Devotional music, as any songwriter who has idolised a lover will testify, doesn’t have to be addressed to a god. In the hands of Joel Gibb, however, the rituals of religious ecstasy are a boundless source of inspiration and metaphor. On Gibb’s third album as frontman of riotous Toronto ensemble The Hidden Cameras, sex and sacramental ritual are combined, and any number of spiritual tropes are used to express earthly desires. Bodies are worshipped, in all their hairy, dirty glory. Music is a transformative, sexualised holy spirit. And ascension need not be to a higher spiritual plane, but merely out of a Godforsaken new town in Ontario.

More than last year’s The Smell Of Our Own, Mississauga Goddam is a compelling rites-of-passage record. On “Music Is My Boyfriend”, Gibb details the comfort he found in music as an adolescent coming to terms with his homosexuality, trapped in a dreary town. “I found music, and he found me,” he sings, “I kissed his ugly gangling greens, he swallowed my pee.”

The lack of squeamishness here about bodily functions finds fullest expression in “I Want Another Enema”, a satire on hygiene fetishists which will doubtless arouse the prurient in much the same way as last year’s “Golden Streams”.

To stereotype them as proselytisers of a gay body politic is, however, missing many of the pleasures of The Hidden Cameras. It’s just that the conflation of explicit imagery, religious metaphor and what continues to sound like churchy music is so striking. Listening to the exuberant chants, you’re reminded of a folk mass written by Jonathan Richman, or something by Belle & Sebastian?which may amount to the same thing.

Occasionally, the sunniness and repetition of the songs can be exhausting, despite the provocative semiotic games Gibb is playing. And while the devotional concept is meticulously executed, and Mississauga Goddam is an effective and affecting mix of content and form, a further album of this ‘gay church folk music’ might be pushing our faith, well, a little too far.

There are many ways to skin the revitalised garage-rock cat, but Fur, the first album from the Archie Bronson Outfit, takes a genuinely distinctive approach. The trio peddle a punky blues/alt.country hybrid that’s broad-minded enough to embrace the likes of Sonic Youth and PJ Harvey, Neil Young, Palace, Fairport Convention and 16 Horsepower.

Theirs is a dark, urgent, viscous sound which suggests that they grew up in the Appalachian foothills rather than Chippenham, but there’s no denying the hammering, near-apocalyptic fervour of “Riders” and “The Wheel Rolls On”, the smouldering intensity of “Bloodheat” or the hypnotic pull of “Pompeii”, which hints at an affection for both “Paranoid” and Liege & Lief.

Of its kind, Fur may well be the best in show.

On one level, The Lilys?Philadelphia-based mavericks who want to be enigmatic so much that they keep telling us they are?are just another group of American alt.rockers, running through the early Pavement songbook with a suitably perverse aversion to conventional structures. Yet as they improve their skills (often a death knell), they become increasingly intriguing. Kurt Heasley now crafts ideas which transcend their influences, and if you catch a glimpse of everyone from The Cure to The Fall in their esoteric meanderings, there’s also a compelling and unique personality, most evident on “Will My Lord Be Gardening?” or “Mystery School Assembly”. They’ve beef (heart) ed up.

How Dave must have got fed up with brother Ray Davies’ endless stream of pop operas when it seems all he really wanted to do was rock out. His first album of new material in two decades is full of the kind of dirty, distorted guitars he first unfurled 40-odd years ago on “You Really Got Me”, although “Fortis Green”, which name-checks both Max Miller and Hancock’s Half Hour, offers a welcome change of pace, and owes more to his old group’s nostalgic brand of English whimsy.

“True Phenomenon”, the title track and the techno-driven “Life After Life” all betray Davies’ obsessive interest in UFOs and aliens, while the ‘bonus’ additions?live versions of “Susannah’s Still Alive”, “Death Of A Clown” and “Dead End Street”?smack more of earth-bound desperation.

There’s something comforting about Sexsmith’s crumpled croon, like wrapping yourself in a favourite duvet. The more robust Retriever differs as subtly from 2002’s Cobblestone Runway as the latter did to 2001’s country-tinged Blue Boy, but the central tenet remains the same: warmly uncluttered arrangements and the teasing out of emotional truths. In short, the dying art of songcraft, as much in the autumnal McCartney-isms of “Tomorrow In Her Eyes” as in the white-soul of “Whatever It Takes”. A rare treasure indeed.

