The nu-folk-rock boom has now, it seems, gone global, spreading beyond its Anglo-American bases to Australia, where Boy & Bear's Moonfire has been a runaway success.

Winner of the Best Medium Sized Festival at last year's UK Festival Awards, Green Man is, at its core, a folk festival, which means beards galore on stage, even more beards among the audience, and lots and lots of guitars.

Much will depend on what the words "Laurel Canyon" mean to you. For this is an updating of the late-'60s model of golden, folk-inflected pop so associated with that storied gulch. And a world already saturated with Fleet Foxes and Bon Iver is primed. Wilson's music is meditative, quiet, stretched. The melodies barely move, sung by a voice as soft as mousse, while tempos seldom stir above a flip-flopped stroll. Themes? Well, here are some titles: "Canyon in the Rain", "Ballad of the Pines", "Magic Everywhere", "Woe is Me". And can that be an authentic mellotron we hear on "Waters Down"? There is always a temptation with these things to play the reference game – "CS&N meet Quicksilver over veggie cutlets round at Neil's" – but that might be a way of avoiding a higher truth, which is that Gentle Spirit is impressively inert.

Miguel Cullen interviews Ishmael Butler of Shabazz Palaces - the face of the avant-rap movement glamorised by Tyler the Creator - about rap selling its soul, winning a Grammy in another life and race-relations in America.

The Seattle sextet are not much to look at, but their soundworld is marvellous (and you even get some Yeats)

Fantastic Foxes back with bite

Do we care that Cloud Control recently won the Australian equivalent of the Mercury Prize?

Named after a single by Steely Dan, Reelin' In The Years is a pleasant ramble through five decades of pop culture seen through the eyes of a music-loving northerner and told through a series of singles that each represents a year of his life. Alongside snapshots from his childhood in Bolton, his student days in Manchester and his broadcasting career, most notably at Radios 1, 2 and 6Music, Mark Radcliffe guides us through his most significant records, an impressively diverse collection that takes in prog-rock (Genesis), krautrock (Kraftwerk), manufactured pop (The Monkees), country (Johnny Cash) and contemporary folk (Fleet Foxes).

Robin Pecknold became so difficult to be around during the making of Helplessness Blues, he now admits, that his girlfriend Olivia left him. Then, when she heard how beautiful the end results were, she came back.

City Slicker: Oslo - Norway's capital is at its best once the mercury rises. Beate Oera-Roderick has some suggestions for new and returning visitors

Fans need not worry unduly: Panda Bear's claim that this follow-up to 2007's Person Pitch would be less sampler-based, and that the influence of Nirvana and The White Stripes had inspired him to make music "with a heavy focus on guitar and rhythm", proves almost entirely unfounded on Tomboy, which involves few obvious guitar riffs but plenty of drifting sound-washes, found-sound collaging, loops and heavily reverbed high vocals, in his usual manner.

“Hey, I can do this after all,” says a grinning Damon Gough – more popularly known as Badly Drawn Boy – as he basks in the applause of an appreciative Union Chapel crowd towards the end of this feelgood-fuelled charity gig. “F*ck LA.” There’s a roar of laughter from the pews. The evening is a validation for Gough, who had a much-publicised meltdown at the Troubadour Club in Los Angeles last December, threatening to fight an unruly crowd and then publicly quitting the music business (“I’m never playing live again - this has been a disaster,” he said).