Weekender

IF YOU ONLY BUY ONE RECORD THIS WEEK...
Last Weekender of the year, so what can we round up for next Monday and beyond to the end of 2011? Well, Lambchop's Nixon and Is A Woman are being reissued in deluxe editions, while the entire Jon Spencer Blues Explosion back catalogue reappears in print on 13th December. Next week, the 6th, we get the dramatic debut from Hereford's own violin-duelling explosive post-rock sextet Talons, Hollow Realm, and a new album, Method, from accordion-friendly stormtossed folkie Johny Lamb under his Thirty Pounds Of Bone guise.

SOMEWHERE TO GO
Right, loads of pre-Christmas gigs and we know this can't approach covering all those of STN relevance, but let's give it a shot. Let's start with the dual ATPs. Godspeed You! Black Emperor kick us off in Minehead next Friday to Sunday, their own reunion after eight years off doing, they say, "a handful of other bands, and solitary roadtrips and wanderings, a couple of recording studios built, and a restaurant and 3 live venues also. a film soundtrack and 4 new kids and 3 new dogs. dead-end jobs. some farming and vegetable gardens. a small record label. acupuncture as a livelihood. and three of us just stayed on the road." Their friends include Mike Watt and The Missingmen, Scout Niblett, Tindersticks, Deerhoof, Thee Oh Sees, Cluster, Flower/Corsano Duo, Marissa Nadler, Tim Hecker, Oneida and, drum roll please, Weird Al Yankovic, his first UK visit which also incorporates dates in London, Birmingham and Manchester. In Between Days offers Hallogallo 2010 (Michael Rother & Friends Present NEU! Music), Holy Fuck, Caribou, Four Tet Ulrich Schnauss and Factory Floor for those stopping over at Butlins, and why wouldn't you, before 10th-12th sees the coming of a very different type of guest for Bowlie 2. Belle & Sebastian, who brought about this mess in the first place, invite round Julian Cope, Field Music, Dirty Projectors, Wild Beasts, Camera Obscura, Saint Etienne, The Go! Team, Teenage Fanclub, Laetitia Sadier, Those Dancing Days (who play the Lexington and Cardiff Buffalo Bar on 8th and 9th, and judging by a recent pic we've seen Linnea's hair is now extraordinary), Edwyn Collins, Campbell & Lanegan, Foals, The Zombies, Steve Mason, Best Coast, The Vaselines, Sons And Daughters, The New Pornographers, Dean Wareham, Vashti Bunyan, Frightened Rabbit, The Phenomenal Handclap Band, Apples In Stereo, Crystal Castles, The 1900s, the 1990s (fantastic dual booking), the Amphetameanies and "one of Scotland’s top authentic Beatles tribute acts" Them Beatles, a band whose booking agent doesn't mention their appearance at one of the world's top alternative music events but does list testimonials from Argyle Street Glasgow Debenhams, Kwik Fit Insurance and "Frank Cogan, Landlord".

That's part of the Belle & Sebastian tour, some of which features the London Contemporary Orchestra on backup, starting on Wednesday at Belfast Ulster Hall, reaching Dublin Grand Canal Theatre on Friday, then crossing over to Gateshead next Sunday, passing through Birmingham, Manchester and Bournemouth before ATP and Leicester, Bristol and three nights at Glasgow Barrowland after. Support at most dates comes from Daniel Kitson, doing one of his storytelling sessions with Gavin Osborn. One step up, Arcade Fire hit the arenas, taking on the O2 on Wednesday and Thursday before Dublin, Birmingham, Cardiff, Manchester and Glasgow. Rather less spacious but equally rarefied atmospheres await a new Billy Bragg tour which also kicks off on the first, heading through Hatfield, Nottingham, Preston, Penrith, Glasgow, Norwich, Leamington Spa, Bexhill, Bournemouth, Cardiff and London (Troxy). Surely it's about time for a new album in 2011, although the fresh song he's been playing recently about rich bankers definitely needs some more lyrical work.

Otherwise, in loosely chronological order: Bobby Conn's post-glam insanity hits Leeds Brudenell tonight with The Blanche Hudson Weekend supporting. The Lovely Eggs, The Just Joans, Paisley & Charlie, The Understudies, Betty and the Werewolves, The Orchids and The Felt Tips are among those playing Glasgow Popfest, SWG3 next Friday and Saturday, Stereo on the Sunday. While that's going on The School and The Loves join forces for Christmas parties at London Luminaire (Saturday) and Cardiff Buffalo Bar (Sunday). Islet end a year of hitting things at Clwb Ifor Bach in Cardiff on the 13th, with Sweet Baboo and H.Hawkline supporting. On the same day at London The Social Alcopop! throw a Christmas party with Johnny Foreigner, Stagecoach, My First Tooth and Attika State. Maximalism! at Brighton Concorde 2 on the 15th, in aid of The Martlets Hospice, is curated by Tom and Alex White, featuring Mystery Jets DJing, a silent auction and British Sea Power, Field Music, The Chap, 80s Matchbox B-Line Disaster, the first Electric Soft Parade show in more than two years and The Pure Conjecture, "a supergroup made up of members of Actress Hands, British Sea Power, Electric Soft Parade, Brakes, The Hazey Janes, The Tenderfoot, Nada and 30 Pounds Of Bone". That's just Tom White, isn't it? The Brixton Windmill on Saturday 18th hosts There's Nothing Wrong With Covers III, headlined as with August's Reading 1992 special by Bananirvana (live karaoke of In Utero, essentially), plus the Johnny Foreigner/Internet Forever/4 Or 5 Magicians (RIP)/Eelectricity And Lust Pavement tribute act Kannberg 1664 and more TBA. Stones Bar and Googies Art Cafe in Folkestone hosts Tinseldayer II on the 19th, headlined by This Town Needs Guns with Tellison, Shoes And Socks Off, Cats & Cats & Cats, &U&I (ex-Blakfish), Tangled Hair (ex-Colour), Stagecoach and Ute. On that same night Maybeshewill play their home venue Leicester Firebug to round off their mammoth European tour, with slow burn blog favourites Dysneyland and Dark Dark Horse (remember, we wrote them up two weeks ago) supporting. On the 22nd Slow Club throw their third annual Union Chapel festive soiree, with the Wave Pictures on before. The Futureheads host Futurefest 2 at Newcastle Academy at the 23rd, celebrating ten years of existence with some of their favourite local bands, including Frankie & The Heartstrings. And then it's Christmas. And then it's the new year. And then the whole sorry charabanc begins again.

Weekender

IF YOU ONLY BUY ONE RECORD THIS WEEK...
You Thought You Saw A Shooting Star But Yr Eyes Were Blurred With Tears And That Lighthouse Can Be Pretty Deceiving With The Sky So Clear And Sea So Calm. A title, Alexei says, that "came from smoking too much weed late at night and not having anyone to say, well, maybe that’s a bit impractical for a title", none of that entirely out of character for him. This of course a new release, a six track EP on new home Alcopop!, from Birmingham kings and queen Johnny Foreigner. Some of it is almost calm and melodically inclined, in a very Pavement sense. Some of it cleaves to the frantic and fretboard abusive, perhaps more abusively than ever. One track has a violin coda. Half of one track is based on electronic beats and namechecks George Pringle. It's reliably ace. Buy from the label.

SOMEWHERE TO GO
Just to get in before the end of the year, three American guitar and black shirt-toting relative giants. A cult of believers will flock to the blessed feet of Berninger as The National play Bristol Academy Wednesday, Warwick Arts Centre Thursday, Glasgow Academy Friday and Manchester Academy Saturday before three nights at Brixton Academy. The only date of the lot not sold out at time of writing is the first Brixton date. Also on the 24th Interpol emerge at Nottingham Rock City, followed by Newcastle, Birmingham, Edinburgh and three nights in Dublin and one in Manchester. Vampire Weekend arrive a day later, starting at Blackpool Empress Ballroom, then Wolverhampton Civic Hall Friday, Edinburgh Corn Exchange Saturday, Sheffield Academy Sunday, then a Brighton stop before the 2nd and 3rd at Ally Pally with special guest support slots for Laura Marling and Janelle Monae respectively. Countering the Yankee charge, two very British bands. The Fall, already labelless and back in the studio, take a trip out to Camden Electric Ballroom on Tuesday, Bexhill on Sea De La Warr Pavilion Wednesday, Holmfirth Picturedrome Thursday, then Leamington Spa, Exeter and Bath next week. Iconoclasts to the last. No such searching subtlety of booking for the annual Madness Christmas tour - actually, Christmas tours plural are annual by nature, aren't they? - which starts next Friday at Blackpool Empress Ballroom, continues through to December 19th.

Weekender

IF YOU ONLY BUY ONE RECORD THIS WEEK...
Couple of albums to mention this week. The more prevalent in 'our' circles is Forget by Twin Shadow, one George Lewis Jr., produced by Grizzly Bear's sonic honcho Chris Taylor and buffed to an 80s shine. Or something like that, anyway - if the initial impression is Summer Camp had it been formed by him out of the Dears, the subtle touches, lyrical love and loss, and warmth of those cascading synth sounds take it out of mere show and tell nostalgia and into the direct hit of the heart. On the other hand, you may have had enough of glistening Rolands and want something with a very British, bedraggled, shouting against the wind mode. In which case say hello to St Thomas by The Scottish Enlightenment. If the often slow moving, chiming guitar cathedrals and thin end of the brooding late night wedge vocals couldn't be more north of the border, the hope and despair, the brutal noise and delicate majesty of the alternating lead guitars are universal, hinting at all sorts while remaining within what the label calls "ecclesiastical rock". The National and Low fans should certainly look this way.

SOMEWHERE TO GO
How on earth did Constellations Festival, across three rooms at Leeds University, garner such a remarkable bill? Here, we can even guide you through it as we've got the stage times here. Start at 2.30 with Honour Before Glory, then wander over for Dog Is Dead, try to catch some of I Like Trains, then check out Dam Mantle before Sky Larkin come on. Pretend you aren't missing Gold Panda - it's just a bloke in a hoodie with some wires - while watching Esben & The Witch, then cower at the feet of Liars. If you want to see some of Local Natives be careful as you might miss the start of Les Savy Fav, except you'll miss it all if you see Los Campesinos! Hang on, whose idea of scheduling was that? Spectrals in the third room haven't got a chance. Anyway, you then finish with Broken Social Scene. Or perhaps Four Tet. Or maybe Sleigh Bells. Most festivals don't manage three days of that quality.

