Around the time, I think, his “Eureka” album came out, I interviewed Jim O’Rourke. It was O’Rourke’s most conventional, song-based album to date, but he still had the musical outlook of an improvising musician. He wouldn’t be touring the album, he told me, because he never wanted to play the same thing more than once. Even a radically rearranged version of a song would be in a way dishonest, he thought. The best way for an insatiable creative force like O’Rourke to make music, it transpired, was to start with a totally clean sheet every single time he picked up an instrument. I remembered this the other day, listening to “Tell Tale Signs” and thinking about the comparable intransigence of Bob Dylan. O’Rourke and Dylan aren’t a perfect pair to measure up against each other, of course, for any number of reasons. But for a start, I guess O’Rourke comes from an avant-garde background where the performance is detached from the idea of the song, whereas Dylan’s approach privileges songs as sacred documents which can be bent into infinite new shapes, but retain their integrity. This, obviously, is the gist of “Tell Tale Signs”. Across the three CDs (and I’m afraid you’re probably going to need to buy the exorbitantly-priced 3CD version), he has two goes at each of “Most Of The Time”, “Dignity”, “Red River Shore”, “Born In Time”, “Can’t Wait” and “Marchin’ To The City”, and three at “Mississippi”. What emerges is an impression of Dylan, more than ever, as someone who regards albums as mere snapshots in time. The versions of songs that made it onto, say, “Oh Mercy”, aren’t necessarily the ones that he thinks are best, they’re just the ones that made most sense on the day. “Tell Tale Signs”, then, is a document of songs in constant flux, an exploration of how Dylan’s obsessive quest to look at his own work in new ways expands far beyond his live shows. The live tracks here, as it happens, are some of the least interesting things in this collection, though a notable exception is a 2003 take on “High Water (For Charley Patton)”, one of my favourite late-period Dylan songs, given a full-blooded rock makeover. “Love And Theft” and (the to my mind slightly overrated) “Modern Times” don’t get much of a look-in, actually, apart from that “High Water”, an alternate version of “Ain’t Talkin’” and a superbly elegaic version of “Someday Baby”, where the familiar jauntiness is replaced with a brooding momentum. The latter kicks off a fantastic sequence through the guts of Disc One, followed up with “Red River Shore” (the set’s greatest unreleased song, though I’m torn between this version and the one on Disc Three as my favourite. In Dylanworld, mind you, we shouldn’t have anything so reductive as a favourite version), “Tell Ole Bill”, a ravishing “Born In Time” and “Can’t Wait”. Maybe Dylan sees his own songs the way he – and, come to that, the brightest folk singers - always approached the songs on Harry Smith’s “Anthology Of American Folk Music” – as ancient but still living entities that should not be preserved in aspic, but constantly messed about with, repeatedly adapted, if only to prove that the innate quality of the songs can withstand any vagaries of mood or fashion. Dylan might change the way a song works, of course, but he still operates within pretty strict musical parameters: only the odd penchant for reggae pacing (Disc 3’s stab at “Mississippi”) strays much from venerable American tradition. Not that we want Dylan to stray, of course: one Mark Ronson remix in the catalogue is probably enough. Anyway, Disc Two is probably the weakest component of the package, though still full of gems: a pleasantly dazed slouch through “Mississippi”; a jauntily bouncing version of, incongruously enough, “Dignity”; a resonant duet with Ralph Stanley on “The Lonesome River”. It’s all compelling for anyone with an interest in Dylan, as you might expect. But with it also comes the frustrating implication that we’ll never see the entire picture. If Neil Young’s “Archives” will eventually, as promised, meticulously document every move Young has made in the past 40-odd years, “Tell Tale Signs” reminds us that Dylan has a much more capricious attitude towards his life’s work. Like “Chronicles”, the picture that emerges is fragmentary, often enigmatic, providing occasional glimpses of revelation rather than full disclosure. Songs spin backwards and forwards through time, changing radically, but often on a passing whim instead of a linear evolution. Nothing is certain, resolved, remotely finished. It initially seems to answer a few questions about how Dylan works, but eventually only adds yet more puzzles and dead-end trails to the myth. And, of course, adds a bunch more great recordings to the canon, too.