Her father, Jo

The kind of record likely to have dreary purists choking on their pints, Nouvelle Vague (geddit?) finds two Frenchmen and a selection of kittenish chanteuses recasting unequivocally canonical tunes as acoustic (largely) bossa nova. Think Weekend and Alison Statton’s other post Young Marble Giants work, Astrud Gilberto on the door at the Blitz and mad Mike Always’ mini empire of kitsch,

Rhode Island’s Load label is currently the market leader for a kind of apoplectic left-field music that replaces post-rock’s pensiveness with a snotty, mosh-friendly zeal. Like their mighty labelmates Lightning Bolt, Norwegian instrumental trio Noxagt specialise in churning bass-and-drum passages that frequently erupt into intense noise offensives. The band’s secret weapon, however, is viola player Nils Erga, whose belligerent sawing makes them occasionally resemble a death-metal Dirty Three. It’s exhilarating stuff, made more remarkable by the way Noxagt combine punk vigour with a blustery Nordic grandeur: a bellowed indigenous folk song (sung by Erga’s grandfather) and a lustrous version of Pearls Before Swine’s “Regions Of May” are both audacious, unexpected successes.

The National are intimidated by female beauty, spellbound and damaged by it. They fear it somehow criticises or diminishes them. It’s hurt them; they don’t trust it. They sing of leaving it well alone, for sanity’s sake, but can’t practise what they preach. This is the weak and helpless art of male self-pity at its finest.

The usual names crop up in comparisons: Cohen, Eitzel, Tindersticks, Dulli. But if The National were copyists, this wouldn’t work, it’d be parody. It’s not parody. It’s heinously bitter and twisted, and hurting bad, and you believe it.

Their second album, Sad Songs For Dirty Lovers, broke their cover last year. Five men from New York via Ohio, they are the brothers Dessner, the brothers Devendorf, and singer Matt Berninger. Violinist Padma Newsome gilds the belladonna. Otherwise they’re a rock band, albeit a restrained one. You may sometimes hear in them shades of Interpol, The Sound or early U2. Often, though, they’re gentler, letting Berninger’s defeated voice and outstanding lyrics do the job.

A mini album, this: six new songs and a (very Joy Division) live pass at “Murder Me Rachael” (from the last album). The French call it “dark rock”. Facile, but they’re not wrong. “Wasp Nest” comes in mock-innocent before declaring, “Get over here, I wanna kiss your skinny throat”. Berninger is all candid lust and implicit fatalism, and on the phenomenal “All The Wine” he drawls: “I’m a festival, I’m a parade… I’m so sorry but the motorcade will have to go around me this time” with all the joy of a dying man.

As with all great poetic works of despair and self-loathing, there’s fine-gauge humour here. Also, mandolins like jingly raindrops. “My head plays it over and over”, grumbles one refrain, which will suffice as a summary. “Don’t interrupt me…”

In the wake of Franz Ferdinand’s deserved success, it seems the A&R battalions have embarked on one of their periodic border raids over to Glasgow. First to gain from this activity are Franz’s regular support act, Sons And Daughters. Those expecting vivacious, Postcard-derived art-pop will be disappointed, however. S&D are a quartet with a gory mandolin-powered line in what we might plausibly tag swamp-folk. Trace elements of PJ Harvey, The Gun Club and Tupelo-era Nick Cave are all identifiable, but S&D have a fervid, hypnotic train chug all their own, and some fractious boy/girl vocal duels that betray Adele Bethel’s stint as foil to the curmudgeonly Aidan Moffat in Arab Strap. A handy start.

Granted he has been off most people’s radar for a generation, but surely the creator of Off The Coast Of Me, the man without whom there would be, arguably, no Prince, and, unarguably, no Andre 3000 (imagine “Hey Ya!” as a Kid Creole comeback smash in a parallel world), deserves better than the horrible, cheap, synthetic horns and bargain basement drum machines which dominate and desecrate this new album. Or perhaps not. Worlds away from “Maladie D’Amour”, Darnell now seems to be writing rejects from Five Guys Named Moe?awful sub-Louis Jordan jumping jives like “Let’s Jaml” and the revived flop “Endicott”. To cap it all, there’s a pitiful rerun of “Annie, I’m Not Your Daddy” in “I’m Not Your Papa”. This record has depressed me immensely.

