I'll have a B, please, Bob: t'would be no surprise at all to discover that the music doing overtime on the Wilco turntable would feature a preponderance of the "B" bands - in this case The Beatles, Byrds, Beach Boys and Big Star. I suppose if you're going to have influences and allude to them in your own music, you might as well pick the very best - which is what American nu-country rockers Wilco do, to quite stunning effect.

Their new release, Summerteeth, is not just a robust follow-up to the wonderful Being There double album of two years back, but also a strong contender in the "timeless classics" stakes. Ignoring modern technology and simply playing to their down-home strengths, Wilco have done a Mercury Rev in that they've stepped outside late 1990s musical sense and sensibilities, and time-travelled back to a (probably mythical) time when the song and its construction and execution were more of a guiding force than so many marketing budgets.

If they certainly touch all the right bases in terms of influences, the curious little country tweak they add to the finished product manages to erase any sense of tribute-philia. Not that this is just another rootsy guitar work-out; the 14 songs here contain dribs and drabs of horns and strings, spooky echoing piano sounds and that most under-estimated and under-used "instrument" - the humble hand-clap.

There's a lot to get your head around here: if straightforward white boy melancholia (sadcore) is your bag, check out Via Chicago and the Morrissey-esque How To Fight Loneliness. But if early REM/ Replacements-type stuff floats your boat, you'll find it aplenty elsewhere on the album. As American as a Beach Boys four-part harmony or the bricks and mortar of a Phil Spector recording studio, Wilco are now beginning to sound like a band who got tired of traversing Route 66 and opted instead for the slower, scenic route around.

For those of you who have come in late on this one, Wilco used to be (give or take a guitarist or two) known as Uncle Tupelo, one of the original "Let's Kill Garth Brooks" nu-county acts back in the early 1990s - in fact, one of their songs, No Depression, apart from giving the magazine of the same name its title, also became a by-word for this style of yeeha-free music. With Uncle Tupelo imploding for the usual critically acclaimed/commercially ignored reasons, the new-look Wilco soon hit pay dirt with a deal with Reprise records and the Being There album, which broke them in Europe and brought them to the attention of Billy Bragg, who worked with them on last year's collection of old Woody Guthrie lyrics, Mermaid Avenue. There's also a darn good Wilco side project band known as Golden Smog, which features main Wilco man Jeff Tweedie, and ex-Big Star drummer, Jody Stephenson - they have a great album called Weird Tales out now on the Rykodisc label.

Wilco themselves are ironically named after the radio slang term "will comply", and Jeff Tweedie lists his main influences as "MC5, The Stooges, The Sex Pistols, The Clash and . . . Merle Haggard". You can't get much cooler than that. Buy this album, it's brilliant.

Summerteeth is on the Reprise label

Sorry about not knowing about the Belle and Sebastian programme thing, and thanks to the 2,474 people who wrote in with a lot of very detailed information about the cult French TV hit. Deck the streets with bunting because the band themselves (who are better than Steps) come in for a gig at The Olympia, Dublin on April 28th . . . I'm sure there's a law somewhere that states you can't go a Nick Cave concert during the hours of daylight; but because of unprecedented demand, the Goth you're not allowed to call a Goth is now playing a second gig at The Gaiety Theatre on Sunday March 28th, at the very un-Goth time of 2 p.m. Older readers should note that this is not a children's matinee performance . . . After a Stone Roses-like lay-off, Setanta signing Brian is back with a new, non-shoe-gazing album next month, called Bring Trouble . . . There's really no point sending in your demo tapes, because apart from the fact that I'm half-deaf, there's nothing much I can do with them. Someone who can is Jim Lockhart at RTE, who'll give you a Fanning session if you're any good - where this leaves all those three-piece metal bands from Mullingar who make my life a misery, I don't know.