Thankfully the band has risen to the challenge and this self-titled debut fulfils their early promise in a rather spectacular way. Both of the singles - The Acorn and Wide Avenues - appear in re-recorded versions. Neither of these particularly break new ground, but appear to have been fleshed out and given subtle makeovers in line with the slightly warmer and more complex tone of the album as a whole.

Elks' lyrical preoccupations remain broadly unaltered: their outsider perspective is a recurring concern, fleeing the small towns in which they were born (in Four Pale Letters), where they felt "like dogs locked in hot cars, where one breath is too many to have to hold", yet (in London) feeling no more at home in the metropolis ("London, this is a warning, your people are tired, your people are wired").

Fear, fights and paranoia abound. In The Acorn they leave the city for "the lakes and the mountains" but little changes: "I keep a gun under my bed, because these country folk are all whack-whack-whacked on prescription medicines". Nauseated and panic-stricken, comfort can only ultimately be found in a brown bag used as a breathing aid and a return to the environment that fuelled their original anxiety.

Independent Bodies continues the theme of isolation ("No one knows what's the matter with you when your devil's within"), its title emphasising the disconnection between the narrator and everything he sees around him. Epic Of Diet Soda rejects churches, political parties and the military against an intense and jaunty musical backdrop that wouldn't have sounded out of place on one of the earlier Pixies albums.

In fact, the music as a whole bears many passing similarities with Black Francis' former band, without being remotely derivative. Don't come to Elks expecting to hear a modern take on Surfer Rosa - you'll be sorely disappointed - but nevertheless there's a similar mixture of complexity supporting a core of strong melodies. Remember the way that The Pixies made rock sound fresh and interesting again? Elks do that too.

On the subject of Big Names, occasionally I've heard echoes of Radiohead in this album. I doubt this is the result of any conscious attempt at homage, but sometimes there's an air of desolation to the vocals that couples with some kind of unexpected chord change and sounds oddly familiar. Neither of these comparisons should undermine Elks' own musical vision, they merely hint at the band's level of achievement.

Elks perform a fine balancing act between many fascinating dualities: environmental claustrophobia and epic soundscapes; the song-oriented structures of indie and the more challenging textures of math-rock; tender reflection and screaming catharsis. The great thing about their album is that none of this feels contradictory. Rather, it all coalesces in the form of a captivating set of songs that deserves to win them many new fans.

This review was written in June and originally published in DrunkenWerewolf issue 5 in October. DrunkenWerewolf is published bi-monthly and covers new and unusual acts who operate in a roughly acoustic/indie/experimental vein.

Let's get the disclosure out of the way first. Kez is a friend of the [DrunkenWerewolf] editor's, which is precisely why Tiff isn't writing this review and I am. Yes, pushing her into the limelight (via a couple of surreptitiously shared tracks on the DW LiveJournal page) and then reviewing her first EP might be considered nepotism of the highest order, but rest assured that I've (sadly) not been handed a fat wad of scruffy fivers in return for a good review.

Not that this would be necessary. The first time I heard the title track of this EP, I was hooked. I played it constantly for a long time. I also pushed it in several friends' directions, many of whom struggled with the rawness of both its execution and its sentiments. Unsurprising, since this EP was created in the time-honoured tradition that has stood many fledgling artists in good stead: press Record, play the music, press Stop.

Is this just a polite way of saying that actually, it's all a bit crap? No. Quite the reverse. This is an intense blast of pure personality. In one sense it's "just" a generic acoustic singer-songwriter release, but - crucially - I've never heard anyone who sounds quite like this. It's a pure expression of self and ultimately that's what the best art is all about. There's all the time in the world to polish things up later.

The no-bullshit approach extrends to the lyrics, which cover relationships ("You're not man enough to be my man"), self-examination & self-doubt ("I've fallen behind, yes I've lost my mind"), truth & deceit ("Your cryptic bullshit means nothing now") and bitter-sweet character sketches ("Pour another glass, it's just another bottle from daddy's cellar"). She's cynical at times, but ultimately an optimist.

5st 2lb is one of the strongest tracks, a relentlessly descending progression that recalls Manic Street Preachers' 4st 7lb in more than just subject matter (the opening "One in five die with their hands in their throat..." floors me every time). She has a beautiful voice: sweet and slightly husky, which balances nicely against the intensity of many of the lyrics and carries the EP through its occasional flaws.

