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”.

Famously hailed by Sinatra as “the best in the business”, Bennett’s been so-square-he’s-hip for decades now, his sons managing his credibility cunningly. This is a no-gimmicks, old-school album, though, recorded live on stage in Englewood, New Jersey from the Bennett Studios next door. Impeccable orchestration, tinkling ivories, whispering brushes and a sax that’s both sleazy and classy. Gliding across it all is the man’s exquisite phrasing, and he’s written his first ever lyrics on “All For You”. These ballads, tidily ironic comments on dreams and loss, ache with piquancy when he throws away a line like, “When my life is done…”

CHRIS ROBERTS

Though not a core Wondermint, Scott Bennett has become an integral part of Wilson’s current marvellous band. This mostly solo, self-produced marvel explores the darker side of power-pop

Unlike Emmylou Harris, with whom she must dread comparison, Nanci Griffith has slid into an all too sickly-sweet niche. It’s impossible not to hanker after the more strident country-folk of 1986’s The Last Of The True Believers rather than this mawkish collection. Too well-meaning and consumed by “all-conquering love”, even the songs with a message seem merely worthy. There’s no doubting Griffith’s heartfelt honesty and passion, but flawless execution nullifies intent. Do we really need more songs about 9/11 or, indeed, Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath?

She sounds instantly familiar, but it’s just your memory playing tricks with echoes of Patsy Cline and Peggy Lee drifting down the ether from 40 years ago, compounded by the ’50s atmosphere lovingly reconstructed by producer Liam Watson. “The Luckiest Girl” and its sitar belong in 1965, but everything else is stuck in a roadhouse during the Eisenhower years, where the juke is stacked with blues and heartbreak. Golightly’s voice is irresistibly fragile, her lyrics possessing the simplicity and crystal clarity (“turning to embers is all I remember”) of country at its best, and the combination makes for shivery magic.

PETER HOGAN

There’s a thin line between wallpapery ambience and the sort of meditative drone music that demands unflinching attention. Happily, although Olympia duo Growing use some pretty ambient signifiers?a lot of birdsong and babbling brooks, chiefly?their second album falls emphatically into the latter cultural camp. The most obvious reference point for these beautifully phased guitar and bass hums is minimalist innovator Lamonte Young. But like fellow travellers Sunn O))), there’s also a sense of an immense, tethered rock power: the gargantuan fuzz ritual of “Anaheim II” effectively finishes the work abandoned by Jason Pierce and Sonic Boom when they split Spacemen 3.

JOHN MULVEY

There can be few less enticing prospects than the live hip-hop album, particularly when the protagonists are as unpredictable, not to mention past their best, as the Wu-Tang Clan. It’d be nice to report that this set featuring all nine of the New York crew’s members eschews the call-and-response bunkum particular to the genre and renews your faith in Staten Island’s one-time kingpins. It does not. As marvellous as tracks like “Re-United” and “C.R.E.A.M.” are, played live they’re divested of the originals’ nuances, resulting in a one-paced, muscle-flexing album full of terrace-style chanting.

PAUL MARDLES

Ariel pink was hanging in obscurity in the LA hills until he handed a demo of material recorded in 1999/2000 to the members of Animal Collective. They were so impressed that they broke with precedent and offered to issue his work on their own label. There are key points of similarity between Ariel and AC?preoccupations with childhood (“Good Kids Make Bad Grown Ups”) and campfires, a general feeling of regression that is characteristic of 21st-century outcrops of psychedelia. Beyond that, however, Ariel Pink languishes alone. Although these two albums were recorded on 8-track, their range, volatility and Simultaneist overload sounds like The Beatles circa 1967, The Human League, FM radio’s Hall Of Fame, Phil Spector, Tiny Tim and the great R Stevie Moore all frolicking at once in an acid bath in his own head. Ariel’s vocals are adrift, bobbing up all over the place in the mix, now a distant cry on the horizon, now right up nose to nose with you, and, on “Haunted Graffiti”, crawling right up into your ear canal.

Tracks like “Among Dreams”, on which Ariel sounds like he’s swimming in his own brain, shouldn’t work?so rambling, so amateurish. Yet somehow they have a way of lapsing perfectly into misshape, so that you can’t take your ears off them. “Strange Fires” sounds like Babybird’s “You’re Gorgeous” regurgitated (indeed, as lo-fi troves go, this is comparable with the shock of first coming on BB’s early, long-unreleased work). But “The Ballad Of Bobby Pym” crowns the collection, one of those sunshine-after-the-rain moments you experience too occasionally both in music and in life.

