As lynchpin of Zumpano and later The New Pornographers, Vancouver’s Carl Newman has a talent for ingenious left turns. On his debut solo album, he pays homage to the quirkier balladeer school. Sunnily arranged, “Miracle Drug” whips itself into an anthem, while the orchestrated “Cloud Prayer” and the moody “Most Of Us Prize Fighters” could have been standouts on the Pornographers’ Electric Version album. Crafty and clean-cut, Newman is a credit to an overlooked art; a big, baroque fusion of sharp garage, paisley pop and ’70s sleekness, finished with a coating of Terry Jacks sentiment. “Rock with good songs” was Newman’s simple demand. He’s delivered.

Another broadly apocalyptic day at the office for Sunn O))), two Americans?Stephen O’Malley and Greg Anderson?with a taste for slothful riffs, feedback, organ-shuffling sub-bass and avantdoom pioneers Earth. As with last year’s superior White 1, ambient metal predominates?deeply silly and yet meditatively beautiful. Monumental hardly does it justice, since the three huge tracks move so slowly one could imagine civilisations rising from the swamps and crumbling to dust in their timespans. Sunn O))) clearly welcome such elemental associations: they play live in druids’ robes; White 1 included a sermon from Julian Cope; and “Decay2” here features satanic breathing exercises from Attila Csihar, a collaborator of murdered Norwegian black metaller Euronymous. It’s hard to take Sunn O))) as seriously, however, given Anderson’s moonlighting with that unlikely lord of misrule, Dave Grohl.

Not only a Brit comedy that’s funny, but an indie-pop soundtrack that’s in good taste. Queen’s “Don’t Stop Me Now” and “You’re My Best Friend” are here to ensure nobody thinks this is XFM, but otherwise I Monster, Eighties Matchbox B-Line Disaster and Ash do it for the kids. Grandmaster Flash and Man Parrish do it for the kids with rhythm. Lemon Jelly do it for the parents. The Smiths and The Specials do it for us all. And Ash teaming up with Chris Martin to cover Buzzcocks’ “Everybody’s Happy Nowadays” is surely done with good intentions and a sense of humour. You’ll be spaced.

The Korgis’ bittersweet 1980 hit “Everybody’s Got To Learn Some Time”, and 1998’s future of rock’n’roll, Beck. What could they have in common? Well, Beck has wised up and done a cover of said narcoleptic nugget. And in this intelligent, melancholy film, it sounds every bit as affecting as intended. Jon Brion, the man behind the score to Magnolia, contributes the bulk, while The Polyphonic Spree chime in with “Light And Day”. If you enjoy the Spree un-ironically, you’ll also love ELO’s “Mr Blue Sky”, here in all its bombast.

The new Dawson’s Creek, and declared a guilty pleasure for adults by every Sunday supplement you read. To enjoy the music fully, pretend you still ask your mum and dad’s permission to stay out after nine. Having made such a leap, swoon to timid acoustic moments from Spoon, South and William Orbit. Get a bit stroppy to the Dandy Warhols or Doves, slam the door to Turin Brakes, then storm out in a huff crying to the grown-up riffs of Jet, who, in this context, sound like they shave and might piss on your barbecue. It’s called Orange County because of the colour of the actors’ skin, by the way.

As a rule, punk-funk has been one of the most uptight of genres. In the early ’80s that was the general point: to subversively combine the austerity of post-punk with the notional abandon of dance music. Dancing became a political act as well as a liberating one, as Gang Of Four made rhythmic capital out of Marxist theory.

There’s an element of this in Louden Up Now, the second album by New York/Sacramento septet!!! (it’s usually pronounced “Chk! Chk! Chk!”). On “Me & Giuliani Down By The Schoolyard”, singer Nic Offer invites the former New York mayor onto the floor for an energetic bout of self-improvement (“y’all could learn a lesson by losing inhibitions”). But while !!! incorporate political rhetoric into their brittle grooves, there’s a critical difference between them and many of their po-faced antecedents.

