Despite the Beefheart-referencing name and a vocal star turn from 68-year-old Mothers Of Invention drummer Jimmy Carl Black, this is as far from ’60s SoCal avant-noise as could be imagined.

It’s an escapist’s dreamscape of quiet, touching on the orchestral restraint of Lambchop, the churchy hush of Low and soft-sigh harmonies that catch the breath like sudden castles of glass lifting from a mirage.

Songwriter John Yates’ delivery rarely rises above a whisper, subtly burnished with cornet, pedal-steel, harmonica, piano and semi-acoustic guitar. Like the ‘Chop, they’re miniaturists of adventurous scope. If the gentle-gorgeous “Blues Is The Root” or the feathery pout of “This Is My Rock’n’Roll” don’t warm you, you probably have no soul.

Amid the improvisers, drone-masters and acid-folk renegades of the US underground, the dozen or so members of Sunburned Hand Of The Man stand out like a beatnik militia. A plethora of unattainable releases (usually on CD-R) and Dionysian live shows have marked out Sunburned’s path thus far, though Rare Wood may be their first LP that’s relatively easy to locate. It’s worth the effort, too. This is prickly, occasionally malign music that often resembles a face-off between Beefheart and Amon D

Phoenix’s first album, United, was a highlight of the end-of-the-century French pop boom, filtering today’s sonics through a retro gauze for perfectly imperfect postmodern results. Its strength lay in the way it tripped between 10cc, jazz-funk, Queen and Californian punk, toying with orchestras, harps, pedal-steel, the whole shebang, in its relaxed search for pop nirvana. One senses that, in retrospect, the band consider this to be a weakness, for they’ve apparently spent the subsequent four years making half an hour of music that stays exactly where it is. Though exactly where that may be is hard to define.

Basically, they’ve binned the Van Halenish guitars and electronic vocals that cropped up on United and settled upon the mellow palette of their hit single “Too Young”, a light sound?close-up vocals over barely electric rock?with stuttering, understated hip hop rhythms and something nicely sloppy and sleepy about the playing. The results are like Bread produced by The Neptunes, especially on the shimmering title track.

First single “Run Run Run” opens with an acoustic guitar riff which hints at Serge Gainsbourg’s Melody Nelson, but its attention-grabbing component is a handclap part which drops half a bar early before the chorus. “Love For Granted” is a drifting beauty borne on a breeze of harmonised voices. “Victim Of The Crime” finishes with a fusillade of over-driven drums. Several songs use a kalimba sound they’ve obviously fallen for. It’s delightfully insidious, the hooks subtle, the lyrics obtuse. And it’s a testament to the care they’ve taken over this stuff that after many listens it remains hard to select either a weak or a standout track. It’s the whole thing?just 31 minutes of music plus a little hidden-track coda?which you want to hear shuffling by agreeably, gently moderating your mood, like some aural Prozac.

Sixtoo is one of a crop of former operatives on the Anticon label, like cLOUDDEAD and Buck 65, who have endeavoured to bring a fuzzy, disaffected, avant-garde sensibility to a hip hop scene gone slick and sour. Although most of this gang have been around since the mid-’90s, only now are their efforts truly coming to fruition. Chewing On Glass’ tone is set by its opening, a lingering, ominous loop of sheet-metal reverb. Influenced by listening to too much Cabaret Voltaire and Joy Division than is bad for you, the remainder of the album sounds like a Krueger-esque rebirth of DJ Shadow, or tapes of ancient TV theme tunes neglected in a dank basement, re-spliced in their grime-caked condition.

Vinicius Cantuaria was something of a star in Brazil, yet the local music industry drove him to flee to New York. Once there, he was quickly adopted by the Knitting Factory crowd and has played often with David Byrne, Arto Lindsay, Laurie Anderson and other avant suspects. Yet where VC really shines is on his own albums, which find him blending a subtle mosaic of sounds rooted in bossa nova.

Rooted but not locked?Horse And Fish finds the guitarist mixing electronica, Chet Baker jazz licks, Afro-Brazilian rhythms, his own consistently enquiring guitar and murmured Portuguese vocals to make music quite unlike anyone else. Cantuaria’s a quiet innovator, and Horse And Fish repays frequent listening.

