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.

The sometime Roxy Music man’s sixth solo album (hence the title) is his first for five years, and the Roxy reunion has drawn in Eno, Andy Mackay and Paul Thompson, not to mention David Gilmour, Chrissie Hynde and Robert Wyatt?many of whom guested on his 1975 debut Diamond Head. Recorded in his own west London studio, it has the feel of an ambitious if occasionally unfocused collective effort. Manzanera claims it’s ’60s-influenced, but it exudes a faint arthouse aura, with his detached vocals contrasted against the jagged pop of “Broken Dreams” and “Green Spikey Cactus” (where Hynde’s backing whoops are stellar). It climaxes in a 15-minute concept piece, “The Cissbury Ring”. Never less than inventive.

The garage-rock cabaret of Fagersta’s Hives proved an entertaining diversion in 2001, with a couple of excellent singles and some slickly funny, if repetitive, live shows. Now on a major label, their excellently titled third album suggests they may yet stretch beyond being a novelty. There isn’t anything quite as punchy as “Hate To Say I Told You So” here, but the fastidiously rehearsed dementia is better sustained than on Your New Favourite Band, the compilation that broke them in Britain. Odder still, Tyrannosaurus Hives contains hints of artistic depth: the best track, “Diabolic Scheme”, isn’t a wiry ramalam but a clanging ballad featuring Jagger-class histrionics from Howlin’ Pelle Almqvist and a strikingly discordant guitar solo.

Possibly the last thing you’d expect on a record from a Nashville-raised songwriter with roots in power-pop is a cover of “Human Nature” from Michael Jackson’s Thriller. But it’s to Mead’s credit that, however graceful, it’s far from being the strongest moment on this deceptively straightforward collection of well crafted, elegantly yearning songs.

Anyone who found themselves swooning a little to Richard and Linda Thompson’s sprog Teddy’s debut a while back will find plenty to love here. Mead makes blue-collar rock of the most delicate kind, his soaring but unshowy falsetto and luscious harmonies raising Indiana far above the ordinary. “Beauty, where to find it?” he cries at one point. Right here wouldn’t be a bad place to start.

“I couldn’t sleep any more and I’m a writer. So I wrote,” explains Olson, who plans to tour this album up until the US presidential election. His disgust at the state of the nation?as befits all things Creekdipper?is elegantly realised, simmering over a bedrock of soft piano, woody guitars and some slow, funky blues. When it starts a-boiling (as on the indignant “George Bush Industriale”?which sifts through the human wreckage of the Bush family’s dealings in the petrochemical business?and “Portrait Of A Sick America”), it’s rendered all the more powerful.

Proto-punk rocker turned troubadour Cohen made his name in the early ’60s with Charleston Grotto, who were then notorious on the LA club circuit. In the 40 years since, Cohen has amassed hundreds of his big-hearted, dog-eared tunes, which blend tiki lounge jazz, Weimar cabaret, psychedelia, lurching blues and boogaloo with dark humour and extraordinary pop finesse. The results-as championed by Tom Waits and John Zorn?vaguely recall Roky Erickson, but there’s no hint of a talent tragically damaged here. However vulnerable songs like “Still Alive”?a tribute to John Lennon?and the quivering “Lucy Lucifer” might seem, Cohen’s arranging hand is steady and his ear finely tuned.

Four years ago Marah earned an Uncut Album Of The Month accolade for Kids In Philly. Then came the leaden heavy rock of 2002’s Float Away With The Friday Night Gods, on which they made an ill-advised bid for Kings Of Leon territory. The good news is that 20,000 Streets Under The Sky represents a substantial return to form, mainly because it finds brothers Serge and Dave Bielanko going back to their original influences with un-self-conscious pride. The fingerprints of Springsteen (who invited them to play with him last year) are all over songs such as “East” and “Freedom Park”. “Feather Boa” sounds like vintage Replacements, whose “Can’t Hardly Wait” is a highlight of Marah’s live show. And so it goes on. Not a record to rewrite the history of rock’n’roll. But one with enough energy, yearning and exhilaration to restore your faith in it.

It would be easy to file The Earlies away as yet another set of disciples of the Flaming Mercury Polyphonic Grandaddies school of warped, fragile psych-pop. However, they score over these other groups insofar as they can write compassionate songs about death and regeneration (“One Of Us Is Dead,” the heartbreaking “Wayward Song”) without lapsing into sentiment?indeed, the songs’ patient progress bring Spiritualized’s “Pure Phase” to mind. They also avoid camp?”The Devil’s Country” is alt.country as played by Neu! and Albert Ayler, but the song’s intent is deadly serious. And unlike any of the above-mentioned groups, they have a singer who can actually sing (listen to the exquisitely weary refrain of “We’re all fools” which concludes “25 Easy Pieces”). An outstanding record which you’d be unwise to miss.

Of all the characters to emerge from the m

Scant consolation maybe, but the flipside of Dubya’s dodgy defence policy is the re-emergence of music as protest (Steve Earle, Mark Olsen and the Pernice Brothers are among the most recently active). Like Earle, though, idiosyncratic veteran Eugene Chadbourne has been venting his political spleen for some time now. Initially a devotee of Coltrane jazz and Derek Bailey’s avant-improv, Chadbourne’s early albums on returning from Canadian exile (ducking the Vietnam draft, he was granted amnesty in 1976) featured sax virtuoso John Zorn. In 1982 he formed rockabilly ruckers Shockabilly, and touching Reagan tribute The President He Is Insane landed two years later, followed by Country Protest featuring The Red Clay Ramblers and Lenny Kaye.

In response to another “era of fear and loathing”, he’s now delivered a sequel, instigated and abetted by Wisconsin’s Carl Johns-led NoahJohn (see also Charlemagne, below). Country Protest Anew is an urgent howl of a record that’s funny, poignant and compassionate without ever coming off preachy. The most vicious sideswipes?”Coward”, “Don’t Burn The Flag, Let’s Burn The Bush”?are breakneck fiddle-fests, but there’s a subtlety to covers of Donovan’s “Ballad Of A Crystal Man” (a deep, bassy, Lee Hazlewood approach) and Bruce Piephoff’s mandolin/accordion-scented “Wind From Newport News” that belies Chadbourne’s nasally, oft-unhinged attack. When he plays it straight?”Hot Buttered Rum”, with lonesome viola melting into lovelorn lap-steel?he’s outstanding. Agitated takes on TLC (“Waterfalls”) and Lauryn Hill (“Lost Ones” reimagined as skewed bluegrass) might appear wilfully enigmatic but work brilliantly, as does a choppy version of Love’s “Mushroom Clouds”. Wonderful.

Part of Berlin’s vigorous, Wall-shadowed counterculture, Die Haut’s abrasive mix of sexless funk and doomy guitars suited then-neighbour Cave as The Birthday Party began to dissolve. Cave added vocals to four tracks on this, Die Haut’s long-lost debut, most memorably on “Truck Love”, a deliriously trashy road movie, roughly conflating lurid pulp, Nietzsche and Christianity?a reminder of his snarling youth. Die Haut’s drummer, Thomas Wyler, would soon join him in the Bad Seeds. Die Haut themselves are most poignantly captured on the DVD, a 1982 live performance?all sharp suits, blank stares and stiff dancing. A vivid relic of a grey age.

Released to coincide with her first British dates in almost 20 years, The Essential Judy Collins is most certainly not what it claims to be. The concentration on her easy-listening side gives us “Send In The Clowns”, “Amazing Grace”, “Bridge Over Troubled Water”and “Morning Has Broken”. There’s nothing from her Greenwich Village folk albums and none of her early Dylan cover versions. Collins was the first person to record Leonard Cohen’s songs, but the fact goes unrecognised. Ian Tyson’s “Someday Soon”, Robin Williamson’s “First Boy I Loved”and “In My Life”should all be here, too.

None of these are random omissions. They’re part of a deliberate effort to present a very narrow-minded, MOR view of Collins’art. Seek out instead the US double CD anthology, Forever.

Two years ago, James Chance’s discography seemed permanently AWOL from record shops, but now you can’t move for his records. This is, of course, no bad thing, and the first disc of this new compilation serves as a reasonable sampler of his work between 1978 and 1988 (including a terrific version of “Throw Me Away” recorded at CBGBs in 1978).

However, the live set which comprises the second disc, recorded in Eindhoven in 1981, sees Chance by his own admission with an untried pick-up band, and the musical telepathy and power are pallid in comparison with 1980’s devastating Soul Exorcism. Neophytes are directed to the indispensable CD reissue of his two masterpieces, Buy and Off White, as reviewed in Uncut 71 (April 2003), though wealthier readers may wish to invest in the four-CD box set Irresistible Impulse.