I’m not necessarily the best judge of which bands are likely to make some kind of significant hipster/commercial breakthrough. But listening to this Ganglians album, “Monster Head Room”, on Woodsist, it surely makes sense that they should be right at the forefront of this new indie/lo-fi/garage scene that’s coming out of the States right now. Thus far, I haven’t been that crazy about many of the records thus labelled: mild enjoyment of, say, Girls or The Soft Pack or whatever, coupled withsome bemusement at precisely the level of hype they’ve been attracting. Ganglians come from Sacramento, and seem to be affiliated with the better, gnarlier end of the scene (on their myspace, notable friends include Eat Skulls, The Hospitals, Wet Hair, The Intelligence and Psychedelic Horseshit. And poor old Wavves, too). Ganglians music, however, is sweeter and more accessible than most of those. There’s a big Beach Boys influence – with no feedback to obscure it – that immediately comes to the fore on the a capella harmonised opener, “Something Should Be Said” - very much in the vein of “Our Prayer” or, perhaps, Animal Collective’s “You Don’t Have To Go To College”. The influence of Animal Collective’s re-imagining of The Beach Boys recurs in the exceptional “The Void”, again reminiscent of something hazy and gibbering from “Sung Tongs”. “Candy Girl”, meanwhile, has the good idea of going somewhere strangely neglected by lo-fi Wilson devotees, namely the shaky and intimate sounds of “The Beach Boys Love You”. It’s a neat fit. Elsewhere, Ganglians call to mind – possibly accidentally – the lilting zing of Vampire Weekend (“Voodoo”) and the snarky and yet more melodramatic end of modern garage epitomised by Black Lips (“Valient [Sic] Brave”). Their strongest suit, however, can be found in a couple of mellow, goofy strumalongs, “Lost Words” and standout track “Cryin’ Smoke”, which initially reminded me vaguely of a cross between the Lemonheads and The Go-Betweens, and now strikes me as sounding rather like the Australian band who ostensibly were a cross between the Lemonheads and The Go-Betweens, Tom Morgan’s Smudge. Not the most obvious reference for a band with crossover potential, perhaps, but these are good songs, played right.

When these two Hyde Park shows were announced last December, we ran a piece in UNCUT celebrating the return to active service of Blur, where David Cavanagh quite reasonably asked the question: which Blur are coming back? After all, here was a band who had undergone many creative iterations during their recording lifetime; equally, so much had happened since the four of them last played together, in July 2000, it seemed appropriate to wonder what Blur would do with these shows. Could they really reconnect with the moptops who made the buoyant baggy pop of “There’s No Other Way”? Would they really revisit “Parklife”, a song intrinsically linked to an era and movement they’d subsequently gone to considerable lengths to distance themselves from? And what about the more abstract, edgier material from the later albums – what place would that have in Hyde Park? Well, tonight we have what you might call EveryBlur. By which I mean, they cover all bases. Here’s a band conspicuously at peace with themselves and with their back catalogue. As guitarist Graham Coxon flagged up in the NME last December, “I always think there are two routes to Blur. The high street route and this other route round the back.” So, of course we’d get “Girls And Boys” and of course we’d get “Trimm Trabb”. Both equally, incontrovertibly, Blur. And both, in their radically different ways, equally brilliant. The crowd in Hyde Park, sweltering in the hottest day of the year, resembles a Hackney flashmob, all skinny t-shirts and angular haircuts. They’re very young, too. One 16 year-old French student, who’s come over for the show, tells me he was “11 when Blur last played Reading Festival” and wants to hear “everything”. In the crowd, I spot, separately, Nigel Planer and Nikki from Big Brother. One girl has written in blue chalk up her right arm “Hooligan” and “Gorilla” on her left, lyrics from “On Your Own”. There’s a palpable air of excitement and energy that, mixed with the heat and alcohol, threatens to drift into something slightly more dangerous. We are, inevitably, a far cry from the crowd who were here for Neil Young or Bruce Springsteen last weekend. Walking into Hyde Park, one residual concern I’d had was – how much have