For over 20 years now, John Linnell and John Flansburgh?here reunited with Flood producer Pat Dillett? have been reliably ploughing their idiosyncratic furrow. Lyrically, the territory they cover is still perversely eclectic: paranoia, Thunderbird wine, nervous collapse (in the touching “Memo To Human Resources”) and giving Bowie a cheekily bad review (in “Au Contraire”). But their five-piece instrumentation is restricting, things shifting up a gear on the few tracks where they add brass. Roll on the concept album, with full orchestra.

For 2002’s excellent debut Moving Up Country, Yorkston installed ex-Cocteau Twin Simon Raymonde at the mixing desk. This time around, the telling enlistment of Kieran (Four Tet) Hebden as producer has resulted in a more lissom approach that adds soft lustre without sacrificing the intimacy of the previous record. Vocally, he’s closest to the autumnal weariness of Fence Collective team-mate Lone Pigeon, but the songs are as rounded as anything on John Martyn’s Bless The Weather. Teased out by accordion, “Shipwreckers”is typical, as is the fireside blush of “Surf Song”, but “Hotel” is the blackly enticing centrepiece, adorned with lovely drips of banjo and acoustic scrape.

The Faint arrived in Britain early last year, causing such a commotion with Danse Macabre (their third LP, in fact) that remixes and reissues appeared in quick succession. All struck a stylishly gloomy, new wave pose, but suggested a band too obviously in thrall to Depeche Mode to deserve a future.

Clearly, the five-piece spotted the loosening wheels on that particular bandwagon, and so Wet From Birth shifts their retro synth-pop into lean electro-funk territory.

The Mode-ish “Erection” aside, the post-techno sound suits them surprisingly well?and extends the lease on their career.

Long since abandoning her Patsy Cline infatuation, KD Lang remains a supremely talented singer, whether setting her sights on torch tunes or contemporary pop. But as a recording artist, she’s drifting. On her second themed album of covers since 1997, Lang surveys her Canadian folk/pop peers?Cohen, Mitchell, Young. She’s in fine voice, but rarely brings new emotional resonance to familiar warhorses like Cohen’s “Bird On A Wire”, much less intimate material like Mitchell’s “Case Of You”.

As a stylistic exercise, Hymns is a success, but the preponderance of monochromatic ballads make this a tough listen.

Let me put it like this. From the time I heard Engine in 1988 to 1995, when they finally split, worn down, you’d be right to think, and disillusioned by their failure to translate critical euphoria into hard sales, American Music Club meant more to me than any other American band, apart from The Replacements.

Like Paul Westerberg’s rowdy Minneapolis rock’n’roll upstarts, there was always something about American Music Club that cast them as eternal outsiders, and it wasn’t just the way Mark Eitzel’s songs, like Westerberg’s, spoke for the disenfranchised, the bereft and lonely, people out there on the margin of things where it’s messy and it hurts. It was an attitude, really. Some vague intransigence, a scruffy unpredictability, a feeling of imminent derailment that made it difficult for even their most ardent fans to truly believe the band would ever occupy the same stratospheres of commercial success as R.E.M., say, or Pearl Jam, whose Eddie Vedder more than once heaped voluminous praise on them, singling out charismatic frontman Eitzel for particular congratulation. As did, famously, Rolling Stone, who in 1991 voted Mark their Songwriter Of The Year, an award that at the time of records like California, United Kingdom, Everclear, San Francisco and Mercury he probably deserved annually. Eitzel’s songs on those albums charted territories of terrible worry. They described a cracked and murmuring world?an unwholesome place, by and large, where things are likely to go wrong in unsettling ways? populated by the iconic lost, everyday martyrs, the kind of people whose daily torments are in themselves no big deal, merely incidental calamities, small unravellings on the bruised extremities of larger disasters.

Eitzel has released seven solo albums since AMC split, and everything he’s done has been at least worth listening to?even The Ugly American, on which, for reasons I have never fully understood he revisited his AMC back catalogue, accompanied by a group of Greek folk musicians. Like Elvis Costello these last few years, however, Eitzel’s recent career has tended towards drift and irresolution, as if it has not always been clear to him what it was that he used to be so good at that it made people want to cheer his name in public. You would, in other words, be hard-pressed to find a fan of his still considerable songwriting skills who didn’t more often that not wish him back in harness with AMC.

