What to make of The Fiery Furnaces? A brilliant band, maybe, whose frequently demented surfeit of ideas has proved too overwhelming for all but their most assiduous listeners over the past few years.

Thanks for all your responses to the Favourites Of 2009 flam I posted last Friday; I’ve posted some further thoughts there, which’ll doubtless inflame the Decemberists and Felice Brothers fans (more or less on my own here in my apathy to the latter, incidentally; check this for Allan’s eloquent alternate take).

The last time I wrote about James Yorkston, I seem to remember some vaguely disinterested feelings about the extended Fence Collective family resulted in a bit of a spat with that scene’s loyalists. So avoiding context this time out, Yorkston has come up with what feels like a pretty fast follow-up to “When The Haar Rolls In”.

A message that one of the Uncut team, Bud Scoppa, had filed his Top 25 tracks of the last six months inspired me this morning to do something similar.

I’ve always thought that the British music press’ reputation for ‘building them up and knocking them down’ is a bit erroneous, though it’s undoubtedly true that there’s a possibly obsessive fetishisation of the new that can sometimes bias against longer-serving bands. Maybe ‘build them up, get distracted by something else, then more or less forget they exist’ might be a truer reflection of what happens.

A quick look at the ever-reliable Wikipedia suggests it’s been seven years since the last Cornershop album was released; so long, in fact, that the Wiiija label still existed to release it. Around the time of “Handcream For A Generation”, I spent a night with Tjinder and Ben in Madrid, coming back to write a feature for Uncut that, if memory serves, basically argued that this album should do every bit as well as the “Brimful Of Asha”-driven “When I Was Born For The Seventh Time”.

A slightly weird list today, in that I was out of the office yesterday and didn’t actually hear the last few records here; I just cribbed them from the office playlist on our Twitter page that John Robinson posts.

I suspect I may have written more about Wild Beasts than any other British band in the two or so years Wild Mercury Sound has been running, doubtless to the bafflement and irritation of a good few regular readers.

Somewhat belatedly, I’ve just got round to reading Alex Ross’ fantastic book on 20th Century composition, The Rest Is Noise. A lot to talk about in there, but one quote stuck out yesterday. “Back in 1915,” Ross writes, “the critic Van Wyck Brooks had complained that America was caught in a false dichotomy between ‘highbrow’ and ‘lowbrow’, between ‘academic pedantry and pavement slang’. He called for a middle-ground culture that would fuse intellectual substance with communicative power.”

A beautiful bit of work today, with this video to “Unwound”, by Music For Your Heart. Very taken with this; imagine a subtle and warm torch song built on the spare dynamics of something from Slint’s “Spiderland”, and you’re close to the appeal of this opening track from Sandra Zettpunkt’s forthcoming album. An unfamiliar name, perhaps, though “Turning Marvel” was recorded by Teenage Fanclub’s Raymond McGinley and mastered by Shellac’s Bob Weston, and features double bass from Calexico’s Volker Zander.