Driving home from the Leonard Cohen show on Friday night, I looked in my bag for something suitable to put on the car stereo, and settled fairly quickly on the new Fennesz album, “Black Sea”. The start, distant field recordings of seagulls and waves, wasn’t really audible above the engine noise. But as we dipped into the Blackwall Tunnel, the billowing noisescape of “Black Sea” itself reared up. I thought I had chosen something soothing and ethereal. Instead, speeding beneath the Thames, assailed by striplights, it was mildly terrifying. Good, though. I’ve been playing all of “Black Sea”, in many different situations, for the best part of a week now. And in the wake of Animal Collective’s “Merriweather Post Pavilion”, I’m fairly confident that Christian Fennesz’s new album is the second great record of 2009. I first came across Fennesz about a decade ago, when I heard his seven-inch version of The Beach Boys’ “Don’t Cry (Put Your Head On My Shoulder)”. The tune was barely there, almost totally unrecognisable. But in his meticulously organised electronic glitches, his digital choir of sighs, the Austrian had perfectly simulated the original’s melancholy atmosphere. His music – as a subsequent album, “Endless Summer”, confirmed – was a kind of sentimental avant-garde. I suspect I’ve written before, more than once, about how most bands who seem to be influenced by My Bloody Valentine feel rather wan, mundane and undaventurous to me, stuck in a foursquare indie environment. I’ve always felt that electronic musicians understood Kevin Shields’ imperative much more intuitively; not bland electro-shoegazers like Ulrich Schnauss who are usually referenced, but people like Third Eye Foundation (on his/their early records like “Semtex”, at least) and Boards Of Canada circa “Geogaddi”. Fennesz is very much on the same page, and the likes of “The Colour Of Three” and “Glide” here on “Black Sea” have that sort of gaseous, unstable feel akin to “To Here Knows When”. Like Shields, too, he has an extraordinarily artful way of layering noise, so that lovely melodies slowly emerge, as if implied rather than explicit. Like Shields, too, Fennesz is ostensibly a guitarist, though one who works intensely hard to make his instrument sound like anything but a guitar a lot of the time. I can’t pretend to understand technically what he does, but much of his playing is processed through a computer, diced up and assailed by interference, creating a dislocated but still aesthetically pleasing sound, most obviously evident here on “Perfume For Winter”, which feels very much in the tradition of “Endless Summer”. Elsewhere on “Black Sea”, however, more so than I recall him doing in the past, Fennesz strips back some of the effects to reveal a more organic guitar sound. So “Grey Scale”, although still subtly altered and processed, has a delicacy which is curiously reminiscent of someone like James Blackshaw. It all adds up to a tremendous album, right up there with “Endless Summer” and “Venice”, which often sounds like the culmination of a strand of aesthetically-heightened music which you could trace through the Cocteau Twins and David Sylvian’s solo work (Sylvian guested on “Venice”, if memory serves) and on past MBV into those Boards Of Canada records (“Vacuum”, with its sombre orchestral textures, is especially reminiscent of them, or even of the Aphex Twin’s “Selected Ambient Works Volume Two”). It’s also one of those records, as I wrote about “In Rainbows” this time last year, that seems to poeticise the world outside as you listen to it: never has a man with a leaf blower, of all things, looked so obscurely moving as they did this morning.

