Today's music tips

Greetings, gentle readers.

I've just found two groups I really like.

First, thanks to BBC News Online's coverage of the UK music pundits' poll, I finally got the message about Animal Collective. Really cool psychedelic-indie-trance-rock-sampling-oh-whatever. Just take a listen and work it out for yourselves, geez, make me do all the work, why don't you?

Secondly, having gone to Animal Collective's MySpace page and added them as fiends - sorry, friends - MySpace suggests some guy called HJ, out of a group called Nemesea, from Holland. This guy is nuts. In successive tracks, house/trance that morphs into something like an Evanescence number, then superbly executed lounge jazz (a skit on "Don't Mean A Thing (If It Ain't Got That Swing)"), followed by classic Ibiza house, and finally sublime fast rock that suggests what would happen if Steve Hackett fronted Metallica and riffed on Latin monastic choral music. HJ's guitar work is superb, absolutely top-drawer, and he's got such a broad reach in styles that I'm in awe.

[Later note] I did get the Nemesea back catalogue. I won't say I was disappointed, but it was very much an Evanescence clone, nothing really to get as excited about as HJ's own work.