional musicians begins a little oddly. A man plays a brief tuba solo, then settles down to some concerted texting on his phone. It turns out that this is a false start, however. The James Blackshaw Ensemble might contain a cellist, two violin players and a flautist, but the tuba player – warming up, it transpires – is here to accompany the support act, guitarist/pianist Tom James Scott, through a series of hushed, minimal pieces. Blackshaw, meanwhile, is a little nervous upfront of the show: finally, he has a sizeable following, and the Vortex (in Dalston) is rammed. I’ve written many times before about this fine British musician – you can find a blog about his most recent album, “The Glass Bead Game” and links to previous pieces here – so it’s great to see he now can pull a decent audience, and one that’s prepared to go along with his musical explorations. This show, I guess, ostensibly pushes his skills as a composer to the fore. While you can still hear his dextrous way with 12-strings on the opening “Arc”, it’s the arrangement that’s most striking: how it sits so comfortably alongside the discreet strings; how a flute and recorder pair up to provide what was, on the recorded version, Lavinia Blackwall’s vocal line (Blackwall, though, billed to appear as part of the ensemble, is absent; maybe busy with Trembling Bells?) It’s quite lovely, a meticulous reconstruction of the expanded sound of “The Glass Bead Game”, propelled but never totally dominated by Blackshaw’s egoless, aesthetically-charged playing. For “Arc”, he switches to grand piano, and while his gentle flurries sit in the mix very similarly to those he creates on guitar, I’m also reminded of Chris Abrahams from The Necks, though this may be, in part, because The Necks were the last band I saw at the Vortex. It’s interesting, though, that the two solo guitar pieces which Blackshaw plays at the end are perhaps the most satisfying. A full band show might be an often brilliant departure, and it’s a very useful way of pointing out the differences between Blackshaw, as a composer, and some of the new folk/post-Fahey guitarists with whom he was initially classified. But solo, you can hear best the full range of his strengths; not just his melodic gifts, but his immense, unshowy virtuosity on the 12-string, as he provides all the harmonic layering needed for these complex and mesmeric pieces all by himself. It’s one of those cases where music can have such a meditative aspect that you stop noticing the vast technical skill needed to create it - forget about the musician themselves, to some degree - and, instead, focus on its stealthy but profound emotional impact.

It’s been a bit quiet on the blog for a while – apologies, but I’ve been embargoed from writing about a couple of films I’ve seen recently. Anyway, one film I have seen, which I am allowed to write about, is Wes Anderson’s latest, Fantastic Mr Fox. Fox is a marvellous stop-motion adaptation of the Roald Dahl story, and Anderson very much claims it for himself. Anyone expecting his to go way off-message will be, I hope, pleasantly surprised to learn that it is definitely a Wes Anderson film – except one with puppets, that is. I’m going to save my powder on this, as I’ve just reviewed it for a forthcoming issue of UNCUT. But it has made me think: with Anderson’s Fantastic Mr Fox and Spike Jonze’s Where The Wild Things Are due later in the year, are we on the cusp of a sea-change in the way children’s films are made? Of course, Pixar and DreamWorks have pretty much led the way in terms of how children’s films have been made over the last decade. That is to say, they’ve functioned on two levels: state of the art animation for the kids and A-list acting cast and jokes for the grow-d-ups. But as undeniably good fun as Shrek, Finding Nemo, Toy Story and the rest of them are, they all broadly suffer (perhaps inevitably) from the Disneyfication of childhood. It’s a condition that’s been around since the days of Bambi and Dumbo – even a film as complex and grim as WALL-E is ameliorated by the big-eyed cutesiness of WALL-E himself. So, you might wonder, what will Anderson and Jonze achieve with their respective films? I’d like to think they’re the kind of directors who’d be ready to tackle head on the traumas and complexities of growing up without covering it over with a bland, generic saccharine finish. Anderson’s film is full of typically droll one-liners and idiosyncratic characters; even the Fox’s cub, Ash, is far away from the usual portrayal of child characters in this kind of film. He is sarky, neurotic, and angry – rather like, you might think, a child of a certain age would be in real life. Meanwhile, the trailers for Jonze’s film hints at some kind of family dysfunction for the story’s boy hero, Max; and the subsequent liberation he experiences when cavorting among the Wild Things. “This is your world,” explains Wild Thing Carol (James Gandolfini) – and what young boy doesn’t dream of having a world all of his own to rule? You’d hope most kids probably wouldn’t have much of a problem with either film. Indeed, you’d hope they’d willingly embrace these strange new takes on their bedtime reading. It strikes me, the people most likely to be concerned about either film are the studios – who presumably can watch their third-party merchandise franchises go up in smoke the minute they hear, say, Gandolfini’s broad Noo Joisey accent voicing a potential soft toy hit. Equally, what must the studio have thought when Jonze suggested that the soundtrack for ...Wild Things be done by Karen O, singer with New York’s finest alt-disco punkers, Yeah Yeah Yeahs? But I’m not sure, on reflection, whether these films are even meant for children. They might be based on children’s books, sure – but I suspect there’s as many adults keen to see new films from Anderson and Jonze regardless of what subjects they cover.