these songs dated? “Tracy Jacks”, “Sunday Sunday” or quite literally “End Of The Century” feel so firmly located in a specific time and cultural headspace, and we are no longer 20th century boys and girls. So how much would this be an exercise in nostalgia, and if so how successful could it be? I realise these are, of course, music journalist questions, and clearly not the kind of issues that are particularly bothering anyone here. This is a communal moment of celebration for a band, their history and back catalogue. Entirely fittingly, too, for band who so assiduously documented a London living, it is held in one of the capital’s largest parks, with a huge map of London covering the left hand side of the stage wall and one of the UK on the right. The sun goes down, the moon comes up. It's a perfect setting. The band arrive at around 8.15 in what’s still pretty much full sunlight. Damon and drummer Dave Rowntree appear to be wearing identical Fred Perry tops, black with yellow trip round the collar and sleeves; Graham in a Breton t-shirt and bassist Alex James dressed in black and Silk Cut. If you’ve been following the set-lists over the band’s warm-up shows over the last few weeks, then there’s very few surprises. We are hits all the way. But there are sly and subtle treatments; “Girls And Boys” is amphetamined up, Damon sounding sociopathic, snarling his way through “Love in the 90s, it’s paranoid…”. Graham’s guitar on “There’s No Other Way” is angry and grungey, a long way from the skittering riffs of the record. Indeed, “Beetlebum” ends with him hunched over his amp, pulling dark, inchoate noises out of his guitar that leaves Damon walking shell-shocked round the stage scratching his head and reminds me, in fact, of Neil Young here last Saturday creating a similar seismic upheaval on Old Black. There are many similar Graham moments: on “Oily Water”, particularly, while Damon screams through a megaphone, he blasts sheets of woozy, rhapsodic feedback from his guitar that outdo anything I’ve heard from, say, Kevin Shields. Even “Parklife”, bless it, with Phil Daniels walking on to deliver a speech from Quadrophenia – “You can take that mail, and that franking machine, and all that other rubbish I have to deal with and shove it right up your arse!” – before it begins, gets reconfigured as something more than a bouncy, blokey, comedy hit. Daniels’ narrator isn’t the jokey bloke down the pub talking about feeding the pigeons, but closer to the sinister, wired persona he inhabited on “Me White Noise”. Ridiculously, perhaps, a line like “It’s got nothing to do with your Vorsprung Durch Technic, you know,” feels loaded with menace. Aside from “Parklife”, the big singalongs are “Tender”, “End Of The Century” and “For Tomorrow”. “Tender” – a pretty bleak relationship breakdown song – is reincarnated as a positive, heartfelt message of love. “We feel really privileged to do nothing for so many years, then come back to this,” says Albarn humbly before “Popscene”. Highlights? Everything, really. “This Is A Low” contains some of the most beautiful guitar soloing from Graham I’ve ever heard, nimble and expansive. “The Universal” is just beautiful. Gig of the year, then. Blur's Hyde Park set list (July 2) was: 'She's So High' 'Girls & Boys' 'Tracy Jacks' 'There's No Other Way' 'Jubilee' 'Badhead' 'Beetlebum' 'Out Of Time' 'Trimm Trabb' 'Coffee & TV' 'Tender' 'Country House' 'Oily Water' 'Chemical World' 'Sunday Sunday' 'Parklife' 'End Of A Century' 'To The End' 'This Is A Low' [encore] 'Popscene' 'Advert' 'Song 2' 'Death Of A Party' 'For Tomorrow' 'The Universal' Pic credit: PA Photos

Very pleased to see the love is spreading for Sun Araw, judging by the comments here when I mentioned “Heavy Deeds” the other day. A few days on, I’m still feeling it’s one of my favourite albums of the year so far. Thanks in no little part to Cameron Stallones’ determined productivity, I’m now suspecting that I blog about the poor guy (here and here, for example) as much as I do about James Blackshaw. The thing is, Stallones’ music as Sun Araw is so immersive and compelling. It’s rich with psychedelic ambiences, but also, increasingly, has a sort of stoned, head-nodding groove which could feasibly cross over to a world which was summed up by those early Mo’Wax comps. “Heavy Deeds” is Stallones’ third Sun Araw album. Ghost images of Stevie Wonder and Bo Diddley adorn the cover, and there’s a distinctly heavier, funkier vibe to his music: