There's a moment during CSNY: Déjà Vu, Neil Young's document of the supergroup's 2006 Freedom Of Speech tour, when one furious ticket holder outside the Philips Arena, Atlanta spits: "Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young can suck my fucking dick!" Atlanta is a Republican heartland, a “red state”, and many at the show seem unwilling to accept CSNY as politically engaged firebrands, particularly when the lyrics to “Impeach The President” – “Let's impeach the President for lying and misleading our country into war” – are displayed on giant video screens behind the band. As the camera crew attract similarly vitriolic comments from other disgruntled punters – one report suggests almost a third of the audience have walked out – I'm left wondering quite what these people expected from CSNY. They are, after all, a band with a lengthy track record of political activism, caught up in the anti-Vietnam movement (as we’re reminded in archive footage dotted throughout the film), while the Freedom Of Speech tour is coming off the back of Young’s Living With War album, arguably the most overtly political record in his career. But perhaps, to a lot of those people who stormed out of the Philips Arena, CSNY are now no different from a host of other bands on the enormodome circuit. All Greatest Hits packages, an easy, nostalgic stroll down memory lane, folks expecting those intricate harmonies and some choice FM radio cuts to sing along to, the memories of “Ohio” and “Find The Cost Of Freedom” presumably strategically airbrushed from memory. Anyway, this section – as the band circle round the American south – seems to me to be the most intriguing part of the film. It’s interesting just how far from their counterculture roots people seem to think CSNY have strayed over the years, as if age, expanding waistlines, receding hairlines and multi-millionaire status somehow precludes them from having political opinions anymore. Earlier in the film, we see CSNY play places like New York and other left-leaning, Democratic strongholds where their sentiments are widely supported; but down south, they’re on something approximating a front line, raising a shitstorm of controversy. Apparently, during those dates in the south, there were bomb-sniffing dogs at the shows and guards outside Young’s hotel room (though footage of this, if it was ever filmed, never makes it into the film). “It was the most hair-raising, nerve-wracking, terrible experience,” he’s said. In fact, driven by Young, the whole band seems galvanised by their latest mission, even if Stephen Stills does express doubts about the enterprise early on. We see home movie footage of Young in what looks like his living room, writing and recording the whole Living With War album in nine days. Snippets from chat shows, with a friendly, laid-back Young chatting amiably about bringing down Bush and his opposition to the war in Iraq. We hear from Crosby and Nash, all very on-message with Young; Stills, also, before too long. If I have a fault with the film, I’d like to have seen more of the offstage dynamic between the band. There’s some interesting footage of Young, his arm round Stills’ shoulders, gently cajoling him, almost like an elder brother affectionately ribbing a younger sibling. When you consider the often-fractious history the two men have had, you want to know a little more about where their relationship is currently at, and by extension the rapport between the four of them when off duty. At this point, the film pretty much changes course. CSNY had taken on the road with them a former Vietnam veteran turned ABC news correspondent Michael Cerre, who’d covered the war in Afghanistan and Iraq and was now embedded with the band, out filming the audience responses during the shows and the accompanying backstage footage. He also catches up with some of the servicemen and women he’d met in the field, all of them now firmly opposed to the war, some of them disabled, for what feels like the human interest strand in a current affairs’ programme. For instance, we meet Vets For Vets – not, sadly, the animal medical profession offering succour to the good servicemen and women of the US military, but a support group run by Vietnam veterans for soldiers returning from Afghanistan and Iraq as they readjust to life after the horrors of war. It’s occasionally pretty moving viewing, Cerre never letting the material slip into sanctimonious tub-thumping. Initially, there’s something fairly schizophrenic, then, about CSNY: Déjà Vu, as it morphs from concert film to human interest documentary. But by dwelling on the lives of the veterans affected by the conflict, Young and Cerre make explicit the connection between the material and its roots in the War on Terror. CSNY: Déjà Vu opens in the UK this Spring