Back in one room at a time sensibleness, Johnny Foreigner embark on the longest tour in the world, leaving a trail of blood, gin and weed in their wake stretching from Reading Play on Thursday through to Edinburgh on December 11th. All the dates are somewhere here, Stagecoach support on the lot, and no you can't play the second guitar part on Salt Peppa & Spinderella. Holy Fuck fill stages with wires from tomorrow at London Electric Ballroom, with Bristol Thekla, Manchester Academy 3, Belfast Speakeasy, Dublin Whelans, Glasgow King Tuts and Birmingham Academy 2 chalked off before we meet here again. If you thought callow youths JoFo had a lengthy tour, the, let's be honest, ageing David Gedge and the latest incarnation of the Wedding Present would take issue, given their tour starts also on Thursday at Sheffield Leadmill and lasts until December 15th. They'll be chiefly playing the piledriving 1989 album Bizarro in full, dates here. Chad Valley/Trophy Wife/Sold Gold Dragons supergroup (or so you'd be inclined to think these days) Jonquil are finally emerging with new material, the Afrobeat emotional wreck of One Hundred Suns EP, also out tomorrow. The tour likewise starts tomorrow at Leeds Nation of Shopkeepers, followed by Liverpool Shipping Forecast (what?), Sheffield Harley, Cardiff Arts Institute, Oxford Jericho and Nottingham Spanky Van Dyke's (WHAT?) The Oxford date, and one at London CAMP on the 24th, has support from ethereal strings-bothering Blessing Force scenemates Rhosyn. Los Campesinos! play their last gig of 2010 at Liverpool Mojo tomorrow for free, Napoleon IIIrd launches Christiania at Koko on Friday, and Audioscope at Oxford Jericho Tavern winds up next Saturday with SJ Esau headlining a bill including Ice Sea Dead People, Felix and Sennen, the same night that Allo Darlin' and Standard Fare form a supreme team at Wakefield Hop/Guerilla Rooms.

BANDS START UP EACH AND EVERY DAY
Here's a band whose featuring here comes with an innate sense of social timing, Manflu. Out on the jerkiest wing of art-post-punk they're like a straightened out Deerhoof, or the Pop Group with Kate Jackson channelling Ari Up (RIP), or the Raincoats to the power of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, or the great lost female-fronted, keys-inclusive No Wave band. Yeah, that sort of thing.

WHAT ELSE?
Unaware of Groupee before this week, but it's a venture that puts bands... in a studio. Yeah, we know, not in any sort of small scale area or anything. What it means is clear sound and fine, largely unfussy visual production work, and some really good stuff ensues. Among their collection Standard Fare play the hits, The Lovely Eggs team up with Jad Fair and Rose Elinor Dougall plays a new song. Plus, at time of posting, 107 others that we don't like as much or have never heard of.

Flying blind intrigue meanwhile about Lost Souvenirs, whose self-titled album is seemingly only available through Rough Trade on tape with download code for non-luddites. As is the modern way, they're advertised as a mysterious anonymous entity, "a band who don't exist. They'll never tour, or do interviews, or pose for photographs. Instead, their album is a message in a bottle - a greatest hits of their own lo-fi folk-pop archives that they're putting out into the world to see who finds it." We're tipped off that there are a handful of people you may have heard of involved in this; we're reliably informed that it's really rather good.

Weekender

IF YOU ONLY BUY ONE RECORD THIS WEEK...
The Orange Juice box set Coals To Newcastle is out tomorrow, but at six CDs and a DVD it might be a bit pricey, what with Christmas and cuts coming up. And especially as this week also sees the release of two albums that are uniquely spectacular in their own ways, both oddly/coincidentally/neither second LPs with Leeds connections. In one corner James Mabbett, Napoleon IIIrd to you, who in the three years since STN's fourth favourite album of 2007 In Debt To has accumulated what sounds like a great wealth of keyboards, loopstations, things with wires like handheld telephone exchanges and suchlike, left them to fight with cutting lyrics (even if it does end with two instrumentals) and a half-submerged pop knowledge, and called the giddy rush of noise and moral confusion Christiania (download tomorrow, CD 15th), after an autonomously self-governing, counterculturally inclined Copenhagen neighbourhood-cum-commune. Here's the track that closes it. In the other corner the six people collectively calling themselves Her Name Is Calla. Such was the level of care absolved into The Quiet Lamb (out in some formats for ages, but physically tomorrow - complicated, all this staggering labels do now) that just mixing and mastering the thing reputedly took a year. Technically it's post-rock, in that there's contemplative quiet patches and explosive loud patches, but it's difficult only in how it requires special effort to take in its 75 minutes of pitch and yaw, tense, fragile and cathartic, almost modern classical in its remarkable scope - have a glance at Tom Morris' track by track guide, where it's revealed one track is about "my own place in hell". We will write more about both of these deep into next month.

SOMEWHERE TO GO
Les Savy Fav gigs are less performance than they are crash circus, with Tim Harrington wandering all over the place in all sorts of gear, connecting with people in a way the recipients could only ever fear. They're over from Saturday at Glasgow ABC2, with Brighton on the 15th (the day after Constellations Festival, and we'll be coming back to that rarefied clusterfuck next week), off around Europe for a bit, then back to London Electric Ballrooms on the 22nd. Speaking of maniac hairiness, Nestor Matthews and his Sky Larkin bandmates are supporting. LCD Soundsystem and Hot Chip share plenty in common - a live member (Al Doyle), a disappointing last album and a live show that gets more synaptic excitement then you'd expect from some people playing some keyboards. Their tour together begins at the Ally Pally on Wednesday, moving across to the Coronet Theatre on Thursday, Cardiff International Arena on Friday and then the rather less glamorously decadent sounding Rotherham Magna Centre on Saturday. Manchester, two nights in Glasgow and three in Dublin follow. Wire have a new album out early in January, one that promises to showcase them at their most malevolent. A preview comes at Oxford Jericho Tavern on Wednesday as part of Audioscope's run of outre nights in aid of Shelter. Meanwhile for no other apparent reason then they can, Slow Club take another break from recording their second album to play a hometown gig at the Sheffield Leadmill next Saturday.

BANDS START UP EACH AND EVERY DAY
Let's not beat about the bush, We Are Trees, who've just played CMJ, sound a lot like Grizzly Bear. Daniel Rossen-like vocals, Chris Taylor production touches (the steadily hammering drums, the rolling surges, the pinpoint seperation of instruments), the works. There are of course much worse, and less difficult, bands to sound like, and Virginian James Nee, who is they, brings his own sense of orchestrated touch and lyrical open hearted touch as it goes along. Listen on Soundcloud, order the vinyl Boyfriend EP out on Tuesday via Bandcamp.

Weekender

IF YOU ONLY BUY ONE RECORD THIS WEEK...
Best Of season is upon us and two of this early batch are of particular note. When Elliott Smith was found dead a week and a half over seven years ago a lot of those mourning his passing would console themselves with the opinion that such was his cult standing that surely he'd be elevated into a more widely known treasure like Jeff Buckley. That hasn't happened, maybe because unlike Buckley Smith never had the one big defining song, and he's settled into a tier of occasional influence instead. That may change now he's on the front of the NME and more overtly we have a supposedly definitive collection, An Introduction To... Elliott Smith, on Domino with a decent press push. Only one track each from XO and Figure 8 seems churlish, and only fourteen tracks means plenty of interest has been left out, but poor is the understanding of the modern singer-songwriter's craft without knowledge of Ballad Of Big Nothing, Waltz #2, Needle In The Hay or Pretty (Ugly Before). At the other end of the glamorous scale, Ultimate Pet Shop Boys notes 25 years to the week since the release of the hit version - it had been out in 1984 to no acclaim - of West End Girls. With just the nineteen tracks to play with, one the obligatory new song, sacrifices have had to be made and while we weren't exactly expecting Absolutely Fabulous, the lack of Rent, So Hard, Was It Worth It?, Can You Forgive Her?, Yesterday When I Was Mad and I Don't Know What You Want But I Can't Give It Anymore is glaring to us. Being Boring's there, obviously, there'd have been riots otherwise.

SOMEWHERE TO GO
Unsurprisingly for a band who can certainly 'do' bombast on record, Broken Records can move mountains, or at least feet, at their barnstorming live best. Then again, they can dial it down and send a cold wind through their audience at their most intimate. Touring for Let Me Come Home starts on Tuesday at Manchester's Deaf Institute and carries on to Sheffield Harley on Wednesday, Leeds Brudenell Thursday and Birmingham Institute Saturday, thereafter heading to Bristol, London (Borderline), Brighton, Glasgow, Inverness and Aberdeen. Meanwhile the rejuvenated, in all senses, Edwyn Collins begins a tour on Thursday at Brighton Komedia, with Oxford Academy 2 on Friday, Leeds Brudenell Saturday, Glasgow Oran Mor Sunday, then Newcastle, Manchester, Preston, Liverpool (Anglican Cathedral!), Bristol and Birmingham. Frankie & The Heartstrings support on the first six dates. Glasgow's 13th Note on Wednesday night hosts The Indelicates Super Special Acoustic Live Album Recording Party, the title of which somewhat gives the game away. We think entry may be list only - check with the promoter.

BANDS START UP EACH AND EVERY DAY
One day Explosions In The Sky will kill us all, but they'll leave a beautiful, desolate set of extended metaphorically charred bodies behind. One such is Rumour Cubes, an instrumental sextet who build violin, viola and electronics into the skyscraping sounds explored on EP We Have Sound Houses Also (download free or buy the specially packaged CD from Bandcamp here, just listen on Soundcloud here, and you really should) and already count Warren Ellis - the acclaimed graphic novelist, not the beardy Bad Seed - as a fan. As with fellow instrumental post-rockists led by dual violins Talons, but in a less frantic way, those strings provide succour and pensiveness one moment and lead catharsis the next as the sonics crash down or ungainly flutter around them. Their biog says they're "working with film makers, poets and DJs". A multimedia experience? That could be in these hands if handled with care a different plane altogether. Even just musically they're getting there.

THERE'S ALWAYS A FESTIVAL SOMEWHERE
Well, next weekend some get to see how much of the organisers' flagrant papering of anyone who asks with tickets - we know of at least five people who've been offered up to four places as long as they pay for their accommodation - has held up the NME Weekender, which it should be noted isn't even an official NME event, just the brand name licensed by a company that usually puts on events in Ibiza. British Sea Power's booking agents really have got to stop agreeing to everything put their way. No, multi-day event of next weekend, and ATP aside this is probably the last time we can do this in 2010, is Bristol's Big Pink Cake Indiepop Weekender at The Croft, which stars Davey Woodward (best known for Brilliant Corners, but he'll always be the leader of the Experimental Pop Band to us), The Blanche Hudson Weekend and The Sunny Street on Saturday and Standard Fare, The School, Jam On Bread and the Mai 68s on Sunday.

WHAT ELSE?
Who'd like to contribute to MJ Hibbett's Christmas song?

Weekender

IF YOU ONLY BUY ONE RECORD THIS WEEK...
Thoughts On An Album (In A Record Store, October 2010). The thing that let Broken Records' debut album down after a set of stellar demos and singles was overproduction, triumphant/heartbreaking songs flattened to an amorphous gloop by dumping everything on top of everything else. Word is Let Me Come Home scales down and brings an understatement to their strings-aided spiralling, finally maybe even replicating the bottled dynamism of their live set. On the other side of the sonic spectrum, Warpaint, a band who have mastered the art of starting minimal and eventually broaching into cinematic soundscapes without changing the instrumentation. Comparison will be made between The Fool and the xx, but while the latter made minimal patchwork almost a necessity Warpaint strain at its edges in an attractive slow burning way until eventually myriad layers emerge. Something to get lost in.