it may still be obscured by the heathaze – and Lord, this is sweaty music – but things are definitely coming into focus. Consequently, the snaking, wah-wah freak-out guitar is a lot higher up in the multi-layered mix, along with a stinging R&B organ vamp (check out the swinging title track, in particular) and Stallones’ still-muffled tribal chants, and the general drifting ambience which epitomised much of “Beach Head” has been sacrificed in favour of more rhythmic, upfront, cumulatively hypnotic tunes. Someone mentioned Spiritualized on one of the earlier blogs, and that influence (accidental, quite possibly) comes to the fore on “Hustle And Bustle”, which reverberates with a comparably languid fervour. The second side of the vinyl is especially wonderful, with the potent, explosive “Get Low” – his most accessible moment yet, maybe – leading into the vivid, low-slung dirge-funk of “All Night Long”. Stallones lets his tunes roll on for about ten minutes at a time on average, but he could let them evolve for a good time longer if he was so inclined. In the past, I’ve mentioned New Kingdom and Sunburned Hand Of The Man circa “Jaybird”, and those reference points seem more apposite than ever on “Heavy Deeds”. I’m reminded, too, this time, of Funkadelic’s cosmic slop, and particularly of Brightblack Morning Light: sticky, horizontal, hot night music. It’s fantastic, and I should also mention that the CD (which I don’t have yet) also features “Hey Mandala”, which came out a while back as a split with Predator Vision, another incarnation of the guy from Ducktails.

Apologies for the crass plug, but if you’ve seen the new issue of Uncut, you’ll have seen an amazing picture of Tim Buckley, playing solo to a 35-strong audience at Izzy Young’s Folklore Center in New York. The year is 1967, and Buckley is somewhere between the relatively orthodox folk-rock of his debut, and the extraordinary, personal music that would fill “Goodbye And Hello”, and act as a jump-off for the potent explorations that would soon follow. It’s a pretty fascinating period, very short, and one that’s never really been revisited; up until now, the earliest Buckley live material that’s officially surfaced comes from his John Peel session in April 1968, a full year later. Much respect, then, to Josh at Tompkins Square (one of the most consistently interesting labels of the past few years, in truth), who is putting out “Live At The Folklore Center, NYC – March 6, 1967”. It’s a remarkable recording, not least for its clarity: as pack leader of a generation of folklorists keen to capture traditional songs in the field before they died out, Young had some very decent recording equipment to hand in his club. The result is this crisp, intimate and generous set, with Buckley tackling 16 songs. The material splits between songs from the debut (most notably a fervid “Aren’t You The Girl”) and stuff in development for “Goodbye & Hello”, most notably wonderful versions of two of his finest songs, “I Never Asked To Be Your Mountain” and “No Man Can Find The War”. It’s unquestionably great music, but a fascinating insight into a songwriter’s development, too. As Buckley expands the parameters of his music (“I’m always trying to stretch myself, explore; I love to see change,” he told Young at the time), you can virtually detect the speed of his development. “Live At The Folklore Center” is blessed with half a dozen songs that have never surfaced anywhere else, in any form (seven that never saw studio versions, if you add “Troubador”). They’re all mostly excellent, but you sense that, by the time, Buckley arrived at the “Goodbye & Hello” sessions, his ideas had already superseded this batch. “Just Please Leave Me”, for instance, is quite brilliant, a giddy and impassioned piece that stands comparison with “Aren’t You The Girl”, but perhaps too frenzied and poppy for the more baked terrain Buckley was approaching. It’s harder, though, to account for why he ditched “What Do You Do (He Never Saw You)”, “Cripples Cry” and, especially, the plaintive, unravelling visions of “If The Rain Comes”. One relative constant, though, is Buckley’s admiration for Fred Neil. Perhaps predictably, an elegaic version of “Dolphins” is here, and outstanding. But “Country Boy” takes as its springboard Neil’s song of the same name, before Buckley heads off into untethered, extemporised space. It feels like a night when one of the great singer-songwriters began his journey in earnest.