Its roughness is precisely what I love about this collection. From a technical point of view, the playing is all over the place: sometimes hesitant, with fluffed notes, missed plucks and inconsequential fuck-ups. She sounds like she's working at the limit of her abilities, but that's why it's so good. This is a real human being, with a guitar, a handful of chords and a head full of ideas. It's not slick.

There are many different things that you can demand of the music that you listen to. If you're after a honed, crafted studio performance, this EP isn't for you. If, on the other hand, you've ever been captivated by the early boombox intimacy of Mountain Goats, Diane Cluck's circular introspection or Kristin Hersh singing Appalachian murder ballads, you'll find plenty here that's deserving of your attention.

This review was written in June and originally published in DrunkenWereWolf issue 5 in October. DrunkenWerewolf is published bi-monthly and covers new and unusual acts who operate in a roughly acoustic/indie/experimental vein.

The Sunday Times published a fascinating feature on Billy Childish last month. I've read numerous interviews with Childish over the years and I've been intrigued by his outlook on life, but it wasn't until a couple of years ago that I finally started to make sense of his music via a compilation called My First Billy Childish Album (and particularly, its spoken word piece I Am The Strange Hero Of Hunger).

"I'm in love with desperate men with desperate hands, walking in second-hand shoes searching for God and hearing God and hating God."

The rawness of tracks like The Day I Beat My Father Up seems to have become a common theme in much of my listening over the past eighteen months, but when I look back I can see that it's always been present in the output of many of my long-term favourites like Patti Smith, Kristin Hersh and Gavin Friday. That intensity and honesty of expression seems to be something that I'm repeatedly drawn to.

The day was breathing without a sound
The dog was dead, buried in the ground
The sun shone like sixteen golden fingers
It glistened like diamonds in my mother's windows

In this recent interview, Childish talks about the need for immediacy in art and his "no sweat" attitude towards creativity. His apparent insouciance stems from a belief that it's important to just get on with things and not care too much what others think, or indeed what you think of them yourself. He associates skill with effortlessness and his philosophy of "the glorious amateur" offers a robust rebuttal to that reactionary Andrew Keen nonsense.

"People think I'm an amateur. That's become a derogatory term, like I don't know what I'm doing. But an amateur is someone who does things out of love."

This interview has crystallised my thoughts on how I relate to artists and musicians. Childish is an especially strong example of the artistic and personality attributes most likely to draw me in. I've started trying to define these things that engage me, to make their common themes more explicit. I've been scribbling notes and drawing mind maps, getting to grips with what my choices say about the art I love and, in turn, what they say about me.

At its heart, it's the encapsulation of a particular creative archetype: the definition of a recurring strand of artistic DNA that I find eternally fascinating. This is very much a work in progress, but it's something I want to write about at greater length once I've spent more time on it. I suppose I'm struggling to get to grips with what universal conclusions I can draw out of it to make it accessible to other readers, rather than just pure navel-gazing on my part.

I came up with the idea for this submission after my holiday in Ireland this summer. I have an ongoing fantasy about living on my own, in the middle of nowhere. I suppose it's the flipside of my early and ongoing desire to live in England's capital city, this occasional desire for stillness, silence and wilderness.

Coincidentally, between acceptance and publication of The Emergency, both Rod Liddle and Sara Maitland have written on this subject for The Times and the Guardian respectively. Maitland's article is based on the experiences that she has documented in A Book Of Silence, recently published in the UK by Granta.

"One of the effects of enforced silence is a heightened awareness, of the senses suddenly sharpened. It is not just, during the daytime, the shrillness of the chaffinch and the wren beginning to get one's goat: it is that with the moronic fugue that accompanies urban life excised, other stuff floods in to fill the space. According to a Brazilian study earlier this year, silence - or more properly, unaccustomed quietness - mimics the effects of tinnitus. Tinnitus is that terrible ringing in the ears experienced by about 25% of the population, the cause of which has not yet been determined (although it manifests itself with undue regularity in the ears of pensioned-off heavy-metal guitarists). The point is, with regular sound removed, the body acts quickly to fill the gap."