Day Five, and we get to Fleet Foxes, and the judges' conversation which resulted in them winning the first Uncut Music Award. Tomorrow, by the way, The Raconteurs. Mark Radcliffe: Their work of seminal genius. It is the greatest record of this year, without question, for any number of reasons. The songs, every track on this, are absolutely fantastic. It’s an absolutely fascinating modern take on so many things. It’s just great to hear something where the vocals and harmonies are right in the centre of it, so the musical backing is just what you need to enhance this just perfect vocal blend. You can have great singers who don’t blend together, and these may not be great individual singers, but I’ve seen them at close quarters. They come in in their plaid shirts and odd socks, looking like they’d come to fix the heating. They sit down, fumble around, and when they start there’s just this magical noise that emerges. It sounds, at different times, obviously like Crosby, Stills & Nash, you can’t get away from that, but there are so many others. There’s parts which sound almost medieval, there are parts of it which sound kind of African. You put the first track on, “Sun It Rises”, and you ask people when does this come from. People could pin a date almost any time in the last 80 years, but it could be yesterday. It’s just extraordinary. I like playing records to my kids, the youngest are six and nine, they’ve got a big Creedence thing going on at the moment. They say, “he’s got a really cool voice, hasn’t he, dad?” about John Fogerty, and yes he has. There was a bit of a divide on Trout Mask Replica the other day, though. But when I first put this on, Mia, who was then eight, listened really intently and then she said, “how are they doing that?”. And that’s a childlike sense of wonder – how can this thing be created? They understand guitar-bass-drums, they understand that people sing, but how was this noise being made? It was other-worldly and ethereal, and yet passionate and intense and vivid and emotional. To me, it’s Number One out of this eight, it is head and shoulders above any other record that has been made this year and possibly for the last four or five years. I really believe it to be that good. Tony Wadsworth: I was struggling as to which one would be my fave, and this was one of the three that I was struggling with. I agree with everything that Mark says, it is absolutely beautiful. It’s like alchemy, really, it’s magical, this beautiful mixture of sounds. When you play music you sometimes listen to the various instruments and what’s being done and it can lose that magic. Listening to this, I found myself never actually thinking about that – until I realised that I wasn’t thinking about it. It is really magical, it is very original. One of the vocal influences that Mark didn’t mention was The Beach Boys, and it’s strange, all of a sudden a chord from Pet Sounds or Smile comes in. The songs are great and it’s everything Mark says it is, apart from being head and shoulders above Elbow! And it’s got a great sleeve. Alison Howe: I’ve listened to this record a lot this week because finally after waiting for them for a year they’re gonna be on Later..., and actually I’m glad it’s taken a year because I’d rather have them now that people are in love with them. They’ve sold a lot of records in this country already, although most people might not have heard of them, but I think the best is yet to come. I change my mind every day this week about which song I like best. I like the whole package. There are three records that I adore on this list, and I will change probably every hour which one is my Number One, I wish we could have a three-way tie. But I think that it is a record that lots of people will discover for a long time to come, and I think that’s a really good sign. They’ve just announced a date at The Roundhouse, and I think the Royal Albert Hall is not far away, personally. Tony Wadsworth: They’re on Bella Union, which is Simon Raymonde’s label, who was in the Cocteau Twins. He’s got some good things on his label, but this, to me, has got a connection to the Cocteau Twins, that ethereal, magical where-does-it-come-from? kinda thing. Allan Jones: Simon’s great, he’s been keeping us up with the bands he’s been discovering. He sent us through a link to, I think, their MySpace site. I think he emailed three or four of us in the office at the same time, we all clicked on to it immediately. As the music came out on my computer I could hear it coming out of four other computers in the office, and we all just looked at each other and went “What the fuck is this?”