SOMEWHERE TO GO
We really hope word of Meursault's greatness has continued to spread since their Glastonbury appearance and play by Fearne Cotton on Radio 1, even if they were played as a recommendation to a listener who wanted something that sounded like both Kele and All Time Low. We'd love to see the equation they used. The power trio touring version goes on a proper nationwide jaunt from tomorrow with an Edinburgh home town show at The Caves, followed by Newcastle Head of Steam Tuesday, Sheffield Harley Wednesday, Leeds Royal Park Cellars Thursday, London Luminaire Saturday, a free gig (so no excuses if you're in the area) at Norwich Playhouse Bar this night-time next week, then Manchester, York, Dundee, Aberdeen and Glasgow in November. Should you be in London tonight we recommend Marginalised: Songs of Love & Loss, a fundraiser for Union Chapel's Margins Project providing services and facilities for those in crisis and homelessness. A night dedicated to songs about love in all its guises, James from The Miserable Rich hosts sets from the ever cryptically reliable Robyn Hitchcock, Cathal Coughlan, Cate Le Bon, Alasdair Roberts, Dan Michaelson, Emily Barker and Jo Bartlett. In further touring news Foals are off around the nation from Friday with support from Toro Y Moi and Andrew Mears ex of Youthmovies' new Pet Moon identity for its first half and Crystal Fighters and Pulled Apart By Horses for its second. Leeds Academy Friday, Manchester and Edinburgh next weekend, then check press for details. Meanwhile Liverpool Music Week starts on Friday and finishes... that's right, 25th November. Paradoxism, thy name is Scouse. We'll keep an eye on this over the week month, but we can't imagine tickets for !!! next Sunday at Stanley Theatre won't be snapped up. And if they have, Field Music are simultaneously playing for free at Mojo.

BANDS START UP EACH AND EVERY DAY
Irish bloggers have been banging on about Dublin's The Cast Of Cheers (is that a good name or a terrible one? We can't work out which) for pretty much the whole of 2010, but we've had stuff to do. Now we've caught up with their album Glitter, available for not much via Bandcamp or freely available with the band's blessing from assorted download servers - this seems a working one - let us join in and lay the line down. It's not like the world is currently experiencing a shortage of bands based around skippish math-rock drumming, declamatory half-shouted statements for vocals and aereated effects-friendly guitar, but Chariot is a self-produced album that seems determined to take Silent Alarm on at its own game. Simultaneously, as befits the country that produced Adebisi Shank (whose recent album is spectacular, and we forgot to ever write about it on here) and And So I Watch You From Afar, something about how these songs are put together, while with modern post-Foals crossover potential, seems slippery in dynamic and strut, tappy guitar parts elbowing in between the polyrhythms. They're already recording a second album, at which watch them fly.

THERE'S ALWAYS A FESTIVAL SOMEWHERE
This weekend is Oxjam, 28 national all-dayers featuring a total of nearly 900 bands and DJs in over 160 venues. We promised we'd give it a mention, but in reality pretty much all of them are overfull of 'unsigned' locals taking a break from being second on the bill somewhere local every single week, and we can ignore those. Send a direct debit to Oxfam yourselves and instead go to Nottingham for the annual Hockley Hustle, also for charity but featuring booking invention across its 30 venues. The Bodega Social, for instance, is putting on a day of local bands playing at being their inspirations, including Nephu Huzzband as ...Trail Of Dead, Stop Eject as Nirvana, Slowcoaches as Pixies and Bronze Medals as Refused. Buttonpusher take on Bunkers Hill with Talons, Buenos Aires, Illness, Double Handsome Dragons and Sir Yes Sir; My First Tooth headline at Lee Rosy's; and Hello Thor take over Jam Cafe and bring Moscow Youth Cult, Over The Wall, Japanese Sleepers and Mexican Kids At Home. There's also a band somewhere about called Arse Full Of Chips. We dare not ask. Next weekend? Battersea Power Station hosts something called the Freeze Festival, which seems to be some bands playing to next to nobody next to some snowboarders. So there's your Roni Size, Hadouken! and a headline DJ set from Pendulum, but headliner Mark Ronson has sneaked Rose Elinor Dougall onto the bill, because surely what better soundtrack is there for wildcats and McTwists then Casiotone shoegaze? There must have been some misunderstanding on Relentless' own stage on Sunday night too, as between ragga metallers Skindred and straight up pop-punks Fenix TX come Dananananaykroyd, a band we personally haven't seen live for just too long now, and whose set will probably contain more high stakes agility than the entire big air competition.

WHAT ELSE?
Tomorrow, remember to Keep It Peel. And in view of such, Dandelion Radio has opened the voting for this year's Festive 50.

Weekender

IF YOU ONLY BUY ONE RECORD THIS WEEK...
At last, a Superman Revenge Squad record that you don't have to pay for via PayPal direct from Ben, Dead Crow Blues also the first album of new songs to feature cellist Martin Webb. First track Fairweather Friends is available for free here, an intriguing choice for preview/first song given it features a suggestion he's about to give up (he isn't). In album terms, while it unfortunately seems to have ventured under most people's radar a good few of the reviews for The Phantom Band's The Wants compare it to Wild Beasts' Two Dancers in terms of progressing and finding further in their own peculiar sphere. With three tracks breaking six minutes the adventuring had better be worth it.

SOMEWHERE TO GO
UK tours by The Chap are so scarce that by comparison hen's teeth are recommended in the window at Gregg's, so any chance to see their peculiar, occasionally choreography and bow-destroying featuring sets is recommended. Just the four dates, mind, starting Friday at Edinburgh Voodoo Rooms before crossing to Glasgow Captain's Rest on Saturday, followed by Hull Adelphi on Sunday 24th and Winchester Railway two days later. Clinic's tour, which is just some people in surgical masks and whatever shirt design they're going with this album, is a comparatively back-breaking eight dates, and the first of those is at Swn, which we'll come back to. Thursday sees them at Manchester Deaf Institute, Friday Liverpool Static Gallery, Saturday Stockton On Tees Georgian Theatre, and then next week onto Glasgow, Nottingham, London (Village Underground, whatever that is) and Leeds. The more convincing live than on record Spectrals support. Last but by no means least, sad news this week that hyper Leeds new wave darlings The Kiara Elles are splitting. Go and download the album Slide Over if you haven't, it's ace, and if you're in the locale of Leeds' Elbow Rooms on Friday go and wish them luck as you wave them goodbye.

BANDS START UP EACH AND EVERY DAY
South London's Breton have been making waves for a couple of months now - the link is to a Soundcloud of their Sharing Notes EP, released in July - as the kind of multimedia collective that sends certain writers into paroxysms of excitement without ever thinking to sell the music as its own venture, especially so if the band decide to join in and fog the notion that they ever made music that might stand up on its own without a cloak of blog-friendly pettifogging. Luckily, Breton are not WU LYF. Theirs is an open house in which math-pop rhythms and dubstep-suggestive lo-frequency electronic basslines are thrown together with rotted electronica (think Holy Fuck filled in with cement) and eerie cinematic soundscapes, leaping from style to style while still maintaining the aura of a whole cohesive work. It starts a bit like Gorillaz, ends a bit like Foals and heads across the shop in the middle.

THERE'S ALWAYS A FESTIVAL SOMEWHERE
Swn's the big one this week, Huw Stephens and John Rostron ramraiding the nightspots of Cardiff between Friday and Sunday to put on the best new talent and often most wayward too. Big recommended artist list! Clinic, Swans, Islet, Standard Fare, Calories, Talons, Perfume Genius, The Victorian English Gentlemens Club, Mitchell Museum, The School, Dog Is Dead, Fair Ohs, Still Corners, Sweet Baboo, the reformed Melys, Peggy Sue, Let's Wrestle, Spectrals, Dutch Uncles, Munch Munch, Veronica Falls, Stagecoach, Race Horses, Chad Valley, Paul Heaton, Threatmantics, Cate Le Bon, The Keys, Young Legionnaire, T3ETH, Egyptian Hip Hop, Tall Ships, Colorama, The Vaccines, Y Niwl, Magic Kids, Attack + Defend and local legend Meic Stevens. In the other set of the Celts, Edinburgh Popfest is over the same three days, one of a growing number of indiepop weekender hangouts for the unerring. Friday at The Wee Red Bar stars ballboy and Withered Hand, Sunday at The Lot brings Darren Hayman, Gordon McIntyre, the Bobby Mcgees and Eagleowl, but the standout is at The GRV on Saturday, where Suburban Kids With Biblical Names headline over Bearsuit (who are opening), Internet Forever, The Second Hand Marching Band, the Just Joans, Red Shoe Diaries, Pocketbooks, Be Like Pablo and Kid Canaveral, not in that order because we're like that.

Weekender

IF YOU ONLY BUY ONE RECORD THIS WEEK...
Busy week this week, including Nosferatu D2's album which we only wrote about last week but the digital release got delayed until tomorrow, and Mitchell Museum's The Peters Port Memorial Service, which gets a delayed CD issue this week and hopefully we'll finally be able to get hold of it, not wanting to sign up to iTunes or owt like that just for one album. No excuse, we know. (Ice, Sea, Dead People's Teeth Union also gains physical form this week) In proper new releases there's Belle & Sebastian, Shrag, Islet's new EP Wimmy (yes, it's got the reggae one on)... but, like the rest of the world, everything stops for Sufjan. Your key to understanding The Age Of Adz, or at least what we've heard of it so far, is the track he contributed to the Dark Was The Night charity album last year, which threw his Neil Young/Gershwin/American folk field recording/showtunes mix into a wall of electronics and saw it emerge remarkably unscathed considering, albeit spread over a wide/long area. Be interesting to see how this does in the universal end of year lists. Be interesting to see how it does as a full listening experience, too.

SOMEWHERE TO GO
Last December we put on the third of our occasional money-haemorraghing but enjoyable nights of live music in a city with no proper gigging scene. (Oh, they try, with their Academies and their Oxjams getting to close off an entire road for a day, but you should see the paucity of bands they put on. Seriously, we've had to reconsider some live plans as we don't have a clue who could support them among known local talent.) This was a particularly epic fail, as bringing up 4 Or 5 Magicians on a fractured, and indeed fractious, tour brought in five punters. Three of those were other local promoters. All five were people we knew. People got less for Christmas from us than they might have been banking on. By the end of the openers' set, for further indignity, one person had turned up, and he during the last song. That band were the falling apart raucous pop shapeshifters Ace Bushy Striptease, and at least something came out of that night as they and the Brighton post-Pavement acerbic if-it's-Dan Ormsby-and-your-granny-on-bongos-it's-a-4 Or 5 Magicians-gig headliners met, got on swimmingly and as an eventual result start a joint tour on Thursday. That's at Big Chill House, followed by Brighton Hobgoblin on Friday, Bournemouth Green Room Saturday, Bristol Mother's Ruin next Sunday, then Birmingham Victoria, Manchester Tiger Lounge and Nottingham Spanky Van Dykes (where we once saw Silver Columns playing Upwords) in the following days. Go and see them if you can, make them less lonely.

BANDS START UP EACH AND EVERY DAY
Staying in Scotland, as fertile as it is at the moment, and to the very Scottish monickered The Douglas Firs - not the one from Bournemouth we first stumbled into when trying to find this Myspace URL again, but the one from Aberdeen that is by and large the work of one Neil Insh, also drummer with Song, By Toad band Jesus H Foxx. The recent Haunting Through EP, on a name-your-price deal from Bandcamp, is all over the place while keeping to a certain uncomfortable tone. Just its opening track, nearly seven and a half minutes long, veers from field recording to Irish folk to gospel vocals to to lushly dulcet singer-songwriter fare with discordance to a reel to an ambient close, like an even more distracted Phantom Band. The range is all over the place but coalesces to a certain point of cut and paste effected folk atmospherics that are Sufjan-like in its scope and ambition, plenty of carefully plotted instrumentation unafraid of following a big chorus with floaty ambience. Hypnotic and entirely fascinating. There's been an album in the works for more than a year; their next gig is a Pakistan flood relief benefit at the Roxy Arthouse, Edinburgh with Alasdair Roberts and Eagleowl on the 18th.

