Jack White’s increasingly baroque love of packaging means that it takes more than one review to get to grips with a solitary release. Hence “Under Great White Northern Lights”, a package commemorating The White Stripes’ 2007 tour of Canada which, in its simplest iteration, comes as a live CD and a longform documentary DVD about the ambitious jaunt.

Never personally had much time for Martin Amis’ writing, but I was idling my way through an interview with him in The Guardian the other day, when I came across his predictably splenetic response to The Bookseller’s claim that the new Amis novel, The Pregnant Woman, was a “return to form”.

This is pretty fantastic. A few days ago, Drag City streamed a song from the forthcoming Joanna Newsom album, “Have One On Me”, which I really should’ve flagged up.

Some albums prove harder to write about than others, for reasons that aren’t always easy to fathom. Others, though, seem purposely designed as hard to pin down: a case in point being Kompakt’s latest “Pop Ambient 2010” comp, which I’ve been listening to a lot for a couple of months now. How do you articulate what music sounds like that exists in such a neutral, undemonstrative space?

A load of pretty heavy psych’s been accumulating over the last few weeks: new albums from Major Stars (what an amazing guitarist Wayne Rogers is); from both Wooden Shjips and Ripley’s other project, Moon Duo; a cool new (to me, at least) band on No Quarter called Coconuts.

It’s a dubious business, calling any band empirically ‘great’. But perhaps one indicator of greatness might be the amount of controversy and whingeing generated when a ‘Best Of’ tracklisting is announced.

If the accelerating success of Animal Collective in 2009 was weird enough, the level of anticipation surrounding their projects for 2010 must be astronomical, following the placing of “Merriweather Post Pavilion” at Number One in so many end-of-year polls.

Not so much a preview, this one, since I believe “The Glorious Gongs Of Hainuwele” may have come out the best part of a year ago. Forgive the tardiness, anyhow: this pretty amazing album has only just showed up on my radar, shamefully.

A bit unusual actually blogging about someone who sits in the same office, but a lovely reissue to start off today: the solitary EP by Apple Boutique, out for the first time on CD and pretty much unavailable since 1987.

Early days with this Bill Fay CD as yet, and I can’t help thinking that two or three listens is in no way enough to get an angle on, what, 43 songs spread across two CDs. “Still Some Light” consists of a bunch of full band demos from 1970-71, plus a home album (“Still Some Light” itself) recorded last year.