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.

Episode Three of our judge's discussions, and today we find them discussing Drive-By Truckers. Tomorrow, The Felice Brothers. Alison Howe: I knew nothing about the Drive-By Truckers at all. I put it on and I enjoyed it, I learned something, which is always a good thing. But there was a moment, I don’t know which song it was, one of the first two or three, and I don’t know whether it was subliminal or whether it really was in the lyrics, I’m convinced he sang “The Hold Steady” at some point. And to me The Hold Steady should be in this list rather than the Drive-By Truckers. I really liked their record, and I was surprised they weren’t here, and for the rest of this record that’s all I could think about. I enjoyed it, but it just passed me by. It’s not the sort of thing I tend to listen to, personally, unlike a lot of the other records, and I wish I had more emotive things to say about it. Allan Jones: They’re one of my favourite groups, but I was surprised to see it getting on to the shortlist. Mark Radcliffe: I’m with Alison, I think it’s the poor relation of this shortlist. I think it’s quite nice, just standard American alt. country; the best bits sound like Neil Young, it’s not shit, it’s fine. Some quite nice songs but there’s nothing out of the ordinary on it at all. Danny Kelly: I’m not going to say anything that’ll drive it higher in other people’s estimation. I actually really like it, but I don’t think it’s as good as The Hold Steady’s record. That’s a belting record, while this is just another record by a very good band. It’s kind of an enforced lesson in American rock and alternative rock over the last 30 years. Where it’s good, it’s very very good, and it’s never really terrible or anything like that. What I’ve got against it is that there’s just so much of it. Mark: They’ve got three songwriters, so they’re all trying to shoehorn their own things into it. Allan: Just before recording it they lost their fourth songwriter, so it could have been another 20 minutes longer! Danny: Anyone who has any interest in popular music to come out and say they hate the record is obviously a liar. There’s nothing to hate about it, it’s very good in places. They kind of passed me by, but when I heard that Patterson Hood was David Hood’s son the record immediately went up five notches for me, because of the work he did particularly with Bobby Womack in the early ‘70s. I don’t believe you should judge records by their parentage. . . Linda Thompson: Definitely you should! – Danny: Well, since this is clearly not gonna win we can loosen our corsets a bit, actually these things do matter. Mark mentioned that Elbow have been together man and boy, and that does bring something to the party. But since I honestly don’t think it’s not even as good as its close relative that didn’t make the list, I can’t go for this. Allan: There’s 17 tracks on there, quite dense songwriting as well that’s not always very clear in the narrative, and I think it probably speaks to their fans more than it would to a broader audience, hence my surprise that they’d actually made the shortlist. Danny: It’s not their best record, even. Allan: It’s pleasing to see them getting the recognition, but I fancy it will appeal to people who’ve not heard them before and probably weren’t too familiar with that kind of music. Danny: I enjoyed it thoroughly, but not in any way that would make me want to go out and buy the previous record, which is always a good test for me. Allan: There are two or three earlier records that would probably represent them more forcefully and in a much more focused way as well. Linda: Not much to add to that, really. I’m friends with Spooner Oldham, and he told me about this group and anyone he loves I usually love. But I’ve heard better bands in Nashville in bars, I really truly have. There’s good picking, but you expect that, and I liked the song “The Purgatory Line”, but for the most part I thought the record was unremarkable. It just didn’t do much for me. Tony Wadsworth: Nobody ever said a record was too short, and I think people should learn that lesson. There’s too many bloody long records around, unfortunately, and you can’t navigate your way around a 70-minute record, it’s really quite hard. I love this type of music, but it is just a fair-to-good example of it. I do like the track “Bob”, though, it’s a nice little cameo of a song, but was sort of the only thing I could pick out of it. The rest of it was just OK alt. country.