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.

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.