I’ve been feeling a pang for the country for a while now, probably brought on by reading Robert MacFarlane’s two wonderful books, “The Wild Places” and “Mountains Of The Mind”; not even a Sunday spent on Walthamstow Marshes could cure me. In the same mood, I was walking to work through the City this morning, just as the sun was struggling to burn off the fog, playing Vaughan Williams and the second CD of Kate Bush’s “Aerial”. “Aerial” is an album I’ve come back to more than most over the past few years, in spite of parts of it making me think of some people a little older than me (an interestingly self-conscious distinction, perhaps) dancing in the garden of their holiday home to a “Café Del Mar” comp after the children have gone to bed. But anyway, another reason to revisit “Aerial” was that I’ve been playing Goldfrapp’s “Seventh Tree” a fair bit these past few days, and there are definite similarities between the two records. I’ve been fairly equivocal about Goldfrapp’s music in the past; sort of distantly admiring of how the duo create conceptual art out of music – disco, glam and so on – that’s often revisited for kitsch or nostalgic purposes. Nevertheless, I’ve always been mildly irritated by journalists who persist in telling me how “sexy” Goldfrapp’s music is, as if shuffling a bunch of quasi-erotic signifiers can automatically send a listener into some kind of uncontrollable erotic state. None of it is that straightforward, of course. “Seventh Tree” has arrived with another easily-digestible myth for critics; it’s a folk album, apparently, a retreat to the country and acoustic instruments – or at least samples of acoustic instruments – by Alison Goldfrapp and Will Gregory. And certainly “Clowns”, the opening track, compounds that impression, willowy and hazy like parts of “Aerial”, and also very like Beth Gibbons & Rustin Man’s “Out Of Season” (I’ll blog about Portishead soon, by the way). Much of this is lovely music, though Goldfrapp’s evocation of the English countryside is even more unworldly and meticulous than that of Bush. You’d imagine that such a calculating, technologically-augmented “folk” would be rather offputting, not least because the duo often draw on ‘80s Europop (especially on “Happiness”) as much as “The Wicker Man” or the Cocteau Twins, and Alison Goldfrapp sounds as sternly controlled and distant as ever, dew-laden ululations notwithstanding. The thing is, it works precisely because it’s such a studied, implausible confection. I was watching the video for “A&E” yesterday, with Goldfrapp lying in a woodland glade, only to be joined by a dancing troupe of hunky creatures apparently built from leaves and mulch. It’s daft and preposterous, and very far from the sort of landscape music I usually favour. But in its hyper-saturated, studiously magical way, it’s quite powerful, and certainly very enjoyable. Now, where are my hiking boots?

The prospect of a new My Morning Jacket album in June is pretty tantalising (though I hope it's better than the fractionally disappointing "Z"). In the meantime, though, an excellent band from Seattle seem to be providing a very useful diversion. Fleet Foxes may look a little disconcertingly Kings Of Leon-ish in their photographs. But have a listen to the tracks on their Myspace page: they're great. My Morning Jacket and, I guess, Band Of Horses are the easiest reference points, since Fleet Foxes have definitely got that high, yearning kind of Cosmic American thing down to a tee. Instead of rocking as hard as MMJ at their best, though, FF seem to be heading down a folksier, hazier path. So of the tracks playing at the Myspace, "White Winter Hymnal" definitely has a hint of Sacred Harp choral groups to the harmonies; that form of backwoods gospel singing that invariably has a transcendent, otherworldly air when it's done well. There's a danger, when an indie band appropriate this sort of stuff, that the desperate striving for old-world atmosphere might end up sounding rather hokey. Fortunately, Fleet Foxes have the dazed, close-harmony skills (hints of The Beach Boys, too, especially on "Sun It Rises") to carry it off. There's an EP due out in the UK in May, with the album to follow in June, apparently (maybe Sub Pop have different plans for the States). Very good, anyway: as ever, I'll report back when I hear the full records. But in the meantime, have a listen and let me know what you think.