As is always the way, I suppose, I finish one compilation of newish psych acts, then a load more records start turning up. For a good 30 minutes now, my new favourite band has been some shady punks from Long Beach who allegedly travel in “a vegetable oil-powered school bus”, and have a percussionist called, well, Sexual Chocolate.

Over the weekend, I watched one of the best music documentaries I’ve seen in an age. “Wild Combination” is subtitled “A Portrait Of Arthur Russell”, and I can only defer to The New Yorker for a start, who noted about the film, “This story begins, as many good ones do, with a gay man from Oskaloosa, Iowa, playing cello in a closet in a Buddhist seminary.”

Coming to work this morning past the giant Budweiser posters of William Tyler, it occurred to me it was really high time I wrote about “OH (Ohio)”. I guess there may have been some reluctance on my part to commit to this one, possibly because I’ve found the last couple – maybe more – Lambchop albums so disappointing, and also because, clearly, none of their slowly insinuating records merit rushed judgments.

A bit of a sketchy bunch this week, as you’ll see. But the TV On The Radio album is getting played daily at least once, and there’s an auspicious new Mystery Record for me to be all cagey about.

Much as I like a fair bit of hardcore, there’s a slightly dim earnestness surrounding some contemporary bands on the scene (like the musically quite interesting Gallows, I suppose) that can sometimes be irritating. Obviously I can sympathise with the ideology, but I guess I’ve reached a point in life where I don’t need to be lectured on the multifarious iniquities of the music business - or the iniquities of life, come to that - in such artless terms.

Judging by the activity on the blog about “Golden Age”, there’s a fair amount of excitement about TV On The Radio’s “Dear Science”. And, now that I’ve heard the album properly a few times, I reckon it’s pretty justified: this is the best record the band have made by a mile.

It occurred to me, some time after filing the AC/DC blog on Friday, that I’ve been a bit slack at covering underground stuff (“Interstellar Overdrive” notwithstanding) for the past week or two.

A quick one today, as Brian Johnson might say. I was subbing some copy for the next issue this morning, where a rock star who shall remain nameless for another four weeks revealed that he’d choose the Benny Hill theme as seduction music. AC/DC always seem like the rock equivalent of that, in many ways – so squalid, so repetitive. And yet, as I may have mentioned before, I can’t think of many bands I’ve seen live and enjoyed so much.

A slight bias towards reissues this week, as we've been digging deep into a ten-CD box set of Philip Glass' greatest hits and, since they turned up yesterday, neat new reissues of the first six Creedence Clearwater Revival albums.

By most fan standards, I’m a bit of a Grateful Dead lightweight. I own no bootlegs, and precious few live albums beyond the canonical early ones – “Live Dead”, “Europe ‘72” and so on. Consequently, two things: one, if anyone has recommendations for me from the “Dick’s Picks”/”One From The Vault”/"Road Trips" catalogue, I’d be very grateful (thanks again for everyone’s help navigating a path through Fleetwood Mac, by the way). And two, “Rocking The Cradle: Egypt 1978” is, I think, my first encounter with live Dead from that period – I reckon the latest show I have is that excellent one from “Cow Palace ‘76”. So forgive me if I can’t quite tell how this one measures up against other contemporary shows.