Sinatra’s fans are just as fervent as those of Dylan and the Dead when it comes to trading privately taped concert recordings. Officially released for the first time here are two of the most sought-after.

The Blackpool show came at a crucial juncture in Sinatra’s career. He’d just signed to Capitol, and From Here To Eternity had yet to premiere. His personal stock may have been dangerously low but he still possessed that ability to mesmerise an audience. The orchestral accompaniment may sound as if it’s in another room, but Sinatra confirms his undisputed greatness as he jokes as well as he croons.

The Tokyo show benefits from much better sound quality, with the Bill Miller Sextet miraculously retaining the essence of Sinatra’s studio versions of “I’ve Got You Under My Skin” and “I Get A Kick Out Of You”.

First Sandy Denny, then Richard Thompson departed, and no one gave Fairport a prayer. Fronted by Simon Nicol and Dave Swarbrick, Angel Delight and Babbacombe Lee, both from 1971, surprisingly rejuvenated the group, the latter a concept album about “the man they couldn’t hang” that actually realised its ambitions. Nicol then jumped ship, leaving Fairport bereft of any founder member. Babbacombe Lee, while a critical success, sold poorly and, on Rosie, the surviving duo of Swarb and Dave Pegg went for an ill-advised contemporary approach. This despite recruiting distinguished friends and ex-members? Denny and Thompson included? as guests, a modus operandi that Fairport follow to this day.

Although it failed to register 0.0001 on the cultural Richter scale when first released in the early ’80s, Mr Nicely does a very pleasing line in faux-psych. The tracks that misfire sound like Soft Cell outtakes or Erasure on ketamine, and any attempt to emulate ’60s production trickery falls flat on its Fairlight. The best of it, though, belongs with the pantheon of great post-psychedelica, like Prince’s Around The World In A Day album, while “Beverly” looks back to Scott Walker and forward to The Beloved and Ibiza bliss.

The one undisputed classic here, “HillyFields”, commemorates the fact that the centre of the universe is a small piece of parkland in south London.

It may not include Bohannon’s mid-’70s hits “Footstompin’Music”and “Disco Stomp”, but stick around. Play it?his best moments from five albums for Mercury between ’77 and ’80 ?and you’re doing your thing like a hammer, knowing you got to stay funky. With a rhythmic fire that burns like a blaze-up between James Brown, Barry White and Talking Heads, mixing African beat with disco heat, Bohannon?drummer and former Motown arranger?took dance to the point of zen, years before people redefined the noun “trance”. Unequivocally fantastic; it’ll take a tremendous act of will to take this off repeat play.

It’s an odd time to evaluate Paul Simon’s solo career in light of his successful 2004 reunion tour with Art Garfunkel. But maybe all that boomer nostalgia needs a little levity, and the sweep of his solo work proves Simon has never dwelled on the past. The Studio Recordings 1972-2000 is that rare bird?an attempt to collect an artist’s entire oeuvre. Never prolific, occasionally over-ambitious, Simon’s career is that of a pensive, cerebral pop craftsman, less interested in musical trends of the day than in finding an appropriate?sometimes daring? sonic backdrop for his acerbic social observations, pithy narratives and gentle reflections. Nonetheless, as the years wear on, Simon’s ability to sustain the intimacy that marked his greatest songs wanes, even as his appetite for musical expansiveness grows.

The remastering is breathtaking throughout this set. The early records, especially the first two, sound radiant, bringing out textures never hinted at before. The brick-box includes all nine of Simon’s studio albums, housed in digipacks. Each contains several extra tracks (30 in all), generally working drafts or demos of familiar songs. There’s no booklet? simply the original lyrics and production notes. Along with Dylan and The Beatles, Simon was a ’60s prophet, instrumental in radically expanding the canvas of popular song, capturing the conscience of the times with as much eloquence and passion as any artist. The duo’s swan song, the ethereal “Bridge Over Troubled Water”, transcended all; a humble gospel song wrapped in sentiments so universal that it instantly launched Simon into the songwriting elite.

His eponymous first solo step, Paul Simon 1972 , is loose and free, with bits of reggae and Latin influences (foreshadowing, that), sublimating big social statements to streetwise hipster personae and deceptively intuitive songcraft. Long on slice-of-life vignettes, it spawned two hits (“Mother And Child Reunion” and “Me And Julio Down By The Schoolyard”). But, as insinuating as those are, the meat lies in “Duncan”, a beautifully sung, aw-shucks reminiscence mirroring the take-stock mood of the times, and “Paranoia Blues”. The latter, a gripping, bottleneck-laced cut, solidified Simon’s reputation as the consummate NY songwriter. While you could read social commentary in between the lines?voices from the generation of the spooked, perhaps?there was plenty of room for humour, too.

There Goes Rhymin’ Simon 1973 is this set’s crown jewel. The songs, many of them cut at Muscle Shoals with greats like Jimmy Johnson and Roger Hawkins, represent Simon at his most melodically indelible. There’s a graceful intimacy here, from the rhythmic kick of “Kodachrome” to the gospel swing of “Loves Me Like A Rock”.