Dr John, alias Mac Rebennack, aka Dr John Creaux, trading as the Nite Tripper, is no stranger to the Babylonian riddles of New Orleans. This Big Easy native has never been one to cause a local hurricane, but he’s always blown his storm warnings in a weird way. A medicine man with an innate knowledge of the voodoo cultures of Louisiana, as Rebennack approaches his seventh decade he’s still dispensing the knowledge without sounding drily academic.

So what’s up, Doc? Plenty. Grand funk, slippery R&B, gumbo groove and French Quarter jazz are staples of his armoury again, yet he also chases down draughts of lifeblood like a Garden District dweller in an Anne Rice vampire novel. Having paid homage to Duke “Elegant” Ellington and rubbed shoulders with younger British types Supergrass, Paul Weller and Spiritualized on his last two discs, this musical polymath sets his sights on a sequence of 18 pieces whose roots spread out forever.

Aided by Stewart Levine of Crusaders fame and various musicologists such as Martin Kaelin, Nicholas Payton and the Quezerque dynasty, the album opens in Sunday church mode with the baroque litany of “Quatra Parishe”, before returning “When The Saints Go Marchin’ In” to its spiritual rather than vaudevillian setting.

“Marie Laveau”, an account of the Witch Queen of New Orleans, bears out Rebennack’s dictum that “music is to be played with, not just played.” As a battery of percussionists?including Earl Palmer, Herman Ernest III and Smokey Johnson?all summon the spirits, they are answered by the Mardi Gras Indians, Meter man Cyril Neville and Walter Wolfman Johnson’s greasy guitar solo. The pure fonque of “Life is A One Way Ticket” and the neat twists and turns of “Such A Much”, featuring fellow veteran Willie Nelson, both loom large, but there’s good stuff everywhere thanks to guests like Randy Newman, Mavis Staples, BB King and Dave Bartholomew.

Ambitious in scope, Dr John’s N’Awlinz cannot be digested at one sitting. This is a banquet of bluesiana; a lifetime of sounds. If you love New Orleans music, he’ll take you there. Magnificent.

For the best part of a decade, Daniel Smith has been taking a sledgehammer to the strangely secular conceit of Christian music as happy-clappy God-bothering. As musical leader of the Danielson Famile?a Smithfest of siblings aged between 12 and 21?he handed in 1995’s debut album A Prayer For Every Hour for his final thesis at Rutgers University. Their first gig was his degree final (he got an A). The songs were unnerving: strident evocations of faith shredded by discordant guitars, abrupt stammers and Smith’s spasmic castrato. Klaus Nomi fronting the Shaggs, maybe, or Tiny Tim getting down with early Pixies. Lyrically, it was hardly Sir Cliff either: the Lord punishing Smith by demanding push-ups, or turning up unannounced as guest DJ at a funeral. Other albums tracked the same vein, often attracting cult producers and engineers like Steve Albini.

Brother Is To Son, however, is a whole new beast. Under the Brother Danielson banner (though the Famile, including wife Elin, father Lenny and mate Sufjan Stevens add back-up), the solo Smith seems sharper and more attuned to his own peculiar frequency. Indeed, at times it’s almost unbearably candid, an unflinching examination of his devotion both to homestead and to God. In this respect, the ebb tides of the music?delicate and brutal, sometimes faltering to a slow swell before crashing on through?make perfect sense. It’s the soundtrack to doubt and reaffirmation.

“Hammers Sitting Still” tries to reconcile the insecurity and frustration of his day job as a carpenter with service to the Almighty, eased by the soothing vocal asides of Elin. “Sweet Sweeps” is eerie: Smith falsetto, a little guitar, taps and scrapes, before woozy harmonies overlap and collide in a flurry of whispers and incantations. It’s a tumbledown spiritual that refuses to be tainted by “the games sweeping the nation’s veins” and where revitalised souls are “brand new brooms”, vessels of God. “Daughters Will Tune You” uncoils slowly from rolling guitar motif to banjo, bells and piano, emerging with the same contented skip as Smog’s “Keep Some Steady Friends Around”. Most striking of all, “Physician Heal Yourself” addresses Jesus directly (“If you can’t heal yourself/How could you fix me?”) before admitting: “I can’t understand the ways of my Lord/When I try and try with my mere mind as a man.”