Rod Liddle

"My assumption had been that silence was monotone; that it would be very pure, very beautiful but somehow flat, undifferentiated. But the more silences I encountered, the more silent places I inhabited, the more I became aware that there were dense, interwoven strands of different silences. Silence can be calm or frightening, lonely or joyful, deep or thin. There is religious silence; a self-emptying silence, and romantic silence - what Wordsworth called the "bliss of solitude"."

Sara Maitland

My fantasy is just that. My holidays are a temporary retreat from a location and a lifestyle that I've chosen, that I would choose again, that generally makes me very happy. I might occasionally daydream of a reclusive existence on top of a cliff with only a dead sheep for company, but sooner or later I always turn around.

In particular, we're looking for people who can be given a likely word count and the URL of a band's MySpace page, who will then research the most appropriate type of design for a particular feature and get to work on the design before the feature is written.

DrunkenWerewolf has an influential reputation and operates in small print runs. It's a labour of love and none of the contributing writers, designers, artists or photographers are paid. However, you get free copies, guestlist places and plenty of experience.

If you're interested in helping out, first check the magazine's MySpace page & blog to get a feel for the territory and then e-mail drunkenwerewolf [at] hotmail [dot] co [dot] uk. We're always on the lookout for writers too, particularly gig reviewers. Get in touch!

Sometimes a crappy phone-cam shot encapsulates what you love about that person better than a glossy studio shoot ever could. It seems to capture their spirit, their essence, their uniqueness. By comparison, a technically perfect studio portrait can often seem false, awkward or stilted. Of course, the reverse is often equally true. A throwaway Polaroid-type snap can easily be just that: sub-standard, fit only for the bin. A measured and thoughtful depiction of someone in a controlled environment can allow subtle nuances to elevate the purely documentary to the artistic.

When cameras were expensive and required a greater amount of technical expertise to achieve decent results, people hired specialised photographers to take their picture. It was a big deal. It might literally have been a once or twice in a lifetime experience, one to be treasured. Now a huge percentage of the world's population walks around with a camera in its pocket by default. The equipment does much of the work and the results can often be amazing, especially when considering the relative lack of planning and effort required to get the result.

I've made numerous recordings of live music performances with my mobile phone's frankly astonishing microphone. In many cases, I value their intimacy and energy more highly than the recorded versions of the same songs. Their "quality" goes beyond the merely technical. I'm reminded of the hoary and patronising cultural cliché of certain "primitive" tribes refusing to have their picture taken by "civilised" explorers, because of the fear that the camera would steal their souls. We smile in comfortable smugness. How ridiculous!

I too think they're wrong. I don't think anyone can steal your soul, any more than they can steal your identity (so-called identity theft is the stealing of the props and trappings of identity, rather than the identity itself). But in another sense, I think they might have a point. At best, a photograph or a recording can capture the spirit of something or someone. If what you're looking for in your relationship with the world is an acquaintance with multiple forms of uniqueness, surface noise or software compression are - at worst - minor inconveniences.

Postscript: half an hour or so after writing this, I remembered a quote that I came across a couple of months ago. I didn't deliberately re-use the phrase in my concluding sentence here, but it clearly bubbled up from my subconscious. Peel's comment seems like the perfect four-word response to the original question.

I love it when you stumble upon something completely unexpected that fires up your imagination. This happened to me last Friday. I was driving down the Maidstone Road into Chatham, intent on going to the Look At Medway photography exhibition at the Brook Theatre Gallery, when my attention was caught by a sign outside a large Victorian House: "Art Show".

Worth a look, I thought. If it's twee, I've wasted five minutes and if it's good I'll be glad I stopped off. I made my way back up the street to an attractive-looking Victorian detached house that seemed a rather incongruous setting for an exhibition. Another sign outside, which I'd missed on my way down the road, said "The Importance Of Elsewhere".

This sounded familiar, but at the time I couldn't quite place it. I wandered in and was immediately greeted by a couple of the organisers, who explained that the building was Chatham's former Registry Office, warned me that things were a little crowded at present and offered me a cup of coffee. You don't get that at the Tate Modern. I was intrigued.

In its former incarnation, the Registry Office was the overseer and underscorer of births, marriages and deaths for the town: the gateway for most of life's major rites of passage. The exhibition wasn't just borrowing an abandoned building; inspired by Philip Larkin's poetry, most of the pieces comprising the show were created in direct response to it.

