LA-based five-piece (not a solo artist) Milo Greene trade solidly in American folk-pop.

Beachwood Sparks are the group whose 2000 debut effectively kick-started the whole revival of laidback, harmony-draped Californian country-rock.

If you're going to quit your day job as drummer in the world's premier folk-rock band, you'd better have something special up your sleeve.

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.