After living with the new Hot Chip album for the best part of a week, it feels like my thoughts about it are finally beginning to coalesce. They’re a curious band, I think: a consummate, bright pop band on the one hand; a group whose songs gradually insinuate themselves over time. What initially appears slight, eventually becomes unforgettable.

I've been gently kicking myself for the past few days after discovering The Necks were playing a couple of shows just down the road from me in Dalston. By the time I tried to get tickets on Sunday afternoon, they'd long sold out. Their new album, "Townsville", is compensation of a kind, but it also makes me regret missing them more than ever.

I've been keeping a list of the records we've played for the past couple of days. Kept away from American Music Club's "Golden Age" after some heavy rotation last week, and I'm contemplating having another go at its predecessor, "Lovesongs For Patriots", after some insinuated reprimands on the blog.

We've just been playing the excellent forthcoming Kelley Stoltz album to start the week (I'll write about it soon), which reminded me of another Sub Pop album I've liked in the past few weeks.

Some interesting things turned up from you this week, not least a couple of impassioned defences of the Robert Plant & Alison Krauss album, which seemed to be getting a rough ride from some unreconstructed old Led Zep fans.

Forgive me for recycling press releases, but there’s an interesting line in this one which accompanies the new album by American Music Club. “Dark music is for people who are healthy enough to take it,” it reads, “And AMC want to appeal to all people – including the sick.”

The new Cat Power album just arrived - or at least a stream of it arrived onto my computer - so that's playing as I write this morning. Sounds pretty good, with a remarkable version of "New York New York" to kick things off, but I'll blog about it properly in the next few days.

A couple of weeks ago or so, I used the online appearance of a new Wu-Tang Clan tune to complain – from a dilettante-ish position, I admit – that 2007 has been a thin year for hip-hop. It now looks like the Wu album may have been put on hold for a while, though apparently there is the substantial compensation of a new Ghostface Killah album instead.

Sometime last week, we had some kind of half-assed straw poll in the office about our best gigs of 2007. You can probably guess a lot of the stuff that came up: The White Stripes, The Hold Steady, Arctic Monkeys, Dylan, Wilco, Lou Reed’s "Berlin". Good gigs. I held off submitting any suggestions, though, not least because I suspected I’d see my favourite gig of the year on Friday night.

I've been preparing myself today for tonight's Boredoms show at Shoreditch Town Hall by subjecting the office to a 105 minute continuous bootleg of their show with 77 drummers in New York from the summer. But it also seems like Japanese rock is much on my mind right now, since I've finally got round to reading Julian Cope's "Japrocksampler".