Underneath that hard man exterior and punk credentials, it was always clear that Cornwell was as familiar with a library as he was with a shooting gallery. This poetically named album (referring to the gloriously named area in New Orleans) has plenty of rock clout, but it also zones in on areas of relative exotica such as meteorology, Cadiz and Henry Moore. With Tony Visconti adding a chrome-bright production, Cornwell sounds re-energised.

Guitarist Eric Drew Feldman is something of a journeyman, having played with PJ Harvey, Captain Beefheart, The Residents, Pere Ubu and The Pixies. Laurie Hall is singer and bassist in a Californian group called Ovarian Trolley. The downer-rock they make as Knife And Fork is tangentially nourished by American roots music, as were The Cowboy Junkies and Mazzy Star, their nearest touchstones. A sour and doleful mood predominates, and not everyone will warm to the religiosity hinted at in some of the lyrics. But the arrangements?a steaming broth of growling guitars and vintage keyboards?offer some compensation.

A solo vehicle for 16 Horsepower leader David Eugene Edwards, Woven Hand sacrifices his other outfit’s thunderous bombast but retains the glowering intensity. This follow-up to 2002’s self-titled debut is a masterstroke of creeping gothic: spectral percussion, skeletal guitar and Edwards’ ominous voice, lent added weight by the religious significance of the lyrics (especially the startling “To Make A Ring”). Of his contemporaries, only Nick Cave and Willard Grant Conspiracy’s Robert Fisher sound as eerily portentous. Queasy strings, thorny banjo and spare use of piano help sustain the raven-at-dusk mood throughout.

Two years on from first album Delicate Shades Of Grey, Anglo-American duo Cicero Buck return with a more confident set of folk-pop songs. Songwriter/vocalist Kris Wilkinson is particularly effervescent on the tough “Gonna Fly” and the rippling Nashville skiffle of “Little Songbird”, while Muscle Shoals veteran Jack Peck adds brass to the dusty twang of “Black Road”. Wilkinson (despite the Yankee blood) sounds very English in her Sandy Denny-like delivery, while partner Joe (ex-The Lover Speaks) Hughes adds bass, background vocals and a stripped reworking of his own “No More I Love Yous” (a huge ’90s hit for Annie Lennox). Fresh and feisty.

After last year’s disappointing Never Go Home, Brian Krumm’s Illinois quartet seem to have rediscovered the last-gang-in-town swagger that made 2000’s Damaged Goods such a riot. Guitars cranked up to 11, it’s bulging roadhouse rock, with the added croak of Krumm’s phlegmy Tom Waits-isms. But there’s a leanness about these loser-through-a-shot-glass songs that suggests they’ve matured too, not least on the latter-day gunslinger ballad “November” and in the neon-splashed moodiness of “St Christopher Street”. The sparse “I’ll Be Over Here” suggests a bona fide classic may be within reach.

Sometime bartender, midwife and reverend, O’Connor’s true calling may lie as a remarkable interpreter of song. Though recent years have found her adding dewy vocal harmonies for Andrew Bird’s Bowl Of Fire (and Mavis Staples), her solo debut is long overdue. A brace of impressive originals?”My Backyard”, “Tonight”?are whispers of classic honky-tonk, but she truly shines on covers of James (Squirrel Nut Zippers) Mathus’ “Bottoms” and “Nightingale”, twisting each into the kind of lovelorn ballad Alison Krauss would kill for. The muted boom-chicka-boom of Matt Weber’s “OK With Me” is equally gripping, as is Lori Carson closer “Down Here”.

Comprising Jel and Doseone, members of the cLOUDDEAD/Anticon axis, Subtle are more gnarled and gristly, if as remote a permutation of hip-hop as offered by cLOUDDEAD on this year’s Ten. Doseone’s enervated, darkish vocal style belies the fast-cut fury of his rapping, backed by an ever-morphing backbeat of guitars, keyboards, orchestral instruments, dub breaks and luminous moments amid the wreckage. A New White is a landfill site of pulverised genres and detritus ?however, Subtle both exploit this sense of cultural mess and overload while also appearing to be overwhelmed by it.

