It’s seven years since Katell Keineg’s second album Jet appeared on Elektra, knocking spots off all the post-Alanis angst-driven female competition, though commercially the record sank without trace. The belated follow-up is an utterly delicious record. Like Natalie Merchant or Annie Lennox, Keineg has a voice that demands attention and cuts through any musical frequency, while left-of-centre tunes such as “Shaking The Disease”and “What’s The Only Thing Worse Than The End Of Time?”confirm her as a songwriter who combines a genuinely poetic sensibility with melodic flair and invention. Worth the wait.

In keeping with their position as an ensemble who knew life before Dury’s rhythm stick tickled a nation, the jazzy R&B inflexions of the Blockheads are as chewy as before, even if the guv’nor isn’t around any more. “Where’s The Party?”, “Moving On”, Derek Hussey’s ornate “Spread it” and John Turnbull’s “Shut Up And Dance” are chips off an old block. And just to show this isn’t some cheap and cheerful knees-up, Chas Jankel and co have enlisted producer John Leckie to make sure the glass sparkles.

Much better than the dreadful Duets albums with which Sinatra finished his career, Charles’finale still errs on the syrupy side. Though the duettists (plus orchestra) were present in the studio for once, Charles’only interesting vocal complement is Willie Nelson, straight-talking through “It Was A Very Good Year”. Gladys Knight helps inspire some gospel grit, and Charles finds poetry in a Bernie Taupin lyric, but it’s his voice, almost pathetically frail yet still capable of true emotion, that occasionally slices through the schmaltz.

“LONELINESS,” Ed harcourt sings on this album’s song of the same name, “what would I do without you?” As a sentiment, it could almost be a mantra for singer-songwriters, wryly summarising the plight of the solitary troubadour. To his credit, Harcourt works hard to resist fey self-pity. Like those of Rufus Wainwright, his songs luxuriate in orch-pop settings, with his facility on a range of instruments giving him an edge over sensitive acoustic warblers past and present. The influence of late-’60s/early-’70s Brian Wilson?whose lost classic “Still I Dream Of It” he had the good taste to cover last year?is never far away.

Unfortunately, Harcourt only ever comes close to the inexplicable brilliance of Wilson. Like last year’s From Every Sphere, Strangers is never quite special. Harcourt’s breathy Dennis-Wilson-meets-Colin-Blunstone tenor floats mellifluously over workaday piano chords that sound too often like bad Badly Drawn Boy rather than the late, great Elliott Smith.

Strangers works best when at its poppiest, as on the sunny, Supertramp-ish title track, the cutely autobiographical “Born In The ’70s” and the ardent, anthemic “Loneliness”. “Let Love Not Weigh Me Down” lays its emotion with a heavy trowel, and a cobwebbed pump organ fails to turn “Something To Live For” into anything more than a Tom Waits/Sparklehorse crib. “The Trapdoor”, meanwhile, features Lee Underwood-ish guitar fills but falls some way short of Tim Buckley’s hazy driftings. Next time, Ed, step into the unknown. It’s the only way forward.

Thalia Zedek made her name in the early ’90s with Come, an extraordinarily intense Boston band whose rough-hewn, bluesy alt.rock radically distinguished them from their peers. After abandoning Come, Zedek went solo. Trust Not Those…(the title is a scrambled fortune cookie message) suggests the Greek rebetika tradition as overhauled by The Dirty Three, but Zedek’s gruff, resolutely mournful vocals and the relentless see-sawing rhythms stop the album’s potential energy dead in its tracks. By the close of play, it sounds like its very lifeblood is draining through the speakers.

Of Cole’s myriad career collaborators-Bolan, Cale and Beck among them-Luke Vibert may just be the most rewarding. Eager to repeat the chemistry of 2000’s wonderful Stop The Panic, Vibert features here on the unlikely house-groove bluegrass of “Surf Acid Hoedown”, along with a host of similarly enticed electrobods: Bent, Groove Armada, Kumo, Alabama 3, Brian Eno. The result is a kind of fidgety South Pacific Social of ’70s cop show paranoia (“Alert The Sax Police”), guitar-funk breakbeats (“The Interloper”) and, on album standout “Milkshake Roadmap”, the most irresistible head-pulse since Underworld’s “Jumbo”.

