A couple of quick things for your delectation today. One is a clip of Black Mountain sleepily invading the mainstream by playing “Stormy High” live on the Conan O’Brien show. Look at all that beautiful hair and how they avoid looking at the cameras at all costs. Mighty impressive.

Second up is a neat new band from, I believe, Austin, called White Denim. If you’ve got five minutes, take a trip over to their Myspace site and listen to “Let’s Talk About It”. It reminds me variously of Devo, The MC5, maybe some far-flung corners of “Nuggets”. Most of all, though, I’m struck by the similarities to one of my favourite neglected bands, Love As Laughter (hopefully, you heard one of their old tunes on the bar band CD that came free with the last issue of Uncut).

White Denim have the same kind of rickety energy, a punchy method of reinventing classic rock’n’roll and a penchant for letting songs roll on and then deconstruct in an impressively free way. I have another great track – not, sadly, on Myspace at the moment – called “Mess Your Hair Up”, which disintegrates brilliantly until there’s little left but a few dissolute handclaps.

Some good new things coming through at the moment, I think, and this is right up with Fleet Foxes, Bon Iver and No Age; I must get round to blogging about their new album, “Nouns”, soon, though the watermarked CD behaves rather moodily on our admittedly troublesome stereo. Not your problem, obviously – I’ll try and sort it out in the next few days, and also post something about Alex Turner and Miles Kane’s The Last Shadow Puppets, which I’m slowly beginning to get my head around.