Art rock trio Yo La Tengo have reached album number 11, their progress almost as unnoticed as Ian Duncan Smith.

So has Bill Callahan, the one-man Chicago band behind Smog, or (Smog) as he whimsically prefers to call an alt.country cottage industry destined to stay forever in the shadows or parentheses of life.

Both continue to plough their own furrow as underground acts cherished by the few in the know - how pleasing to hear Summer Sun in the City Screen bar on Monday lunchtime - and both appear to have caught the sun.

Once loud, now quiet as a sleepy village, and less prone to experimental elaboration, New Jersey's Yo La Tengo and their free-jazz associates breeze through their languorous, twanging melancholia. Summer Sun is easy listening on the warmly melodic, dreamy surface yet with a lonely stillness and darkening undercurrents too: the sun and the sunstroke.

Like Yo La Tengo, Smog's Callahan has turned down the volume and brushed up on his Velvet Underground ballads to bring a sunnier, almost drunken musical disposition to his mumbling, misanthropic missives.

His observations on life and love are as mischievously witty as ever, his deadpan humour desert-dry, but his melodies have a new swagger and there is a newly contented air to that hesitant, sad voice. Sara Beth Tucek's backing vocals will be succour to devotees of Gram Parsons and Emmylou Harris's entwined country blues; a welcome counterpoint on porch songs for a summer evening.

Updated: 09:06 Thursday, May 15, 2003