In fact, given the office's transitory status (it's going to be refurbished as a residential unit in a few months' time) countless opportunities were taken to merge the art with the building itself. For example, the lines of poetry written on the municipal-building-style carpet guards running up the stairway and the use of fireplaces as pedestals and focal points.

Elsewhere, the building's wallpaper was used as a canvas for numerous pieces. Lines from Larkin's work were scratched into beautiful wooden handrails and graffitied onto bannisters. Fire exit signs were incorporated into larger works and multicoloured twines of fabric spilled out of ventilation grills and ran alongside bright-red fire alarm wiring.

Larkin's infamous This Be The Verse ("They fuck you up, your mum and dad...") was embroidered onto a curtain that hung in front of a marker-pen modified window. It seemed like a fitting comment on the phenomenon of suburban window-twitchers and the minor domestic atrocities conducted in the name of familiar and societal respectability.

The place was a perfect physical synthesis. As the exhibition's accompanying leaflet comments, "Participants have picked up on Larkin's recurring themes - the relentless force of time, the route of ordinary man through life's fleeting collisions with happiness, and the journey towards the resting place of Elsewhere."

In several cases, it was hard to tell how much conscious thought had gone into the creation of the work and how much the building had permeated the subconscious regions of those involved. Was the wallpaper book used as the basis for written texts simply a cheap and convenient found material, or a hint at the multiple layers of time embodied by the building?

Dust-marks left behind by clocks that had hung on the wall were seized upon by the participants and used to profound effect to comment upon "time's eroding agents". Window casements were used as anchors for brightly coloured swathes of material. A safe - presumably too heavy to shift and left behind after the move - housed two pairs of gold shoes.

I liked the unintentional irony of the straightforward administrative sign on the inside of the front door ("Please make sure you have SET THE ALARM if you are the last one to leave!!!"). Also of presumably unplanned poignancy was the network socket at floor level in the A Love Seat Removed room, discreetly marked with the label "END OF LINE".

I chatted for some time to creative director Tania Holland, as well as Wendy Daws, one of the artists involved in leading the project. They explained the involvement of various community groups in the project, including Kent Association for the Blind and MCCH Pathways (which works with adults with learning disabilities, autism or mental health problems).

The Importance Of Elsewhere worked on so many different levels: as a philosophical repositioning in terms of identity and creativity of what would seem at face value to be a rather stuffy administrative building; as an exploration of Larkin's most essential themes; as a demonstration that an inclusive form of community art can be vibrant and compelling.

What I enjoyed most about this show was its sense of playfulness. Though dealing with weighty and occasionally potentially uncomfortable themes, there was an overall sense of joie de vivre in the engagement with the building and the determination to make the most of the fascinating and fantastic opportunity that its circumstances provided.

Ironically, the event's success subverts its own title, indicating that The Importance Of Elsewhere is actually located very clearly in the here and now. It's a credit to the hard work, imagination and self-confidence (newly acquired, in some cases) of all those involved and a fascinating model for future projects, both in Medway and... elsewhere.

Further reading and viewing

• Curious Planet case study
• Flickr: my photo set
• Flickr: Phil Dillon's photo set

Naturally, I was immediately asked to justify myself. I said that I'd grown tired of being a news junkie, of being ground down by the relentless negativity of the media and the resulting anxiety that it causes about issues over which I have absolutely no influence. I likened this dispute to keeping abreast of a stressful marital dispute between a couple living three streets away who I've never met.

Over the past few years, my life has been focused on five areas: spending time with my family and friends, exploring my creativity, earning an income, paying attention to physical and mental well-being and keeping our domestic affairs running more smoothly than they have previously. My internal frame of reference in most areas has shrunk to a small geographic area covering London and Kent.

"Doesn't that just make you one of those insular, Little England, fog-cuts-off-continent Tories that you're always banging on about?" he asked. Fair point, I admitted, but inaccurate. It's more about scope of action and ability to be involved. Take music, for example. I tend to prefer marginal artists these days. If I focus on bands from the south-east of England, I'm more likely to be able to go to their gigs.

The honest truth is that there is a certain amount of escapism involved. I've felt out of sync with much of the world - or at least, the part of it that I live in - for most of my adult life. I've toyed half-heartedly with many of the things that seemed to dominate people's attention over the last couple of decades. For a while I even convinced myself that I could enjoy a life of designer labels and property improvement.

