The only consolation in Brothers in Arms’ planet-conquering weight was the way it crushed Dire Straits, too, leaving them capable of only one limp follow-up before Knopfler retreated to a low-key solo career. Shangri-La should be more appealing, steeped as it is in pulp narratives and mid-century Americana: Sonny Liston and McDonald’s founder Ray Kroc are featured, and “Don’t Crash The Ambulance”, seemingly set down a Cold War missile silo, gets the hardboiled lingo just right. But mostly it’s mannered, played with tepid, mid-paced, life-draining politeness: more James Last than James Ellroy.

If Merritt’s acclaimed 2002 debut Bramble Rose was her very own Elite Hotel or Heart Like A Wheel, the follow-up’s gone all Dusty in Memphis There are still echoes of slow-burning enchantment on the likes of “Plainest Thing”, but the classic soul ache of “Still Pretending”and “Good Hearted Man”‘s brassy gospel are more Carla Thomas than Linda or Emmylou. Merritt may have realised a dream in enlisting producer George Drakoulias and teenhood heroine Maria McKee (The Jayhawks’ Gary Louris is here, too), but the key lies in the expressive pull and dew-on-the-vine purity of her remarkable voice. For hip-shaking Stax sass, try out “I Am Your Tambourine”or “Shadow In The Way”.

As frontman of grunge-soulsters The Afghan Whigs, Dulli presided over a band for whom covers were an exhilarating part of their modus operandi, so it’s surprising that he’s only just got round to devoting a whole album to them. But although the breadth of his track selection is impressive (Bj

An accessible, melodically vivacious primer for those yet to sample the surreal guy-done-wrong repertoire of Douglas (practically everybody, then). On Statecraft, this unsung New York heir to the geekdom of Jonathan Richman benefits from the fret-pizzazz of Joey Santiago. These 16 tracks bring a Daniel Johnston-style kookiness to post-OJ Edwyn funk (“Splitting The Atom”), Pinky Blue-era Altered Images (“Close To Me”) and, with “Free At Last”, the year’s best punk-pop riff this side of Graham Coxon’s “Freakin’ Out”.

Songs about women and a series of duets with them add up to a concept album of an unusual stripe from Louisiana swamp-rock legend Tony Joe White. Shelby Lynne adds her lazy Alabama drawl to the smoochy swamp-rock of “Can’t Go Back Home”. Lucinda Williams smoulders with intent. Emmylou Harris is less earthy, but her keening tones contrast thrillingly with the pebble-dashed vocals of white, who, now in his 60s, sounds like a cross between JJ Cale and Johnny Cash. If you dug the two recent Country Got Soul compilations, this should be your next stop.

Philadelphia has long been known as “the city of brotherly love”, but a number of nu-soul artists-namely Ursula Rucker, Vivian Green, Floetry (who relocated there from their native south London), Jazzyfatnastees and Jaguar Wright?are challenging that epigram’s gender bias.

Most notable among them is Jill Scott, who first made her name on Philadelphia’s spoken-word scene but broke into music after she was discovered by Amir “?uestlove” Thompson, drummer with conscious hip hop crew Roots. Scott co-wrote their 1999 Top 40 hit “You Got Me”, and subsequently recorded with them before going on to work with Will Smith, Common and Musiq, among others. She made her solo debut in 2000 with the wryly titled Who Is Jill Scott?

Words And Sounds Vol 1. Despite its slipperiness, “nu-soul” is as good a term as any to describe Scott’s style?a blend of R&B and hip hop with ’70s soul?but her rootsy poeticism sets her apart from the likes of Mary J Blige and aligns her far more closely with Erykah Badu. Beautifully Human is a warm and sensuous, seductively fluid affair, with Scott easing off on her trademark spoken scat and instead unfurling a singing voice that moves from plaintive, Holiday-toned blues through Kitt-enish cool to Franklin-like gale force. Only the crypto-cosmic nonsense of “I Keep Still Here” (“I am the love unshattered/I am the great orgasm”) mars an otherwise emotionally subtle, righteously soulful treat.

Hovering somewhere between the endearingly shambolic charms of early Built To Spill and the hushed and intimate tones of the late Elliott Smith, Rogue Wave continue Sub Pop’s recent revitalisation in the wake of The Shins and The Constantines.

Former dotcom worker Zach Rogue escaped the San Francisco silicon crash to New York, where he fashioned a deliberately rustic sound despite his urban surroundings with producer friend Bill Racine.

Inventively hook-laden, crammed with joyous harmonies and lo-fi studio trickery, this is the sound of a creative spirit rejuvenated and unleashed.

