One of the best shows I think we’ve hosted at Club Uncut last night, thanks to Baltimore’s regal Arbouretum. I raved about their third album, “Song Of The Pearl”, back at the start of the year, and from the grand start of “Another Hiding Place” onwards, it’s clear they’re an unassumingly wonderful band. For the full review, check out our Wild Mercury Sound blog.

One of the best shows I think we’ve hosted at Club Uncut last night, thanks to Baltimore’s regal Arbouretum. I raved about their third album, “Song Of The Pearl”, back at the start of the year, and from the grand start of “Another Hiding Place” onwards, it’s clear they’re an unassumingly wonderful band. Last time, I mentioned plenty about Crazy Horse, Richard Thompson and Television, and all that holds good live, especially in the discreet virtuosity with which Dave Heumann and Steve Strohmeier grapple with their guitars. The churning tempos might be pure Crazy Horse, but there’s a real nimbleness to these jams that keeps bringing to mind ’69 vintage Grateful Dead, not least because a handful of these songs threaten to gravitate towards “Dark Star” as they progress. The likes of “Another Hiding Place” and the amazing “False Spring” have genetic affinities with British folk-rock, too, but, in common with some of that Fairport Convention reunion I blogged about last week, Arbouretum’s music is far removed from the feyness that often implies. Listening to the way Heumann carries a song, I was reminded of something I wrote in a review of Richard Thompson’s last solo album, “Sweet Warrior”: “These remain, ostensibly, rock songs underpinned by the cadences of folk, delivered by a stern and occasionally rather wry man who plays guitar with a fearsome penetrative clarity.” That makes sense for Heumann and Arbouretum, too, though there’s a rich, psychedelic thickness to what they do which is generally outside Thompson’s comparatively austere remit. By the end, unless I was having auditory hallucinations, they appear to have located a hitherto underexposed cosmic potential in Flanagan & Allen’s “Underneath The Arches”, investing it with all the bent vigour of “Marquee Moon”. You can hear that, and plenty more, at their Myspace, incidentally. An incredible band - and thanks, too, to the supports Kurran & The Wolfnotes and The Goldheart Assembly; keep an eye out for the latter especially, one of those accomplished little British bands that come along every few years sounding, however accidentally, not unlike The Jayhawks. You still may have a chance to catch Arbouretum this week, by the way; I really can’t recommend them enough. Tuesday, July 28: Winchester, The Railway Wednesday, July 29: Colchester, Colchester Arts Centre Thursday, July 30: Manchester, Night & Day