. It was just a glorious sound. It’s very rare for any of us in the office to agree on what we like, but there was this unanimity of feeling. It was just one track at that point, but we were all desperate to hear more. Mark: It’s a great name, as well. Not like Drive-By Truckers. Or Elbow, for that matter. Danny Kelly: I’m glad that Mark went first on this one, because it saves me having to weep with joy about the record. Just when you think that there are no more combinations left of human voices, no more tones for it to achieve, no more places for it to go, sometimes from across the world you hear a piece of music like this. It’s the most beautiful record, I think it exudes love in both directions. You can’t help but loving it, it’s sucking you in with this gas of human voices - I don’t hear the music at all, I know it’s in there, I just hear them singing. But equally, I can hear the love going in to the record, there’s not a moment or a corner of this record that isn’t adored by the people who made it and cared about it and cultivated it. I don’t know how they got there, but it’s a beautiful, beautiful thing. It’s wonderful, and I would want it to win. Mark: The mystery of that adds to it. We had them on the radio show and I said “how did you get to this?” There’s early Fleet Foxes stuff, you can see it on YouTube, where they’re a pretty standard indie band. The same people are in it, but the bass player and the drummer aren’t doing any backing vocals, and it’s really ordinary. And so it seems to me that it was a chance happening that these voices, that blend, was there all along in these people that were somehow drawn together. I think that’s why it’s such a great cover, there’s bits happening everywhere and every corner. My kids loved it because they spotted someone having a dump out of the window. Danny: Tony mentioned mid-’60s Beach Boys albums, but to me it sounded more like Surf’s Up, which is important, there’s a huge difference between youth and middle-age. The Beach Boys had stopped showing off when they made Surf’s Up, and some of the singing is better than the earlier records that people really love. Here what you’ve got is very young people showing off. One thing that young people should do is show the fuck off. It’s undignified to show off all the time (I must remind myself later when I’m on air), but it’s just a wonderful wonderful exposition of sounds. It is what it is, I don’t go into imagining what they’re gonna do next, I’ve no idea, because I don’t know if they’ll ever be able to do something as brilliant as this again. Allan: With the Felice Brothers and the Drive-By Truckers, all the influences are manifest and you can’t help hearing them through those influences. But with this, it exists unto itself. Danny: Everything’s contradictory, isn’t it? In the same way as we criticise the Felice Brothers or even Bon Iver when we don’t know what the fuck they’re on about, I don’t know what these people are on about either. I don’t know whether they’re happy or sad by the end of the record. I know that I’m happy, and that’s the important thing. Linda Thompson: They are very churchy, and what they do have in common with Brian Wilson is that these guys have obviously listened to a lot of descants. I haven’t heard descant harmonies for a long time. I’ve spent a lot of my life listening to The Copper Family, The Carter Family, the Watersons and Carthys who are much rougher around the edges. These people have cleaned it up, it’s very beautiful and it’s very clear. I did like it very much, I love anything that’s kind of folksy, but it touches me more cerebrally than it does in my heart. But I hope they make a fortune, and if it won I wouldn’t be unhappy, but I like a dirtier sound myself. Mark: I’d be surprised if it was conscious on their part to be influenced by The Copper Family, I think it’s a more naturalistic thing that’s happened. Linda: It does sound a lot like the New Lost City Ramblers as well, it’s very back to the ‘60s. Danny: I hear what you’re saying and I’m not disagreeing with you, but I love the Watersons particularly, and I do hear that one is clean and one is dirty, but I don’t think they’ve cleaned it up. They’ve just arrived at a different place. Tony: It’s interesting that there are no brothers in the band, no common blood, because I would have thought there would be, judging by the voices. Danny: I know nothing about singing, really I don’t, but the blood thing clearly does bring something to the party, but you can work at this, as I understand it. Tony: Also, isn’t it ace that we’ve got something that is so vocal, that’s quite unusual. And if something like this becoming popular gets people singing again then that’s got to be great for everybody. I think people should sing more. Mark: I think backing vocals has become the great lost art. As multi-tracking became easier and easier, it just added to the same spectrum of sound, it was just putting middly washes in. The technology is such that you can go to Argos this afternoon and get something you would have had to go to Abbey Road for five years ago. This has stripped all that out and put singing back in. Vocals are the last unique thing that’s left, no one can be like the Fleet Foxes. No-one can buy that sound, that’s unique to them. You can sample every voice but it won’t constitute the same way. Danny: Who knew that the person who would like it least would be Linda Thompson? There’s no telling, is there? Linda: There’s no accounting for that, but I think I’m biased against my own genre, I really do. Mark: I think this is its own genre. Danny: It’s beyond genre. Allan: It’s one of those records that you hear every four or five years, if you’re lucky, that comes along out of nowhere with no kind of background to it.