A news story in my inbox the other day reminded me that I still hadn’t blogged on the El Guincho record, the one I’ve been alluding to on playlist blogs for a while now. I say “a while”, though in truth I was heinously late hitching up to this particular bandwagon, since most go-getting bloggers were onto “Alegranza” sometime last year, when it was first released in Spain. Anyway, better late than never. That news story, by the way, announced that El Guincho – or Pablo Diaz-Reixa, as he’s known at home in the Canary Islands – will be supporting Vampire Weekend on their sold-out UK tour. It’s a mighty apposite coupling, since Diaz-Reixa also makes great pop music which is informed – but not, critically, predicated upon – world music. Given El Guincho’s hipster ubiquity these past few months, and his occasional habit of chucking Spanish folk music into the exuberant, danceable melée, it’s tempting to label this stuff as Hoxton Macarena, particularly on the fantastic shunt’n’loop of the opening “Palmito Park”. But as most critics have noted ad nauseam, the closest analog to “Alegranza” can be found in the various work of Animal Collective, particularly Panda Bear’s “Person Pitch”. The similarity comes not from source material – there’s no overt Brian Wilson fetish here – but from a cumulative, ghostly, ecstatic repetition, as Diaz-Reixa loops his variegated samples to oblivion, creates chants and delirious rituals out of layer after layer of loops. He works with a planetload of raw sounds, but like the Gang Gang Dance album I wrote about a few weeks ago, there’s a clear intention to point out a kind of overarching, hypnotic groove that unites disparate sounds and cultures. Unlike Gang Gang Dance, however, El Guincho doesn’t seem overly-anxious to hammer home this as a quasi-mystical imperative. Rather, he seems more intent in providing a rampant carnival soundtrack for any occasion. This is music programmed for abandon, that takes in a very Brazilian sense of massed percussive oomph (see “Kalise”, for example), stinging Hi-Life guitars (“Antillas”), rattling Afrofunk breaks (“Costa Paraiso”), steel drums (“Fata Morgana”), brutally edited opera singers, possibly (“Polca Mazurca”) and chant after chant of uncertain provenance. For all his eclectic sources, though, it’s Diaz-Reixa’s doggedly targeted vision, his unforgiving habit of locking each idea into a churning cyclical pattern until the music becomes disorienting, that’s most impressive about “Alegranza”. Like, again, those Animal Collective records, there’s something pleasantly destabilising about this music; a swishing, light-headed kind of joy that verges on seasickness. I know that doesn’t sound terribly appealing, but have a listen to the whole album at his Myspace: hopefully you’ll see what I mean.

Saturday evening at the last and finest mini-festival of late summer, and Minnesota’s most rock’n’roll Mormons can no longer turn the other cheek. Grinding to a halt between glacially slow riffs, LOW guitarist Alan Sparhawk makes an extraordinary appeal for audience sympathy. “It’s been a crappy day,” he grimaces, voice croaking. “All the people I love told me they hated me today.” Sparhawk’s wife, drummer and co-vocalist, Mimi Parker, shoots him a look of pure poison. “Not all of them,” she hisses. Welcome to End of the Road Festival 2008. Great sounds, magical location, and simmering marital tension live onstage. Only in its third year, Britain’s premiere one stop shop for outdoor indie-folk and left-field Americana is already an established brand and sold-out success story. The setting is idyllic, a peacock-patrolled Victorian pleasure garden overlooking Madonna’s country estate on the verdant uplands between Wiltshire and Dorset. The musical menu may be pretty single-minded, but it is full of rewarding oddities. Backwoods heartache chronicler BON IVER, for one. Wisconsin’s Justin Vernon proves himself worthy of the extravagant praise lavished on him this year with a warm and, given his debut album’s introverted mood, surprisingly lusty folk-rock set. MERCURY REV headline on Saturday, road-testing the Coldplay-tinged sparkles of their new "Snowflake Midnight" album. There is too much blustery bombast in their spangled set, but at least they bring a welcome blast of awestruck cosmic yearning to a weekend heavy with prosaic beard-rockers. AMERICAN MUSIC CLUB are engaging, but not wholly convincing. Mark Eitzel may be a sage-like poet and mordant wit, but his rambling jazz-rock confessionals seem a little smug and self-absorbed here. In baggy trousers and pork-pie hat, he could almost be fronting one of those unfathomably popular