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.

A slice of Detroit old-school punk, out one onstling with intent. The rush of “Wretched Boy”, the sha la las of “Snow A Sign Of Life” and the Who-styled chording on “Ain’t That something are all truly endearing. Fronted by Josh Malerman and Mark Owen, with a Moon-esque basher called Derek Berk, The High Strung have every right to escape the lo-fi clutches of producer Jim Diamond and stride out for the summit. Hard to resist, too, an album that’s got a song on it called “Rah Ra Rah!”

Fretwell’s spell as Manchester’s best-kept secret has been lengthy. Once record labels were jostling to turn him into the new David Gray. But his self-released 8 Songs EP tapped a more antique kind of craftsmanship. A deal with Fiction followed, and

now his tenderly abrasive tunes are on full-length releases. “Brother” echoes Dylan in its caustic intonations, while the small-town soul of “New York” soul of ?New York? is Springsteen for the NY-Lon generation. Drums and piano add drama out his lyrical voice is too banal to elicit anything resembling an original insight. A secret worth hearing, nonetheless.

Jane Gillow

Contrary bastards, the Manics. As the world stands at its most politically charged precipice for decades, the bolshy Welsh trio follow their spiky and poorly received 2001 manifesto Know Your Enemy with an album of warm, widescreen, soft-rock ballads. All fluid guitar surges and gentle string arrangements, Lifeblood seems closest in tone to Everything Must Go, although the sound is lighter, less bombastic, more soothing.

Musically and lyrically, the mid-’80s are a key reference point. The opening track is even called “1985”, name-checking Morrissey and Marr in its intoxicating swirl of bittersweet memories and bruised majesty. Vintage New Order, U2 and Associates are all cited as influences and their ghosts sometimes hover very close-the crystalline piano rolls of “Empty Souls” and “To Repel Ghosts” are straight out of “New Year’s Day”.

Sadly the swooping, singalong momentum of “1985” and its splendidly incongruous partner in misty-eyed nostalgia, “The Love Of Richard Nixon”, is not sustained throughout the album. Promisingly titled tracks such as “Glasnost” and “Cardiff Afterlife” foreground meticulous MOR production over memorable tunes. Which is a shame, because a couple more killer anthems might truly have qualified Lifeblood as Everything Must Go 2. That said, the Manics are clearly learning to conquer some long-standing flaws. James Dean Bradfield’s voice is no longer stuck in shrill fifth gear but more soulful and supple, capturing that “ache” that Nick Cave defined as essential for love songs. Most of Nicky Wire’s lyrics now flow smoothly instead of spitting out shopping lists of intellectual disdain. Although the Manics will clearly never be the entryist superstar subversives they once promised, the gap between their ambitions and their abilities narrows with each record. Contrary little bastards.

A past-master of jarring turntable juxtapositions, the New York-born, Barcelona-based Rupture has taken years to arrive at this official studio debut via numerous mix-tape mash-ups. Special Gunpowder is a bold genre-fusing hybrid featuring an army of ragga MCs, rappers, avant-rockers, French and Arabic folk musicians and more. The collagist sensibility may derive from hip-hop, but Rupture appears to be aiming for something more jazzy and organic?he was, after all, once in a band with Norah Jones. As a consequence, the wild collisions and beat-driven energy of his past work are tamed a little. A rich and exotic ride, but uncharacteristically cerebral at times.

STEPHEN DALTON

On the heels of last year’s career-topping Befriended comes this minimalist reworking of old standards from matrimonial duo Karen and Don Peris, alongside upright bassist Mike Bitts.

Clocking in at half an hour?and with Mrs P sounding like a soft pout through clouds of duck-down?it’s ideal lullaby comfort music, extra warmth courtesy of Don’s suspended-in-air guitar lines.

There’s a touch of Victoria Williams’ Sings Some Ol’ Songs here, only kink-free and much sweeter, rendering “Over The Rainbow” and “What A Wonderful World” pleasantly diverting rather than essential.

Part of 2002’s scuzzy punk uprising against the soporific rock of Coldplay et al (alongside McLusky, Ikara Colt, 80s Matchbox B-Line Disaster), gobby Welsh yelpers TMHR’s debut arrives just as The Libertines and Razorlight have filtered such ragged energy through great tunes and into the charts. It makes the Rifles’ supercharged snot’n’roll rebel yell sound dated before its time. Still, there’s fire in it, from the Clinic electro-rumble of “Showman” to the brimstone bellowing of, well, everything else. Good news for fans of no tunes.

As Dr Johnson once said when asked to comment on the skills of a dancing dog, it’s not a question of how well the beast does it. What’s impressive is that he does it at all. We might say the same of Sky Saxon, who at almost 70 is still trying to bridge the gap between garage-rock and psychedelia as if 1967’s endless summer had never ended.

Red Planet is the first Seeds album in 37 years, and although Saxon’s comeback is hardly in the Arthur Lee class, there’s something oddly appealing about the period Wurlitzer organ sound and the primitive fuzz guitars on songs such as “Fools On Capitol Hill” and “Colorized Bottles”.