Great title, for a start, though I have little idea what it means. I just put “Mountain Battles” on for the third, maybe fourth time, and I’m beginning to get the hang of it. For a start, it sounds like something of a departure.

After all the mature, relatively sedate stuff I’ve been writing about recently like Roedelius and the Imaginational Anthems “Primitive American Guitar” comp, something a bit livelier today.

In spite of the current enthusiasm for Krautrock round these parts, I must admit to being a bit sceptical about the new album from Hans-Joachim Roedelius: one half of Cluster, one third of the recently reformed Harmonia, and now collaborating with an American called Tim Story on a highly pretty CD called “Inlandish”.

I'd say the key moment in Cloverfield -- just the very monster movie the post-9/11 world has been crying out for -- occurs while a giant creature of unknown origin lays spectacular waste to New York City, and one of the characters screams: "I AM SEEING THIS SHIT RIGHT NOW!"

Nice thing turned up in the post the other day from one of my favourite labels at the moment, Tompkins Square. The New York label tends to specialise in fingerpicking guitarists who are very much in the tradition of the Takoma school, which they categorise, neatly enough, as “American Primitive Guitar”.

A few of you have been asking for me to write something about the new Drive-By Truckers album and, to be honest, I’ve been putting off doing so for weeks now, playing the record again and again to come to terms with it.

We were listening to the new Elbow album this morning when the first line of Track Four stood out. “I’ve been working on a cocktail called grounds for divorce,” sings Guy Garvey over a ratchety chaingang rhythm, one of those industrial-propulsive beats with which Elbow pepper their Floydian/Talk Talk reveries. Then a crisply distorted guitar cuts through it; far too controlled to be grungy, exactly, but endemic of the way this largely excellent band manage to mix up the grandiose and ethereal with something that’s much more earthy and humane.

Just as I started writing this blog, an email pinged into my inbox to let me know that Juno has now taken $60 million at the US box office and kept the Nic Cage blockbuster National Treasure 2 off the top spot.

A bit of a rush today, since we're trying to finish the next issue of Uncut. But I've been revisiting the MGMT record that turned up last year, and which features fairly prominently in the New Brooklyn Bands feature in the current issue.

A couple of records I’ve been meaning to blog about for weeks today. One is the new album by Earth, “The Bees Made Honey In The Lion’s Skull”, which further confirms Dylan Carlson’s drift away from absolute minimalist metal drone to a kind of slow, but surprisingly melodious desert rock.