The first time I heard Eagles Of Death Metal, I was backstage at a festival in Bologna, trying to interview Queens Of The Stone Age even though Josh Homme, dancing like a menacing and mildly suggestive uncle, was more interested in playing me his new side project.

It seems like much longer than a year since Cat Power’s “Jukebox” album was released; one of those January albums, maybe, that are unfairly forgotten when the end-of-year accounting is done. A handy reminder, though, comes with this lovely six-track EP of covers, culled from the same sessions, that acts as a kind of book-end to the year.

I was thinking the other day about live albums, specifically those ones where crowd noise takes over: things, I guess, like Suicide’s “23 Minutes Over Brussels” and that “Black Sabbath Riot” record that came out a few years ago (was it something to do with Alec Empire? I can’t remember).

I’ve written about this guy Babe, Terror before here, but he emailed me about a new track he’d posted the other day, and I think it might be his best one yet.

A slightly tenuous connection, but it’s odd to think that, when the record I blogged about yesterday, “Brighten The Corners”, first came out, Damon Albarn was at the height of his Pavement phase. I remember going to see Pavement in Oxford on that tour (“Westie Can Drum”, “The Killing Moon”. . .) and Albarn was there with Justine Frischmann, looking conspicuously inconspicuous in a baseball cap pulled down low.

When promos of the latest deluxe Pavement reissue – “Brighten The Corners: Nicene Creedence Ed”, no less – turned up last week, it struck me that perhaps, in 12 months’ time, we might just be talking about a Pavement comeback being one of the key reunions of 2009.

Not that I take much notice of these things, but it did seem fitting that a copy of the new Sunn 0))) album arrived just in time for Halloween. Like most of their crushingly slow meditations on doom, “Dømkirke” would probably be interpreted by many listeners as an apt soundtrack for the gates of hell opening at an agonisingly slow pace.

I was just re-reading my blog on the first Marnie Stern album, “In Advance Of The Broken Arm”, from last year. I mentioned plenty of stuff about Lightning Bolt and Sleater-Kinney (and slyly avoided a couple of other reference points, more of which later), and about how Stern had certain similarities with early PJ Harvey.

In 2005’s Brick, Rian Johnson played a cute twist on the high school movie genre, importing the tropes of film noir for a murder thriller set in the halls of academe. The Brothers Bloom, last night’s premier at the London Film Festival, is a similarly knowing piece of work. On face value, it’s a movie about two con men brothers, played by Mark Ruffalo and Adrien Brody; but, more than that, it’s also a movie about the act of fiction itself.

A few weeks ago now, I blogged about the third Brightblack Morning Light, “Motion To Rejoin”. In the interim, I’ve played it to death, decided it’s one of my favourite albums of 2008, and written about it at length for the new issue of Uncut.