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”.

On their third album (the first for new label Sub Pop), Comets On Fire have opted to clean up their sound. Although, as this is a band who sound like a cross between Funhouse, Black Flag in their stoner jamming period and Ummagumma, employing one member solely to play the Echoplex (a delay box last used on ’70s science fiction soundtracks), ‘clean’ is a relative concept. Certainly their patented space-grunge is tempered with a folksier edge, courtesy of John Fahey acolyte Ben Chasny (who records solo as Six Organs Of Admittance), but they still manage the neat trick of making classically-minded rock that’s unafraid to skirt the outer limits.

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.