Had it not been for the photogenic presence of Michael Hutchence, INXS would’ve struggled to graduate from Australia’s pub-rock circuit. While they aspired to fuse funk rhythms with rock abandonment, more often than not?even on the million-selling Kick?they sounded like the kind of band who rolled their jacket sleeves up to expose their no-nonsense, unpretentious origins. At best they went proficiently where others had gone before, echoing Prince in hobnailed boots on the sprightly “New Sensation”, but elsewhere they epitomised the ponderous mid-’80s?a fact that no amount of comely packaging can disguise.

Anyone familiar with the queasy physical noise aesthetic developed over 20 years ago by Throbbing Gristle and Whitehouse will be intrigued and amused by Burned Mind, the first widely available album by hip Ann Arbor, Michigan sound vandals Wolf Eyes. This sinister cacophony, generated by Nate Young, Aaron Dilloway and John Olson and split into parts entitled “Stabbed In The Face”, “Black Vomit” and “Urine Burn”, revels in its own thudding nastiness but brings few new ideas to the table. A formidable racket, undoubtedly, but next time Wolf Eyes should look to cure their myopia.

It’s only a year since APC’s last album Thirteenth Step, but frontman Maynard James Keenan wasn’t going to let the US election pass without comment, hence this collection of protest songs. The raging, metal-reinforced anger of “Counting Bodies To The Rhythm Of The War Drums” sets the tone. But it’s one of only two originals alongside 10 extraordinary covers, most of which are mercifully free of heavy-rock clich

Blue-eyed soul, currently enjoying a critical reappraisal, can be a source of immense pleasure, guilty or otherwise. It can also be an excruciating contrivance. In the late ’90s, all-round musical whizz-kid Lewis Taylor found himself pitched as the UK’s new white boy soul sensation, but while the Marvin-influenced records were startlingly strong, his heart wasn’t quite in it. Not content with being able to sing like an angel, Taylor could also toss out Prince-ly guitar licks with his hands tied behind his back, and this was something he wanted to do.

His plans for a radical change of direction, however, were too confusing for the record company, and thus shelved. Now an independent operator, Lewis can release whatever he likes on his own cunningly titled label (it’s an anagram of his name, see), and the album he had in mind back then finally emerges, re-recorded. By the demand of everyone who’s since heard the (“badly recorded”, he says) demos. Whereas his soul LPs have tended to be improvised over grooves and atmospheres, this is more crafted, the songs written on guitar or piano, the vocals layered with detail and delicacy.

The influences are clear: Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, The Beach Boys, John Sebastian. It’s much closer to that West Coast hippie feel than are other touted ‘now’ bands like The Thrills, refusing to airbrush the follow-ons of The Eagles and America out of history. And it’s hard to believe one man is making most of these sounds. The high, multiple harmonies are exhilarating, the guitar solos eloquent. Taylor himself hears it as a British sound, but there’s as much Joe Walsh here as Clapton or?dare we say?Frampton.

And as his dazzling vocabulary swoops from AOR pomp to unplugged, organic breakdowns, the ’60s sunshine sometimes backs off to allow in more aggressive phrases. “Listen Here” has a hint of Prince’s “When Doves Cry”; “Hide Your Heart Away” could be Fifth Dimension or The Association. He can’t mute the soul, hard as he might try: The Isleys breeze in often, thank goodness.

Taylor’s versatility doesn’t make him a swift pitch, but with each release he dynamites more barriers. You could lose yourself in this.

Tempting as it is to invoke comparisons to CS&N and the mid-’60s folk explosion, they don’t do justice to this follow-up to Tom and Greg Moore’s Colossal Small disc. Operating in a minimalist vacuum, their engaging songs are melt-in-the-mouth without being twee.

Hardly psych, their quiet charms are all about the basics of life. “Mint Mouth Motorhead” and the equally sweet “Color And Kind” manage to be idiosyncratic and utterly immediate.

While they eschew attitude, they still have that brand of certainty that set Tim Hardin apart.

Less is Moore.

Once guitar god with Cali-punks Top Jimmy & The Rhythm Pigs, diabetes and a monstrous drug intake left Ayala a homeless bum busking for nickels on street corners. Now, post-rehab, there’s a Hollywood biopic on the way and this stellar comeback album.

Old running buddies Dave Alvin, John Doe and ex-Minuteman Mike Watt lend support, but the whiskered 54-year-old is a one-man dervish on this cyclonic whirl through swamp-blues, zydeco, country, Tex-Mex and happy hour rock ‘n’ roll. The fretwork is bar-room punchy, the voice grizzled to perfection, the lyrics (particularly “When The Pain Stops Killing Me”) picking at still-fresh wounds.

If anyone can make the uneasy partnership of comedy and hip hop work, it’s f

Billed as a return to the Reprazent mainman’s underground indie-label roots, Return To V is a lengthy anthology which varies immensely in quality.

While the walloping sub-bass rumbles and precisely knotted beat clusters of “Shoulder To Shoulder” or “On And On” surf the hardstep fringes of Aphex or Squarepusher at their most extreme, Size’s posse of guest MCs also deliver banal Brit-rap and ragga-chat of a distinctly 1992 flavour. It’s striking how Size now sounds frozen in time while fellow Mercury prize-winner Dizzee Rascal is tearing up the old drum ‘n’bass rulebook.

