As a general rule, I must admit to finding most of the stuff that goes by the dubious name of “nu-gaze” pretty lame. If there’s a minor boom in bands who revisit the aesthetics of shoegazing, most of them strike me as being awfully conventional, a particularly insipid kind of indie that revolves around weak vocals, predictable effects and a generally fey take on orthodoxy. Two decades ago, maybe some of this stuff would’ve appealed to me: I actually started my career as a music journalist by writing about Ride, Slowdive and so on. But in the same way as I wrote about a lack of affectionate nostalgia the other day, very few of those records (the glaring exception, of course, being the enduringly extraordinary My Bloody Valentine) sound much good to me now. I think of a lot of that stuff as gateway drugs: music that introduced me to the possibilities of experimental music, of noise, even. By the time I’d spent a few years immersed in that stuff, the sound of most shoegazing struck me as ineffably tame. I write about this because I’m playing the new album by No Age right now, and it strikes me that this LA duo have found a way of revitalising the idea of shoegazing – or more specifically, the sound of My Bloody Valentine, without having to resort (like most useful disciples of Kevin Shields) to electronica. “Nouns” is the first proper album by No Age, following a great compilation of singles called “Weirdo Rippers” that came out last year. It begins with “Miner”, a fabulous torrent of noise that (much like Track Seven, “Sleeper Hold”) reminds me of MBV’s “Feed Me With Your Kiss”. No Age use noise as a tool of attack rather than an ethereal balm, and they hook it to tunes which align them with the sound of the post-hardcore ‘80s American underground, not wimpy Anglo indie. In other words, No Age are a punk band, but a volatile and inventive one. Only two songs on this 12-track marvel of an album last more than three minutes, and many have snot-caked skater-boy titles like “Teen Creeps”, “Ripped Knees” and “Brain Burner”. Occasionally (“Impossible Bouquet” and “Keechie”, maybe), they come up with a vigorous lo-fi take on ambience. Other times, as on “Here Should Be My Home”, they’re more straightforwardly, enthusiastically, tinnily punk. Mostly, though, they make a fantastically direct and energising racket that makes me think they should be supporting Sonic Youth for the next decade. They’re playing the Uncut stage at the Great Escape in Brighton in May, by the way, on a weird and exciting bill that also includes – I think – Bon Iver and Wild Beasts. Should be quite a night. . .

In one of those strange coincidences, I happened to buy a new DVD player the other week, and the film I chose to christen it with was The English Patient. It’s one of my favourite films, an unashamedly epic romance played out across the burning sands of Cairo, a self-conscious throwback to the kind of Technicolor splendour you associate with David Lean’s movies. It’s interesting, perhaps, that the first time Anthony Minghella had any impression on me was over 20 years ago, when, as a young writer of television scripts, he devised a story line in Grange Hill whereby one of the school's pupils, Zammo Maguire, became addicted to heroin. The images of Zammo, slumped into the school's changing rooms, are ingrained in the memories of anyone in their late thirties; iconic images from our youth, up there with Tom Baker's Doctor Who contemplating averting the creation of the Daleks, say, or the vandalism of the Blue Peter garden. Looking back through his work prior to The English Patient, Minghella's output seems very parochial. Apart from Grange Hill, there was Boon and the obligatory Inspector Morse episodes. 1990’s Truly, Madly, Deeply, which he wrote and directed, was originally intended for the BBC’s Screen Two strand before being upgraded to a cinema release. There’s certainly nothing inherently cinematic about it, nor is there anything to suggest in his follow-up, Mr Wonderful, an American rom-com with Matt Dillon, that he was about to make anything as extraordinary as The English Patient. Adapted by Minghella himself from Michael Ondaatje’s Booker Prize novel, the film charts the tragic affair between Hungarian geographer Count Laszlo de Almasy (Ralph Fiennes) and Katharine Clifton (Kirsten Scott Thomas) the wife of one of Almasy’s colleagues on a British archaeological group based in Egypt during World War 2. Almasy recounts most of the story in flashback, after a horrific incident has left him badly disfigured. Minghella exquisitely draws the various plot strands together, effortlessly bringing into Almasy’s orbit his nurse Hana (Juliette Binoche), David Caravaggio, a former spy (Willem Dafoe) and Kip Singh, a sapper in the British army (Naveen Andrews), all of whose lives are touched, to some degree, by Almasy and the events that took place in the desert. The English Patient was a masterpiece, intelligently crafted, poetic and damn near perfect in every respect. It also sets up a constant that runs through Minghella's films; a belief that people want to see quality movies. I also very much liked his follow-up, The Talented Mr Ripley, another literary adaptation, this time of one of Patricia Highsmith’s novels about a charming sociopath, Tom Ripley, who here murders his way round the Mediterranean during the 1950s. As with its predecessor, it’s elegant and polished, with fine performances from Matt Damon, Gwyneth Patrow and Jude Law. It has a dark heart, too, thanks to Minghella’s shrewd observations on the seductive power of money, class and sex. I find Cold Mountain a frustrating film. Again, adapted by Minghella, from Charles Frazier’s Civil War-era novel, there’s much to admire. His cast all do excellent work – from Jude Law’s Confederate solider making the pilgrimage back to find true love Nicole Kidman, to Natalie Portman, Philip Seymour Hoffman and Ray Winstone. The scope, too, is huge and thrilling, the opening battle scenes as vivid as anything Spielberg threw at you in Saving Private Ryan. But it’s infuriatingly episodic, Minghella perhaps getting so involved with the minutiae of each different set up that he loses sight of the film as a whole. Between them, those three films raised a jaw-dropping 24 Oscar nominations and 10 wins. A considerable achievement, by any standards, from the man who got Zammo hooked on smack.

