I suppose all the Americans are going to be off recovering from turkey, enjoying pumpkin pie for breakfast, putting on pilgrim hats and stuff. The rest of us, meanwhile, will go to work and wait for Friday night. (Friday night in Glasgow is Wolf Parade.)

(ps: looks like i'm going it alone tonight. any glaswegians going and want to hang out with a canadian?)

Uncle John and Whitelock - "Baghdadi". They're Glasgow's most exciting band, a furious hoarse blues that stamps and stamps and grabs at steeples. They stand on a stage and they rage - they rage and preach and you relish it. Soon you're stamping too, you're unscrewing the creaky portholes in your ears and eyes and heart, opening the hatches to let all the volleying sound in. But how do you bottle it? How do you bottle a band that throws whales at you, that tosses fiery houses and dying mothers? Well, you try. "Baghdadi" is that: it is an attempt. And so long as you turn it loud, loud i say!, just past the point of comfort... well you can begin to hear it. You can begin to hear Uncle John and Whitelock. Toss in that stormy blackbrown sound, try to climb its ladders, imagine a Wolf Parade lost for twenty years in the desert; Franz Ferdinand after all their loved ones have drowned.

Louder! (I do mean this.)

(I read somewhere that this band started as an art project where they built a back porch and then created a band to play blues on it. I don't know if that's true but if it is I think it's like Noah who built an ark cos god said "you'll need it!" and boy did he ever.)

There Is Nothing Else is out December 5th on GFM. Another, lesser song is available on the SAMH's "One in Four" comp. When Uncle John & Whitelock come to you: you better go and see 'em. Man.

St Jude's Infirmary - "The Church of John Coltrane". We'll take it all: traintrack clickclack, twins in twining harmony, a sound like Sons & Daughters in a little black dress, lyrics about John Coltrane and the Holy Spirit, bluzzing guitar and Scottish spoken-word. We'll take it all, put it in a pot of weak broth (this is the production), and boil it till the flavours come out out out, till the weak broth don't really matter because yum that's a whole potato, that's a cherry, that's twins in twining harmony and a thumping stained-glass chorus. I like that this track does it all, that it vaults from one parish to another, that it knows its knots. I like that just as you tire of things in the third minute, in comes a Scotsman with a poem, in comes an electric fence. He says "I don't want you back" several different ways; inevitably, none of them sound true.

St Jude's Infirmary live in Edinburgh.

Happy Healthy Lucky Month is out in January on SL Records (Ballboy, Misty's Big Adventure). They also have a song called "Montreal", which you can listen to here.

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Elsewhere:

Dave Barclay of The Diskettes is offering beautiful things at Popsheep. His latest gift is Kiowarini's "Le dernier souffle de sa nation", with vinyl that crackles like a campfire, a voice like Israel Kamakawiwo'ole on the night he finds out he'll be a father. Such a lovely song.

Following on the American and Canadian polls, Take Your Medicine has compiled the UK's "Hottest 47 Acts". Unlike the Canadian list, I pretty much think the results here are awful. Despite getting the winner right, of the top 25 acts there are only eleven that I would ever recommend to anyone (Girls Aloud, The Go Team, Radiohead, Patrick Wolf, Basement Jaxx, Rachel Stevens, Boards of Canada, MIA, Mystery Jets, The Futureheads, Franz Ferdinand), and the remainder I pretty much loathe. Unfortunately, crap guitar rock seems to rule the British blogosphere as much as it does the British mass music media. The list of omissions is as long as my arm.

As before, my ballot (with comments) is after the break.

The top ten UK bands of 2005, according to me:

1. Girls Aloud
One day robots will take over the earth with such astounding ferocity
and awesomeness that we'll spontaneously erect one-hundred-foot
statutes to the cybernetic generals who lead them. And in the meantime
there are Girls Aloud.

2. The Streets

3. Uncle John & Whitelock
These Glasgow bluesmen have arms as long as telephone poles, and a
singer with a voice as deep as the Lake of Menteith. You have to see
them live to understand their hosannas: a bellyful of spite and a
heart full of longing.

4. The Clientele
This band is a fog machine.

5. Acoustic Ladyland
A skronking skree with a terrible name. If the edges of jazz have gone
dry and desiccated, Acoustic Ladyland are an injection of bloody, hot
and furious life.

6. Go Team

7. Sons and Daughters
Songs of snarls and tears, country blues sung sweetly, drums stomping
with discodance fever.

8. MIA

9. Radiohead
It would be foolish to give up on these boys.

10. Hood

Didn't fit: Kano, The Pipettes, Wiley, Doctor, Belle & Sebastian, Mojave 3, Mogwai, Elbow, Arab Strap, King Creosote, Sugababes, Scatter, Alastair Roberts, Camera Obscura, The Zephyrs, Four Tet, and doubtless lots more that I've forgotten.