Since his 1999 solo debut Black On Both Sides, Brooklyn’s Dante “Mos Def” Smith has proved himself to be hip-hop’s renaissance man: the backpack rapper who’s also a Hollywood star and Broadway actor, political activist and awards show host. Here he resists the obvious big-budget comeback and (aside from the glorious Kanye West-produced “Sunshine”) delivers an experimental and melancholic set. “Black Jack” is a bass-heavy blues jam, “Boogie Man Song” dispenses with traditional hip-hop beats and suggests a new kind of lo-fi folk-soul, while the 11-minute “Modern Marvel” manages to sample Marvin Gaye’s “What’s Goin’ On” and get away with it. The rap metal of “Ghetto Rock” and “Zimzallabim” might just be a step too far, though.

MALIK MEER

Pro Forma’s original line-up featured a synth/keyboards player, drummer, guitarist and vocalist called Paul Thomson, now better known as the drummer from Franz Ferdinand. Prurient curiosity isn’t the only reason to investigate this short collection of the band’s output to date, however.

The (then) trio dubbed their sound “council house”, which is as accurate a description as any of their tense, darkly glowering lo-fi disco-punk approach. Joy Division, Kraftwerk, The Normal and “Being Boiled”-era Human League have clearly all made an impact here, but the band’s post-house and techno interests divert them from the over-familiar, retro road.

Befitting a band permanently on tour, Biffy Clyro are well drilled, precise alt.rock shouters, now keen on extending their range. They shouldn’t have bothered. Recent Top 30 single “Glitter And Trauma” bizarrely mixes Buggles with Cheap Trick’s dafter moments. Elsewhere the prog-rock timescales, pompous a cappella tracks and cartoon synth crunches would make even Muse go crimson. A pity because, on the likes of “Only One Word Comes To Mind”, Biffy Clyro capture grunge’s emotionally bruised centre quite naturally.

Operating at the rarely-explored mid-point between My Bloody Valentine and Slayer, Isis are part of a new wave of underground metal acts who reject the shirts-off sword’n’sorcery posturing of old in favour of producing distended but crushingly heavy soundscapes. Their third album purports to be a concept record about surveillance culture, but how we’re supposed to know this is anyone’s guess: despite quotations from Foucault on the inner sleeve and its general air of unease, Panopticon consists largely of instrumental chunks of Mogwai-style post-rock that those with long attention spans will find utterly rewarding.

PAT LONG

If The Ramones had been made up of Avril Lavignes, they would have been The Donnas. Produced by sometime Lavigne sidekick Butch Walker, Gold Medal smooths down a few of the Palo Alto quartet’s rougher edges, but the essential formula is intact: ’70s power-pop pastiche meets revved-up sugar-rush melodies, cynical teen-romance lyrics and knowingly dumb sexual innuendo. Aside from a richer production and heartbroken power ballads like “Revolver”, signs of ‘maturity’ are mercifully absent. They may be shamelessly role-playing their Joan Jett schtick, but The Donnas still out-rock earnest retrobores like Jet and Kings Of Leon.

STEPHEN DALTON

So gargantuan a behemoth is this whole franchise that even we head-shaking non-believers can recognise the commercial import of these releases. The 3D “lenticular” images on the sleeves are doing my eyes in, but I’ll retain the composure to report that John Williams’ bombastic scores for the three original Star Wars films are here repackaged (either as box set or three doubles) and digitally remastered. You get archival bonus tracks, posters, screensavers and various Internet links. Strikes me as some kind of covert attack of the clones, but if Williams is to be granted a tribute (he won an Oscar for the first of these), this is full-on and fitting.

Mugison’s follow-up to last year’s acclaimed Lonely Mountain debut is the score to a Fridrik Thor Fridriksson film, recorded in a church and in his girlfriend’s mum’s front room in remote Western Iceland. Fridriksson (whose last, Falcons, boasted a song by Keith Carradine) has also used Sigur R

Forty-six of the songs used, over the last couple of years, to sell us shit. A work of undeniable postmodern genius in itself, then. But does it function? In the case of KFC’s selections, yes. So soulfully orgasmic are Laura Greene’s “Moonlight, Music And You”, The Chi-Lites’ “What Do I Wish For?” and Jackie Wilson’s “Who Who Song” that you’d gladly eat the food to be near them. The rest is scattergun, from The Dandy Warhols and The Stranglers shifting phones and The Specials and Iggy flogging motors, to the truly inspired?Teddy Pendergrass for yoghurt, April Stevens’ “Teach Me Tiger” making catfood sexy. But did the iPod hawkers really think The Hives were the way forward?

San Franciscan trio Coachwhips arrive surfing a sizeable wave of industry hype, having been the hit of this year’s South By Southwest festival in Austin, Texas. Their UK debut is a riotous, raw, supernaturally distorted and breathtakingly brief pillaging of ’60s garage rock and synth-punk, both of which they render newly dangerous. Seemingly recorded in a lint-lined biscuit tin for $4.99, Bangers Vs Fuckers whips up an astonishing whirlwind of white keyboard noise and maxi-fuzzed guitar, distilling the spirits of Six Finger Satellite, Hasil Adkins and Pussy Galore in its 11-track, 18-minute frenzy. Brutal, but damned impressive.