In the playlist yesterday, I mentioned that James Blackshaw, one of my favourite contemporary guitarists, has a new album out as part of a duo called Brethren Of The Free Spirit. Actually, Blackshaw has two new things in circulation at the moment, and both are excellent. Blackshaw, as regular readers will probably know by now, is a British guitarist who’s loosely connected with the New American Primitive scene of musicians thanks to his presence on one of Tompkins Square’s invaluable “Imaginational Anthems” comps. I guess the New American Primitive tag means, ostensibly, a kinship with John Fahey and the Takoma School of guitarists: a deep, meditative style of playing which takes in folk, raga and various other influences, combining them into an elaborate but crystalline, fluid kind of music. I must admit I’m hooked on it, and especially on the records made by Blackshaw. Blackshaw’s is a Londoner in his twenties with a 12-string, whose meticulous and ecstatic playing has made him one of the stars of this scene: “Sunshrine”, “The Cloud Of Unknowing”, “Waking Into Sleep”, “O True Believers” especially, are worth picking up, but anything you can find is good. Including, of course, these two new ones. “The Garden Of Forking Paths” only features one track by Blackshaw, but he’s “curated” this lovely collection of solo instrumental pieces, also featuring Chieko Mori (Japanese, on koto), Helena Espvall (the Swedish cellist from Espers) and Jozef Van Wissem (a baroque lute player from Holland). It’s an engrossing comp, and a clever one too, because it discreetly moves Blackshaw a little away from that aforementioned American Primitive scene. The atmosphere of “Forking Paths” is similar, but there’s a pronounced, delicate austerity to much of this music, which draws affinities between seemingly disparate sounds – ancient and modern, classical and folk, composed and improvised, avant-garde and accessible. It’s a terrific experiment, and one followed through by the Brethren Of The Free Spirit. Here, on “All Things Are From Him, Through Him And In Him”, Blackshaw teams up with the lutist Van Wissem for a series of intense duets that owe as much to the graceful formalities of modern classical music as they do the patterns of folk and its renaissance antecedents. Like all Blackshaw projects, it has a sort of warm, concentrated intensity to it, an intangible character that makes this music much more approachable than a sketchy description like this might suggest. A cat joins in at one point. And you can find a copy, along with plenty of other albums by Blackshaw, over at his Myspace. Please, buy lots. Oh, and if you're in London, please come over to the Borderline on Thursday night, where our first Club Uncut night is headlined by Dawn Landes, whose recent album was an eccentric, countryish and very likeable rethink of Catpower's schtick. Should be a good night.

