There is no guarantee of success in any area of rock and pop but those who wish to succeed through sheer graft might look to metal as their main chance. While multiple bands in other genres have fleeting, unpredictable moments in the sun, a decent metal act ticking the right boxes with the fans and initially willing to slog the circuit for 350 nights of every year, especially in the endless wilds of Middle America, can build and build and build. Look at Iron Maiden, possibly the biggest band of their vintage in the world.

Rodgers and Steinbeck: sound unlikely? Well, self-proclaimed “family show” man Hammerstein may have baulked at words like "whorehouse" when he created a play for music out of Steinbeck’s Cannery Row and Sweet Thursday. But by 1955 the R&H duo had already dealt with issues like miscegenation and ageism (South Pacific), domestic violence (Carousel) and slavery (The King and I), so Steinbeck’s north Californian coastal community of amiable social dropouts, drunks and whores might not have been totally unexpected territory.

It is unfortunate that those who hate Deap Vally find it way easier to articulate why than those who love them. There’s little new in the bluesy, garage-rock riffs that pose and swagger their way through debut album Sistronix, and it’s not as if - on the evidence of the hidden a cappella track that closes off the album - they have the greatest voices. Even the two-piece, guitar and drums setup has been done before, with the White Stripes so obvious a reference point it would be negligent not to mention it.

For starters, Middle Class Rut is a great name for a band. It sounds irritated, punky, full of fighting spirit. Happily the duo from Sacramento California, live up to it. Their second album is an impassioned roar, occasionally a howl of disgust, grounded somewhere between punk and heavy rock, but smeared with distortion and MCR’s own take on the wall of sound.

Reasons behind the prolonged absence of Queens of the Stone Age are legion, including line-up turbulence, successful side projects and the near-death experience of band linchpin Josh Homme. As if to acknowledge and compensate for the lengthy gap in new material since 2007‘s Era Vulgaris, there’s little that hasn’t been thrown into the ...Like Clockwork mix: power ballads, industrial sleaze, surprising reunions, the sound of broken glass - and Elton John on piano.

The Eagles recorded their first two albums in London in the early Seventies, though they couldn't have imagined they'd be back 40 years later to present their new documentary, History of the Eagles Part One, at Sundance London. There is, as you may have surmised, also a Part Two, which is available in the DVD and Blu-ray package that goes on sale on Monday 29 April.

Cold War Kids remain all mixed up. The Californian band appeared in 2006 bearing tasty blues-rock indie that leapt about in the same places Jack White hangs out. There was lots of media blather about their being a Christian band since most of them had met at the private Christian college, Biola University. Then it turned out they had much more complex and conflicted theological perspectives than were easy to sum up in music mag pull-quotes.

There was a common theme to overheard discussions about Peter Jackson’s The Hobbit. Whether in cinema doorways, school playgrounds or pubs, the consensus seemed to be that it laid out Tolkien’s tale in a suitably epic fashion and was no less a feat than the Lord of the Rings trilogy. And yet, and yet… because we’d seen it all before – the silhouetted convoy traipsing over pan-shot New Zealand landscapes, the wizards, orcs and elves - because we’d seen it all before the experience was unexpectedly anticlimactic. Thus it is with Black Rebel Motorcycle Club’s seventh album.

When I first approached John Adams with the idea of making a documentary about him, he gently but firmly turned me down: he had unequivocally bad memories of a film made a few years back, an uncomfortable ride with a director who thought nothing of editing a sequence in which John spoke about one piece, while a completely different one was being played to illustrate his comments. When John had objected, the director in question had dismissively refused to make any changes.

Californian oddballs Camper Van Beethoven are best known for their strange song “Take The Skinheads Bowling” which established the group in 1985 and was re-popularised when used in Michael Moore’s Bowling for Columbine. With the exception of a sabbatical during the Nineties, when Camper Van Beethoven frontman David Lowery had success with the more accessible Cracker, they’ve been lurking in the shadows of US alternative music ever since.