Elliott has walked with the greats, from Elvis to Hendrix, in a chequered career as sideman and garage band leader. Hep, though? his seventh solo album?confirms his own strain of illusionless, desolate black humour and backwater regret. The pedal-steel-laced music is spare, artful rock’n’roll, and Elliott’s mordant voice sometimes yelps into an Orbison shiver. But it’s his careful, implacable stories of beaten but unbowed losers that makes this connect: trawling through Tampa for temporary thrills or staring at their TVs, searching for an exit, yet stuck in “Nowhereville”.

There are several surprise elements to Weller’s covers LP. The first is that he’s made it now, for such collections are more usually delivered as a contractual exercise when artist and record label are parting company. Yet oddly, Studio 150 is Weller’s debut for a new label. The second is the choice of material, as he’s avoided the ’60s rock classics we might have expected in favour of a varied selection that ranges from funk to folk. Apparently, they are not even his own Desert Island Discs, but simply songs he felt he could meaningfully reinvent and make his own. As with most such enterprises, sometimes it works and sometimes it goes horribly wrong. “Close To You” was an utterly daft idea that Weller admits began as a joke with his kids on holiday. There it should have remained. Gordon Lightfoot’s “Early Morning Rain” is given a country-tinged acoustic treatment but it’s unclear in what way this makes it his ‘own’, for if Dylan’s version on Self Portrait was pointless enough, Weller’s take has even less purpose. Neil Young’s “Birds” is another rum choice, while doing “All Along The Watchtower” in the style of Blue

The Go! Team’s chuck-it-all-in-the-Moulinex philosophy has yielded one of the year’s strongest debut albums, something like The Avalanches go C86 or a big beat Belle & Sebastian, with much fun to be had spotting where the instruments start and the samples end. The song titles read like situationist slogans? “Junior Kickstart”, “Feelgood By Numbers”, “Panther Dash” ?and when they’re not doing hairclip harmonies, two girls do a rap/ girl group thing over crash-bang-wallop arrangements which sometimes sound like they’ve been lifted from ’60s TV shows, other times battered old northern seven-inchers. And the thing is, no note feels wasted. No filler, just smiles all round.

Three decades since joining forces on No Pussyfooting and The Evening Star, Brian Eno and Robert Fripp are old masters of ambient avant-pop. Their latest collaboration, titled with knowing reference to their shared past, contains seven wordless tracks of celestial self-indulgence and deluxe sonic wank. While Fripp’s guitar noodles and gloops into infinity, Eno adds cinematic chord clusters and icy electronic mist. In purely experimental terms, of course, The Equatorial Stars is the emperor’s old hat. But standout tracks such as “Lyra”and “Tarazed”contain distant echoes of the duo’s superlative instrumental work on David Bowie’s “Heroes”album. Soothing, quietly beautiful, utterly inessential.

Jon Spencer’s commitment to rejigging the blues according to his own punk aesthetic has sustained him for 13 years. His band cut a distinctively rough dash until 2002’s Plastic Fang, which replaced their visceral riffing with conventional song structure and?thanks to Rolling Stones producer Steve Jordan-a conscious retroism. For seventh album Damage, the (now “Jon Spencer”-free) trio hired five different producers (Jordan, David Holmes and DJ Shadow among them), plus guests Martina Topley-Bird and Chuck D to further broaden their sound, which embraces Stax-style soul, nuggety funk and gruff, politicised rap with equal enthusiasm. More variety in their blues, certainly, but no less vigour.

Mandarin largely draw on late-’90s post-rock?all somnambulant guitars and feedback, a formula that quickly lost its potency. The weaker tracks here conform to dynamic clich

“No one ever said to me that I should write a symphony”, sings Alun Woodward over “Get Action!”. But, through their previous two albums (The Great Eastern and Hate), The Delgados sailed ever further into a blustery squall of epic orchestration. Less sturm und drang than strum and jangle, Universal Audio is a more focused confection-“Everybody Come Down” and “Girls Of Valour” have the honeyed harmonies and citric tang of The Beach Boys filtered through XTC. There’s the odd lapse into melancholy indie-rock ordinaire, but at their best they seem like a band newly inspired by the possibilities of simplicity.

Hailed in some quarters as heirs to The Verve and The Stones Roses with their self-titled 2002 debut, The Music were also widely dismissed as prog-rock revivalists. Happily the Yorkshire foursome’s second album largely reins in their bloated fuzz-rock bombast for a more grounded, focused sound. They still worship Led Zeppelin, particularly on the huge and vaguely Eastern-sounding blunderbuss of a title track. But at least in the album’s latter stages there are softly chiming melodies and everyday emotions that point towards a grand future as muscular soft-rock balladeers. Perennially uncool, perhaps, but still a passionate and energetic racket.

