As solo outlet for Carl Johns?leader of Wisconsin countryites NoahJohn?Charlemagne allows him the freedom to break the slow-shuffle shackles and explore pop. The headlong skip of “Dawn Upon” is typical, its happy quick-step framing a tale of a man tormented by moonlit visions of a lost love. “Two Steps Ahead”, with low-slung bass and ’60s handclaps, is similarly sprightly, as is the Byrds-lite strum of “How Could He?” Underneath the summer demeanour, though, lurks a weather-beaten heart?listen to the flickering pulse of epic closer “Portrait With No Shortage Of History”: lives soured by the taste of good times gone bad.

Given his gutbucket-of-blues voice, it’s a surprise to find the ex-Uncle Tupelo/Son Volt man’s first live album arriving 15 years into his career. Backed by Washington DC’s Canyon, this is Farrar’s 2003 US tour: the sound crisp, tight and fluid. Alongside thrusting newies “Doesn’t Have To Be This Way” and “6 String Belief” are covers of Floyd’s “Lucifer Sam” (an early Tupelo staple) and Neil Young’s “Like A Hurricane”. His solo material is typified by the thudding “Damn Shame”. Comes with bonus DVD featuring 11 cuts from the shows.

See Uncle Tupelo feature, p70

Grammy-nominated at five (for 1973’s “Daddy What If” du

LA’s 35-year-old singer/songwriter nearly jacked in the solo stuff last year, so Return In Kind, though a covers record, is something of a reaffirmation. Where Casal has sometimes been victim of a too-perfect voice, here (as in recent work with side project Hazy Malaze) he adds grit to the mix. Aided by Eric Heywood (steel) and “Farmer” Dave Scher (strings/keyboards), he completely inhabits the songs, be it poking around inside Gene Clark’s “With Tomorrow”, teasing out the hopeless ache of Johnny Thunders’ “It’s Not Enough” or tripping on Michael Hurley’s “Portland Water”. White soul music par excellence.

The first Polyphonic Spree album?a daft and rapturous indie-pop-gospel-opera contrived by Tim Delaughter and two dozen of his Dallas disciples?looked like something of a one-off in 2002. Even after massive acclaim, the Spree’s UK label, 679, evidently agreed, dropping them in 2003. Now back on his own Good imprint here, Delaughter’s predictable response has been to go further over the top: Together We’re Heavy is bigger, lusher, more toothsome and glutinous, overdoing the ELO-go-Moonie delirium that made the first album alternately thrilling and creepy. Again, there are great moments, notably older tunes like “Two Thousand Places” and “When The Fool Becomes A King”. But Delaughter is stingier with his pop songs this time, filling out the album with much ponderous, quasi-symphonic ballast. And his muppetish Wayne Coyne impression is now more irritating than winsome. Clearly, extreme joy has its limits as a creative tool.

It’s five years since Campag Velocet’s debut, Bon Chic Bon Genre, an idiosyncratic blend of surrealist poetry, queasy psychedelia and baggy backbeats. Fuelled by twin obsessions with A Clockwork Orange and professional cycling, it enjoyed no more than marginal, cultish success.

With It’s Beyond Our Control, however, the band are back and very much meaning business. Pete Voss’ thuggish, drawled wordplay?part Mark E Smith, part Shaun Ryder?is still central, but Campag Velocet have updated their sound with darkly edgy guitar work and post-techno texturing. Thus, “Sunset Strip Eclipse” appropriates Joy Division’s gloomy disco, and engagingly groovy closer “Ain’t No Funki Tangerine” segues into an ambient house outro. Curiously compelling?and cleverly controlled?stuff.

Very unplugged and minimal with a soft country edge, this is perhaps Tanya’s Tapestry, her Blue. It’s the one where it makes sense that she covered Gram Parsons’ “Hot Burrito 2” live. Often she sings to just piano, lightly brushed acoustic guitar and pedal-steel: when David Narcizo’s drums come in towards the very end, they’re shy, muted. It’s an intimate, mature record. The vocals are wonderful. They have to be.