A massive hit in his native Canada, Sam Roberts and band?all Jesus beards and scuffed denim?are steeped in every conceivable rock vernacular. With The Dears’ George Donoso on drums, there’s a strong Anglophilia to much of this record that recalls Ride, The Kinks and, on “The Canadian Dream”, a scrubbed-up Beta Band. Classic power-pop and straight-ahead rock get an airing, too?admirable, perhaps, but too ambitious. When they succeed, though, like on the caffeinated garage-stonk of “On The Run” and “Dead End”, they do so with panache.

ROB HUGHES

This Evansville, Indiana quartet made their name with a brand of fractured, scientifically American music that straddled the divide between hardcore and emo. Now those strands no longer play so well, they’ve found their feet, and are more reminiscent of Built To Spill than Fugazi. Big, chopped-up guitars and minor key melodies abound, proving that the Mock’s forte lies in dynamics. The tortured “Birds” and the cello and vocal layering that propel “This Nation” indicate an ageing-up process?one that benefits from sophisticated arrangements and says so long to brute force anthems.

Those morally outraged by Nouvelle Vague’s bossa nova sanitisation of new wave standards should lend a sympathetic ear to San Francisco subversive The Soft Pink Truth’s rousing electro-trash covers of three-chord anarcho-punk. By spicing up Crass’ “Do They Owe Us A Living?” and Minor Threat’s “Out Of Step” with booty beats and glitch-rave, TSPT’s playboy Drew Daniel, one half of Matmos, invites obvious parallels between these two styles of youthful musical nihilism, both throwaway and seditious. As inventive and well-meaning as these bastard pop blasts are, they’re still not a patch on the originals.

Everyone from R.E.M. to A Perfect Circle has been trying recently to sing Bush out of the White House. But credit to Dan Bern, who kept the tradition of protest song alive while it was deeply unfashionable. Subtitled “Music To Beat Bush By”, Bern’s contribution to the current pressing cause consists of eight songs in his usual Dylanesque style, ranging from the didactic (“Bush Must Be Defeated”) to the lyrical (a setting of Pete Seeger’s poem “Torn Flag”) via the satirical (“President”, which sets out Bern’s own programme for his first 10 days in the Oval Office). Angry, comical, justifiably concerned.

Loudly trumpeted as a return to his ’70s roots, Songs From The West Coast saw the Rocket Man fall back to earth after a full quarter-century spent underachieving in the murkiest outer reaches of the AM/FM stratosphere. Stripped of studio frippery and with piano reinstated in a central role, that 2001 album was, by a country mile, Sir Elton’s most impressive workout since 1976’s Blue Moves, and served notice that he wasn’t about to coast for the rest of his days writing Broadway bombast or fluff for cartoon lions.

The self-produced Peachtree Road more or less duplicates the formula. A pared-down, organic sound that recalls Madman Across The Water and Honky Ch

A far cry from the standard contractual filler live album, The Tigers Have Spoken is a dizzying statement of Neko Case’s intent, vigour and sky-high talent. It was recorded over a series of recent shows in Toronto and Chicago, with an interchangeable line-up of her similarly sharp, focused and joyously spontaneous buddies?Kelly Hogan, Jon Rauhouse and The Sadies. Alongside covers of Loretta Lynn, Shangri-Las and Buff Sainte-Marie tunes, there are brand new songs (like the gleeful opener “If You Knew”) and radical reassessments of old Case favourites.

At just 35 minutes, Tigers is a leave-them-gagging-for-more whirlwind, and confirmation that, at 34 and with three albums behind her, Case still has a tantalisingly wide-open game plan for her future.

The soaring voice that inhabited the bruised honky tonk dramas of Furnace Room Lullaby and the noir torch songs of Blacklisted is a ferocious force in person. Full of the animal instinct she praises on the title track, Neko rides Rauhouse’s keening arcs of slide, Hawaiian and pedal-steel like a woman on a mission.

The inner joy and aching pain of Buffy Sainte’s “Soulful Shade Of Blue” is joyously teased out. This performance alone seals her status as a major artist, but the riches keep pouring down. Ther’s knuckledusting punk spleen of “Loretta”, Ms Lynn’s own high-kicking “Rated X” (also recently covered by The White Stripes), or the way Case’s astounding vocal pirouettes on the Rauhouse slide tightrope during “Favourite” (the first song she ever completed, in the year 2000).