Swiftly following her UK debut Segundo (released as her second Argentine LP in 2000), Tres Cosas confirms Molina as a mistress of the soft musical arts. Ghosts of bossa nova inhabit her songs’rhythms and her breathy, precise voice, while her production parallels Four Tet’s folktronica, with slivered acoustic guitar notes alongside quiet electronic storms. Her arrangements are also imaginatively apt, from the unpredictable slow build of the near six-minute “S

Signed to Slash and contemporaries of The Del Fuegos and Beat Farmers, Wisconsin’s BoDeans began cutting solid, if unspectacular, roots-rock with 1986’s Love & Hope & Sex & Dreams. Despite top-notch producers (T-Bone Burnett, Talking Heads’ Jerry Harrison), touring with U2 and a Rolling Stone Best New Band gong, they never quite pulled it off. The tight’n’fast “Wild World” and downbeat ballad “Slipping Into You” apart, their return seems similarly blighted: there’s gusto aplenty, but Sam Llanas’ and Kurt Neumann’s emotive vocal attack and chiming guitars ultimately lack killer hooks or instinct.

In something of an audacious coals-to-Newcastle move, this formerly London-based quartet upped sticks and headed west to become the darlings of the California alt.country/alt.folk scene, and can currently be found working a second job as Pete Yorn’s backing band On Fly The Radar, their second full-length CD release since relocating, they continue to explore loneliness, love and loss, wrapping the sentiments up in unforgettable, harmony-drenched melody.

Nick cave has spent THE past half-decade holding rock’n’roll in contempt, while carving an increasingly traditional plinth for himself in the marbled pantheon of singer-songwriter greats. A run of reflective albums has included some drop-dead classics, but a creeping air of Calvinism and cold porridge has dampened his electrifying muse at times. And although last year’s Nocturama marked a partial return to full-blooded form, it was recorded in a mid-tour rush and lacked focus.

But now, having opened up his songwriting to his fellow Seeds (though not recently departed mainstay Blixa Bargeld) and reunited with Nocturama producer Nick Launay, this double-CD splurge is the happy result. Unconstrained by any over-arching style, both are rich and expansive banquets of soul, folk, blues and punkoid clamour. Featuring the London Community Gospel Choir, the lineage they invoke includes Spiritualized, Tom Waits and Memphis-era Elvis. But mostly they just sound like vintage Cave?chaotic, darkly glamorous and fired by illicit passion. With a lusty peacock strut, he’s got his mojo working again.

Abattoir Blues is the heavier of the pair, born in a controlled explosion of stack-heeled soulman stomping called “Get Ready For Love”. Cave songs sometimes threaten to overwhelm their tormented narrator, but this time he rides the roaring tidal wave with a Dionysian swagger. The Lyre Of Orpheus is gentler, jazzier and spiced with a faintly Latin flavour, from the light-headed semi-calypso “Breathless”to the fierce bolero “Supernaturally”.

Anguished confessions and slavering cannibals lurk within the shadows, but Cave has rarely sounded more romantically upbeat than on strumming single “Nature Boy”, a warm-blooded comedy of seduction and intoxication. Any resemblance to Steve Harley’s “Come Up And See Me (Make Me Smile)” is, of course, purely coincidental. Most chapters from Cave’s 25-year history are represented: woozy lust anthems and hellhound howls, achingly literate laments and quasi-biblical junk-blues eruptions. With this feast of fearsome rock’n’soul, Beelzebub’s favourite lounge singer has returned to reclaim his throne.

“Who are you?” asks Rachid Taha on the title track of an LP that raises awkward but vital questions about racial, political and personal identity in the post-9/11 world. Born in Algeria, raised in Paris, Taha began in French punk band Carte de Sejour but has since emerged as the chef de bande of a cross-cultural musical movement that does for North Africa what Manu Chao achieved for the Latin/Caribbean diaspora. Potently produced by Steve Hillage, authentic Arabic sounds swirl around pounding rock rhythms, heard to particularly fine effect on “Rock El Casbah”, a stirring bilingual homage to Joe Strummer.

In late 1997, Tommy Stinson joined Guns N’Roses. Seven years on, that band’s Chinese Democracy album remains unfinished, so Stinson can hardly be blamed for making a solo record. Varied and melodic with echoes of Big Star, Cheap Trick and, inevitably, The Replacements, there are crisp ballads (“Light Of Day”), Stones-style rockers (“Something’s Wrong”) and the odd full-throttle riff (“Couldn’t Wait”). Opener “Without A View” is a heady brew of acoustic’ guitars, cellos and layered vocals unlike anything we’ve heard from Stinson before. Still, he’d be better advised giving his old mate Westerberg a call.