THERE'S ALWAYS A FESTIVAL SOMEWHERE
In The City isn't so much a conference and gig coming together as a cultural ecosystem. Based in a four hotel campus around Manchester’s Northern Quarter between Wednesday and Friday, by day there's a selection of keynote speakers - the president of Jay-Z's Roc Nation, Epic's MD, REM's manager, former BPI and Warners chairman Rob Dickins, Nick Mason, Paul Morley, Mike Pickering - and panels with hard hitting guests - Guy Garvey, Helienne Lindvall, Mark Gardener, John Robb, Trevor Dann, Joe Muggs and everyone's fantasy matchup in an industry bare knuckle fight, Ryan Schreiber and Sean Adams. And by night, a whole horde of bands, from the unsigned to the internationally acclaimed. Deep breath - No Age, Sky Larkin, Standard Fare, Pulled Apart By Horses, Let's Buy Happiness, Dog Is Dead, Still Corners, Male Bonding, Calories, Spectrals, Gallops, Honour Before Glory, Young British Artists, Yuck, HEALTH, Clock Opera, Is Tropical, This Many Boyfriends, My First Tooth, Dutch Uncles, These Monsters, Worriedaboutsatan, The Woe Betides, Egyptian Hip Hop, The Neat, T3ETH, Tim And Sam's etc, Chad Valley, Chickenhawk, Brontide, Orphan Boy and hundreds of others that we're currently trawling for future new band linkage.

Weekender

IF YOU ONLY BUY ONE RECORD THIS WEEK...
Most weeks this would be the new album from Clinic, Bubblegum their sixth studio effort and one that sounds not all that much like numbers one to five inclusive for once, more pastoral and blurrily languid than before. But oddly the headlines are taken by a reissue this week, and one from only last year at that, albeit one you can actually buy in shops and from download centres this time. Not all that oddly, though, given it's Nosferatu D2's We're Gonna Walk Around This City With Our Headphones On To Block Out The Noise, four years past recording and yet still sounding completely contemporary, Adam Parker's octopus on amphetamines drumming, Ben Parker's tense guitar squalls and those hyperspeed lyrical brickbats we've come to know from his Superman Revenge Squad persona, with the self-doubt replaced by anger at everyone and everything else. Having spent a day of a major festival swanning round in one of their T-shirts this summer you should know our adoration for this record is unbound. Now it's time for you to learn. Look, here's an example of what to expect:

Nosferatu D2 - Springsteen by audioantihero

SOMEWHERE TO GO
Drowned in Sound are having their tenth birthday at the moment, and the live wing of the festivities kicks off in earnest on Friday at Skate Central in Sheffield. Rollerpalooza II brings together a rollerskating rink, No Age, Pulled Apart By Horses - unstable enough on terra firma, you'd have to say - and Male Bonding. Also on Friday, just along the Pennines, another cracker of a joint tour kicks off as the serrated blues-grinding of Archie Bronson Outfit headline Leeds' celebrated Brudenell Social Club with The Victorian English Gentlemens Club supporting. They move on to Edinburgh Cabaret Voltaire on Saturday and Nottingham Bodega Sunday (the same day Frankie & The Heartstrings and Summer Camp are at Stealth) before visiting Birmingham, Brighton and London Scala together next week.

BANDS START UP EACH AND EVERY DAY
Most Kingdom Of Fife musical activity is parlayed by the travails of the Anderson brothers and Fence friends of Anstruther, but Dunfermline's The Scottish Enlightenment are slowly (their first single came out in 2007) proving themselves worthy in their own far off field. The title track of their new EP Little Sleep, available through Bandcamp and also on Spotify, starts with cascading sweeps of guitar and then soars towards post-rock territory, like a less feedback frenzied, more pensive and liable to properly explode on contact Twilight Sad. It might be a cliche by now to say a Scottish band sound like they're pissed off with everything (and pissed) and channel that into their music, but that last ditch desperation against the world is what comes across strongest.

THERE'S ALWAYS A FESTIVAL SOMEWHERE
If Truck is the king of the DIY festivals and Wood its horticultural price consort, OX4 is a minor viscount with plentiful designs on making a name for itself. A one day event in venues across Oxford's Cowley Road. Everything Everything, who as you may know everybody now hates, are de facto headliners, ahead of Abe Vigoda, Dog Is Dead, Willy Mason, Someone Still Loves You Boris Yeltsin, Boat To Row, Chad Valley, John Spiers, Dead Jerichos and ex-Goldrushists, and thus lords of this hectare, Dreaming Spires.

Weekender

IF YOU ONLY BUY ONE RECORD THIS WEEK...
The new No Age, Everything In Between, is 75% of a great, grotty record, but your hip friends will tell you all about that. Let's instead talk about a band who, ooh, quote us alongside Lowe, Lamacq and Ravenscroft (W) in their press release. Ice, Sea, Dead People are three gentlemen of Bedford and London who over Teeth Union's 24 minutes take post-hardcore apart rivet by rivet and slam it back into something they think might resemble an order. It's tauter than anything you've heard, arrythmically, epileptically undanceable while still driven by big old basslines and hi-hat, detuned art-punk that splinters as you handle it, and that very much includes the vocals. It's a big mess of noise that occasionally stumbles across a sliver of melody and reacts by beating it to a pulp. And it's ace.

SOMEWHERE TO GO
Whether the sudden downturn in temperatures has made something click with people preferring the warmth of being huddled together in the back of a loaned Transit or whether we simply ran out of festivals, there's a lot of exciting tours starting and one-offs happening this week which we'll have to cover in chronological order and paragraphs.

SUNDAY: London! Standard Fare acoustic at the Hangover Lounge! Go!

MONDAY: In the glory days of the rolling label tour revue, Stiff Records used to stick all its current hopes in a bus (or a train once) together and hope for the best. Brainlove Records, that estimable home of all that is off-kilter with everyone else's expectations of what a solo singer-songwriter is, or just everyone else, is doing much the same, albeit with fewer pub soiled Gretschs and more monomes. The tour starts at Cardiff 10 Feet Tall, moves on to London CAMP on Tuesday, then Norwich Knowhere Bar Wednesday, Leeds The Well Thursday (a venue we'll come back to), our own stopover at Leicester Firebug on Friday, over to Dublin Twisted Pepper on Saturday, then next week York on the 5th October and Manchester on the 8th. Meanwhile Shrag take their twisty, shouty, spiky post-indiepoppunk on the road, chiefly notable for some of the supports they're picking up along the way - Love Ends Disaster! at London Social on Monday, LookiMakeMusic at Birmingham Victoria on Tuesday, Horowitz on Saturday at Bristol Croft and, remarkably, Standard Fare on Friday at Manchester Kraak. Sheffield and Leeds fill in the gaps. In more elevated company, your only chance of seeing Rose Elinor Dougall in the wake of her album release would seem to be her support slots on the Mark Ronson tour that starts here in Bristol.

TUESDAY: Darren Hayman is playing an observatory. An Astronomical Evening with Darren Hayman is at Godlee Observatory in Manchester, part of the university building and home to the Manchester Astronomical Society. The gig includes an opportunity to tour the observatory, and Hayman will be playing two sets featuring a themed set of older songs (Alan Bean, then) alongside tracks from new album Essex Arms.

WEDNESDAY: Two bands who we think we'd not be far off beam in calling Official Friends Of STN (so obviously the tour is scheduled such that we don't think we're going to get to any of the dates) go on a joint tour, and haven't they grown between them. Frankie & The Heartstrings' indie dancefloor almost-anthems (and it's a dancefloor Frankie will cover most of during the set) and Summer Camp's synth fuelled Hugheswave make for odd bedfellows but there's a certain romanticism at their varying hearts, not to mention a suspicion they've slaved away at this to a degree they'd be loathe to publicly admit. F&TH start on their own at York Fibbers, then Warmsley'n'Sankey join in from Thursday at Brighton Jam before hitting London Lexington on Friday and Leeds Brudenell on Saturday, continuing on to the following eekend via Cardiff, Manchester, Glasgow, Newcastle and Nottingham.

FRIDAY: Music Like A Vitamin is an event under the banner of the Scottish Mental Health Arts and Film Festival, curated by Emma Pollock and Idlewild's Rod Jones. This year's tie-in is a collaborative album featuring the pair plus The Twilight Sad's James Graham, Frightened Rabbit's Scott Hutchison, Sparrow and the Workshop's Jill O’Sullivan, James Yorkston, Alasdair Roberts, Karine Polwart and Jenny Reeve. The launch gig is on the 1st at Edinburgh's HMV Picturehouse, with everyone on the album plus Broken Records. Two tracks from the album can be downloaded for free. Meanwhile beautiful/doomed instrumentalists Maybeshewill basically get on the road from the same day and don't come off until a time when only they see fit, a tour that carries through to the 24th beginning at the Newcastle Cluny 2. Tour dates here, support from the three members of Blakfish who now trade as &U&I.

BANDS START UP EACH AND EVERY DAY
They "wish desperately to be cowboy folk", it says here, but for now The Swansea Recreation Centre - guess where they're not from - come on like an evil twin to the Cocteaus referencing that's starting to come into vogue. Beat Happening are their top friend but they're the sort of band who try to sound ragged in the same vainglorious way but are too onto something to completely give in. Across the available tracks there's nods to Magnetic Fields, Broadcast, Phil Elverum, Danielson, Jad Fair and plain just-inside-outsider oddness, mostly in the bits where the (male) singer tends to sound like Kermit being throttled. It also reminded us of Brighton's falling apart indiepop dramatists Foxes!, then it turned out the band were formed by one of their founder members so fair enough. They have plenty of ideas, and also know what not to do with them to keep on a straight line.

THERE'S ALWAYS A FESTIVAL SOMEWHERE
No two ways about it, Play Patterns looks extraordinary. Taking place Friday to Sunday at The Well in Leeds, it's a two room extravaganza with a properly impressive line-up. Friday brings Calories, Copy Haho, Gallops and Wonderswan; Saturday Hot Club de Paris, Ice Sea Dead People, Dutch Uncles, Cats And Cats And Cats, The ABC Club, The Neat and the long dormant That Fucking Tank; Sunday pulls it right off with Johnny Foreigner closing proceedings after Talons, Lone Wolf, Honour Before Glory, I Concur, Bear Driver and a solo set by now ex-Grammatic Owen Brinley have had a shot. Advance tickets are £15. Almost cheap at twice the price.

Weekender

IF YOU ONLY BUY ONE RECORD THIS WEEK...
It's tempting to wonder if the unanimous critical praise for Edwyn Collins' seventh solo album Losing Sleep, featuring guest slots for Johnny Marr, Ryan Jarman, Alex Kapranos, Nick McCarthy, Roddy Frame, Romeo Stodart and Jonathan Pierce, isn't in some way connected to his heartening return from the brink. Tempting, but also wrong-headed. There's nothing particularly new in his arsenal this time around - adult contemplation without being AOR/MOR as per his last album, the Northern Soul nods that stretch right back through his career, and his rich baritone seems unaffected - but the contemplation on life and shaky self-doubt ending in something near to defiance tell their own tale. Good to have him on his feet, of course. Great to have him in this form.