There’s an interesting snippet in the next issue of Uncut, when the Flaming Lips’ Wayne Coyne talks about Portishead’s “Third”. “It got under my skin,” he says. “From the standpoint of being in a band, they do some fun production things, it’s pretty inspiring. I liked how they embraced more stranger elements of prog-rock, and Silver Apples-influenced drum loops and things like that.” Re-reading this quote the other day, it helped crystallise a few ideas I’d been having about the new Flaming Lips album, “Embryonic”, and also about the self-titled debut album by Beak>, a new group featuring Portishead’s Geoff Barrow. Both “Beak>” and “Embryonic” are plainly rooted in a very loose, jamming aesthetic, and if “Third” betrayed a preoccupation with Krautrock and The Silver Apples, it has nothing on Barrow’s work here with Billy Fuller and Matt Williams (two more Bristol musicians, from Fuzz Against Junk and Team Brick respectively, acts in Barrow’s Invada stable who’ve never made much of an impact on me, to be honest). The stated design of “Beak>” seems to involve 12 days of writing and recording last January, with all tracks “recorded live in one room with no overdubs or repair”. The results involve lots of pleasantly skewed old synths, rackety beats much indebted to Can and early Kraftwerk (I’m thinking “Ruckzuck”, specifically), and an often dank atmosphere, increased by one of the band occasionally moaning in the distance and, consequently, recalling the stentorian misery of Ian Curtis; “I Know” does this especially effectively, while being a rich Silver Apples nod, too. Plenty more of the influences which threaded through “Third” are pushed right to the fore on “Beak>”, with Barrow clearly unencumbered by the vaguely orthodox songforms that Portishead still favour. “Ham Green” showcases his love of booming, staccato, stoner doom, while the uncharacteristically pretty “Battery Point” is reminiscent of someone like Mogwai’s more rippling, pastoral moments. The overall feel is very off-the-cuff, and consequently it can wander off on some slightly lost trajectories from time to time. But the spontaneity and rough-and-ready nature of the whole operation also feels like a necessary palliative to Portishead’s somewhat lengthier – tortured, perhaps – working practises. That’s a feeling which pervades the Flaming Lips’ “Embryonic”, too. If their recent albums have been, for the most part, over-wrought in a good way, “Embryonic”, according to Coyne, was conceived as a double album as a means of forcing the band to become more free and uninhibited. “I believe I was stuck thinking of us as being a group of reckless, sloppy freaks,” he says in some characteristically illuminating press notes, “and that, if we weren’t constantly trying to be more disciplined or more refined or more together, maybe our creative luck would elude us.” “Embryonic”, then, is a bunch of generally untethered jams, again much in thrall to Can, The Silver Apples and so on, as well as a fair bit of electric-period Miles Davis. Again, as with Beak>, it feels like something the band absolutely needed to do, to escape from a certain closed perspective. But while Beak> very much seems to be an end in itself, there’s something about “Embryonic” that doesn’t quite gel. As the title implies, it has an air of being a work in progress rather than a completed action. Of course, that can make for some very exciting and liberating music, and there are points amidst these 18 tracks where you sense the Lips have intuitively stumbled on something rather impressive: the glissandos and skronk of “Aquarius Sabotage”, say, where they manage to imbue general freeform chaos with the grandeur of their finest latterday records; the frail, stuttering guitar solo on “Powerless” that sounds like an attempt at Sonny Sharrock, possibly; the passage in “The Ego’s Last Stand” which drives rather than drifts, and the similarly pulsating “Silver Trembling Hands”. But then again, there are plenty of other points where the pieces sound less dynamic and exploratory, more straightforwardly unfinished (“Your Bats”, playing now, for instance). It’s frustrating, not least because it suggests that the Flaming Lips, nowadays, might be more effective if they erred on the side of conservatism: that perhaps their greatest strengths are being able to take semi-outré psychedelic ideas and transform into songs saturated with melody, ambitionn and accessibility. Though it galls me to admit it, I might like “Embryonic” more if they’d worked on these tracks more and made them more conventional. A lot to absorb, though, and it’s a record that demands to be played again and again, even when it’s not totally working.