If you want a good night out, you could do a lot worse than Bill Wyman’s Rhythm Kings and their tasty diet of blues and R&B classics. Inevitably, the formula translates less well on record, but Wyman has the good sense not to be a bass player with delusions of grandeur. He sings on just two of the 15 tracks, mostly leaving the vocals to Georgie Fame, Beverley Skeete and others. Covers of songs by Ray Charles, Sam & Dave and Johnny “Guitar” Wilson are well chosen. “Disappearing Nightly” has a nice JJ Cale vibe and some great guitar by Albert Lee, while “Down Home Girl”, which the Stones did in the early days, is given a potent Bobby Charles-style arrangement.

Hardly essential, but rather enjoyable nonetheless.

More abrasive than the Lower East Side’s other leading anti-folkster Jeffrey Lewis (see p97). Major Matt perhaps nails its ethos more succinctly, witty social observation, hangdog stare and no-frills production that sounds like gas bubbling from leaky pipes. Mason is tougher here, be it grinding big guitars into the chewy “Sidewalker”, tripping over “Good(bye)”‘s springy guitar figure or wrapping “Munich” with percussive thwack and knotty bass. Hi-fi, it seems is the new lo-fi.

DJs Kaiser Saucy and Lord Fader emerged from Soho around four years ago, having made their names as club hosts and promoters. After a lucrative but unsatisfying spell of remix work, they decided to make music of their own as The Loose Cannons.

Make The Face is the result, an exercise in minimal but exuberant digital funk which owes as much to OutKast and Etienne de Cr

Anyone still in thrall to the Manx’s 2000 debut may balk at certain moments here. Sure, the thickly atmospheric glaze of psych-folk and keyboard drone are still here, but they’re kicking their heels?if not exactly rocking out?with a little country, some Beatlesy buzz and indie strum. Trouble is, it doesn’t always pan out. They’re far more at ease among the textural folds of the dark “Dinner Bell” (with its late-Floyd undertow) or the softly spinning “Pinstripes”. Banjo-flecked closer “Fixed Bayonets”, however, is up here with their best.

Fast Lady are Doncaster’s, if not the world’s, finest exponents of “machine rock” classic-sounding metal songs performed with the aid of a laptop in place of a drummer, lending this debut a curdled, unsettling quality. The Money Shot is the trio’s straight-faced homage to the New Wave Of British Heavy Metal and features several songs about denim-clad loose women (“Love Science”, “Rock Quimmen”) and one about the drummer from Def Leppard (“Living Life With One Arm”).

Every line yelped by Axl Rose-alike frontman Sebastian Falkstaff you’ve heard a million times before, just as Pepe Florente’s crude riffage will be suspiciously familiar to Black Sabbath fans. Basic stuff, but unfailingly entertaining.

Where the hell did THIS spring from? His real name is Steven Henry, his imaginary accomplice is a one-eyed teddy bear named Barry Convex, and he is nothing less than the British Dr Octagon. Cheerfully rapping atonal joints which deal with hyperactive nipples (the bloody brilliant “Adventures Of The Lactating Man”?”Come back in the morning with a pint of semi-skimmed”?Andre 3000 meets Benny Hill), sex with primates (“Drilla Ape”?”Looking like a hairy Naomi Jordan”) and infatuation with a plastic My Little Pony toy (“Pononee Girl”?”I’m willing to ride you like Frankie Dettori”), this is hilarious, sick, deeply avant-garde and even more deeply danceable hip hop shit. It’s The Madcap Laughs to the Sgt Pepper of The Streets’ A Grand Don’t Come For Free.

Teased out from a series of four-track demos recorded at home between shifts working for a homeless charity, 28-year-old singer Mara Carlyle’s first solo offering is a balmy, beguiling affair. A kind of abstract Norah Jones, Carlyle’s lushly soothing voice has graced records by the Matthew Herbert Big Band and Plaid, who helped with The Lovely’s delicate arrangements. In places, particularly on “Alive”, she sounds self-conscious, as if tentative about performing her own deeply personal music. But “Bonding” and “I Blame You Not”, creamy exhalations both, prove Carlyle to be a very promising talent.

Dance music sourced from the corniest ’70s and ’80s MOR? Not as ridiculous as it sounds. Besides, Daft Punk and The Avalanches already precede Mylo (Skye’s Myles Maclnnes) in the ‘flirting with the unfashionable’ stakes. Even so, this goes one step further, specifically in the way Mylo yanks obvious hook lines from the likes of Kim Carnes, Chaka Khan and Toto, then nails them to a softcore techno thump. Hard not to admire his audacity as much as his ear for a great drivetime radio riff.