Taking up the baton so tragically laid down by Bill Hicks in the early ’90s, comedian David Cross also echoes some of the late Sam Kinison’s heavy metal comedic riffery, as an appallingly wonderful, knee-weakening abortion joke illustrates early on here. Though as gross as he can be, Cross isn’t tediously politically incorrect, as anti-war and anti-Bush routines pour fresh and furious scorn on neo-con trickery. A routine about a mega-expensive restaurant’s gold-leaf-topped dessert as “capitalism’s ultimate fuck-you to the poor” will leave you sick and reeling. Ten years we’ve been waiting for this guy…

Americana being everywhere now, it’s getting hard to distinguish between the good stuff and the same old same-old. The fact that Burrito Deluxe boast cornerstones of both The Band and The Flying Burrito Brothers doesn’t actually make the enchilada complete. Garth Hudson is a genius, but he’s wasted on a set of songs as comfy and unchallenging as the proverbial old slippers. Carlton Moody is doubtless a decent cove, but his cornball Nashville larynx is no match for the wavering ache of Gram Parsons. And Se

Even Liam Howlett concedes that The Prodigy’s dismal 2002 comeback single, “Baby’s Got A Temper”, marked the world-conquering Essex rave squad’s nadir. After that, the producer began this troubled project afresh, excising live stooges Keith Flint and Maxim’s contributions, and replacing them with actress Juliette Lewis, rappers Princess Superstar and Kool Keith, and brother-in-law Liam Gallagher. Musically, however, Howlett long ago entered a stylistic cul-de-sac and appears unable to write anything other than numbly aggressive, breakbeat-battered schlock-rock; ideal, still, for clubs and PlayStation 2 games. Flashy standouts “Girls” and “The Way It Is” recall Utah Saints’ poppier moments. The remainder, turgid and humourless, is at best ordinary.

Glaswegian McCluskey fled to America mid-’90s to seek stardom, recording two albums with The Wild Colonials and working with Dr John, The The and Joe Henry. Former Shudder To Think lynchpin Nathan Larson is the latest svengali to believe she’s special?he’s produced this (in Sweden and Manhattan) and written more of it than she has. It’s nearly great, but can’t decide whether it’s classy pop (say, Raissa) or more twisted (PJ Harvey), and falls, albeit gracefully, between two stools. A cover of Matt Johnson’s “Love Is Stronger Than Death” reveals latent power.

The US underground’s current infatuation with all things eldritch and rustically psychedelic has produced some marvellous music of late, most conspicuously from Devendra Banhart. The second album by PG Six?singer and multi-instrumentalist Pat Gubler? is every bit as lovely, flitting between brittle wire-strung harp pieces, gently churning acid-rock and intimate acoustic folk. While Gubler also makes brackish drone-music in the fine Tower Recordings collective, his solo work is more orthodox. Celtic traditions loom out through the mist but, like fellow traveller Alasdair Roberts, Gubler generates a close, mystical atmosphere without lapsing into mimsy clich

A slight improvement on 2002’s grey, DFA-assisted Gotham!, Radio 4 are now closer to a late-’80s pop/funk/house revival group with elements of political protest. Indeed, tracks like “Party Crashers” and “State of Alert” ?although all basically the same song ? come on like INXS doing “Naked In The Rain”, with the occasional touch of Jesus Jones. There’s even a Clash-do-dub pastiche in “Nation”. However, unlike The Clash, Radio 4’s politicking seems spurious and tacked-on ? no one is blamed, and the music isn’t sufficiently strong to change anyone’s mind or move anyone’s heart.

Restless souls, these Thrills. As five Dublin dreamers, they penned a debut album? 2003’s half-million-selling So Much For The City?full of surf-folk snapshots from the month’s holiday they once had in San Diego. Given more Venice Beach-time, they’ve now produced a second effort besotted with the desolation and romance of inner-city Ireland. Out are drowsy Pacific resorts, sand in hair and Las Vegas as vampiric metaphor for love. In are “Faded Beauty Queens”, drunken kebab shop punch-ups, bad sex and wasted lives. Seems the grass has never looked greener back home.

As front-runners of a gaggle of California-infatuated bands from this side of the Atlantic (HAL, Thirteen Senses, Ambershades), however, The Thrills sensibly don’t stray too far musically from their debut’s evocations of Neil Young skimming pebbles with The Beach Boys. Van Dyke Parks guests here, alongside Peter Buck. Opener “Tell Me Something I Don’t Know” threatens a new Britpop direction for 20 seconds, then the Wild West piano tinkles, the five-part harmonies descend like it’s raining Pet Sounds and Conor Deasey’s croak woos us once again.

Bolder and brassier than before, …Bohemia is also painfully bittersweet. The guilt of the LA tan shines through on “You Can’t Fool Old Friends With Limousines”, while “Found My Rosebud” and “The Irish Keep Gate-Crashing” smack of the poolside revelation that There’s No Place Like Home. Yet even when treading through broken bottles in Temple Bar at chucking out time (as on “Saturday Night”), there’s a charming naivety to The Thrills that is forever Malibu.