And here, fuck me, they are?Eitzel flanked again by genius guitarist Vudi, stalwart bassist Dan Pearson, drummer Tim Mooney and new recruit Marc Capelle on all manner of keyboards, synthesisers and flugelhorn?reunited for Love Songs For Patriots, their first album in 10 years. What’s it like? Absolutely fucking brilliant, since you ask, AMC going about their work with the determined air of people with unfinished business, points to prove to the world and each other, utterly inspired.

As anyone who saw their recent reunion show at London’s Queen Elizabeth Hall will loudly testify, Eitzel these days is greatly appalled by the Bush administration and what it is doing in the world?and the wryly titled Love Songs For Patriots is partially inspired by the same anger that is said also to fuel R.E.M.’s forthcoming new album. Eitzel hasn’t suddenly turned into Phil Ochs or Billy Bragg?but there’s an extent to which it wouldn’t be unreasonable to describe Love Songs… as a protest album. There’s certainly no denying the livid impatience, disgust and outrage that informs several key tracks here, which make me think of other one-off albums of scorching discontent, like John Cale’s Honi Soit and Elvis Costello’s Blood & Chocolate.

I’m thinking here of cuts like the hugely declamatory opener “Ladies And Gentlemen”, a startling call to arms, musically abrasive, with discordant guitars and Jason Borger going somewhat demented on a piano part that recalls the nerve-jangling pianistics of Mike Garson on Aladdin Sane, or Steve Nieve’s dramatic interventions on something like “Clubland”.

Anyone coming to Love Songs For Patriots expecting something sedate, a cosy echo of bygone woes, AMC in middle age smoothing over the turmoil of yore, may well be shocked at this brutal exercise in sonic violence?and will doubtless be taken further aback by the sheer malevolence, three songs in, of “Patriot’s Heart”, which has the relentless, disturbed momentum of Costello’s “Tokyo Storm Warning”, Eitzel piling on a ton of mordant disdain over the band’s woozy lurch. Like the astonishing “Job To Do”?whose cunnilingual suck and slurp recalls Honi Soit’s “Strange Times In Casablanca”?and the shattering juggernaut that is “America Loves The Minstrel Show”, the long, tense, occasionally rabid “Patriot’s Heart” describes a maggoty political universe, ghastly in its corrupt duplicity, rotten to its miserable fucking core, much given to pageant, oppression, gaudy violence. The latter’s vaudevillian darkness similarly invades the sarcastic lounge-room vamp of “Mantovani The Mind Reader” (“And at the end of his show he has a marvellous goodbye/A shot-glass melody for a tympani sky”) and the rickety comedy of “The Horseshoe Wreath In Bloom”.

It’s ironic that what the Bush government is doing in America’s name has provoked some of Eitzel’s most furious songs at what is otherwise, from what people close to him tell you, a happy time in a personal life more typically characterised by ongoing turmoil. Mark, in other words, may feel at war with the people who run his country, but has reached an apparent amnesty with the many demons that previously assailed him?as evidenced here on the lovely “Another Morning” (which was featured on Uncut’s recent Americana 2004 CD), “Love Is” and “Only Love Can Set You Free”.

He can still, better than anyone, write the kind of songs that capture with sad perfection the disintegration of relationships that have soured beyond recognition?here, specifically, we have the wry, downbeat “Myopic Books”, which marks the first time Dinosaur Jr and Saul Bellow have appeared in the same song, and the resigned, world-weary, seen-it-all-before “Song Of The Rats Leaving The Sinking Ship” (“I swear you want to say goodbye even more than you want to breathe”). But even on the similarly downcast “The Devil Needs You”, with its long instrumental coda?a swirling mist of skittish drums, bleary horns, guitar feedback and ominous keyboards?the desolation is less complete than previously might have been the case.

For all its fear and loathing, Love Songs For Patriots is finally uplifting, and the track I keep coming back to here is the troubled but eventually optimistic “Home”, which has the epic humanity that defined AMC’s earlier masterpiece, 1990’s Everclear. Vudi’s guitars carry the thing on clouds of six-string glory, while Eitzel gives passionate voice to the best thing anyone can hope for, which is to somehow belong?to someone, something, somewhere. “I hope I make it to a warm heart,” Eitzel sings. “I hope I don’t end up wherever the washed-up are hung,” he goes on, a troubled voice in a universal gloaming, giving light to a saddening dark. Believe me, a brilliant record.