For several years, Big Steve and Stephanie Arlene have carved out a very individual London-Americana sound. Their relocation to Sacramento last year has obviously been inspirational: Going To California more than delivers on the promise of their debut. Great picking and melodies, Stephanie’s sassy vocals, Big Steve’s London drawl, memorable songs celebrating married life, chastising family members, reflecting on small-town life. Produced in Austin, Texas, it mixes tough country rockers and languid ballads (with a dash of mariachi), and the spirit of love and lived experience comes through on every tune.

As Har Mar Superstar, Sean Tillman-a short, fat Minnesotan who strips to leopard-print thong and socks to deliver lewd R&B songs over backing tracks-suggests a joke funny only once. His second UK release strips away much of the ironic cladding of his 2002 debut, exposing his superb white R&B voice, accomplished rapping and groovy pop songs. Pristine production renders this as vital as anything by Justin Timberlake, and the reinvention of “Alone Again, Naturally” is a revelation. Wisely, Har Mar has now gone beyond the joke.

Nyles Lannon has evolved three separate projects to enable him to explore his musical interests: song-based slowcore with the band Film School; instrumental glitch as n.Ln; and, as N. Lannon, the territory somewhere in between. Rather than a stylistic no-man’s-land, Chemical Friends maps Lannon’s natural habitat. His sweetly downbeat tunes and reverbed murmur recall Elliott Smith, but it’s the setting of this against programmed beats that sets him apart. Like Simon & Garfunkel reared on Loveless, or perhaps Nick Drake meets Fennesz, but N. Lannon is in a felicitous field of one.

“I WAS AT MY smartest when I was 11,” said Matthew Friedberger recently, “and I never really got any smarter.” Little wonder, then, that the second album by Friedberger and his long-suffering sister Eleanor often sounds like the work of preternaturally brainy, hyperactive children.

Gallowsbird’s Bark, their 2003 debut, suggested The Fiery Furnaces were a playful garage-pop band with an unusual surfeit of ideas. Blueberry Boat, however, is an extraordinary leap into the wide blue yonder, where every song contains at least three great pop tunes battling for supremacy. At first, it seems like an epic self-indulgence; Matthew’s short attention span played out on a preposterous scale. It lasts 76 minutes, and several songs stretch beyond eight. But the Furnaces rarely stick with a theme beyond 30 seconds. Instead, they build collages where genres are haphazardly stapled together: nursery song, manic carny music, the interlude themes at hockey games, prog, indie rock, Beefheart, The Who, Pavement, crotchety electronica and, frequently, avant-garde sea shanty.

Gradually, the Friedbergers’ method reveals itself. While their debut was informed by Eleanor’s international wandering, Blueberry Boat is the product of Matthew’s imaginative crunching together of history books, old maps, the glossary to Moby Dick and a vivid, detailed nonsense vision that’s like Edward Lear relocated to Brooklyn. His point, he claims, is to create a history of American travellers. Blueberries are the quintessential American product, and the blueberry boat symbolises cultural imperialism.

The Furnaces, though, are too entertainingly impatient to keep their allegories tidy. As the music relentlessly shifts, so Eleanor and Matthew’s deadpan duelling vocals trip off on endless digressions: the blueberry boat is attacked by pirates on the South China Sea; European Championship football fixtures confuse American sales reps in a Damascus cyber-cafe; “Little tender-footed crabs meet my knuckleduster.”

It’s a lot to take in. And sometimes, as another brilliant tune (“My Dog Was Lost But Now He’s Found”, say) flies past with lunatic haste, it seems they can be eccentric to the detriment of their own songs. Persevere, though. What initially resembles a mess slowly crystallises, after six or seven listens, into a polyhedric and endlessly fascinating album: bright, daft, wise, infantile and far more memorable than one would ever have guessed.

When Dave Faulkner and Brad Shepherd, brains and balls of the Hoodoo Gurus, split up five years ago to explore trippy fusion and nugget punk respectively, fans only prayed for this day. A permanent schism? What are the chances? Nil, as Mach Shau?title nicked from The Beatles in Hamburg?proves. Faulkner’s super-smart lyrics still here? Check. The consummate golden guitar crank and grind still firing? Check. They blitz through “Sour Grapes”, rise and fall anthems like “Girls On Top” and the tear-jerking “Song Of the Year” with renewed grandeur.