I must admit a line in the press release reeled me into this one. Jesca Hoop, originally from California, worked “for five years as nanny to the children of Tom Waits and his wife, Kathleen Brennan. ‘Her music is like going swimming in a lake at night,’ Waits reckons. Intriguing, obviously. I’ve been playing Hoop’s “Kismet Acoustic” EP quite a lot of late, and while I can’t pretend it all quite works for me – “Intelligentactile 101” is as archly whimsical as its title, more or less – some of it is terrific. Does she sound like swimming in a lake at night? Hard to say. Perhaps a twee, folksy-indie Karen Dalton would be closer to the mark; I’m reminded of Liz Green, who’s operating in similar territory, too. The first track here is the best and, promisingly, the newest one she’s written (the others apparently had fleshed-out treatments on an album, “Kismet”, from 2007, that I’ve never come across). It’s called “Murder Of Birds”, features Guy Garvey on discreet, low-level backing vocals, and melodically moves in the same territory as Kate Bush’s “Army Dreamers”; Joanna Newsom is a plausible comparison, too, though Hoop seems more earthly than transported. There’s something about her guitar playing here that’s oddly reminiscent of Newsom’s harp, as well – a certain gem-like shimmer that sounds like a kora at times. It’s lovely, anyway, and there’s enough else on “Kismet Acoustic” – notably “Seed Of Wonder” (more Newsom allusions here, perhaps) – to make Hoop worth following more intensively next year. I’m currently bombarded, like all music writers, by publicists and media outlets proffering and requesting “tips” for 2009, and might chuck her name into the mix along with, oh, Crystal Antlers maybe. Everyone’s going to vote for Passion Pit this year, I imagine. Not keen on that. I digress. It’s a bit invidious, but writing about Jesca Hoop reminded me of another new American female singer-songwriter who I’ve been meaning to mention for a while now. Larkin Grimm was brought up in a religious cult commune at Yale, studied at Yale and fell into the orbit of The Dirty Projectors, and now seems to be Michael Gira’s latest discovery at Young God. The knowledge that one of her predecessors at Young God was Devendra Banhart is some indication of Grimm’s style. It’s hard to remember now, but the first sighting of Banhart suggested a mystical and somewhat sinister figure, and there are similar elements to Grimm, especially on “Blond And Golden Johns”, a studiously witchy song about prostitution. It’s genuinely effective, though some elements of her “Parplar” album self-consciously pushes the “weird” button a bit too hard – a very different kind of whimsy to that of Jesca Hoop, but just as occasionally frustrating, vide “Little mother Mary riding on a unicorn,” and so on. But then, like Hoop, there are some things here that are just wonderful. Again, the first track is the show-stopper, “They Were Wrong” being slow, low-lit and minimal in a way which suggests that Grimm might be better advised to concentrate on these solemn, graceful moods – even the eerie chants like “Durge” – rather than the more wild-eyed, rickety tracks. Lots to be fascinated by here, anyhow. Check out the myspaces, maybe? Jesca Hoop and Larkin Grimm.

And on we go with the judges' discussions. Today: The Felice Brothers. Tomorrow: Fleet Foxes. Mark Radcliffe: I love The Felice Brothers. It’s practically The Band, isn’t it? Let’s be honest. Tony Wadsworth: It’s Cahoots by The Band. Let’s be specific, it’s one album. Mark: I think this is a far, far better record than the first one they made, which completely died out after the first few tracks. I love that sharecropper-dustbowl thing that they seem to be steeped in. I absolutely love it; “Greatest Show On Earth”, “Frankie’s Gun”, I think there are fabulous songs on it. Ultimately, why it might fall short for the prize, for the very top of my list, is that you can’t really escape the fact that it’s been done before, and to what degree it’s some kind of facsimile of a whole musical sound and experience and lifestyle. I’m not quite sure how honest a record it is, though I think it’s beautiful and I think they’re absolutely engaging and intoxicating. I think it’s an absolutely marvellous record, I really do, I can barely speak highly enough of it, although there are things of which I think more highly. Allan Jones: Do you think The Band comparisons, which they’ve obviously encouraged by the picture on the front of the first album, tends to overshadow an appreciation of how good and unique some of those songs are? Mark: Maybe, because it’s an easy reference point to make. If they’d dressed in PVC silver jumpsuits it’d be more like “where the fuck’s that coming from?”, wouldn’t it? But because they dress like that, if you’d heard the Felice Brothers without seeing them that’s exactly what you’d expect. It’s exactly how you’d feel it should be. We’re criticising it for being the whole package, but it’s wonderfully done. Tony: Actually, seeing as you’re talking visuals... shit sleeve. Danny Kelly: Yeah, shittest sleeve of the ones we had to judge. Mark (holding up the Vampire