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.