It’s an often painful stumble through the wilderness, but Smith ultimately emerges invigorated.

You will too.

Lindsay first encroached upon Western consciousness with DNA on the Eno-produced No New York compilation in 1978. Lindsay’s affection for bossa nova, whispery vocals and lumpy technique has made him an odd champion of Brazilian music and helped the likes of Vinicius Cantu

Drifting in like a San Francisco fog, Call And Response’s second album is a magnificent surprise. If their 2001 debut confected a Free Designed, bubblefunk California of the imagination, Winds Take No Shape cruises into more crepuscular territory.

They’re a band of rare harmonies. The players and voices of Carrie Clough and Simone Rubi attain a lunar twilight grace across complex structures. Songs conjure weird confluences: it’s possible to tease out strands of tropicalian bossa nova, Laurel Canyon folk, Vini Reilly, reverbed languor and even Broadcast’s spooked tenderness. You could praise individual moments (“Trapped Under Ice” is a bittersweet frost flower that blooms into radiance) but it’s the overall weave, the daydreamy drift, that impresses. A 40-minute swoon of a record.

Proof that there’s more than one way to skin the electro-punk cat comes in the form of Sheffield newcomers Pink Grease. Their debut album puts welcome top-spin on a genre fixated on Suicide by reviving Devo, adding the glamour and flamboyance of The New York Dolls, Ziggy-era Bowie and Roxy Music, then whipping the lot along with the Glitter Band’s ludicrous stomp. “Fever” is an over-sexed strut through the psychobilly swamplands, but “Serial Heartbreaker” suggests Bryan Ferry joining The Rezillos and “The Nasty Show” is a jabbering, triumphantly rude-worded remake of “Looking Through Gary Gilmour’s Eyes”. Who cares whether or not Pink Grease are ‘for real’ if they throw a party this blindingly good?

The lilting, fragile sounds of this LA four-piece will massage the shoulders of fans of Mercury Rev, The Flaming Lips, Neil Young and Kevin Shields. When it counts, Marjorie Fair burst into ecstatic guitar abandon, while singer Evan’s feel-my-pain confessionals can be equally therapeutic. They’ve mastered the burning/chilly genre with ease, and if their debut gets a little Lennon-maudlin towards the end (“My Sun Is Setting Over Her Magic” is especially mournful), its many highlights mesmerise. The stunning “Stare” is both melodic and explosive, one of the year’s best singles, while “Waves” is superbly onomatopoeic. A rich harvest.

One doesn’t want to stir up any unpleasant rivalry here, particularly between two such close friends. But, to put it bluntly, The Heat is the album Ryan Adams was trying to make with Rock’n’Roll. This reviewer doesn’t actually believe that Adams’ last record was half as bad as Uncut’s esteemed editor, Allan Jones, made out in his crushing two-star review (Take 79, December 2003). Yet in making a record cut from remarkably similar sonic cloth, Malin has done so with mountains more panache and canyons of conviction.

Not that he’s in any way apeing his buddy. If anything, it seems to be the other way round. Adams produced Malin’s solo debut, 2002’s The Fine Art Of Self Destruction, and noted at the time that his prot

We raved about their eclectic mini album a year ago, and now Secret Machines?the Curtis brothers plus drummer Josh Garza, relocated from Dallas to New York?have honed their tight, tingly sound to produce a more direct yet equally powerful rock beast. In short, it’s like John Bonham playing with Can, or Floyd-meet-Spiritualized with a barely repressed pop consciousness.

Awkwardly funky, they’re not averse to nine-minute epics (the suspenseful opener “First Wave Intact”, or the closing title track) but manage to fuse garage meatiness with stadium-spraying scale. It’s all about the riffs, which insistently seduce and bully you until you’re leaping around your living room like a Kiss fan with a brain. Potent postmodern blues.