Finding it a bit hard to pay much attention to music beyond the new White Denim album these past couple of days (I’ll write about that next week). Nevertheless, it seems like a good time to flag up a few things I’ve neglected to blog on over the past few weeks.

A nice list again this week, with a terrific new White Denim album arriving late yesterday afternoon.

One of those serendipitous music/environment moments this morning. As I was walking down Stamford Hill in a thickish mist, Colin Stetson’s fathomlessly deep saxophone came looming out of my headphones like a foghorn This is one of the first things you hear on “New History Warfare Vol. 2: Judges”, a pretty unusual and excellent record that I’ve been meaning to write about for a while.

Not a record I’ve pulled down from the shelves in a while, but this weekend I was inspired to locate a handsome set called “Tibetan Buddhist Rites From The Monasteries Of Bhutan”. The motivation, I guess, was a certain preoccupation with “Totem 3” by The Master Musicians Of Bukkake, and its predecessor “Totem 2”.

After whingeing about the last couple of playlists, I think there’s a lot more good stuff arrived for this week’s effort.

Listening to “Tomboy” on the way to work this morning, I started thinking about how Radiohead and Panda Bear have both played the internet these past few weeks/months. I read a very good piece yesterday by Stephen Troussé, that’ll be in the next print edition of Uncut, about “The King Of Limbs” and what he calls “the re-enchantment of the album release.”

I have a good few mysterious records in my collection, as you can probably imagine. Among the more obtuse are a bunch by a shadowy New York collective called The No-Neck Blues Band. It’s not always easy to read these albums, since the band have an apparent disdain for even the most fundamental marketing expediencies. Often, their name is nowhere to be found on the package, replaced by a kind of glyph that, decoded, reads NNCK.

I was reading the latest edition of Uncut last night, as I should, when I came across this quote from Kurt Vile, sat at the bottom of Louis Pattison’s review of “Smoke Ring For My Halo”. “It’s got this kind of wandering, mellow feel,” Vile says of his album. “We recorded a lot of rockers, but they just didn’t seem to fit.”

Thanks to everyone who contributed to last week’s very interesting playlist thread. If you haven’t had a look, there’s some good talk about the Radiohead and REM albums; dubious thanks to John E, who successfully encouraged/goaded me into unpacking a good month or two’s worth of irritation with regard to “Collapse Into Now”. Better now.

I don’t mean to suggest “Let England Shake” is anything other than excellent, but I can’t help thinking that one supplementary reason why PJ Harvey’s latest album has had such laudatory reviews (better, mostly, than the equally good “White Chalk”) is that offers journalists so much to write about. “Let England Shake” is so full of imagery, content, allusion, it offers up boundless possibilities of meaning. Reductively, it has been called a protest album. Expansively, you can parse (or, maybe, project on) it for all manner of ideas about war and nationality.