Weekend CD): It’s not fuckin’ worse than that, Tony! That’s just nothing. That is actively shite. Allan: They look so great, they’ve all got great features, you’d think they’d put a really great picture on the sleeve. Mark: I love it, though. It’s probably coming in second or third for me. Danny: Everything that Mark says about the record is true, it’s a lovely record. I can’t say it’s going to be one of my favourites, if we’re talking in those terms. The arguments you end up having with yourself about which Band LP it sounds like I actually found a bit distracting in the end. It is amazing for a group to be so influenced by one sound, but if you’re gonna do that it might as well be by something as beautiful as they have been. On the other hand, though, I don’t think they’re helping themselves. Their feel for their own indigenous music is not served by this very narrow view they’re presenting of themselves. I think they’re better than they give out from the visuals. I loved “Frankie’s Gun”, but I remember listening to it and thinking I need to get hold of Allan Jones, because only one person in Britain will know exactly where we are on the carousel of influence and re-influence here. Obviously, Bruce Springsteen would not have made The Seeger Sessions if there had not been this astonishing recovery of alternative indigenous music in the United States over the last 15 years. Then, The Felice Brothers hear it, and I’m lost now on where we are on the re-influencing. I think it’s a lovely record, I think if you’d never heard the things that influenced it you’d still think it was a lovely record, and that’s very important. Not my winner, but I’ll definitely go and see them the next time they’re in this country because I love to see people do this stuff in real time with their breath in the air. Linda Thompson: I agree about all The Band stuff. The lyrics are good, it’s very well played, I’d very much like to see them live. I found myself doing other things when I was listening to it, and that’s never a good sign for me. So, I liked it but I didn’t love it. Danny: There are some very lovely lyrics, but after the whole LP I got the distinct feeling that they’d fed the original lyrics through some kind of computer programme that takes out any word that makes you think the record could have been made in the last 25 years. There’s no songs about mobile phones on it, are there? They could be a little more open in what they write, and in the way they write. Allan: It’s an interesting point that there are no contemporary reference points in there, but I didn’t miss that, because it felt like they were writing about fairly current things. Even a song like “Frankie’s Gun”, where you get the idea it’s about bootleggers, but they’re probably on a crystal meth run. There’s a contemporary content there, which they don’t naturally reference, and it fits in with this whole school of American fiction, people like Daniel Woodrell. You think he’s writing about the past but you then realise he’s writing about the almost immediate present. It gives them a really frightening quality, because you realise there are still these communities where they don’t have mobile phones. But I think some of the songwriting on it is really amazing. Tony: I love it, I think it is a fantastic album. I just wish that it didn’t wear its influences so much. It doesn’t wear them on its sleeve, they’re tattooed on its arm! Danny’s point is a really good point; there are no contemporary references in the lyrics. Even Bob Dylan on his last album mentioned Alicia Keys... Danny: Thus giving Jack White permission to go and make a record with her. Tony: But it’s refreshing when someone who is the epitome of this sort of music is doing that. You wish that they had maybe more ambition to add to their influences, but they do them so, so well and you actually ask yourself does it matter? Should it matter? I think it’s only because we’re trying to judge a winner here that it does matter. Mark obviously really really loves the album but isn’t going to make it his winner, and I’m sort of like that as well. I think the reason why I prefer Elbow to this, in this context, is because Elbow isn’t copying one particular genre. I mean, they even copy arrangements, there’s one song that starts like “When I Paint My Masterpiece”, it fades in and you just think they’ve copied one specific arrangement of one specific Band song. Even the horns are Band-influenced because they’ve used Allen Toussaint to arrange them. I just wish they could add to those influences. But it is a beautiful and enjoyable record, and it’s a revelation to me because I didn’t know their music until we were given this opportunity, so thank you for introducing me to The Felice Brothers. Alison Howe: My colleague Mark Cooper will be very disappointed in me when I tell you that I’ve never listened to The Band. So I don’t come from the reference point of view at all, I knew nothing about where they might have borrowed from. I enjoyed it, the first half more than the second, maybe the novelty started to wear off, but about seven or eight songs in I’d had enough and I’d got the point.