It was with a degree of amazement that I received a new album by Liam Hayes & Plush a couple of weeks ago. Most people who’ve followed Hayes’ progress over the past 15 years didn’t expect “Bright Penny” to be finished for another few years, even though, technically, the last Plush album came out in 2002. Hayes, really, is a kind of pop visionary, and one whose pursuit of the gilded sounds in his head brooks no compromise. I wrote about his last studio album, “Fed”, here when it finally gained a UK release last year, and “Bright Penny” is a similarly extravagant confection. How Hayes managed to finance this one remains obscure: among the personnel this time are the same horn arranger, Tom Tom MMLXXXIV (who worked for Earth Wind & Fire), Morris Jennings (Curtis Mayfield’s old drummer), Bernard Reed (Jackie Wilson’s bassist), Brian Wilson’s rhythm section, John Stirratt and Pat Sansone from Wilco and so on. It’s an auspicious lineup, not least when you remember that Hayes comes from the Chicago underground scene, initially sitting in with the likes of Will Oldham and Royal Trux. I’ve written before about how Hayes’ take on classic songwriting mirrors in some ways that of Oldham – though Hayes’ models are the likes of Burt Bacharach and Jimmy Webb rather than Dylan or whatever. On “Bright Penny”, though, while Hayes still has a tendency to slip loose from his formal arrangements, the overall package is straighter and slicker. Often, it’s easy to imagine you’re listening to some overlooked artefact from the ‘70s, some collection of flamboyant gestures corralled into an album. Bits of it, frankly, can be a little too sweet for me: “White Telescope” dangles precariously between sounding like a great lost Boyce & Hart song, and resembling something from some sub-Godspell children’s musical. The horns, too, can be too high and bright in places: I’m reminded of Martin Carr ruefully describing a similar sound on “Wake Up Boo” as being “very Jimmy Young”. Mostly, though, this is another terrifically crafted record, not just privileging Hayes’ gossamer taste in ballads (check out “I Sing Silence”, and its airy nod to the Bee Gees’ “How Deep Is Your Love?”; or the ravishing "The Goose Is Out", when Hayes urges, "Let's watch the stars in my auditorium") but also his more surging, soulful instincts. “Look Up, Look Down” is the most rocking he’s been since that fabled debut single, “Three Quarters Blind Eyes”. “We Made It”, meanwhile, mixes up plangent Wilson-esque Fender Rhodes with swooping horn arrangements, a wonderful harmonica solo and Hayes, still sounding as endearingly distracted as ever, possibly hymning his own creative achievements. “Bright Penny” is a much more upbeat, celebratory record than Hayes has made before, perhaps because it often seems engaged with what he’s managed to do, against the odds. The unfeasibly perky “So Much Music”, especially, emerges as a kind of defiant manifesto, noting how music “almost drove me crazy” before Hayes asserts, “No I’m never gonna give up”, then hires a host of backing singers to ram the point home. Hayes doubtless envisages songs like “So Much Music” as potential hit singles, though it’s hard to remember the last time a record like this was played on the radio, let alone broke into the charts. Pragmatically, the best he can hope for is that the cult status of Plush continues to slowly grow, and that these records are recognised for their frequently great music as well as the extraordinary force of will which compelled them to be made.

A few records that have slipped through the net and deserve a mention today, I think, beginning with Sharon Van Etten’s spectral “Because I Was In Love” on Drag City. The fact that Espers’ Greg Weeks recorded and mixed “Because I Was In Love” is a pretty big clue as to how it sounds, though Van Etten doesn’t go in for the sort of brackish, wrought intensity often favoured by Espers. Maybe the closest reference point for these super-intimate sketches might be the “Dear Companion” solo album Meg Baird put out a couple of years ago, though there are also affinities with the likes of Josephine Foster, Samara Lubelski and Marissa Nadler. Pretty nice. Talking of Espers, Helena Espvall, the band’s cellist, has a second album with Masaki Batoh from Ghost, “Overloaded Ark”. It’s a stronger set than last year’s self-titled, though still in the same vein: drawing parallels between various ancient folk forms; essaying a kind of microscopically evolving, medieval psych. The promo CD comes with a rather threatening missive from Batoh, which basically suggests that anyone planning to review his album by looking at Wikipedia instead of using “your pure impression, deep and wide knowledge for art and generous love for ordinary readers” should give up. So that’s told us. In preparation for the Wooden Shjips gig at Club Uncut next month, Ripley from the band sent me the latest 12-inch from his other project, Moon Duo. “Love On The Sea” gallops along in much the same strobe-lit fashion as the Shjips themselves, though perhaps with a heavier accent on the organ, pointing up the Suicide vibes and possibly steering fractionally away from the Spacemen 3 influence towards Spectrum. James Ferraro, from The Skaters, is apparently being presented in this month’s Wire as part of a newish scene of artists – also including Pocahaunted – under the banner of “hypnagogic pop”. On the covers of Holy Mountain’s reissues of a couple of his rare solo albums, “Clear” and “Discovery” (watch out for these, they have virtually identical sleeves), the music is described as “tropical drones concepts”. From where I’m sat, these lovely and immersive records essentially deal in saturated lo-fi ambience. There are similarities with the feel of that Ducktails record, though Ferraro is a lot more kosmische in many ways, and “Clear” especially sits nicely alongside some of the various Cluster and Harmonia reissues that have been turning up recently.