Moving on, today Beach House's third album goes under the critical microscope...

With the new issue onsale, Top 50 of the year inside and all, plus the whole Uncut Music Award business, it occurs to me I should hunker down and prepare a Wild Mercury Sound 2010 chart.

Following from yesterday's transcript of the Paul Weller debate, here are the Uncut Music Award judges on the Arcade Fire.

Having just finished Peter Matthiessen’s book about (among other things) Nepal, “The Snow Leopard”, it’s been quite nice these past few days to perceive cold and snow as a path to spiritual revelation as much as a physical ordeal. Of course, crawling down the A10 on the Number 76 yesterday morning pretty effectively demolished the romance.

Over the next few days, we'll be posting full transcripts of what the Uncut Music Award judges said about each of the shortlisted eight albums. Today we begin with their comments on the eventual winner; Paul Weller's "Wake Up The Nation".

Paul Weller is the winner of the Uncut Music Award 2010. His album, “Wake Up The Nation”, is the third winner of the prestigious award, following the triumphs of Fleet Foxes and Tinariwen in 2008 and 2009. Watch the judges making their decision after the jump...

A raised eyebrow last week, when the new Earth album arrived, accompanied by a press release citing Pentangle, Fairport Convention and Tinariwen as key influences. It’s been a fair while, of course, since Dylan Carlson’s outfit made music quite so doomy and reductive as their reputation.

Another round-up today, following on from the Slow Previewing blogs I filed a week or two back. Again, a few records that I didn’t get round to writing about at time of release, but which definitely deserve flagging up.

Crawling from the wreckage of the Kanye West business, “Runaway” is still stuck in my head, in spite of this week’s impressive crop.

Just to let you all know, we'll be announcing the winner of this year's Uncut Music Award a week today (Tuesday, November 30, that is). The eight shortlisted records being discussed by the judges are: