In the mid-’80s Alex Cox, having made Repo Man and Sid & Nancy to some acclaim, was deemed a financially viable punk auteur. This changed after Straight To Hell, his surreal anti-comedy-cum-spaghetti-western, which had a peculiar genesis. Cox had booked a bunch of less than abstemious musicians for a Solidarity Tour of Nicaragua. That tour, due to small matters like a civil war, collapsed, but Cox had the musos under his charge, and somehow talked Island into funding a thrown-together movie using the assembled wasters as cast (for the full story, see the feature on p84).

Surprisingly, the soundtrack was never properly exploited, so Joe Strummer, Elvis Costello and Pogues completists will relish this. Never before available on CD, and extended from a 1987 vinyl release which included less than half the score, it’s remastered by The Pogues’ Philip Chevron and Pray For Rain’s Dan Wool. No less than nine Pogues tracks debut. “The original Stiff album was more a souvenir than an actual soundtrack,” notes Chevron. There are Strummer instrumentals (Morricone meets Carpenter), “Danny Boy” sung by Cait O’Riordan and dialogue from eager wannabe Courtney Love. Pray For Rain “split the residuals”, in their own words, with “the heavyweights on the roster”. It’s torture to my ears, in truth, but a significant and maverick cult collector’s item.

Never meet your heroes, they say. And emphatically avoid jetting off to Iceland and making a record with them. Advice that Jimmy LaValle, aka The Album Leaf, ignores here. After half a decade composing languid West Coast folktronica, LaValle makes the obvious leap by sharing a studio with post-rocking mates Sigur R

A long way from the Afro-pop of “Seven Seconds”, Egypt contains eight tracks paying tribute to Sufi saints of west Africa. N’Dour’s soulful voice takes on the wailing sound of a muezzin calling the faithful to prayer, while the backing is provided by a Cairo string orchestra. This is closer to the devotional music of Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan than N’Dour’s mainstream collaborations, and his non-world music fans may prefer to sit this one out and wait for his next rock album.

Leftfield New York poet-rapper Mike Ladd has already mapped out an apocalyptic musical future on previous solo albums as well as his Infesticons/Majesticons releases. But this could be his masterwork, a panoramic urban collage of verbal graffiti, syncopated retro-jive talk, gutter-punk street hassle and bruise-black humour?”Dire Straits Play Nuremberg”, indeed. Adding techno belches and pizzicato strings to his gritty gumbo of lolloping anti-folk and junk-shop Afro-futurism, Ladd refreshes the bloodline of stoned-genius one-offs from Sun Ra to Hendrix, from Beck to Kool Keith.

Grime?the latest incarnation of the polymorphous London garage scene?hasn’t yet taken the charts by storm as predicted. And evidently seen by her label as a next-generation Ms Dynamite, here Chanelle “Shystie” Calica tries to straddle underground credibility and more assimilable pop-rap. And, as is usual with this sort of thing. it doesn’t entirely work. There’s no doubting the potency of tracks like “Step Bac”, reverberating with grime’s adventurous mix of rawness, ballistics and the baroque. But a misfiring Kanye West-style overhaul of “Make It Easy On Yourself” suggests that, for now, Shystie may be happier ‘keeping it gutter’ than manoeuvring into the mainstream.

The enigmatic “Client A” and “Client B” (Sarah “Dubstar” Blackwood and Kate “Frazier Chorus, Mrs Alan McGee” Holmes) make progress as pristine as their air hostess uniforms. With cameos from both of The Libertines’ leading men (burbling drunkenly

It’s a tried and tested fast-track to success: talented young artist is taken under the wing of one older and wiser, and groomed for the public. But Micah P Hinson’s story is a little different. Befriended at a young and vulnerable age by a Vogue cover model and rock star’s widow in his adopted hometown of Abilene, Texas, Hinson’s life spiralled out of control until, rather than riding into town on glamorous fur coattails, he was arrested for forging prescriptions and jailed. By the age of 19 he was homeless, bankrupt and rejected by his family.

Fortunately, financial destitution inspired creative wealth in the form of a raft of songs that Hinson?a bespectacled 22-year-old with a cracked but lugubrious baritone?recorded in Manchester with The Earlies (under their Names On Records pseudonym), two of whom were his childhood friends in Texas. Their lushly orchestrated arrangements steer him away from self-pity without detracting from the genuine intimacy of his songs, cocooning their skeletal forms with a full-blooded, human warmth. Had Bill “Smog” Callahan woken up in bed on the right side, he might sound a little like this (as, in fact, he did occasionally on 1999’s Knock Knock), though Hinson himself sees Leonard Cohen as more of an influence.

It’s an ambitious but striking debut that demonstrates how the tradition of acoustic songwriting need not be frail to be authentic or enhanced with electronic glitches to be contemporary. While his vulnerability remains intact on tracks like the eerie “The Possibilities”, “Don’t You Forget” ends in a positively intense fashion and by “On My Way” Hinson is roaring. Any initial thoughts of Hinson as yet another tortured troubadour are dismissed. Truly, a gospel of redemption to believe in.

Recorded live on a reel-to-reel in a disused school, the debut from this London art noise project pivots around a wickedly potent take on the blues. There are echoes of Nick Cave’s From Her To Eternity, but…Bender’s third member, film-maker/curator Geraldine Swayne, navigates them towards eerie folk. Despite the improvised conception, there’s a sinewy discipline about these cloud-rumbling vistas.

One half of the German avant-techno duo Dauerfisch, Andre Abshagen indulges his more nostalgic pop leanings under his Pet alias. Much of Player One Ready deliberately evokes the more clunky, commercial end of ’70s electronic Euro-pop, owing less to Kraftwerk’s sublime austerity than Jean-Michel Jarre’s technoscapes. A few tracks could have been the themes to vintage schools TV shows, while others sport a wilfully plastic sheen of glam-rock glitter. Abshagen clearly has fun in this much-trodden field, even though his pastiches lack the polish or wit of like-minded Berlin neighbours such as Schneider TM.

It’s hard to consider the debut from Chichester’s Hope Of The States without being distracted by its awful backstory: guitarist James Lawrence committed suicide at the studio as the album was nearing completion. Gorehounds who parse The Lost Riots for signifiers to his demise will struggle to find any, however. Instead, HOTS rely on a blustery concept of emotional expression, clearly drawn from close study of OK Computer and Godspeed You Black Emperor!. It makes a change to find a British band acknowledging Radiohead’s complexity rather than (as with Keane et al) oversimplifying it. But the heart of The Lost Riots is drowned in bombast, and Sam Herlihy’s vocals are nowhere near strong enough to compete with the melodramatic, if prosaic, arrangements they’re pitted against.

Five years ago, Uncut was sent a tape of a dreamy song full of dark, lacerating wit called “Lose That Dress”, the first dispatch from Chicago-based singer-songwriter Kevin Tihista. Since then, his career has encompassed two fine albums, one on a major label (Don’t Breathe A Word) and one on a tiny indie (Judo). His British debut gig remains one of the most painfully shy, wish-I-wasn’t-here performances we’ve ever seen. At one point, Kevin produced a box of chocolates and passed them around the audience to break the tension. There were so few of us, there were still several left after the box had been round twice.

Six months ago another Tihista album turned up, without any track listing or title. Just a home-burned disc of 17 skewed pop masterpieces on which Tihista tests his fragile state of equilibrium to its limit. This, it turned out, was Wake Up Captain.

In effect, it’s a song cycle that charts Tihista’s struggle to keep on an even keel. “I have finally hit the ocean floor,” he sings on “Real Life”. By “Oh”, he’s still “drowning in the ocean”, wondering if his life is worth saving. Briefly, he gets his head above water, only to go under again on “Godsend” and “Family Curse”, a devastating observation of teenage anxiety. Alienation then gives way to madness. “Goodwings” sounds whimsical, almost like a nursery rhyme. But despite the levity of the tune, the subject matter is dark as hell as he jumps off a building expecting to fly, only to find “when I woke up in the hospital, the doctor said I shoulda been dead”. Then there’s “Freakshow”, a brilliant Smile-style mad-as-Brian pastiche, and “Yummy”, an even more bizarre Ohio Express parody (“yummy, yummy, yummy, I’ve got drugs in my tummy”). But they seem to work.

By “This Is An Offering”, at the end of the cycle, he’s promising, “Nothing on earth is gonna tear us apart, we’ll make a brand new start”. Typically, though, the lyric is juxtaposed against doom-laden piano that suggests the demons that inspired this beautiful and disturbed record are still lurking in the shadows.

You may have forgotten about Teena Marie. It has, after all, been a decade since her last album, the independently released Passion Play. And in Britain she is remembered, if at all, for her 1980 hits “Behind The Groove” and “I Need Your Lovin'”. But, in the US, Teena was one of the biggest stars of the ’80s, producing numerous hits and albums which continue to shame the Ciccones of this world with their intelligence and innovation, including 1980’s self-produced Irons In The Fire, 1981’s It Must Be Magic and 1986’s jaw-dropping Emerald City.