Rhymin’ Simon and its follow-up, Still Crazy After All These Years 1975 , angle for a level of sophistication more akin to Gershwin or Berlin than Dylan. “Tenderness”, which echoes Ray Charles’ “You Don’t Know Me”, and “Something So Right”, with its gorgeous string arrangement by Quincy Jones, remain spine-tingling works 30 years on. The album’s sublime centrepiece, meanwhile, “American Tune”, captures the unravelling of ’60s idealism in the starkest terms: “I don’t know a dream that’s not been shattered/Or driven to its knees.” Here, the protagonist of S&G’s “Homeward Bound” finally realises there’s no home to go home to. Still Crazy, meanwhile, was cut in the wake of Simon’s failed marriage. With its jazzy sheen, sodden New York atmospherics, and melancholy verging on ennui, it’s torch music for the broken-hearted. Like other wrecked masterpieces of its era (such as Dylan’s Blood On The Tracks), it has a corrosive sadness at its core that no amount of tasteful jazz chops by ace session players can hide. It’s over-produced, nasty in places, but still bears the hallmarks of a legend in his prime. The title track, with its woozy late-night reverie and watery Bob James arrangement, is Simon at his self-referential best, but also a prime example of why punk rock had to happen. “Have A Good Time” is even more telling, speaking of ’70s hedonism the way Simon’s most passionate ’60s compositions captured that generation’s idealism. It was Simon’s last album proper for eight years. During the drought, Simon appeared in Woody Allen’s Annie Hall, switched record labels and played the film-maker. The less said about the music for Simon’s 1980 movie One-Trick Pony , the better. A triumph of style over substance, it’s got plenty of groove but precious few memorable cuts (“Late In The Evening” was the hit). A couple of fine bonus tracks, “Stranded In A Limousine” and a sad Vietnam-era ballad, “Soft Parachutes”?which was the film character’s fictional big hit?salvage this disc. But a rare Warner Brothers faux pas, omitting Simon’s 1977 hit single “Slip Sliding Away”, disappoints. Go figure.

The little-regarded anomaly of Simon’s catalogue?Hearts And Bones 1983 ?followed the ballyhooed 1982 S&G reunion. Simon expressed disappointment with this record, and it was a failure on the charts. Still, it’s his most nakedly personal and, in its weird way, most soulful record. It’s been described as Simon’s Tonight’s The Night-and, while Simon never possessed Young’s impulsive bent, Hearts And Bones’ dark themes and eloquent narratives, from post-war snapshots to panoramic vignettes, trace complex emotional terrain, making this his unsung masterpiece. “What is the point of this story?” he sings in “Train In The Distance”, one of the most perceptive songs of his career. “The thought that life could be better,” comes the answer. An acoustic demo of this song is the singular highlight of this box.

Graceland 1986 was next, and its success reconnected Simon with his rightful audience?baby-boomers seeking unthreatening, multicultural spirituality. An influential effort which shone deserved light on South African musicians, there’s nonetheless aloofness in Simon’s songwriting here. Given to cuteness (“You Can Call Me Al”) and irrelevance (“That Was Your Mother”), Graceland is more touristy than revelatory. While admirable for opening up Western tastes to world beat, substantial portions of this record sound forced. Only “Boy In The Bubble” (“These are the days of miracle and wonder”) and the title song take their place in the upper regions of Simon’s canon.

The Rhythm Of The Saints 1990 shifted the focus from South Africa to Brazil, and is both less accessible and more oblique. Simon’s melodies are so thin that the grooves just vanish into air, though its musical landscape remains self-consciously adventurous. “Born At The Right Time” is the lone standout.

Songs From The Capeman 1997 , the aural companion to Simon’s Broadway flop, and You’re The One 2000 , are his most recent outings. Expanding upon and recasting the street music of his youth, the former’s precision and attention to every sordid thought and character detail are daunting. Despite some nice moments (the elegiac “Trailways Bus”), the album does not cohere?the spoken asides and impenetrable narratives aren’t conducive to practical listening. You’re The One, the long-awaited return of Paul Simon, modest songwriter, is preoccupied with ageing and mortality, veering from joyful simplicity to ruminations on love and philosophy. Alternately ponderous, comic and disconnected, it’s merely workmanlike

If the excitable Boy In Da Corner thrust teenage MC and producer Dizzee Rascal to unthinkable heights, Showtime proudly posits the UK’s leading grime ambassador back where he started: vexed, 10 storeys up, in Bow, E3. There is now much for Dylan Mills to discuss (hence worthy episodes “Respect Me” and “Get By”) but his “ghetto frame of mind” remains untainted by fame. Showtime sounds incredible. With his arresting style of mutant grime-pop, Mills dazzles on every track, his instinctive flair for melody and arrangement enhancing “Graftin'” and “Flyin'”.

As “Dream”, a cute cover of Captain Sensible’s “Happy Talk”, confirms, Showtime proves Dizzee’s capable of anything.

After years spent in one desert or another, Howe Gelb currently resides in his Danish wife’s hometown of Aarhus, when he’s not on the road here and there. Combined with the variegated musical territory, this makes the latest Giant Sand album a decidedly far-flung affair. Among its 15 tracks are references to New York City, songs called “Napoli” and “Classico”, gentle samba shuffles, songs about German hotel rooms, songs sung in French, and even ?extending its geographical range somewhat?a song called “Flying Around The Sun With Remarkable Speed”. The line-up is more international, too, with Peter Dombernowsky on drums, Th

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.