What really makes this work as a live concept is the way the listener is coaxed to follow the sound. There are parts where the acoustic moves high into the roof of whatever room the band are playing, and they give chase with zeal and tender care. All the audience is along for the ride on the majestic banjo-plucking rave-up of “This Little Light” and the closing communal singalong of mysterious mountain gospel chestnut “Wayfaring Stranger”. A gig of the year, no question. You should have been there. Now you can be.

The daughter of South African jazz pianist Abdullah Ibrahim, Tsidi “Jean Grae” Ibrahim has been a bafflingly marginal player in the New York hip-hop underground for some years now. This Week is a belated attempt to push this thoughtful, urbane rapper into the mainstream. For the most part, it succeeds, as Grae cruises eloquently over booming, soul-sampling backdrops that recall Jay-Z’s recent triumphs (9th Wonder, one of the Jigga’s producers, helms the outstanding “Supa Luv”). Grae’s strength, however, may turn out to be her commercial downfall: a wry solipsism that compels her to detail an ordinary life far removed from rap’s gaudier fantasies.

Mellifluous, lovelorn Glaswegian AOR is now evidently such a part of Caledonian cultural heritage that the Trashcan Sinatras received help from the Scottish Arts Council to release this fourth album, eight years after the collapse of Go! Discs left the band bankrupt.

For all their travails, you might expect bitterness or even anger but, galloping opener “Welcome Back” aside, the record is happy to cruise along a Crowded House highway of mellow. But it’s frequently lush and lovely: “All The Dark Horses” and “It’s A Miracle” chime with the keen, earnest romanticism of prime Aztec Camera.

STEPHEN TROUSSE

When rock stars recast past works in orchestral bombast they are usually one step away from senility or public ridicule. But the Loaf has

no such worries, having never had an ounce of credibility, while Bat Out Of Hell has always cried out for the full rock-opera treatment since its release back in 1977. Recorded in Melbourne in February, Jim Steinman’s Spector-meets-Wagner pomp-rock behemoth mostly suits these absurdly overblown arrangements, while Meat indulges his Elvis-meets-Pavarotti tendencies to the full. It’s monumentally kitsch, of course, but no-shit classic tunes like “Two Out Of Three Ain’t Bad” can stand any amount of high-camp vandalism.

Recorded in a pre-WWII Berlin bunker complete with chandeliers and red velvet furnishings, Poe’s third album features ripened love songs marinated in raw ache and longing. With sparse but telling bass and drum accompaniment, the largely first-take recordings include previously released gems (“Moon” and “Reunion”) alongside new beauties, including the majestic loaded metaphor “You’re The Bomb” and the anguished nerve-end-shredder “Settlement”. Poe can capture dream/nightmare atmospheres within sweetly turned melodic pop songs, so well does he inhabit a unique area somewhere between Kurt Cobain’s acoustic scowl and Joe Henry’s jazzy reveries.

You don’t have to sing ancient ballads about jolly plough-boys and lovelorn milkmaids, like Kate Rusby and Eliza Carthy, to be a folk singer. Timothy Victor is the personification of a truly modern folkie. He sings plaintively and picks expertly in the style of Jansch or Renbourn.

But the 11 songs, which address such timeless subjects as loss, death and betrayal, are all contemporary. As the title implies, he’s opted for a uniform late-night mood, and a change of tempo somewhere might have been welcome. Nevertheless, this is still lovely stuff.

Free of band constraints, Butler is more intimate and playful than Canyon’s country grandeur might allow. Whereas the latter’s Empty Rooms (2002) married Pink Floyd spaciousness to Mojave 3’s wounded wanderlust, Killer On The Road reinvents BB as a hard-travelled tourbadour, a carpetbag of blues in tow. Gripping it is, too, from the unadorned “Good Intentions” to the muted country revivalism of “Next Time” and grisly tough-luck tale “Rio Grande Rail”. Confirmation, if it were needed, of a major talent.