SOMEWHERE TO GO
Life spent in the back of a van with all your gear is cramped and uncomfortable enough without having to cart two drumkits around amid the instruments, amps and human detritus. That's why Adam & The Ants got famous first. Islet's first tour begins on Friday at Winchester Railway, with Southampton Lennons being thoroughly circumnavigated on Saturday, and then another two weeks of whooping, bellowing and tambourine-armed chasing after that. Best new live band in Britain? Well, obviously. The Nottingham alldayer is fast becoming a standard of the indiepop scene. Moved from November back to next Saturday this year, it returns to Bunkers Hill in Hockley (although we hear a double booking - for something announced in March? What sort of venue operation is that? - means it's all moving into the actual bar halfway hrough) with an acoustic afternoon at the Chameleon on Sunday. Allo Darlin', Milky Wimpshake, Red Shoe Diaries, Betty and the Werewolves and The Sweet Nothings (nee The Pete Green Corporate Juggernaut) are among those playing the former, Emma and Ian from Pocketbooks head the latter.

BANDS START UP EACH AND EVERY DAY
Apart from that they seem to have a NSFW Myspace, Evans The Death, who are playing the Sunday of that just plugged weekender, could be your next favourite indiepop newbies. Equally from Clapham and Chelmsford, their C86 jangle is tempered by a garage/US college rock-infused drive, while up front Katherine Whitaker's plaintive voice can soar or scold on command. They're smarter than they're letting on.

THERE'S ALWAYS A FESTIVAL SOMEWHERE
The Fence Collective's well established Home Game has birthed a baby brother, and it's one where, like some alt-folk equivalent of the Are You Being Served? film, the whole company has gone on holiday together. Away Game takes place on Eigg in the Inner Hebrides, with all of 150 camping places (sold out), and organiser Johnny 'Pictish Trail' Lynch is bringing over the local bakery. British Sea Power, suckers for any sort of out of the way event, headline, over Darren Hayman, Johnny Flynn, Neil from Meursault, Dan from Withered Hand, Gordon McIntyre, King Creosote, Sweet Baboo, Adem, Rozi Plain and new Malcolm Middleton project Human Don't Be Angry. Back on the mainland Sunderland's Split Festival is at Ashbrooke Sports Club all next weekend. The local music mafia - The Futureheads, Maximo Park, Frankie & The Heartstrings, Lucas Renney - are out in force, alongside Sky Larkin, Hot Club de Paris, Dutch Uncles and Let's Buy Happiness among others. Meanwhile in Gloucester it's the inaugural Underground Festival, a route-one title for a free-thinking weekender at the Guildhall. Saturday is headlined by Chapel Club with Egyptian Hip Hop and Stagecoach among the supports; the Sunday looks more interesting with the Joy Formidable surely dreading following Pulled Apart By Horses, with Islet, Gallops, Shoes And Socks Off, Hold Your Horse Is and Boat To Row heading those staying gallantly out of the way.

WHAT ELSE?
Here's extraordinary. If you're as big on Half Man Half Biscuit as us, you'll know about their The Bastard Son Of Dean Friedman, in, erm, tribute to the late 70s AOR singer-songwriter. They played in rock city Bilston on Wednesday night, during which Dean Friedman himself came on and did this:



Apparently HMHB then came on and did their own song in question with Friedman's aid, but nobody seems to have bothered videoing/uploading that.

Weekender

IF YOU ONLY BUY ONE RECORD THIS WEEK...
The pile-up of new album releases is, thanks to some judicious moving around mostly of import release dates, not as gargantuan as it once looked, which means the way is clear to delve deeper into Grinderman 2. Supposedly Cave, Ellis, Casey and Sclavunos go into the studio without any preconceived ideas of what they're going to do, which while understandable with the not entirely subtly layered music suggests Nick may be bottling quite a lot up at home. The second collection of feral malevolence with electric bouzouki is a coruscating wig-out of mid-life sexual catharsis, as well as the overdue return of Warren Ellis to violin for a bit. The thud and muster of Grinderman is tempered a bit by psychedelic funk and soul, the overall feel being more stuck somewhere between the dissolution of the Birthday Party and those first couple of strung out Bad Seeds records. Can't imagine what the reaction will be come full band reintegration.

SOMEWHERE TO GO
Rockfeedback as a TV concept never quite worked, especially that one where they put on a gig in someone's front room with, if memory serves, Future Of The Left and Jeremy Warmsley and tried to package arranging the gig, talking to people at the gig, showing people at the gig, showing off around the gig and showing the actual fucking gig into less than fifteen minutes with the latter coming off worst. Still, Toby L's plaything from before he went and co-founded Transgressive is a good honest server in these troubled online times, and it celebrates ten years of existence on Friday at somewhere called XOYO, London EC2A. British Sea Power, whose new album is out early next year with an EP in early October, headline over the newly four-pieced Future Of The Left, Anna Calvi, Three Trapped Tigers and special guests, plus a roster of DJs including Geoff Travis, the Rough Trade shops crew, one of the Maccabees, White Heat, Young & Lost, Eat Your Own Ears, all those. In a more northerly direction, Postcards From Manchester at The Deaf Institute brings together Allo Darlin', Internet Forever, Vera November (Verity off Electrelane), Here We Go Magic, Trailer Trash Tracys, Mazes and so forth.

BANDS START UP EACH AND EVERY DAY
In existence only for seven months and already with a Yeasayer London Roundhouse support in the bag, The Voyeurist purvey the sort of dirty electronica that could have stepped straight out of the Wasp synthesizers and amusing hair of Sheffield 1978-79, early Human League and Cabaret Voltaire via Martin Hannett's production depths, led by the sort of icy but haughty Siousxieish female vocal you didn't really think anyone dredged any more. Not that the world's been desperately crying out for another synth-led band invoking that era, but they're doing it so differently it's barely recognisable in that context.

THERE'S ALWAYS A FESTIVAL SOMEWHERE
What with the weather having turned we're at the scrag end of proper festival season with stuff like Loopallu (Paolo Nutini headlines, but also Idlewild and Aberfeldy) in Ullapool. So we're increasingly looking at things like Campfire Trails, Wednesday to Friday at Troxy, E1. The Felice Brothers headline day one ahead of Adam Green, White Rabbits and Mountain Man; Wild Beasts play Thursday with Fanfarlo and Here We Go Magic; Old Crow Medicine Show bring it all back down to earth. For our money, though, Southsea Fest looks faintly unbeatable. Taking over Albert Road in the town, and raising some funds for Ellen MacArthur Trust, it's £15 advance, £18 on the day for a lineup including Pulled Apart By Horses (James will more than likely end up at the other end of the road), Islet (Mark will more than likely start at the other end of the road), Talons, Shoes And Socks Off, The Megaphonic Thrift, The Strange Death Of Liberal England, Screaming Maldini, SixNationState, The Miserable Rich, Stars & Sons, Let's Buy Happiness, &U&I (75% of Blakfish's new band), The Agitator, Cats In Paris, Stagecoach, Revere, Hold Your Horse Is, Crazy Arm, King Charles, Pure Reason Revolution and loads, loads more.

Weekender

IF YOU ONLY BUY ONE RECORD THIS WEEK...
Summer Camp are Jeremy Warmsley and Elizabeth Sankey. It's important to mention this off the bat as every single review has felt duty bound to go on about secretive groups in general well before the primary purpose of telling you what the music's like. Look there, they've now done gigs and photoshoots and everything, they're hardly the Residents. And now they've got a six track EP out, Young, which in some quarters has seen them filed as complicit in 2010's other growth economy, chillwave, but is nothing of the sort. It's basically a warped pop record about youth, nostalgia and consequent loss of innocence built on wipe-clean synth production that knows evoking the 80s is about more than pretending you're Vince Clarke, not careful at all with its sources. Where they go next will be fascinating. Where they've gone now, likewise.

SOMEWHERE TO GO
Horse The Van fired up again, cymbals cowering for their lives, Sky Larkin are getting round to touring Kaleide, a good length journey starting in Brighton on Friday - full dates here. If you like your rock'n'roll a bit more amped up heavy and garagey, your venues a little more heaving and smashed up and your drumkits that much more redistributed and set alight, Monotonix sprint, climb and dive across the country in advance of an Albini-recorded album due out in January - Brighton Volks Monday, London Camp Tuesday, Leicester Musician Wednesday, Sheffield Plug Thursday, Bristol Croft Friday.

BANDS START UP EACH AND EVERY DAY
The Sailplanes have been around for two or three years already but they have a new EP available free from their site. Describing the approach as "toning down the abrasive sounds, and concentrating more on playing our fucking instruments", it's not too far from the post-punk with extra spiky, awkward bits that we've been talking about before in relation to Love Ends Disaster!, but similarly in thrall to the frictionless rhythmic bloc of Life Without Buildings via the ever present Sonic Youth and the Raincoats' poised clatter.

THERE'S ALWAYS A FESTIVAL SOMEWHERE
End Of The Road time again, always a great occasion with fine clientele and more than enough special to carry the musical side through comfortably. Headliners are Modest Mouse, Yo La Tengo and Wilco, also in the list are Edwyn Collins, the Mountain Goats, Caribou, Allo Darlin', Steve Mason, Brakes, Jonquil, Monotonix, Smoke Fairies, The Low Anthem, Eagleowl, Three Trapped Tigers, Errors, Pulled Apart By Horses (clerical error?), Left With Pictures, Mountain Man, Iron & Wine, The New Pornographers, the Unthanks, Adam Green, Felice Brothers, Wolf Parade, Black Mountain, Philip Selway, the Antlers, Woodpigeon, Diane Cluck and the Ruby Suns. Meursault and Darren Hayman are also playing, but only on the Thursday for early camping arrivals. There's an understandable crossover with the far more easy press-friendly Bestival, although they get the flashier names. Dizzee Rascal, the Prodigy and The Flaming Lips headline, while the rest swings wildly from off-beam - LCD Soundsystem, the XX, Wild Beasts, Fever Ray, Jonsi, the High Llamas, Archie Bronson Outfit, Janelle Morae, Everything Everything, Summer Camp, Beth Jeans Houghton, Four Tet, Sleigh Bells, Washed Out, Beardyman, Yuck, Gaggle - to heritage - Roxy Music, the Wailers, Gil Scott Heron, Chic, Heaven 17, Echo & the Bunnymen, Cornershop, Babybird, Rolf Harris, Level 42 and most famously Howard Jones. More northerly, while we usually shy away from new startups - we remember the stories of Zoo Thousand - we're assured that some good people with level headed plans are behind Headstock, on Saturday at Newstead & Annesley Country Park, Nottingham. Your old favourite descriptive terms for festivals that aren't Sonisphere - "laid back", "family friendly" - are all applied in the official bumph, while Ash, Field Music, Frightened Rabbit, The Beat and the Penguin Cafe Orchestra stand out in the programme. And the most expensive tickets are £30. Harvest at Jimmy's is also next weekend, but we took one look at their site, saw the opening sentence "We are beside ourselves with excitement and very honoured to have the very talented Scouting For Girls live and unleashed", and scarpered. Are they trying to convince themselves?