The truth will out, in the end. I built a house of cards that tumbled down spectacularly. I've learned over the past few years that I am not who I thought I was, or who I thought I wanted to be. I'm a starry-eyed dreamer who can spend literally hours staring out of the window. I'm motivated by ideas and concepts, by relationships and connections, by the essence of things rather than their surface sheen.

The past few years have been about creating an environment around myself in which to float aimlessly, allowing direction to reveal itself slowly rather than panicking about its lack and forcing myself down a road to nowhere. A smaller bubble-world has suited that purpose and, putting it bluntly, the larger world outside could go to hell. And, interestingly, it seems to be doing precisely that.

My curiosity is roused. I'm reading newspapers again. Fascinating things are happening. House prices plummet. The questionable business models of investment banks are failing. The obsessive and misguided "target culture" in education is scaled back in favour of genuine achievement. Privately owned commercial organisations are being taken into public ownership. Labour is finally working.

When I hit my mid-teens in the early 1980s, the world seemed a fascinating - if somewhat scary - place. As the decade progressed into a frothy maelstrom of wine bars and padded shoulders, I felt less and less in common with it. In my UK-based context, one of the main reasons for that was undoubtedly the self-centred, market-driven, no-such-thing-as-society ethos of Thatcherism.

Its legacy has been remarkably persistent, but the one thing I've learned over the years about the passing of time is that whoever came up with the grandfather clock got it absolutely right. The pendulum swings in one direction, pauses in mid-flight for a split second and then returns inexorably the other way. I was worried for a while that the laws of reality had been catastrophically re-written, but no.

The Thatcher's roof is on fire. The straw is dry, the rage is strong and there is no rain in sight. She wanted us all to be consumers, so now we are flame. Somewhere in one of the rooms below, a small piece of metal hurtles towards its next tick. I'm standing outside, eyes re-opened, basking in the warm glow, my world getting bigger by the second, slowly feeling less like an alien in my own country.

DrunkenWerewolf issue 5 is out now, including interviews with Lupen Crook, Kiran And The Night Owls, Untitled Musical Project, The Delta Fiasco, Planningtorock, Day For Airstrike, The Old Romantic Killer Band and Tim Holehouse. My reviews of recent releases from Elks, Kez Pietersen, bIRDbATH and The Jelas sit alongside plenty more by my fellow contributors.

It's almost exactly three years since I first came across Lupen Crook (blogs are useful). Since then he's become one of my favourite musicians and I've spent a lot of time immersing myself in his intriguingly skewed vision of the world. Offered the opportunity to interview him earlier this year, I thought hard for at least ten seconds before jumping at the chance.

It eventually happened in late June. His responses - couched in a characteristic blend of baroque embellishment and arresting bluntness - were fantastic. Quite literally, in some cases; "Medway Council don't tell you that in their brochure, but I shit you not: it's all true," he concluded after one particularly juicy digression into Kentish mythologising.

The questions reflect many of my own broad preoccupations - identity, location, context, influences, and so on - as well as covering more specific areas like the recurring theme of anti-authoritarianism in his work. His answers reveal much, sometimes with a startling degree of candour, about his background, motivation and growing sense of purpose.

"I was told once that my song writing was a direct contributor to my 'illness' and that I must 'stop chasing this idle obsession immediately' if I ever wanted to get better, or avoid getting worse. I ignored them. I lied to them. I fake wellness. Now I deal with any abnormal thoughts honestly and without embarrassment. Most important to me is a clear head and a good night's sleep when I can get it. Be ready to fight when I have to and most of all to know that when the time comes I know whom I'm fighting against and exactly what for."

Sporting a crookedly feline cover shot by Jenny Hardcore and retailing for the bargain price of Three British Pounds, DW5 is stocked in shops in Bristol and Liverpool and is also available via the online/offline magic of PayPal & post. You can keep up with Drunken ravings and recommendations via the blog, as well as becoming a fan of the magazine on Facebook.

And then the uncomfortable truth. How, exactly, will we achieve this? What greater peaks can we scale? A molehill of substance would tower over this mountain of conceit, but which of us will dig themselves out of their tunnels of silence? What will we actually do?

We sink into self-denial and self-sabotage. Better the devil you don't want to know than the one you daren't.