Well, it’s time to jog your memory. La Do

Mojave 3’s stoned country was a radical departure from Slowdive’s billowing space-rock. Goswell, with co-writer Joe Light, goes even more organically rustic here. But while her parent band draw on prairie-wide Americana, Waves Are Universal moves closer to English and Celtic folk. Furnished with flutes and glockenspiels, the fresh clarity of “Gather Me Up” and “Deelay” magnify Goswell’s introspective and breathy voice. At times songs pass by too easily, but “Coastline”‘s overcast atmospherics are bewitching.

The Flatlanders played precious few gigs in their early-’70s heyday, and all thoughts that live recordings existed of those honky-tonk and living-room sessions had been dismissed. But here it is?the 1972 Flatlanders, in all their glory, plus musical saw-player Steve Wesson, playing extraterrestrial honky-tonk before a couple of dozen souls at Austin’s legendary One Knite club. Save for a couple of Butch Hancock originals, the band hew out a Texas roots primer, but it’s still an unexpected, fly-on-the-wall delight. The sound quality is ragged but serviceable, like an AM signal beamed from another galaxy. The musical and historical value, though, is priceless.

Frontman with Kinky Machine and Rialto and model for Vogue, Eliot had an interesting ’90s. Now he’s decamped to Cornwall to record his solo debut, pitched as echoing Neil Young or Elliott Smith. Despite some sweet I’m-a-mature-father-now lyrics, it fails to convince. The better songs are half-built “Wonderwall” retreads, the rest are dismayingly bland, making Lloyd Cole sound like Nat King Cole. “She Is Moving On” declares, optimistically: “I told her I was nearly famous”.

Havens’ live show, in which he mixes songs with reminiscences about the days of Greenwich Village and Woodstock, is an unabated joy. On record he’s equally nostalgic, sticking unswervingly to the same rhythmically strummed open tunings and passionate folk-soul vocals he’s been peddling for almost 40 years. Despite the familiarity, the formula still sounds not only great but positively noble: he even gets away with new versions of “Woodstock” and “All Along The Watchtower”. A monument to more hopeful times.

There’s nothing on here to match the brazen “Backstabbers”-sampling “Wish I Didn’t Miss You” from Stone’s previous album, 2001’s Mahogany Soul. But the first six tracks or so of Stone Love are as good a soundtrack to summer as you’re likely to get this year, with the Joyce Sims-referring “I Wanna Thank Ya” (complete with Snoop Dogg cameo) and the Pearl & Dean-gone-wrong brass stabs of “Love’s Ghetto”. Thereafter it’s an interminable sea of coma-inducing ballads. Memo to all R&B artists and producers: please stop programming albums in this fashion.

If familiarity breeds only contempt, Robert Pollard and GBV should be despised more than most. In a little over 20 years, various incarnations and offshoots have yielded over 50 albums and more than a thousand songs. Now, Pollard has decided to focus completely on the solo career that began in 1996 with Not In My Airforce. Free of band baggage, he senses a new “maturity, and even integrity” in the air.

Of course, the curious paradox of the dissolution is that, far from appearing jaded, recent GBV works have been bursting with vitality and colour. Last year’s Earthquake Glue was arguably their best album since 1994’s critical breakthrough, Bee Thousand. So it’s the timing that makes the occasion of their 15th and final studio LP Half Smiles Of The Decomposed a genuine shock.

As a send-off, though, it’s not quite the full parade. Newcomers may not be persuaded to delve deeper into the back catalogue by the stodgy “Closets Of Henry” or aimless “Sing For Your Meat Leon”, but there’s enough golden rain for converts. The punkoid “Everybody Thinks I’m A Raincloud” sounds like the perfect minor chord marriage of The Raspberries and The Motors. “Sleep Over Jack” is a nervy wiggle of skinny-tie pop. “Never Have To Die” brilliantly highlights their USP: driving fuzz-pop, fat hooks, urgent choruses. Acid drops and Beat Boom chops filtered through the haze of America’s mid-’80s college scene and out into the knowing present.

Fiction Man, Pollard’s eighth solo outing, is a palpable release of pressure; bold, inventive, sonically daring. With GBV producer Todd Tobias laying down echo-dripping beds of noise, from the industrial (“I Expect A Kill”) to the string-delicate (“Conspiracy Of Owls”), this is wilfully experimental music that doesn’t forsake melodic muscle. In this respect, it’s probably closer to the explosive hiss of Bee Thousand or 1995’s Alien Lanes. It’s the sound of Pollard reconnecting with the accidental thrill and discovery of the past. At times, he’s like Barrett-era Floyd doing “White Light/White Heat”. Or Bowie fronting ’86 R.E.M. in Spacemen 3’s reverb chamber. Sonic boom music par excellence.