Today, the Uncut Music Award judges consider Deer Tick's "Black Dirt Sessions"...

A few months ago, I managed to smuggle a track by Oneohtrix Point Never onto an Uncut CD; a David Bowie-themed compilation of vaguely futuristic music. Oneohtrix is the project of a guy based in New York called Daniel Lopatin, who reconfigures various kosmische tropes with some ‘80s sci-fi vibes and comes up with a kind of New Age music for underground noise fans.

Album Number Four on the Uncut Music Award 2010 shortlist. Here's what the judges said about The Coral's "Butterfly House"...

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

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".

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.

Primal Scream have long held firm to the belief that the past is a hostile foreign country, much of it best left unvisited. It’s a condition that extends, for the most part, to their first two albums. Rarely – if ever – do they perform any of those tracks live, while 2004’s Dirty Hits compilation did a very good job of pretending nothing existed prior to the band’s self-declared Year Zero: Screamdelica. But it’s a strange policy, really. After all, without that self-titled second album – in particular the ballad “I’m Losing More Than I’ll Ever Have” – Screamadelica arguably wouldn’t exist, and we wouldn’t be here tonight.

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.