Zbigniew Preisner (there’s one for the Scrabble match) is Poland’s film music god, having scored Kieslowski’s Three Colours and Dekalog. His work here for the overblown, befuddled Thomas Vinterberg turkey is tastefully shimmery, and strident only when necessary. Perhaps he could lease it out to an infinitely superior movie, which shouldn’t be hard to find. Among Vinterberg’s hilarious sleevenotes is a ludicrous boast: “It’s all in the film… including an excellent song I wrote. It is in Latin, and just as there are seven days, there are seven words in the song. Here they are?Ira Dei. Chaos Mundi. Homo Querem. Amorem.” That clears that up, then.

Latest soppy Kate Hudson vehicle? you have to wonder what her Black Crowes hubby makes of it all? features an eclectic pop selection, with a few little smashers more by accident than design. Devo’s “Whip It” and Liz Phair’s “Extraordinary” are about as daring as it gets, while there are decent if overtly radio-friendly offerings from John Hiatt and Joan Osborne, plus the resurrected Simon & Garfunkel’s too-cute-to-shoot “At The Zoo”. Zero 7 adorn a zillion coffee tables with “Destiny”, while Bowie’s “Fashion”, still beep-beeping boldly and brassily, is the pacemaker (sorry) for the rest.

As clinical as plastic surgery in Florida. Gabriel & Dresden are DJs who’ve remixed Madonna and Britney and had a hit as Motorcycle. Presumably the producers of the already notorious Nip/Tuck required a musical sheen as deceptively pristine and callously effective as its anti-hero sex-addict surgeon, and they’ve got it. This rush of modern techno-chill drives through The Engine Room, Poloroid and Wax Poetic (featuring Norah Jones) before getting fleshy and flirty with Client, Kinky and then Bebel Gilberto working with Thievery Corporation. What must America think of us Europeans? Nice and sleazy.

Jim jarmusch’s imminent set of dryly comic vignettes, filmed over the course of a decade, will pitch him to a new generation, as it features Jack and Meg White, Wu-Tang Clan (RZA scored Jarmusch’s last film, Ghost Dog) and Steve Coogan among its cast. One of the better sequences sees Tom Waits and Iggy Pop mock-bickering over who’s more famous, and both contribute to this studiously cool soundtrack. Jarmusch, closely associated with The Clash, Talking Heads and Neil Young in the past, goes for pieces which underline the atmosphere of specific scenes, rather than random marquee names.

Bookended by two of the seven billion versions of “Louie, Louie” currently on record (Richard Berry & The Pharoahs to begin, Iggy as penultimate flourish before a surge of that rock beast Gustav Mahler), it gets lively with two Funkadelic cuts and The Stooges’ matchless “Down On The Street”. Eclecticism ensues, with The Skatalites, Jerry Byrd and Eric “Monty” Morris. Waits then combines with C-Side for “Saw Sage”, one of those abstract, percussive Waits instrumentals which sound like angry children bashing upturned milk bottles and pulling cats’ tails. The real glory is “Crimson And Clover” by Tommy James & The Shondells, the extraordinarily airy, ambitious, reverb-riddled romantic reverie which, years ahead of its time, knocks everything Brian Wilson ever recorded into a cocked hat. Those present simply can’t fathom how to produce it?they actually don’t know what they’re doing?so it eternally retains a muddled, misty magic all its own. Like “Down On The Street”, but for entirely different reasons, it’s one of the greatest records ever made.

After two acclaimed EPs, FTW’s much-delayed debut album is certainly impressive?but, like the ludicrous Polyphonic Spree, somewhat overstated. Caked in strings, horns, mellotrons and shrieking operatics, nearly every track is epic or stately enough to close most other band’s albums.

They even wrap it with clunky trip hop. There are passages of fractured beauty on “Losing Carolina; For Drusky” and “Donald Pleasance”, but these are still poor compensations for either songs or trailblazing. Instead, they fall somewhere between Mercury Rev’s billowing drama and Sparklehorse’s witchy atmospherics.

A case of mistaking ambition for ability.