WHAT ELSE?
Now the BBC seem to have given up on Peel Day, it's left to the web to keep the memory alive. Football And Music are organising a blog/Twitter-wide #keepingitpeel day for 25th October.

Weekender

IF YOU ONLY BUY ONE RECORD THIS WEEK...
Good set this week, with the much awaited and ambitiously fertile much awaited Everything Everything debut Man Alive, Gallops' inventive, soul moving EP and the long delayed (it's been on Spotify for a while) Admiral Radley album I Heart California, the best thing Jason Lytle's done since splitting Grandaddy. That's out of two things. But seeing as we made its constant promise of imminent release a running joke for a while, and moreover because it's a damn fine debut record that stretches the emotional depth while not sacrificing the subtlety of the writing, we're going to plump for an album named not after a bemoaning about the lack of Yoni Wolf in the author's life but a quote from 17th century mystical poet and Catholic hymn writer Angelus Silesius: "The rose is without why, it blooms because it blooms/It pays no attention to itself, asks not whether it is seen." Rose Elinor Dougall, conversely, is asked to be seen a lot, and will be even more when Mark Ronson's album comes out as she provides vocals on three tracks and will be in his live band. Beat the rush, get it this week. We did a thorough review for TLOBF; Just Played got a lengthy and insightful interview out of her.

SOMEWHERE TO GO
A quiet week as everyone gets over Reading & Leeds and winds up for the resumption of the proper touring calendar. One band getting in early, even though their album isn't out until November, are the quiet-loud post-rock densely storm-tossed dramatists Her Name Is Calla. Their tour kicked off last night at one road less travelled, Berwick-upon-Tweed; Sunday they're at Glasgow The Captains Rest, Monday Manchester Night & Day, Tuesday Clwb Ifor Bach in Cardiff, Wednesday a homecoming of sorts at Leicester Firebug, Thursday London Luminaire and Friday Cambridge Portland Arms, wrapping up on Saturday 4th September at Pocklington Arts Centre in York. The Manchester to London dates are with The Monroe Transfer, with whom HNIC have been recording a collaborative album. One at a time, please. Elsewhere, Big Scary Monsters recording artists Hold Your Horse Is and Shoes And Socks Off embark from Wednesday on a month long tour.

BANDS START UP EACH AND EVERY DAY
Pete Green, who gets quoted or referred to here pretty much every week and you've still never, ever heard of, reckons The History Of Apple Pie - not a great name, is it - could be the next Standard Fare. Reputedly Peggy POBPAH is already a fan of the London duo, who say they sound like "eating mint choc chip ice cream in the sun with your best friend", and actually sound like Comet Gain and the Pastels toying with fuzzpop and reverb in an attempt to work out how Galaxie 500 do it. Yuck's younger, less showy siblings, in a way.

THERE'S ALWAYS A FESTIVAL SOMEWHERE
Here's baffling. Bingley Music Live is a one stage, £30 effort in West Yorkshire whose headliners are Buzzcocks, James and The Enemy. Also playing are a mixture of the entirely likely (Reef, Levellers, Dan le Sac vs Scroobius Pip), the cheap return pop of the day (Example, Professor Green) and the brave in the circumstances (Seasick Steve, Frightened Rabbit, Gaggle). Oh, and playing before James on the Saturday: Public Image Ltd, their only UK festival appearance in 2010. What? Maybe it's typical atypical Lydon behaviour, especially when out on the end of the Central Line is Offset for some of his spiritual children of all eras. Mystery Jets and Atari Teenage Riot are your peas in a pod headliners, Monotonix and Pulled Apart By Horses dare each other on to further onstage battery midway through Sunday, while elsewhere we see Art Brut, Liquid Liquid, Caribou, These New Puritans, Rolo Tomassi, Calories, 80s Matchbox B-Line Disaster, Thomas Tantrum, Male Bonding, Banjo Or Freakout, Telepathe, Lovvers, Cluster and Esben and the Witch. None of that nonsense over at the Moseley Folk Festival. Nothing's as wild and loose with the name as Saint Etienne headlining last year - it's The Divine Comedy, Donovan and, for the novelty in your life, The Ukulele Orchestra of Great Britain - though the High Llamas must stretch the definition a tad between Johnny Flynn, Beth Jeans Houghton, The Low Anthem, Erland and The Carnival, The Unthanks, Fyfe Dangerfield, Sparrow and the Workshop, Alasdair Roberts and Boat To Row. Plus, and we quote, 'Workshop - Rapper Dancing with Ryknild Rabble'. Round the back of the corn exchange?

WHAT ELSE?
Fractions Of One, another one of those online music magazines you hear so much about, has compiled a charity compilation to help the Pakistan flood appeal. Get Set, Go is a mere fiver, for which you get tracks by among others Tubelord, Internet Forever, Gallops, Three Trapped Tigers, Shoes And Socks Off, Shield Your Eyes, worriedaboutsatan and Adebisi Shank.

Half Man Half Biscuit popped in to see Marc Riley on 6 Music a couple of weeks ago, partly to say thanks for the whole Joy Division Oven Gloves shebang, partly to play three new songs on an album Nigel says should be ready by the end of the year. And here they are in Soundcloud form with cheeky download aperitif.

Weekender

IF YOU ONLY BUY ONE RECORD THIS WEEK...
Don't. Save up, there's some very busy weeks ahead (hello, w/b 13th September). If we must fill this with something that catches the eye, Isobel Campbell & Mark Lanegan have a third volume of their protracted hawk-like encircling each other (it's even called Hawk) out, but those have been variable quality so far.

SOMEWHERE TO GO
"The last four and a half years have been a tumultuous ride to say the least; we've both eclipsed our early expectations and had to face a seemingly infinite series of difficult setbacks. It's been both fun and utterly maddening, inspiring and crushing. We now finally face a set of circumstances that are truly impossible to overcome and realise that the only logical way to continue to move forward with our lives is to put Grammatics to rest." And there goes one of Britain's most intriguing and promising (if that isn't too shallow a word for a band who've long had an album out, but the sense was they could have gone much further into their particular darkness) bands. They have a final EP coming out soon but are currently on a farewell tour, tonight at the Manchester Deaf Institute. This week they then head through Glasgow Captain's Rest on Monday, York Stereo Tuesday and Barnsley Walkabout on Thursday before they go very ungently into that good night at home in Leeds at the Brudenell on Friday, with Blue Roses and These Monsters supporting.

BANDS START UP EACH AND EVERY DAY
Plantagenet 3 - there's one, sometimes two, of them - refer to him/themselves on Facebook as "post-surf: hopefully the most ridiculous genre name you'll hear this year." Hypnagogic pop proves that wrong but not the whole surf-but-something-other approach, sounding like a Labradford windy minimalism/Chicago scene style post-rock outfit attempting to reconfigure the Ventures at their own speed, minimal drumming against half speed reverberating guitars. The influences list mentions Morricone, which seems about fair, though for an umbrella we'd go with 'tonight, playing live, Dick Dale is John McEntire'. Go and buy their single, should you so wish.

THERE'S ALWAYS A FESTIVAL SOMEWHERE
While 4Music and its coterie of failed Hollyoaks actors takes in the surface venality of V, us snobs are off to Green Man. We've never been before and are worried that, unlike most festivals, they haven't sent any maps, opening details or parking arrangements with the ticket. Once there, though, much is on offer: Joanna Newsom, the Flaming Lips and Doves are your headliners in reverse chronology, with other names standing out including Billy Bragg, Laura Marling, Tindersticks, Mumford & Sons (might get a bit of peace around the rest of the site while they're on, judging by Latitude), Field Music, Fuck Buttons, Wild Beasts, Beirut, Islet, The Wave Pictures, Felix, Johnny Flynn, Fanfarlo, Steve Mason, These New Puritans, DJ Yoda, First Aid Kit and Summer Camp. Throw in nicely booked comedy (Josie Long, Milton Jones, Robin Ince), literature (John Cooper Clarke, Stuart Maconie, David Quantick) and film (Nuts In May, Ponyo, 200 Motels), plus an on-site competition in which Bella Union invoke Kit Williams' Masquerade, tents and that just about all seems worth the hassle of not knowing where anything is in advance. Elsewhere, Beautiful Days is run by the Levellers with all that implies and is one of British Sea Power's stop-offs on their way to playing every single festival that ever wanted them. This a band who played not only Zoo Thousand but were also billed for celebrated non-starters Red List Live (in the same location as Zoo8) and Indie Guitar Festival. The Wailers, Billy Bragg, Fairport Convention, Wilko Johnson, Thomas White, Thomas Truax and John Cooper Clarke also show up amid your New Model Armys and Shoogleniftys. For substantially less, by which we mean free, Morton Stanley Festival is a weekend event at, um, Morton Stanley Park in Redditch, attracting Hot Club De Paris, Tubelord, the only fitfully active nowadays Sunset Cinema Club, Shapes, Youves, Boat To Row and those all-important "others". Or, y'know, there's always 80s Rewind Festival (near Henley on Thames, £100 the weekend) with Boy George and, we quote verbatim, 'Tony Hadley with ABC and Go West' headlining. Mother! The Weather Girls, Imagination and Johnny Hates Jazz together, in 2010! Oh, by the way, organisers, 10cc, Odyssey and Chesney Hawkes don't count as 80s acts, and booking Bjorn Again is just silly.

WHAT ELSE?
Indietracks, as you'll be aware by now, takes place amid the restored engines, abandoned stock and pastoral workshop of the Midland Railway Museum in Butterley, Derbyshire. The effort all concerned put in to make it such an evocative weekend is genuinely tremendous, so now the festival is corralling people to give something back to them after a year in which the famed llama petting zoo had to be closed for financial reasons. The Swanwick station building, where people enter the site from the main museum hub via steam train, has been a work in building progress since the first event in 2007, and while nearly complete they need an extra push to finish the internal and external building and furnishing. Contributions are sought before September 10th.

Weekender

IF YOU ONLY BUY ONE RECORD THIS WEEK...
Sky Larkin, then. Not just Leodensian men and woman of the world, but "used to describe something that is new but has already earned a right to be considered experienced, talented, etc. --- A NOOB THAT IS NOT A NOOB. 'that chick is totally sky larkin in the pool room.'". It's not even a rhyme with anything relevant, come on. Kaleide got our seal of approval on TLOBF, even if Any Decent Music registered it as a 6/10. Pah. The stream is still active if you want full quality reassurance. The album launch is this afternoon from 1pm at the Strongrooms in East London, with the band on from 4. Also the Harkinator, as nobody has ever called her, has an ideas blog of her own which is very much worth a glance if you were hitherto unaware of it.

SOMEWHERE TO GO
Plenty of options in London this week, because the rest of the country doesn't matter. Chief among these is the sterling work of Pic'n'mixx, who first take on Hoxton Bar & Kitchen on Tuesday with our now foremost purveyors of retro girly pop (that sounds condescending but it's the only thing we could think of that'd fit both), Lucky Soul and The School, with The Lodger opening and Pocketbooks and How Does It Feel? residents DJing. Come Saturday the Buffalo Bar welcomes a man and his million pedals, Stairs To Korea, plus unpromisingly named East Londoners Spaghetti Anywhere and renaissance man o'indie Darren Hayman DJing whatever he feels like playing. Plus the latter event holds open the famed Pic'n'mixx mix CD swap box, where you're encouraged to bring along a CDR of appropriate playlisted qualities and exchange it for someone else's, possibly that of someone semi-famous in such field. Meanwhile out in Peckham Upset The Rhythm are putting on Yes Way from 13th-15th at the Auto-Italia space, bringing along Islet, Fair Ohs, Male Bonding, Veronica Falls, Gentle Friendly, Munch Munch, Lovvers, Cold Pumas, Slowcoaches and loads of people you've never heard of unless you live in an N1 squat for art reasons.

