ALBUM OF THE WEEK
Woodpigeon
Songbook
With chief Woodpigeon Mark Hamilton hailing from Canada I guess you can't, strictly speaking, classify the music he and his band make as Americana but Songbook is as lovely a collection of rootsy folk, rock, country and bluegrass as you're likely to hear this year.
The harmonies are dreamy, the guitar strings picked and strummed rather than amped-up and mangled, and the percussion spare. There are even toy pianos and glockenpsiels in there if you listen carefully.
Feedbags is stripped-down and lo-fi, If Only I Were a Painter, I'd Paint For You The Moon is a sweet rock'n'roll shuffle – complete with handclaps – while the faux naif The Alison Yip School For Girls could have been plucked from the soundtrack to Juno.
Death By Ninja (A Love Song) reveals Hamilton has a sense of humour but the killer tune here is A Hymn For 2 Walks in Different Cities with its sumptuous trumpets and marimba and joyfully insistent chorus.
End of the Road
Rating: 4/5
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The Aliens
Luna
Beloved by music critics, Astronomy For Dogs, the debut album by Scottish indie group The Aliens proved too adventurous for mass consumption, much like their previous outfit, the Beta Band, had done in the late 90s.
Pleasingly, though, they've refused to rein in their imaginations second time round.
Opening track Bobby's Song combines everything from Krautrock to psychedelia, Beatles harmonies and sea shanties in one mad 10-minute song-cycle; Theremin is all blissed-out electronica and found sounds; Magic Man is indie dance with daft lyrics like "Bake me a cake and I'll do a headstand"; while on Sunlamp Show they sound like a perky beat group from the 1960s.
It doesn't all work – Smoggy Bog is a poor man's Pink Floyd (the Syd Barrett version) and the title track is three-and-half minutes of self-indulgent twiddling – but still it's good to have The Aliens around to remind us that indie rock doesn't all have to be narrow-minded and conservative.
Pet Rock
Rating: 3/5Click here for more

Travis
Ode To J Smith
The godfathers of melancholy indie pop have found themselves eclipsed in recent years by the equally glum Coldplay, Snow Patrol and Keane. So they've decided to reactivate their old label – on which they released their debut single All I Wanna Do Is Rock in 1996 – and crank up the guitars like did in the dying days of Britpop.
What seems to have slipped their minds is that not many people bought their early records. It was only when went all wistful that they became million-sellers.
Here songs such as J Smith and Long Way Down are downright lousy while Broken Mirror sounds – unforgivably – like a cut-price U2.
The one bright spot is Last Words, and that's precisley because it has what so much else here lacks – a catchy chorus and a whistleable tune.
Red Telephone Box
Rating: 2/5
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Todd Rundgren
Arena
So you've been a teen star in a Sixties garage rock group, created prog rock a few years later, produced seminal albums by the likes of Sparks, New York Dolls, XTC, Patti Smith and the Psychedelic Furs, pioneered pop videos, created the world's first interactive CD and spawned music downloads via the internet. What else do you do?
Plug in your electric guitar, make an album of over-the-top stadium rock songs with one-word titles then cross your fingers and hope the hordes who have fond memories of Boston, Journey or Styx might rush out to the stores to buy it.
Even though you sense Rundgren has his tongue in his cheek – how else do you explain lyrics like "You're smooth and hard and that the way you stay/Bright and polished like a Chardonnay" (Gun) or "How does one vent one's sense of sickness/At skull and skin of such thickness?" (P***in')? – Arena is so irredemably naff that it's hard to see anyone falling for it – even in a Guilty Pleasures kind of way.
Cooking Vinyl
Rating: 1/5
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