Fuck Dress - 'Suburban Nietzsche Freak'

"God is dead, so I listen to Radiohead."

Quite so. How refreshing once in a while to find an utter throwback of a tune like this. Here we are with a slice of indie back from when that degraded word ever meant anything. This has surely wormed its way through a rent in the fabric of time from 1985. (Perhaps Radiohead were actually named after this lyric then?) The label of the day is In Tape Records. The Fall are going through one of their periodic spells when they are fashionable and it's cool to acknowledge their manifest influence on all music (these moments are interspersed with long spells where everyone forgets about The Fall, but they keep working regardless). Yeah Yeah Noh are putting the fun back into being pretentious. The Membranes are the next big thing. The June Brides are surely going to change the world. And all records sound like this: thin guitar, robotically thudding drums, and two singers, a deep-voiced male and an accompanying female, apparently stood too far away from the microphone. Things are recorded in sheds, and sound like it. The lyrics are alienated, knowing and not afraid of wearing their smartness on their sleeves.

Yep, I like this, like it a lot, and I'm going to listen to it 27 times and then file it away for the next 10 years before rediscovering and being confused by it. It currently exists only in non-physical form but is due a real release from NROne records - no idea of the capitalisation there, it's a guess - sometime next month, and you can pre-order it (not an expression I have ever understood) there. Nrone has become one of those quietly good labels which most of the time gets it right. Inevitably there's a Myspace site, which rather shatters the illusion that it's 1985, when we were all using ZX Spectrums, and there are other tunes knocking around the internet, none of which, inevitably, are as great as this.

Yet another fuck band, by the way, in what's getting to be quite a collection, but it's becoming a bit boring to keep pointing this out, isn't it?

Mogwai - 'Young Team' reissue

In the main, I manage to resist reissues. Of course, I’m a Fall fan, so the house is cluttered with their repeat offerings of the same LP. We’re talking three figures by now. My view is everyone’s allowed one act where they buy all the reissues, lives, bootlegs and pretty much any pointless everything, and mine is The Fall. It could be worse. Some people do it with Bob Dylan. But boy, the CDs just pile up. Recently, when returning from holiday, I opened the door to find it jamming against shiny discs strewn across the front room. At first the inevitable burglary was feared, but then the pleasantly mundane reality of it became clear: there’d been a CD collapse. Piles of them, and piles upon piles, were stacked precariously on speakers, and on top of bulgingly full racks. The faintest breath of wind would have been enough. Probably somebody slammed a door in a neighbouring house. Even now they sit higgledy-piggledy towered upon the floor awaiting the imposition of some kind of order.

Anyway, I don’t do reissues, but this one was always something special. There are times when Mogwai are the most important band in my life, and it’s still their t-shirt I wear probably more times than I should. I do have other clothes, I’m just proud of them. Ten years on, it would be hard to explain the impact of this record to some post-rock neophyte. There have been so many subsequent copyists that it’s difficult to get across how different, how shocking this music was. Of course they weren’t the first to do it, just the first to get it right. It redefined the rules. Most of the songs didn’t have lyrics. They were as long as they cared to be. They had very quiet and shockingly loud bits, or sometimes just quiet bits. It’s art stuff, but it’s rock.

But hearing it now I curse my cloth-eared 20-something self. I was then yet labouring with a mostly ideological misconception that all music should be three minute pop songs. Oh sure, I liked it enough, on then-novel double vinyl, but still it feels I missed a trick. Now, in an evidently louder and clearer edition, it seems it should have been life-changing. Meanwhile, all the other CDs pile up, inessential, and for this last week I barely listened to anything else. All other offerings sound flat. I only need this more.

This is an epic, infinite affair. I found it seizing on different emotional states and amplifying them. The twin peaks, Like Herod and Mogwai Fear Satan, had me strolling euphoric in sunshine one day, noticing leaves on trees like these were new things. The next day, they had me sobbing. And it’s really hard not to do this without talking about the sounds of stars dying or planets imploding. This is end of the world music. It turns everything into a scene from a film. It's your personal epic soundtrack.

About halfway through the week, I realised this is what I want to be listening to on my headphones as I leave this life. Of course, I hope that isn’t for a long time yet, but I can’t imagine a better soundtrack to go out to. If I time it right, the last notes of Fear Satan would be the final thing I hear on earth. I want this noted by the relevant authorities, and am prepared to carry a card to this effect.

Aidan John Moffat - 'I Can Hear Your Heart'

I adored Arab Strap. Sure, there were flabby moments mid-period, and times when they got close to self-parody (hey, here’s another song about drinking, drug abuse and bad sex for you) but they’re one of the few defunct bands whose songs I find myself coming back to again and again. I have these spells where The First Big Weekend, or Hey Fever, or Packs Of Three, or The Shy Retirer, or (I could go on, Christ, when they were good, who was better?) demand frequent attention. I’m in one such now, partly because when bits of my shabby life start to fall off I find the Strap supply a fitting soundtrack, and partly because the recent solo work of the two former Strappers has sent me scurrying back to the source.

Aidan Moffat and Malcolm Middleton now ply their separate trades, of course, and I have time for both. Malcolm’s given me moments of pleasure, not least last Christmas’s anti-heroic attempt at a festive chart-topper (check the sociopathic Santa video) We’re All Going To Die, or the recent hymn to the sad pleasures of at-home drinking, Blue Plastic Bags. But if you’re allowed to have favourites, Aidan, who recently has collected a John, was always mine. He always seemed to me to be the soul of Arab Strap, the man undergoing any amount of personal degradation so you didn’t have to. I admit, I worried about him with the demise of the Strap. Attending one of their last shows, at a mobbed and up for it King’s Cross Scala, he seemed to be the one who didn’t want to let go. I fast-forwarded and saw a grim future, embracing spiral of decline clichés. But here he is, with one of the few really essential records of the year.

Yet it took me a while to come to this. At first I thought it was too fragmented: brief, mostly spoken word pieces delivered over backing which turns out to be mainly recycled from old records. It just seemed too slight to me. But after a few plays I found it nagging, insistent. It’s life in the raw again, (hilariously the record's webpages ask you for your age to check you're over the threshold to access its 'adult content') but there are moments of pure poetry, lines that are going to haunt you and remind you of your own misdeeds and hurts. There’s apparently a narrative arc to this – in which case it’s the tale of a particularly mammoth and depraved weekend on a scale beyond even my own imaginings – but to me they work best as odd shards, gaps of beauty and gristle nestling between more conventional songs, without which no current playlist or mix CD can be complete. Live this really works too, having caught a recent gig at Kilburn’s Luminaire, now on its way to being my favourite place to see music, in which a slimmed-down, almost healthy-looking Moffat acted the raconteur and accompanied himself with an old record player and a stack of vinyl.

This is a beautiful thing, simple as that, funny and sad and full of life as it is lived. It’s issued by our old friends Chemikal Underground, which for many years was the greatest record label on earth (the Strap, Mogwai and the Delgados all in one place – did this really happen?). It comes appropriately packaged booklike, with a short story which you’re tongue-in-cheekly instructed to read before you listen to the CD. And you’re a bit foolish if you don’t already have and cherish this.

Look, all I’m saying is we’re going to be needing a new Poet Laureate soon, and we really could do a lot worse.