For fans of Belly and Throwing Muses, this won’t ‘rock’, and anything ‘indie’ has long been left behind. It’s funny that while Kristin Hersh launches a thrash-rock band in 50 Foot Wave, Tanya goes for rarefied air, chooses to express the near-religious grace of her heart. This is the Brill Building housing Mary Margaret O’Hara, Mazzy Star or Kate Bush’s Lionheart on the haziest, laziest summer evening. The catch is that Donelly was always great at emotional-tug pop hooks, 1997’s Lovesongs For Underdogs being one of the most undervalued albums of the past decade. Beauty Sleep (2002) hinted serenity was about to cloak the quirks. Here, despite the confessional lyrics, serenity is uniform. It’s classy, and fine, but does it excite?

The quality’s unquestionable. “Divine Sweet Divide” is a fragile, lovely hymn to the communication gap between lovers that must be traversed/tolerated/embraced. “Every Devil” is piano-led (by Elizabeth Steen), to the point of being McCartney-ish. There’s so much piano on this album you think of “Let It Be”, relevant or not. “Just In Case You Quit Me” is another devotional?”I can make it rain, I will make sure it finds you”?while “Butterfly Thing” boasts a conceit worthy of John Donne, and “My Life As A Ghost” is “sweet and strange/We’re happy in our star-scattered way”. “Fallout” is a brittle heartbreaker, and “Dona Nobis Pacem” appears to be a Latin psalm. While the sheer intelligence?and sublime voice?show up the feeble likes of Amos, Winehouse and Jones, there’s a sense that the Zen languor could do with fleshing out at times, some dynamics, some sex, some light and shade. For better or worse, this is love songs for grown-ups.

The Railway Children were just one of a string of successful independent bands poached and groomed for obscurity by the majors in the second half of the ’80s. Anyone jonesing for, ironically, something close to the Postcard sound?sparkling guitars, a melancholy, yearning tenor?will swoon for this quietly gorgeous album of acoustic revamps. Three tracks from their sole album for Factory (Reunion Wilderness, 1987) are obvious highlights, especially the irresistible lilt of “Brighter”. You’d think, given the Coldplay/Keane hegemony, there’d be an audience for this superior version: gentle, epic music but, here, with a soul.

SANCTUARY

“To me, sophistication and jail have a lot in common,” Jonathan Richman once said, and it’s a mission statement that continues to guide his career. Not So Much To Be Loved As To Love is an uncompromising set of lovable acoustic Richman eccentricity, with not a hint of sophistication in sight, from the inept single string guitar solo on “Vincent Van Gogh” to the delightful banality of “My Baby Love Love Loves Me”, on which he apparently set out to write the most hopeless demo the Brill Building ever rejected. Now well into his fifties, his voice still sounds like that of an awkward adolescent, and he continues to play the chord sequence he learnt from La Bamba and hasn’t seen fit to vary since.

Of course, simplicity is a high art form and, beneath the apparent primitivism, Richman knows exactly what he’s doing. His song about Abu-Jamal, who’s been on Death Row in America for 20 years, is a case in point. It’s a serious subject and yet, at first, Richman seems to be trivialising it as, to the accompaniment of an Ivor Cutler-style wheezing harmonium, he sings what appears to be a collection of inappropriately throwaway lines about Abu-Jamal’s plight.

But as he goes on to urge us to add our voices to the freedom protest, it emerges as a potent modern-day folk ballad.

Richman once named a song after Pablo Picasso?who “was never called an asshole”. Here we get songs in honour of Vincent Van Gogh (“the most awful painter since Jan Vermeer”) and Salvador Dali (“when I was 14 he was there for me”). “He Gave Us The Wine To Taste It” is a wonderfully bibulous tribute to the pleasures of the vine and a neat attack on wine snobs (“don’t criticise and waste it”), while “The World Is Showing Its Hand” is a daft tribute to the enlightenment that can be found in unpleasant odours. And those are the more ‘regular’ songs. Then come such oddities as “Sunday Afternoon”, an acoustic instrumental that owes much to “Groovin'”, and ditties sung in Italian and French for no apparent reason other than that he can.

Weird, wonderful and life-affirmingly wise.

A few years back Jim Webb, on the Archive album, reworked songs of his which others had recorded beautifully. It was a fascinating, flawed project; you didn’t begrudge Webb the indulgence. If there’s one living songwriter even more entitled to show us how he’d sing his own stuff, it’s Dozier. The Motown legend who, along with the brothers Holland, penned such masterpieces as “This Old Heart Of Mine”, “I Hear A Symphony” and “Stop! In The Name Of Love” here re-imagines for piano and voice a dozen durable diamonds. He slows them right down and lures out every last drop of angst (as, he says, he did when first drafting them). Very Radio 2 on the surface, but listen close and his world is empty without her.

DJ Ivan Smagghe and producer Arnaud Rebotini have stated their aim of making “electronic music that is not afraid to scare people”, and revived their mid-’90s Black Strobe project accordingly. It’s the perfect name for the duo’s dark, industriogoth disco, which draws on a shared past watching alt. rock bands in Parisian clubs, and is a million kilometres away from both the feelgood, filtered house of Daft Punk and Air’s woozy electro-pop. The Chemical Sweet Girl EP tacks confidently between Front 242, LFO and LCD Soundsystem, but there are echoes of Joy Division on “Innerstrings” and of New Order on “Me And Madonna”, the deadly robotic cool of which should guarantee clubland acclaim the second the needle drops.

A bona fide collector’s piece, this black box of fun comprises no less than a 60-minute DVD (videos, live footage and interviews), a Lewis-illustrated comic, related stickers, a poster, two seven-inch singles and an original Jeff cartoon (each drawing is unique to each box).

Of the singles, “In And Out Of Night” (with Diane Cluck) and “Six Stories” add rhythmic grace and raindrop patter to Lewis’ sleepy delivery, while brother Jack joins him for the blearily vengeful “Flood”. As storyteller, he’s still happily demented. Sample lyric: “At the general store, there’s Norma Jean/Loved her since I was 14/But she loves a trucker from New Orleans/And she over-charged me for my pork and beans.” It’s a hard-knock life.

Last year’s reissue of desert-drone epic Unknown Spin, seems to have spurred Texan psychedelicists Charalambides into a frenzy of activity. Joy Shapes, their first studio album in years, sees their slo-mo improvisations spiral off into Patty Waters-ish wails, pedal-steel ululations and surprisingly abrasive guitar. After such a demanding, listen, a solo album by the band’s guitarist, Tom Carter, is like avant-garde comfort food. Brilliant, too: Carter is no less unfettered on Monument, but his lap-steel extemporisations aren’t as jarring.

Perhaps the Cowboy Junkies will never top the quiet glory of ’88’s The Trinity Sessions, the transcendent eeriness of which not only redefined new country but pioneered modern lo-fi. Yet every album since has had moments of menacingly forlorn Velvet Underground-meets-Hank Williams beauty. On One Soul Now they come principally from the title track, the haunting “From Hunting Ground To City” (with a Margo Timmins vocal so laid back it borders on inertia), the more upbeat “No Long Journey Home” and the lovely melancholia of “The Slide”. “This ain’t no depression, just notes falling slow,” Timmins moans elsewhere. It’s a fine distinction. Look out for the limited edition featuring a bonus cover-versions EP

Magnus is a collaboration between Tom Barman of superior Belgian noirists dEUS and heavyweight techno DJ/producer CJ Bolland. The dance/rock hybrid is usually an ugly beast, but The Body… represents a meeting of minds rather than a dilution of disparate talents. Live drums augment programmed beats throughout, while sax, Wurlitzer and sampled film dialogue are added to the mix and members of Belgian bands Evil Superstars and Millionaire guest. No one style dominates, but whether affecting the nervy white funk of Wolfgang Press (on “Hunter/Collector”) or imagining a Balearic take on the spaghetti western score (“Buttburner”), The Body… hangs together brilliantly.