Neil Young, like Dylan, has a lot to live up to. Most obviously, he has to contend with his own reputation, and the expectations of his audience: two things which are not entirely compatible. Still, there is something odd about the way he sets up for the acoustic part of the show. With the broken theatre lights at the back of the stage, and the sense of clutter, it looks as if it’s designed to give the suggestion of a man looking back from the end of his career, alighting on memories, and finding new significance in things he’d forgotten. This may be an accurate representation of the state of Young’s mind as he curates his back catalogue in preparation for the release of his extensive Archives project, but it doesn’t always encourage a sense of intimacy. The set design adds a layer of theatricality, and the painter at the back left of the stage seems to represent the act of creation – but none of this is as helpful as, let’s say, speaking to the audience, or explaining the context of the songs, some of which are pretty obscure. (Incidentally, The Clash employed graffiti artist Futura 2000 to paint the backdrop on the Sandinista! tour, but his art was more dynamic, and more in tune with the spirit of the music). It is a reverential crowd. Neil gets a standing ovation before he does anything. He gets a cheer when he drinks a glass of water. And when he plays, the audience is so quiet that you can hear every cough and wheeze. When things get this precious, the quality of the songs is laid bare, and it doesn’t always help. As a writer, Young has always prized sincerity over poetry, and some of his lyrics can be a little gauche. But the acoustic set does seem to be telling a story of sorts. "From Hank To Hendrix" has him “with this old guitar, doin’ what I do”, while the line “it’s easy to get buried in the past” jumps out from the beautiful desolation of "Ambulance Blues". It is a treat to hear this song live, and it shows how, even as a young man, Neil sounded old and dismayed, circling around burnout. "Kansas" has a thin tune and bitter lyric (“I feel like I just woke up from a bad dream”), while "Sad Movies" is more straightforwardly autobiographical. On earlier dates in the tour he explained how he wrote it about his movie-going days in Toronto, but in this setting, the words play into the theme of a man examining a life of performance: “Black and white, the exit lights up in the balcony, looking for someone to feel for a while”. "Mexico" sounds weary (“the feeling’s gone, why is it so hard to hang on?”), and "A Man Needs A Maid" with a slight "I Don’t Like Mondays" feel on the piano, gets a big cheer. Finally, in response to a shout of “Old Man”, Neil speaks. “Time’s funny,” he says, “sometimes it’s standing still, sometimes, it’s going like hell. I like it though. The older I get, the better I feel.” And then he plays "Harvest", and it’s only at this point that he truly starts to overcome the self-consciousness of the setting. It is tremendous – sad and wistful, and Neil himself seems to spark into life. Suddenly he can’t stop talking – reprising the story of his Granny Jean (mentioned in John’s earlier review), who worked in a copper mining town, checking the tags of the miners as they came back above ground. “She was a valued member of the community, but more than that, she played a helluva honky tonk piano”. And Neil plays "Journey Through The Past", his hands rolling over the keys like a saloon bar entertainer. It’s a sentimental journey. He picks up the banjo. Put it down. “It comes down to: would you rather hear about plant life or dogs? That’s the way government works, isn’t it?” He plays "Homegrown". Afterwards, he says he used to think it was a drug song. Then he thought it was about food, and how people could eat healthily, “Then fuel – growing plants and using ‘em in cars. That’s pretty good.” He hesitates. “That’ll never work. They’re all over that… so all you get’s a stupid song and all this information”. He rambles on endearingly, losing his way. “I’m losing the whole audience,” he says. “Thank God it doesn’t matter!” More evidence that he is curating the soundtrack to his life? The lyric of "Love Art Blues": “My songs are all so long and my words are all too sad – why must I choose between the best things I ever had”. "Old Man": in which the young Neil compares himself to a codger, and he here he is, singing it when he’s old. He hasn’t touched some of these songs for years, and age has changed them. The words mean different things. The electric set is something else. Suddenly, the theatricality doesn’t matter. After all that introspection, the second half is about the joy of noise, and it’s still a thrill to hear that heavy guitar sound. It’s isn’t metal – it’s live rust, a corrosive, crumbling noise that sticks to your skin. It doesn’t even matter much when the song is bad (thank you, "Dirty Old Man"), Young and his band play them as if they are controlling the weather, with the emphasis on thunder. "Powderfinger" is a terrific example of the raw power of riffing, but the show hits the heights with "Hey Hey My My", a quite preposterous celebration of the power of rock’n’roll which makes perfect sense, with Young careening off into a jet engine guitar solo, and the crowd doing call and response on the line about Johnny Rotten. "Too Far Gone" is a step down in intensity, but leads perfectly into Young’s reworked version of "Oh Lonesome Me" (“one of the greatest sets of lyrics I ever heard"), stretched out from Don Gibson’s original into an achingly sad song, with Young’s voice almost snapping on the chorus. And that leads into a fantastic version of "Winterlong" (“for Danny Whitten”); all grungy sadness, with lovely steel guitar and plaintive melodies. It doesn’t get any better, though the second encore of "Tonight’s The Night" comes pretty close. The show ends where Young’s career began, with the surf instrumental, "The Sultan", which he recorded with the Squires. Not that Neil explains that. Instead, the song is introduced by an Ali Baba character in a pantomime costume, banging a gong. In the end, it’s a thrill – a mix of the obscure and the familiar, and a lesson in the way the meaning of songs is changed by time and context. Oddly enough, it feels like the beginning of something, not the end. ALASTAIR McKAY Set 1 From Hank To Hendrix Ambulance Blues Kansas Sad Movies Mexico A Man Needs A Maid Harvest Love In Mind Journey Through The Past Homegrown Love Art Blues Love Is A Rose Out On The Weekend Old Man Set 2 The Loner Dirty Old Man Spirit Road Powderfinger Hey Hey My My Too Far Gone Oh Lonesome Me Winterlong No Hidden Path Encores: Fuckin’ Up Tonight’s The Night The Sultan