Various Artists: All Tomorrow's Parties : Los Angeles UCLA

You guys rock the holiday camp. But with rock eggheads Sonic Youth on hand as curators, and the upscale campus of UCLA as a venue, it seems like America’s inaugural All Tomorrow’s Parties has real pretensions to the cerebral. Judging by the opening day of spoken word performance, you’d be right. But come day two, as a mohawked Eddie Vedder limbers for a rare set sans Pearl Jam, and breaks into a performance of what he calls "speed-thrash ukulele", things are all getting satisfyingly odd. His performance peaks with ‘Satellite’, a new track about a romance between a wrongly convicted Arkansas death row inmate and his long-suffering girlfriend. It’s astounding. We’re not so sure about Catpower’s Chan Marshal, though. Hunched over her guitar, croaking like a 70-year-old blues singer, though it’s hard to judge whether it’s hilariously brilliant, or absolutely terrible.

Television dazzle with a set spanning everything from ‘Little Johnny Jewel’ to a life affirming version of ‘Marquee Moon’. They may be close to retirement age, but NYC’s greatest black-clad rock’n’rollers sure show young pretenders like The Strokes
just who’s boss. Unfortunately it’s downhill from there, as the Ashton Brothers All-star Stooges Revue - a supergroup featuring one J Mascis - proceed to butcher the legacy of Detroit’s favourite sons. A cover of ‘1969’, with’s greatest moment since the ‘Daydream Nation’ LP, while ‘Mote’ is classic old-skool noise. Textbooks away, math-rockers: as Thurston says, this weekend was all about "hot licks, pure noise, and sweet thunder". Bang on.

Jason Reynolds