Robert Plant/Alison Krauss, on tour
For rockers, it was the Led Zeppelin reunion that was the big news of 2007. For the band's singer Robert Plant, however, it often seemed that the biggest deal was actually the album he'd just made with bluegrass/country singer Alison Krauss. All round, it's hard not to sympathise with Plant's point of view. After some uncomfortable post-Zep years trying, Mick Jagger-like, to chase the zeitgeist, he has lately found a comfortable role for himself as a guardian of roots music. It's this position that informs Plant/Krauss's Raising Sand. Produced by Dylan collaborator T Bone Burnett, it's a surprisingly cool record, filled with snaking guitar lines and dusty grooves, the pair's harmonies making a delicate job of the decidedly earthy material. Worthy of your love - every inch of it, in fact.
· NIA, Birmingham, Mon 5; Apollo, Manchester, Wed 7; CIA, Cardiff, Thu 8
Black Acid, on tour
If his former group Death In Vegas managed to mix dirge rock with big beat, for his new one, the New York-based Black Acid, producer Richard Fearless is evidently trying something more ambitious. A mixture of three-chord rock, slurred vocals and backwards noises, this may as well be the soundtrack to an imaginary movie called Being Bobby Gillespie, a terrifying Charlie Kaufman-scripted trip inside the mind of the Primal Scream frontman. Death disco, heavy krautrock, horror soundtracks and smack rock boogie are duly present on the band's forthcoming debut, to which elegant dissipation is surely the only response. All this would be so much black trousers and aviator shades, were it not for Fearless' evidently firm hand on the musical tiller. Familiar as his many references sometimes are, he's definitely not afraid to mix up the medicine.
· The Legion, EC1, Mon 5; Nice N Sleazy, Glasgow, May 6; Roadhouse, Manchester, Wed 7; Crawdaddy, Dublin, Thu 8
ATP Vs Pitchfork Rye
Some people don't grow out of arguing about their favourite bands, and that's the principle underlying this season's All Tomorrow's Parties festival. Generally an event curated by one designated act - this time last year it was the Nick Cave-affiliated Dirty Three - on this occasion, it reprises the soundclash format, with two different teams choosing what's going to appear. On the one side, there's the organisers, whose tastes run from the more leftfield side of indie rock to the fringes of the avant garde. On the other, there's Pitchfork, the music website which has done more than any other to re-popularise the wordy and the kind of nerdy dork rock - Shins, Modest Mouse, Decemberists, etc - that was so popular in the early 1990s. It makes for an interesting mixture: Sebadoh, Black Mountain, Howlin Rain and Red Kross represent for the former, Hot Chip, Vampire Weekend and Dirty Projectors for the latter.
· Pontins Camber Sands Holiday Centre, Rye, Fri 9 to May 11
Silver Jews, on tour
Smart Alec? The Silver Jews may be your spiritual home. A group initially formed around the waspish David Berman and the no less wry Stephen Malkmus, this was a band arguably too ironic to exist for very long in its original form. Never a group to take itself seriously as a commercial prospect (recording its early albums on a Walkman), of late things have become a little more orthodox for Berman's group. His remarks are no less tart (he's described Will Oldham as "yesterday's papers"), but the band's former edgy sound has now developed into country rock, while their new album, Lookout Mountain Lookout Sea, demonstrates the warmth of the voice with which Berman delivers his prickly messages.
· Concorde 2, Brighton, Wed 7; City Varieties, Leeds, Thu 8; ABC, Glasgow, Fri 9