Middle American fratboy bands, like Smash Mouth or Bowling For Soup. Sunday night headliners CALEXICO also disappoint, never quite getting into the guts of their potentially rich mongrel mix of saloon-bar Americana and Mexican mariachi sounds. Admittedly the spaghetti western trumpet fanfares sound fantastic after a guitar-heavy weekend, but most of their set is too polished, too clinical, too Crowded House. Thankfully, End of the Road also features plenty of lesser known artists prepared to spike and twist the alt-folk rulebook. Such as the wry Canadian collective WOODPIGEON, who sound like Arcade Fire without the triumphalism. Or sardonic New Yorker JEFFREY LEWIS, who punctuates his DIY clatter with sharp comic monologues. Meanwhile, San Francisco punk-folk duo TWO GALLANTS are plain electrifying, howling their noir-ish vignettes in a semi-feral whine pitched somewhere between Jacques Brel and prime-time Violent Femmes. More than anyone else this weekend, they sound wired, possessed and potentially dangerous. End Of The Road may be the most mellow and uplifting fresh-air festival on the calendar, but a drop of the dark stuff still goes down a treat. STEPHEN DALTON

Turning up at the SonyBMG HQ in London last week to review the new AC/DC album for Uncut, it occurred to me: what on earth am I going to write? I’d heard and blogged already about “Rock’n’Roll Train” and – not for the first time in anticipation of a new AC/DC album – knew what to expect. The challenge would be how to spend 700 words saying little more than, “It sounds the same as all the others, and it’s great.” As it turned out, though, I rather wish now that I’d had that problem. Not to panic you completely, there are hairy great chunks of “Black Ice” that peremptorily and brilliantly recycle the AC/DC formula one more time. Four songs feature either “Rock’n’Roll” or “Rocking” in the title, for a start, and “She Likes Rock’n’Roll” is an especial marvel: a morse code riff in the blessed vein of “Back In Black”, with a fantastic passage where Brian Johnson leads his bandmates in a sort of huddled chant, a rock haka, a neat way of reminding themselves why they’re here. “She likes rock’n’roll,” they note, “She likes rock’n’roll/ She likes rock’n’roll.” Then, the penny drops: “I like rock’n’roll!” This is great, clearly, and there are a bunch more songs that’ll sound just fine in the unlikely event they make it into the setlist for the live shows. As “Rock’n’Roll Train” shows, the general air is of AC/DC at their most monolithic. If 2000’s “Stiff Upper Lip” found a band operating at a slightly more frantic, back-to-basics pace than of late, the likes of “War Machine”, “Smash’n’Grab” and the title track are all fiercely grandiose. The producer this time round is Brendan O’Brien, veteran of numerous Pearl Jam and Springsteen projects, and someone who’s clearly buffed up the patented razor-sharp, ultra-precise AC/DC sound for modern rock radio. This is no bad thing: AC/DC don’t suit sludge, and the needling clarity of the Young brothers’ guitar tones has always been the band’s greatest strength. But if we’re looking for a villain here, chances are that many AC/DC hardliners – I can probably count myself as one of them – will round on O’Brien. “Black Ice” is clearly an aggressive statement by one of the biggest bands in the world keen to impose themselves on 2008. But uncharacteristically, that desire to reassert dominance seems to have resulted in a few weird compromises. The hints come in tracks two and three, “Skies On Fire” and “Big Jack”, where the guitar textures sound a bit softer, a bit more modern, a bit perilously like U2 in places. Track four, though, is destined to be a point of extreme stress: “Anything Goes” is unambiguously a pop song, that reminded me of Laura Brannigan’s “Gloria” (and by extension Pulp’s “Disco 2000”) and Slade’s “Run Run Away”. It’s evidence, as if we needed it, that AC/DC’s genius has been founded in their imperturbable, stubborn resilience to change. And “Rock’n’Roll Dream”, a ballad, more or less, only accentuates the problem. There is, though, a silver lining of sorts, in that two more departures from the norm – into Led Zeppelin territory, specifically - are actually pretty great: “Stormy May Day”, a fraught melodrama driven by Angus on slide, of all things; and “Money Made”, which has a stomp comparable to “When The Levee Breaks” and which might just be the best thing on “Black Ice”. Plenty to write about, then, as you’ll see in the next issue of Uncut. But how strange that AC/DC should start trying to evolve at this late date. The tour, of course, will be the same as ever. Won’t it?