You realise 21-year-old singer-songwriter Lerche is a bit different when he opens his second album with a French horn instrumental. It’s an act of extreme confidence but hardly misplaced, for the dozen songs that follow boast tunes that wrap themselves around you like a favourite jumper. Steeped in influences from Brian Wilson and Van Dyke Parks to Jeff Buckley, Lerche can do melancholic troubadour (“It’s Too Late”), shiny pop perfection (“On The Tower”), woozy psychedelia (“Days That Are Over”) and symphonic ballads (“It’s Over”), all sung in the beguilingly lazy voice of an overgrown choirboy. Think swoonsome pop at its most non-cynical but with a left-field twist, like Rufus Wainwright or Ed Harcourt, perhaps. A real find.

Cole Porter’s lyrical and melodic genius is likely to endure as one of the last century’s immortal contributions to culture. Lennon/McCartney, Holland/Dozier/Holland and possibly Bacharach/David may last as long; others currently revered will be forgotten in 50 years. So it’s dandy that they’re making a biopic about him, and fine that “an extraordinary range of contemporary artists” are performing his music for it. Trouble is, these artists are neither extraordinary nor a range.

Consider what could have been risked here. How about giving Mark Eitzel “Every Time We Say Goodbye”? Or asking A Girl Called Eddy to murmur “Night And Day”? Might it not have been an interesting experiment to get PJ Harvey to deliver a dark “Let’s Misbehave”?

What do we get instead? “Anything Goes” is taken nowhere special by Caroline O’Connor. Robbie Williams blusters out “It’s De-Lovely” with his usual lack of finesse. Sheryl Crow snores through “Begin The Beguine”, and Mick Hucknall slobbers sweatily over “I Love You”. Oh dear. One begrudgingly concedes that Elvis Costello’s “Let’s Misbehave”, Diana Krall’s “Just One Of Those Things” and even Alanis Morissette’s “Let’s Do It” are… not too bad. They’re just uninspired; reverential without fire.

The nadir is Natalie Cole’s shaming of her dad’s gifts; she warbles the words “I die a little” like she’s complaining of a mild flu. This was a splendid chance to expose Porter’s precision to a new generation. Instead, it’s de-dreary, de-disappointing and de-dull.

What’s not to love about a score that fills nearly half its running time with diverse versions of Rodgers and Hart’s “My Funny Valentine”? Elvis Costello, Chet Baker (sublime), The Kronos Quartet and pianist Marvin Laird all saunter down its plush chandeliered corridors, its tree-lined boulevards, its narcoleptic nooks and crannies. No less a figure than Van Dyke Parks fills up the residual squares and piazzas, and there’s even a waft of Julee Cruise (and a shiver of Saint-Saens and Bach) to gratify those desiring even loftier highs. Sadly, all this comes from arguably the doziest movie Robert Altman’s ever made.

While many of St Etienne’s ‘concepts’ have left me cold, this one resonates, perhaps because I’ve just read the enchanting coffee-table tome Classic Cafes by Adrian Maddox and Phil Nicholls. Bob Stanley’s sleevenotes similarly eulogise the faded majesty and allure of “caffs”?”‘It’s for lorry drivers,’ said my mum.” As these temples to a bygone age disappear, they exude the melancholy of half-recalled Donovan songs. In homage to these hallowed halls of grease are kitsch gems from The Kinks, Chairmen Of The Board, The Moments and The Sapphires.

The Beeb are hoping for a kind of Our Friends In The North success with this 1963-79-spanning Soho crime drama. Its author, Jake Arnott, has written sleevenotes for this 44-song double album, which moves from buoyant ’60s hits from James Brown and Dusty to ’70s landmarks by T. Rex and The Jam. R Dean Taylor’s “There’s A Ghost In My House” is exhilarating, Rod Stewart’s “Reason To Believe” is moving, and Bowie’s “London Boys” is seedily weird. And there’s an eerie grandeur to The Walker Brothers’ “The Sun Ain’t Gonna Shine Any More” when followed by The Merseys’ “Sorrow”. Spectral splendour.