A strange moment, on Friday night. Sitting somewhere quite close to the roof of the O2 Arena, it seems to me as if several thousand people are singing, simultaneously, in a scarcely-audible whisper. Onstage, Leonard Cohen and his extraordinary band are playing “Hey, That’s No Way To Say Goodbye”, with a softness, precision and clarity that I can rarely recall hearing at an arena show. And everywhere around the venue, it sounds like fans who may have been singing those words privately, to themselves, for decades, are now reciting them en masse in a kind of hushed incantation. It’s pretty incredible, and also moving, and it really brings home that, with great songs, a great band and a decent sound engineer, a charismatic singer can shrink the most inhospitable of performance spaces and make them intimate - sacred even. By now, I guess quite a few of you will have witnessed this lengthy, graceful victory lap of Leonard Cohen’s - or at least, like me, will have heard and read about the potency of these shows. Still, though, there’s a tangible shock to experiencing it for yourself – one that’s oddly comparable, maybe, to the Led Zeppelin show at the same venue almost a year ago. It’s weird to think that either Cohen’s or Led Zep’s songs need to be heard live to validate their visceral (albeit radically different) brilliance. But when Cohen plays a sequence of “Who By Fire”, “Chelsea Hotel #2”, “Hey, That’s No Way To Say Goodbye” and “Anthem” at the end of the first set, it reminds me that while, as a music hack, I might sometimes be a little quick to heap praise on artists, occasionally you hear a passage which emphasises that, well, genius exists. Apologies for the hyperbole, but really, again, if you’ve seen any of the shows, perhaps you’ll understand where I’m coming from with this one. Allan has already blogged about the Thursday show at the O2, so I’ll try not to repeat too much of what he said. He picked out Javier Mas from the outstanding band (that intro to “Who By Fire”. . .), which is fair enough, but I’d like to draw attention to Neil Larsen’s baroque, bluesy Hammond playing, and not just to the singing of Sharon Robinson and the Webb Sisters, but to how Cohen stands, seemingly transported, when they take their leads (on “Boogie Street” and “If It Be Your Will” respectively). What’s striking, beyond the brilliance of the songs and the way they’ve been so meticulously arranged and performed, is a certain reinvention of Cohen himself. This ongoing tour, that now looks like it will roll through most of 2009 too, might be a useful financial operation. But it also represents a redefinition of Cohen in the public eye. To non-fans of Cohen, he’s historically been stereotyped as depressive, gloom-laden and so on, patron saint of lonely people in bedsits or whatever. Now, thanks to his kind of ubiquity over the past few months, a more plausible and accurate image has become wider currency – that of Cohen as droll, urbane and profound; as a poet who can be both playful and spiritual (a remarkable reading of “A Thousand Kisses Deep” being especially powerful here). From the skipping that Allan noted, there’s a measured lightness of touch throughout that doesn’t detract from the seriousness of some of the content. But as he plays a tiny keyboard solo on “Tower Of Song”, it’s the image of Cohen as wry and self-deprecating that is most enduring. Maybe he’s come out on the other side of something, and while he’s undoubtedly too realistic a thinker to believe in total consolation, at least he’s reached some kind of resolution. By the encores, the pace ramps up gracefully to an elegaic sway for “So Long, Marianne”, then relatively raucous urgency for “First We Take Manhattan”. Later still, there’s an exquisite slouch through "I Tried To Leave You” that features the band taking jewel-like solos, a pleasure given how grim these bits of a show can often be. Everything here, in fact, is so perfectly judged, it’s hard to find fault. Even the fact Cohen says virtually the same things every night doesn’t matter – his words are so finely-judged, he probably spent the best part of a year writing them. After so much care, it seems churlish to expect him to abandon them after one use. By the way, the current issue of Uncut features interviews with Leonard Cohen and his band. For more details, click here.

We have a couple of reviews of last week's extraordinary Leonard Cohen shows up on the Uncut site. To read about Thursday night, visit Allan's blog. To read about Friday night, visit Wild Mercury Sound.