“It’s hot as a witch's tit in this room,” says Club UNCUT headliner Jesca Hoop. “I’m going to have to retune my guitar real quick… cos it sounds like a witch's tit. So if you’ve ever wondered what a witch's tit sounds like, then this is it.” Today has been the hottest day of the year so far in the capital. Despite the welcoming evening cool outside, temperatures in the newly-refurbished Upstairs At The Garage in north London are unforgivingly high. But in some respects, you couldn’t have wished for a better line-up at Club UNCUT in heat like this. White – the daughter of a folk singer and sculptor who spent some of her childhood on a hippie commune in Northern California – brings a breezy, ‘60s coffee-house vibe to her songs, while Hoop, as perhaps befits the former babysitter of Tom Waits’ children, can be a little more leftfield with her melodies. But both of them have a beguiling charm that goes some way to soothing the otherwise punishing heat in here tonight. Simone White, opening for Jesca, at least has the foresight to wear a light summer dress, as opposed to Hoop’s long-sleeve lace number and a knee-length skirt. All the same, she still finds the time to reflect on the differences between American and European air-con systems (the result? We loose). “I’m melting up here,” she gasps, before shrugging: “It’s OK. It’s good for the vocal chords.” It’s possible you caught White live on last year’s Honest Jons Revue, performing on the same bill as label boss Damon Albarn, Tony Allen, Candi Staton and Victoria Williams, or heard her “Beep Beep Song” on the soundtrack to an Audi car commercial. Tonight, just her and a guitar, her voice reminds me sometimes of the smoky softness of Suzanne Vega or Cat Power; she sings very quietly, yet with incredibly precise annunciation. Although the songs themselves appear gentle and graceful enough, you sense they address more significant issues. She introduces “Great Imperialist State”, from her 2007 album I Am The Man, as being about “the disconnect between the things we consume and where they come from”. There’s songs, too, about her grandmother “a singer and dancer in the 50s” (“Mary Jane”), the shocking antics perpetrated at a teen party “dropping white pills into pink lemonade” in “Candy Bar Killer", and an 80 year-old woman she knew who wanted to die (“A Girl You Never Met”). White and Hoop, it turns out, are old friends. Hoop explains they “spent a lot of time living in a French-style house with a big oaktree in Tapanga Canyon.” Hoop is joined on stage for parts of her set by a second guitarist Johny Lexus and a backing singer Amy May. They’re playing their first gig together, Hoop tells us, before opening with a new song, “Whispering Light”. Tom Waits himself has described Hoop’s music as “like going swimming in a lake at night”; for my part, I think there’s something both theatrical and elemental to Hoop’s songs that remind me, fleetingly, of Kate Bush or Bjork. Her voice shifts into different registers, while the lyrics frequently mention skies, rivers, storms and winds’ or enchanted places where the boundaries shift and the dead might come back to life or animals talk. But, please, there’s nothing twee or precious here. She’s a great between-song raconteur, bantering about the collective nouns for birds with the audience, or how she lost her dress and car keys at Glastonbury, or opening “Intelligentactile 101” with “This is a children’s story. I heard it from my nephew. When my sister was pregnant. Except he turned out to be a girl. So I had some explaining to do.” We’re treated to five new songs, presumably destined for her forthcoming album Hunting My Dress (nothing to do with her Glastonbury experience, so claims), before returning to sing one final song, “Storms”, a cappella. Then it’s out into the night, and the fresh air. We'll be back for more Club UNCUT, at the Lexington on Pentonville Road, N1, on July 27. And that'll be Arbouretum's delayed show from March. Should be good. Before then, though, UNCUT will be covering Blur's Hyde Park show on Thursday this week.

In the new edition of the always interesting Yeti magazine, there’s a good and provocative piece about Jack Rose and the Black Twig Pickers, in which the author Justin Farrar calls out “All the shaggy indie hippies and underground freakers out there dabbling in Appalachian folk, country music and roots rock.” Rose, who Farrar honourably exempts from his rant, joins in, too. “We’re not dabbling with folk forms trying to make them contemporary or psychedelic,” he says. “We can actually play our instruments without the ‘free folk’ label, which I think lots of other musicians use to cover up their lack of musical skill. Plus, we swing like a motherfucker.” Well, speaking as an expert on “shaggy indie hippies and underground freakers”, and as a bit of a dabbler in “proper” American folk, I’m probably not altogether qualified to comment on the new “Jack Rose And The Blag Twig Pickers” album. But I can say unequivocally, Rose is right: they swing like motherfuckers. Rose you’ve probably come across before, as the doyen of the new school of American Primitive guitarists. The Black Twig Pickers are a pugnacious old-time collective from Richmond, Virginia, centred around a banjo player and fiddler called Mike Gangloff, who used to play with Rose in the wonderfully ominous freestyle explorers Pelt (I remember reviewing 2001’s “Ayahuasca” for The Wire, and being amazed and a bit out of my depth). “Jack Rose And The Blag Twig Pickers” actually revamps one “Ayahuasca” tune, “Bright Sunny South”, but the prevailing vibes here are very different. As Farrar describes in his Yeti piece, the group are fundamentally committed to making good-time old-time dance music. There’s none of the mysticism so often deployed by notionally ‘free folk’: essentially, Gangloff and Rose are intent on revisiting the Old Weird America, but not bothering too much about the weird bit. As far as I can see, that quest for ‘weirdness’, however self-conscious, is what often makes contemporary folk music achieve a sort of transcendence – though of course I suppose I’m approaching it from an indie-rock perspective, at heart. The pursuit of authenticity, or at the very least a kind of traditional orthodoxy, can sometimes, to my mind, end up as rather hokey; rough-hewn Appalachian kitsch, if you like. Parts of “Jack Rose And The Blag Twig Pickers” skirt a little close to that, not least when Gangloff lets rip with his parched holler. But the unshowy richness and vigour of their playing, and the evident joy which underpins it, make these 11 tracks transcendent in their own easy-going way. Much here is wonderful, from the unself-conscious flow of “Sail Away Ladies” into “I Shall Not Be Moved” onwards. By “Soft Steel Piston” they’re flying, Gangloff’s fervently sawed fiddle and Rose’s spirited picking sitting tight but comfortable over the locomotive clack of Nate Bowles’ washboard. “Kensington Blues”, an old Rose solo tune that resembled a sweet John Fahey piece in its original guise, is brilliantly fleshed out, its original concentrated solipsism socialised and transformed. And “Revolt” has a depth, intensity and virtuosity which borders on the cosmic, without ever betraying its resolutely earthy principles.