The six short tracks of Vital Pink (on the same disc) are less multiple, with less slipping and sliding, offering relative respite. Great musical ideas apportioned one or two at a time, rather than in the nines and tens. Still, it testifies to an idea that the spirit of pop and rock past can only be recaptured by returning to the meagre studio means of yesteryear, rather than drearily hi-tech recording methods which clog every sonic pore. As Pink proves, it’s the perfect way to access the frightening no-limits of the imagination.

With 12-inch releases on Gilles Peterson’s Talkin’ Loud among others, and a series of appearances on tracks by other notables like Smith & Mighty, you’d hope that Tammy Payne aka Jukes would be no stranger to real feeling. But sadly her debut album, produced by ex-Portishead bassist Jim Barr, offers more pastel soul than acoustic soul, full of aimless strumming and one-dimensional vocals, akin to a lo-fi Zero 7. Worthy, much like the bookstores in which it will be played.

Texas-born Greg Ashley fronts The Gris Gris, an Oakland-based trio wandering, on its debut, through an unruly, occasionally creepy acidic landscape. Alternately childlike (as on the sing-songy “Mary #38”) and darkly lysergic (as on the whacked-out house of mirrors that is “Everytime” and the feedback-drenched “Best Regards”), The Gris Gris summon comparisons to everyone from Roky Erickson to The Velvet Underground to outr

Self-styled city boys with hillbilly souls. The Popes boil up a traditional storm like an Irish Mekons, making The Saw Doctors sound like Sunday choirboys. This live set from 2003 is a hoot, frontman Paul “Mad Dog” McGuinness roaring them on through furious Gaelic rockers and fiddle-strewn hoedowns, replete with “Church Of The Holy Spook” and “New Rose”. Included as a bonus is 2000 debut Holloway Boulevard (all bawdy ballads and breathless flings), highlighted by the great “Like A River” and MacGowan taking lead on his own “Chino’s Place”.

So June’s Flashlight Seasons was no fluke?Gravenhurst really does sound like Nick Drake. Yet this swift six-song successor to his Warp debut proves there’s more to Nick Talbot, Gravenhurst’s bruised soul, than willowy finger-picking and sotto voce pining. The title track, for example, is an exquisite lament that swells over seven minutes into electric turbulence. And his heartfelt, stripped-down rendition of H

Goth techno, built for stadiums and sung by Liam Gallagher and lggy Pop, is evidently a thing of Death In Vegas’ extravagant major-label past. Now on their own Drone imprint, Richard Fearless and Tim Holmes’ ambitions are more modest, that rotten album title notwithstanding. A song called “Sons Of Rother” reveals more?that they’ve consciously restyled themselves in the image of ’70s Krautrock, especially Michael Rother’s Neu! and Harmonia. At times it’s hard to see the point of such a meticulous homage to motorik; one suspects Kraftwerk themselves might have trouble differentiating the start of “Zugaga” from “Trans Europe Express”. Nevertheless, DIV’s most aesthetically satisfying album, and perhaps an explanation of why their production work for Oasis last year was so abruptly terminated.

JOHN MULVEY

Listening to his easy-going version of country these days, you sometimes wonder where Nelson’s “outlaw” status comes from. The smooth vocals, the simple arrangements and the gentle, often sentimental songs sound more Jim Reeves than Steve Earle. And yet the rock’n’roll aristocracy reveres him as a legend.

Look at the line-up for live album Outlaws & Angels, recorded for a recent US TV special. There’s Keith Richards, who learnt his country from listening to Hank and hanging out with Gram, duetting magnificently on “We Had It All”. Lucinda Williams, Shelby Lynne and Rickie Lee Jones also step up to the plate while, to illustrate the breadth of respect, Kid Rock and Toots Hibbert also appear. Sadly, Dylan’s duet from the event isn’t on the record, presumably for contractual reasons. But the impression that a serious repositioning is going on cannot be dispelled, even by the presence of flag-waving token redneck Toby Keith.

Nelson’s new studio album offers further evidence of an attempt to broaden his appeal. It Always Will Be finds him covering Tom Waits and indulging in more duets with the likes of Lucinda Williams (again) and Norah Jones. But this reaching out to a new audience does not involve compromising the simple verities and virtues that have characterised Nelson’s records for years.

He rocks gently with daughter Paula Nelson on her splendid “Be That As It May”, and “Dreams Come True” is an atmospheric late-night jazz smooch. But, for the rest, it’s all about the emotional honesty of the simple country ballads, particularly his own compositions such as the title track, the lovely sing-me-back-home closer “Texas” and the unadorned, laid-back honesty of his voice. Thankfully, he hasn’t tried to reinvent himself as some born-again alt.country maverick. Authentic, uncomplicated, direct and unerringly true, this is simply how country was always meant to sound before they added the saccharine and sequins.

NIGEL WILLIAMSON