The sound of sherbert and acid fizzing in tandem drives this monumental example of NYC psych-pop. Helmed by the writing, guitar and vocal skills of Hilarie Sidney (from Apples In Stereo) and Norwegian Per Ole Bratset (from Palermo), the 13 cuts here are so vivid they give off an aura comparable to the Velvets. The Marks are not really generic power-pop, nor are they atypically East Coast. The best songs, like “Queen Of Verlaine” and “National Time”, have total integrity?even their thrashes ooze melodic class.

“What if every dream I have ends in bitter sorrow?” John Hoeffleur sings in a sepulchral baritone that leaves little doubt that the real truth is already far worse. Building on the same world-weary alt.country template as The Beauty Shop’s impressive debut, Yr Money Or Yr Life, a cast of fatally flawed souls drowning in disappointment and terminal ennui glide their fucked-up way through Crisis Helpline’s 10 songs. The bleakness is only tempered by the eerie folk-punk surrealism of tracks such as “Babyshaker”and “Rumplestiltskin Lives”. Fans of Johnny Dowd and the Violent Femmes will find much to please them here.

With their last album, 2001’s The Ugly People Vs The Beautiful People, The Czars emerged as masters of the crestfallen chamber ballad. Produced by Simon Raymonde, ex-Cocteau Twin and the band’s label boss, it distilled the intimacy of 2000’s Before…But Longer into a richly layered quilt of baroque pop, luxuriantly embroidered by the vivid vocalisms of leader John Grant. If anything, the self-produced Goodbye is even more striking.

Grant’s elegantly expressive baritone remains its centrepiece, but plaintive piano (he was a classical scholar back in his younger days) and occasional strings powder the air with the delicate doom of a failed Regency romance. It’s often beautiful stuff, belying the misery within. Lyrically, it’s a catharsis of ugly sorts, Grant struggling through the mire of lost loves and missed opportunity with equal parts guile and bile. “Trash”, for instance, drips with lover-scorned vitriol, intoning, “Save that bullshit for the bedroom/That’s where all your best work gets done”, before a gentle courtier-waltz gives way to a scything guitar solo and the concluding line, “Why don’t you try sticking your dick/Into all the things that you bought/With your hard-earned cash?”The wonderful “Bright Black Eyes”is equally scathing, but Grant rises to the kind of soaring vocal crescendo mostly reserved for emotional uplift,

The cultish success of Berlin’s Puppetmastaz, Nottingham’s Pitman and Jewish-Canadian cabaret MC Gonzalez suggests that the micro-genre of comedy hip hop isn’t about to disappear any time soon. The latest addition to this dubious fold is Newport’s Goldie Lookin Chain, whose signing to a major via Must Destroy (home to The Darkness) implies that much is expected of them. Aliases like Eggsie and Adam Hussain and track titles such as “Your Mother’s Got A Penis” indicate their level of seriousness. The mordant humour that fuels tales of empty days spent stoned in car parks can raise a smile, but the goonish caricaturing quickly palls.

To fans of African music, S

Strange and serene, Red Tape is a refreshing contrast not just to Andrew Brooks’ 2002 debut You, Me & Us (an orthodox house offering), but to anything else around at the moment. Like fruitier labelmate The Soft Pink Truth, Brooks is a young, gay man whose accessible, glitch-flecked digital funk carries a homoerotic subtext (his reading of PJ Harvey’s “Mansize”, for example, the weak link here). Rich in ideas and lissomly executed, beguiling quasi-disco gems “Roxxy”, “Bedbugs” and “Burning Buxx” reveal a Beck-like versatility. Indeed, for all its wayward experiments, Red Tape fascinates and satisfies at every turn.

You won’t find Messed Up Here Tonight in regular record stores? it’s only available from Jesse Malin’s merchandising stand at gigs or on his website. But it’s worth the effort for a frantic live version of “Wendy” (from his solo debut) recorded last December with Bruce Springsteen, and half a dozen live tracks recorded in Liverpool in January with Ryan Adams on drums?immediately before Adams fell off stage and broke his arm. There’s a soundcheck cover of “Everybody’s Talkin'” from the same gig, and it’s topped by four studio outtakes, the best of which are a lovely, wasted ballad called “Red Eye” and the 2001 B-side “Cigarettes & Violets”.