BANDS START UP EACH AND EVERY DAY
Oxfordshire trio Dead Jerichos should on paper be the sort of band snobs like us buy bargepoles for specifically so we can refuse to touch them. They share DNA with The Jam and Arctic Monkeys, two bands we barely need more adherents of. Their singer has that sort of lad-rock accent. Their pull quotes include "Fred Perried lad garage" and "saving the new wave from shoegazing wank", a phrase that hasn't endeared anyone to a potential audience since These Animal Men. And yet Bob Harris had them play Truck at his invitation, and he knows a thing or two about music. All 17 years old, there's an intensity, an invigorating tightness, a direct ball association with stories of small town ennui and a suggested willingness to learn a way out of the landfill site that makes them quite captivating in their own way. They clearly know the Cure, Buzzcocks (hints of Magazine too) and the Skids, and have half an ear for their local scene's yen for math-dance guitars. If they can stay comfortably this side of The Enemy interesting things may well occur.

THERE'S ALWAYS A FESTIVAL SOMEWHERE
Our third weekend away of the year is next weekend, and it's not away at all as it's our home town soiree Summer Sundae. Into its tenth year of being in a smaller area than you'd imagine, this year's innovations include an actual repurposed beach. Wonderful, sand redistributed all over the place by dusk Friday. Musically it's done pretty well for itself in our insular terms. Seasick Steve, Mumford & Sons and, erm, Tinchy Stryder headline; elsewhere you've got Los Campesinos!, The Fall, Teenage Fanclub, The Wave Pictures, The Go! Team, Slow Club, Frankie & The Heartstrings, The Futureheads, Fanfarlo, Roots Manuva, Johnny Flynn, Local Natives, Steve Mason, The Invisible, Summer Camp, The Low Anthem, The Leisure Society, Dog Is Dead, Gaggle, Swimming, Red Shoe Diaries, Erland and The Carnival, Peggy Sue, Danny & The Champions of the World and the great Peter Wyeth at, ladies and gentlemen, 10am on Sunday. Get there early, beat the eager lively crowds. If you're not around for that maybe pop by LeeFest in Bromley, a one dayer on Saturday that started in someone's back garden in 2007 and is now in a proper field, which is how it counts as a festival and Yes Way doesn't by our rules, with proper bands: Johnny Foreigner, the Futureheads, Hot Club de Paris, Does It Offend You Yeah? and King Charles are all around.

WHAT ELSE?
Another idea from the restless creative hub of 4 Or 5 Magicians' Dan Ormsby. Following last year's tribute to Our Band Could Be Your Life, this year's themed all-dayer celebrates the 1992 Reading festival of Nirvana infamy. It's at the Brixton Windmill on August Bank Holiday Saturday, the 28th, and the headline act will be Ormsby and co as Nirvana, but with vocals supplied by twenty different people. Some will be minor indie celebrities (we know Laura Internet Forever will be one), the rest will come from the willing. If you can be there, can sing a bit, know a song from this setlist and have the aptitude to get up on stage, contact the band at fourorfivemagicians[at]hotmail[dot]co[dot]uk with your Kurt reasoning and song preferences.

Weekender

IF YOU ONLY BUY ONE RECORD THIS WEEK...
Well, The Suburbs, obviously. Unlike everyone else in the world we haven't heard it yet because we've learnt not to trust advance leaks, but we're slightly disconcerted by the way every single review stretches to call Neon Bible a letdown of Sonny Pike proportions. No it wasn't! No Funeral, but then very little is, and it's got (Antichrist Television Blues), the growing terror of Black Mirror and the superior version YES IT IS of No Cars Go, none of which can make a record bad per se. Still, what they say about this one is it's becalmed, Win's singing about kids again and there's some fascinating musical divertions. We'll just have to listen to it on Spoti...oh.

SOMEWHERE TO GO
Jens Lekman doesn't get about much, especially now he lives in Melbourne. He's having a sojourn around Europe at the moment while he works on his third album, the first sightings of which we discussed yesterday. In the past his live presence has run the gamut from acoustic and backing tape to huge choir, strings and horns. All he'll give away for this trip is he'll be backed by "a full, formidable band", which pull into the Manchester Deaf Institute tomorrow and London Union Chapel on Tuesday.

BANDS START UP EACH AND EVERY DAY
The frankly wrongly named Biggles Flys Again is the name under which Conor Deasy (not the Thrills one, though he's also from Dublin) makes quiet songs of simple feelings and internal confliction. Elliott Smith comes to mind in the subtly intricate singer-songwriterliness of it all, although something also tells us he's heard a bit of solo Paul McCartney, the early stripped back stuff.

THERE'S ALWAYS A FESTIVAL SOMEWHERE
Relentless Boardmasters looks so depressing while Rebellion looks faintly hilarious - the King Blues and Gallows adrift among third reunion wave punk - so that'll be the Big Chill next weekend, then. It's always seemed to us slightly too keen to project itself as cosmopolitan and 'laid back', that old standby, and Spencer Tunick's doing some mass nudity-based nonsense. It's not art as living sculpture and texture, it's an excuse for papers to print a lot of people's bums. Still, once we're past that we're on for headliners MIA, Thom Yorke and Massive Attack, plus Liars, Gregory Isaacs, Kelis, Beth Jeans Houghton, Explosions In The Sky, Roots Manuva, Lonelady, Caribou, the Willkommen Collective, Steve Mason, Gallops, Hope Sandoval and The Warm Inventions, Patrick Wolf, The Heavy, Gaggle, Mystery Jets, John & Jehn, The Phenomenal Handclap Band and The Agitator, plus talky turns from Harry Shearer, John Hegley, John Shuttleworth and Paul Morley. And also Peter Hook And Howard Marks Present 'An Evening Of Unknown Pleasures', but into every life a little self-promotion must fall. And the ever popular Disco Shed turns up. It's just a shed with lights and a smoke machine, but people flock to it. Meanwhile Standon Calling has the somewhat left of the usual headliner rota Orquesta Buena Vista Social Club featuring Omara Portuondo heading up affairs this year, alongside British Sea Power, Liars, Jeffrey Lewis, Joe Gideon and the Shark, The Phantom Band, Summer Camp, Steve Mason, Wildbirds & Peacedrums, Three Trapped Tigers, And So I Watch You From Afar, A Hawk And A Hacksaw, Jesca Hoop, Telepathe, Fucked Up, These New Puritans, Erland and the Carnival, Sparrow and the Workshop, Lone Wolf, Revere, Swimming and Tom Ravenscroft DJing.

WHAT ELSE?
- You don't come across the concept of a splendid tribute album every day, but here goes: a splendid tribute album is being released soon. None Of Your Fairy Stories is an indiepop tribute to the Ramones, being issued through Precordial Catch Records, the outlet of Spiral Scratch co-ubermensch Marianthi and sparkly Grimsby Town fan of note Pete Green. All proceeds go to Lymphoma Association, the support charity for the type of cancer that killed Joey. Helen Love, of course, get track one, followed in various order by The Pains Of Being Pure At Heart, Allo Darlin' (doing I Wanna Be Sedated), MJ Hibbett (Now I Wanna Sniff Some Glue), Pocketbooks, the Just Joans, Liechtenstein, Little My, Horowitz, plenty more, and closing with Green's own take on Blitzkrieg Bop.

- Speaking of which, did we ever link to Pete Green's pub review blog? Well, we have now. His band, formerly the splendidly named Pete Green Corporate Juggernaut, are called The Sweet Nothings now, by the way.

- Here's a curio, passed on by our man on the inside of superior post-nostalgia dumping ground TV Cream. He has a copy of the 1978 Christmas Radio Times for the West, and on 5th January 1979 the listings include this:

10.15pm XTC
A synthesis of the unorthodox and the conventional. One of the leading new
wave groups based in Swindon perform their latest songs. Plus rock in a
rather different style from the Bath group Interview.
Director ROY CHAPMAN
BBC West

Leaving aside what "rock in a rather different style" might be, and whether Julian Cope should know about it, this seems fascinating scheduling. They'd had a couple of albums out by then, White Music and Go 2, which had had critical acclaim and sold well but nothing you'd call worthy of a BBC1 documentary, even regionally (although Partridge did go the local BBC TV feature route later on) - indeed they'd only break the singles chart in 1979. Given the exhaustive archiving tendencies of the XTC fanbase it's strange that this doesn't seem to be known more widely. Anyone know anything?

(Also, just found out while researching this that expanded reissues of the whole XTC catalogue are reportedly due to start before the end of the year, with English Settlement, Skylarking and Oranges & Lemons first. Coo.)

Weekender

IF YOU ONLY BUY ONE RECORD THIS WEEK...
We thought it was out weeks ago. It wasn't. It's out tomorrow. It is A Little More Suspicion In Our Fairytales Plz, the third album by Birmingham's restless noisemakers Ace Bushy Striptease but the first they're insisting you pay for. There's moments of careful loveliness, and there's moments where they seem to be throwing their guitar pedals at each other for sport. They know noise, and they know anthemry. You should know them too. *pause* Oh, alright, two records. You do already know Los Campesinos!, perhaps too well at times. They're putting out a limited edition 10" four track EP called, worryingly, All's Well That Ends, comprising reworked acoustic versions of four songs from Romance Is Boring.

SOMEWHERE TO GO
Public Image Ltd are coming back around, and Lydon promises/threatens the proceeds will go towards a new album. In the meantime pretend that really is Keith Levene and Jah Wobble up there with him at Shepherd’s Bush Empire on Monday, Bristol Academy Tuesday, Oxford Academy Wednesday, Leeds Academy Friday, Liverpool Academy Saturday and Glasgow AcadHAHAHANOIT'SNOT Glasgow ABC on Monday 26th. Meanwhile, we're not sure whether this counts as a gig or festival so let's play safe, as The Flapper in Birmingham spends Friday, Saturday and Sunday putting on the storming lineup of Off The Cuff - Chapel Club on Friday; Pulled Apart By Horses and &U&I (75% of Blakfish) on Saturday; and on Sunday the preposterous line-up of Adebisi Shank, Tellison, Tubelord, Shoes And Socks Off, Talons, an out of place Boat To Row, Maybeshewill and Hold Your Horse Is.

But, frankly, fuck all that. We've got our own gig on. It's at Leicester Musician on Thursday, it's an Indietracks warmup, and a fiver on the door gets you MJ Hibbett & The Validators (we think the Vlads' only public runout this year besides the festival, as Hibbett's on Dinosaur Planet duty afterwards), Standard Fare (who we booked for this at the start of the year, advance working fans) and Lime Chalks. Fuller details on the Facebook event.

BANDS START UP EACH AND EVERY DAY
When we talk about bands creating modern guitar pop in their own image, we like to think that we might every so often find a what-we-call-indie band who seem rootless, who aren't choppy riffs or falling apart at the seams like Pete might have, or at least not urgently drafting in a synth player. Where this is all leading is that Niteflights sound more like contemporaries of Orange Juice, or maybe the Subway Sect, then of whoever the schmindie band du jour are. Not doing a very good job of describing this, we know. What you need to note down essentially is that Niteflights are a band who are going somewhere, capable of crafting a pop hook as they are of upending expectations, unassuming and careful but ready to surprise and to lace the pot with lyrical cyanide.

THERE'S ALWAYS A FESTIVAL SOMEWHERE
Perhaps because it's a short break between really major events, they're all at it next weekend. As you may have gleaned from the above, we're reconnecting with the Indietracks clan next weekend at Ripley's Midlands Railway Museum. Oh, for the peculiar delights of the acoustic acts on a steam train, the boiling hot tin church, the cafe and the signal box. We wrote a bit for their blog a little while back. That photo is quite old, by the way. The Pains Of Being Pure At Heart, as always seemed destined, The Primitives and hero of Indietracks '09 Eddie Argos' other band Everybody Was In The French Resistance...Now! headline, with strong backup from, as well as the three doing our do, Slow Club, Allo Darlin', David Tattersall, Ballboy, Internet Forever, This Many Boyfriends, Shrag, The Pooh Sticks, White Town (that White Town, yes), The Loves, The Just Joans, Red Shoe Diaries, Foxes!, The Blanche Hudson Weekend, Veronica Falls, The Smittens, Paisley & Charlie, Jam On Bread and so forth.

Which is, to some extent, a right bugger, as our former favourite kick-off of our festivalling year Truck has gone and booked its best line-up in years. We could start with the headliners, Mew and Teenage Fanclub. Or we could just dip into the bran tub of a band listing and pull out Los Campesinos!, Future Of The Left, Meursault, Islet, Blood Red Shoes, the Mercury Rev Clear Light Ensemble, 65daysofstatic, Thomas Truax, Steve Mason, Pulled Apart By Horses, Summer Camp, Thomas Tantrum, Ace Bushy Striptease, Fucked Up, Is Tropical, Dog Is Dead, The Flowers Of Hell, John Otway... and that's far from hell. When are they going to get round to patenting teleportation for such occasions?

Briefly through some others: Secret Garden Party ("brings people together by removing all barriers – you will do things you never thought you had the nerve or bombast to do". Gulp) have Gorillaz Sound System doing a headline DJ set, which seems to involve some people DJing under Jamie Hewlett animation. More bodily, they offer Mercury Rev, Joe Gideon & The Shark, Summer Camp, Helmholtz Resonators, Kitty Daisy & Lewis, Son Of Dave, Danny And The Champions Of The World, John & Jehn and The Crookes. Port Eliot Festival is primarily a literary event - Bill Drummond ("he’ll be teaching you how to build a bed"), Justine Picardie, Marina Hyde, Toby Young, Phil Daniels, Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, Margaret Drabble, Ferdinand Mount and Alex Bellos are there in that capacity this year. So is Luke Haines, reading from Bad Vibes with performance illustrations. There's set aside music too, chiefly for our purposes by The Leisure Society, The John Moore Rock and Roll Trio, Wilko Johnson, Fionn Regan, Kathryn Williams, Jim Bob, Alabama 3 and Danny and The Champions of The World. Also, live on stage, Jarvis Cocker's 6 Music show. Saturday's very more metropolitan 1-2-3-4 Shoreditch has, in among the expected arse, The Pre New (the new incarnation of Earl Brutus), Vic Godard & the Subway Sect, Rolo Tomassi, Vivian Girls, Fucked Up, These New Puritans, Wavves, Zombie-Zombie, Still Corners, Veronica Falls, Dum Dum Girls and Spectrals, as well as Peter Hook getting in the way as he tends to do these days. A day later comes Splendour at Wollaton Hall, Nottingham, with the Pet Shop Boys headlining and the Leisure Society, Dog Is Dead, Fists and Fyfe Dangerfield peeking out from under a festival whose second stage will be headlined by Shed Seven and Terrorvision. Non-hipster Londoners! Why not take your kids to Ben & Jerry's Sundae On The Common at Clapham Common all weekend? Oh yeah, because they'd be exposed to Scouting For Girls. But there's also Billy Bragg (love to see how he pitches this one), Slow Club, Doves, Idlewild, Kitty Daisy & Lewis, Frightened Rabbit...that headliner's put you off, hasn't it? Ah well. Sheffield is meanwhile being taken over for three days by Tramlines, and they're doing well out of it too - Future Of The Left, Blood Red Shoes, Standard Fare, Mystery Jets, 65daysofstatic, Pulled Apart By Horses, Dinosaur Pile-Up, Grammatics, Rolo Tomassi, The Twilight Sad, Screaming Maldini, Gallops, Three Trapped Tigers, Nat Johnson & The Figureheads, Chapel Club, Male Bonding, Is Tropical, Darwin Deez, Echo & The Bunnymen and a band called The Kooks who don't appear to be that Kooks. Someone should warn them.

WHAT ELSE?
Our Mercury's in retrograde. After a good couple of years predicting five of the 12 Mercury Music Prize nominees, last year we slipped to four, as we recall without checking. The announcement for 2010 is made on Tuesday, but as we'll be writing up our Latitude experiences by then we'll have to knock them out now. So, step forward for your provisional nominatures... Delphic, Field Music, Fionn Regan, I Am Kloot, Laura Marling, Mumford & Sons, Plan B, Polar Bear, These New Puritans, Wild Beasts, The XX and an experimental jazz/folk/whatever record we don't know about yet. (Ah, the cop out. True, though.)

Weekender

IF YOU ONLY BUY ONE RECORD THIS WEEK...
Dark Night Of The Soul? MAYA, or however she wants us to spell it out? Let others cover them. Tender Trap we thought long and hard about, given background and such, but STN has got a little hairslide-like of late. Let's talk about manaical Glaswegians instead. The depth of our influence was spelt out broader than perhaps ever about a month ago when we saw the long supported here Mitchell Museum play to eight people in our own home conurbation. No matter, at least we have the music. The Peters Port Memorial Service is getting some major league lovin' in Scotland but very little attention south of the border, which is everyone in England's fault. A million ideas are shoehorned into pop length rollercoaster avant-indie that nods to Flaming Lips, Unicorns, Modest Mouse and Why? but could only really be British for its charge towards offhandedness and lyrical idiosyncracies.

SOMEWHERE TO GO
Oh, loads to go round this week. Where shall we start? Tonight, that'd be best, at Cardiff's esteemed Clwb Ifor Bach for an alldayer for brain injury support service charity Headway Cardiff. The School headline, Gindrinker add their particular special sauce, Pagan Wanderer Lu is midway down the bill, some others are playing and it's all £6. Gil Scott-Heron plays Somerset House on Wednesday, the same night The Lovely Eggs and Hotpants Romance's joint tour arrives at Sheffield Penelope's and takes this section regulars Standard Fare as bait. They'll play for any old promoter, them. (More on this next week.) The thematic highlight, though, is Wichiten, Wichita Recordings' week of tenth anniversary gigs at the Highbury Garage. Each night will also feature special guest DJs and an indie raffle, whatever one of those is - is it like a meat raffle? - and the first 200 people through the door each night will receive a goody bag, like on kids' telly shows in the late 80s. Lissy Trullie headlines on Monday with support from the surely overdue some new material Those Dancing Days; Tuesday sees First Aid Kit spread their quiet magic with Peggy Sue supporting; the label's breakout stars (apart from Bloc Party) The Cribs bring Sky Larkin and Lovvers south with them on Wednesday; while in a true did-we-somehow-book-this-one-ourselves? fashion Thursday is opened by a band whose frontman was recently spotted doing the merch table for Pavement, Johnny Foreigner, followed by Frankie & The Heartstrings (so that's Huw Stephens down to DJ, then) before Los Campesinos! top the night as only Los Campesinos! ever can. Why can't we go, mum?

BANDS START UP EACH AND EVERY DAY
The world perhaps doesn't necessarily need another overly fuzzed out no-fi band, but it's got a good one anyway. Slowcoaches are from Leeds and have the whole post-Jesus & Mary Chain loud pop thing going on with heavily distorted bass and a hint of something stewing beneath the dissonance in a Vivian Girls sense, exacerbated by Heather's offhand vocal style. Given more than two tracks on a Myspace they could easily show northern England has an equally strong hand to play in the noise-pop scene-ette.

THERE'S ALWAYS A FESTIVAL SOMEWHERE
Our first festival of the year is next weekend, as we head east to experience the shady woods, crowded poetry tents and water-resistant ground of Latitude. Some controversy this year as Melvin Benn and Festival Republic have junked the Sunday midday slot without officially announcing it, but there's still plenty we'll end up missing to go round, from Belle & Sebastian's first UK gig in nearly four years with orchestra in tow to The Mystery Fax Machine Orchestra. You forget that Lovebox started off as Groove Armada's charabanc, so curious and relatively well financed eclectic is its range now if still with a solid foothold in the dance world. Roxy Music headlining. Wonder what they're like now. If Bryan calls Otis a freedom fighter or somesuch we vote they bulldoze the whole park at once. Down the pecking order... 2000 Trees is somewhere we always mean to go, both for its Friday/Saturday nature and its amiably jagged booking policy. We can't this year anyway, as it's sold out. Frank Turner and the Subways headline, as they do every small-to-mid-sized festival, but below them you've got the likes of Future Of The Left, Pulled Apart By Horses, Johnny Flynn, Kill It Kid, Maybeshewill, And So I Watch You From Afar, 65daysofstatic, Tubelord, Shoes And Socks Off, Three Trapped Tigers, Errors, Sparrow & The Workshop, A Genuine Freakshow and Cats And Cats And Cats. Guilfest boasts what new addition Thomas White calls "the most utterly bonkers line-up that I think I've ever seen", and once you've seen the likelihood of a stage time clash between the Wonder Stuff and Fucked Up, who appear seemingly at random in the midst of the band list, you can't help but concur. Rare is the festival that prides itself on booking 65daysofstatic, N-Dubz, Hawkwind, Alvin Stardust, Orbital, Mungo Jerry, Level 42, The Soldiers, The Twang, Delays and Young Knives and expecting families to go along with everything. Larmer Tree Festival, running Wednesday to Sunday, is on the End Of The Road site and acts as a kind of all round entertainment palette cleanser, boasting a lineup that thinks nothing of switching from Martha Wainwright, The Unthanks and Hypnotic Brass Ensemble to Cornershop, Frank Turner, The Bookhouse Boys, Voluntary Butler Scheme, The Heavy, Toumani Diabaté and Kill It Kid, who seem to be playing every festival this summer except any we're going to.

WHAT ELSE?
- I Like Trains, as they now unexcitingly are, have finished recording their third album, He Who Saw the Deep. They say it's "a progression from what has gone before it... light and shade, hope and devastation, and we are taking a look at where we are heading instead of where we have been", but all bands say something like that. This being the modern world, they're having to get the fans to finance the thing through a series of pledges, including a number of gifts that range from signed copies and thank you notes to 'Play Alistair at Scrabble' and 'Partly broken distortion pedal.' They were four fifths of the way there when we last looked, so get in while you still can and make a band as happy as their world outlook will ever permit.