Chiefly, !!! appear to have few inhibitions of their own, being a triumphantly uncool band who’ve inadvertently stumbled into fashion. Formed in Sacramento in the mid-’90s, their dry, percussion-heavy music became the height of cool thanks to The Rapture and other DFA-affiliated bands. Louden Up Now, then, continues to draw on a hipster’s almanac of influences (A Certain Ratio, The Pop Group, Can, Chic) as well as some less credible ones (The Lo-Fidelity Allstars).

But it’s exuberant dorkiness, as well as fluidity of playing, that makes !!! stand out. Offer is a buoyant, foul-mouthed frontman; on the choppy rant of “Pardon My Freedom” alone he suggests President Bush should “suck my fucking dick”, tells Christians he’s “taller than Jesus” and disapproves of some venetian blinds.

Its daftness occasionally grates as much as it amuses, and there are moments when you wish Offer would shut up and let the band get on with it. Live, his gaucheness is infectious, but a ham-fisted anti-Bush/Blair rant on “Shit Scheisse Merde” illustrates how !!!’s positive attributes can also be negative ones. As a result, this isn’t as strong as S.T.R.E.E.T.D.A.D, the superb 2002 album by Outhud, a band sharing many members?including Offer?with !!!. Still, Louden Up Now is an irresistible party record that, alongside S.T.R.E.E.T.D.A.D and The Rapture’s Echoes, is rich enough to survive transient fads. “Catch me singing this in 20 years at some local county fair,” spits Offer, and it’s hard to imagine, even then, that anyone will have figured out how to becalm this indefatigable, empowering band.

You know the priest has started reading the last rites on dance music when the record label best known as home to Fatboy Slim releases… an alt.country record. Cynicism aside, Lucky Jim mark a laudable attempt by Skint to expand their horizons.

A two-piece (Scottish lad Gordon Graham and Brighton boy Ben Townsend), Lucky Jim draw on all the necessary and obvious references (Dylan, Gene Clark, Gram). But this collection of border skirmishes is surprisingly effective thanks to a neat line in bruised acoustic melancholia and Gordon’s prairie-dog growl. “You’re Lovely To Me” is all mandolin, strings and dusty melodies blown in from the desert. “Almeria”, a nod of the Stetson to the Spanish city where Leone shot his Dollars trilogy, possesses a ragged, loping gait; a Morricone mooch. “The Honeymooners” sounds like Gainsbourg’s “Bonnie & Clyde” for the E generation, while “My Soul Is On Fire” is a fine example of frontier melodrama.

Since their Mercury Music Prize-winning debut Bring It On six years ago, Gomez’s fusion of American roots music has suffered from the law of diminishing returns. The marketing pitch for their fourth album claims they’ve beefed up the sound and gone for a more straightforward rock’n’roll approach built around bass, drums and layers of riffing guitars. This actually does them a disservice. Yes, tracks such as “Where Ya Going?” and “Chicken Out” are heads-down-see-you-at-the-end hard rockers that makes them sound like Southport’s answer to ZZ Top. But there’s plenty more going on that doesn’t involve such dumbing-down. “Meet Me In The City” is a semi-acoustic blues shuffle and “Sweet Virginia” is a lovely piece of baroque pop, while “Catch Me Up” and “These Three Sins” are country-rock romps that recall the heyday of Albert Lee’s Heads, Hands & Feet.

Emerging in 2001 with “Circle”, a collaboration with Doseone of the oddball cLOUDDEAD collective, Boom Bip was an onomatopoeically perfect alias for the creator of glitchy, goofy-footed hip hop. Now, it’s doubtful Bryan “Boom Bip” Hollon would describe what he does as hip hop in any way. Corymb (it’s botanical) is a giddily gorgeous collection of remixes (Boards Of Canada, Four Tet and others) and new tracks. It ranges widely in timbre and texture, but is sombre and reflective throughout, with the iridescent “Pulse All Over” suggesting early Verve gone post-rock and “First Walk” sounding like a Felt for the laptop generation. Occasionally, a typewriter chatters, horses whinny and xylophone notes fall like gentle rain. Ample cause to cheer on Boom Bip’s third solo LP, due this autumn.

Christine McVie is not in the business of pushing envelopes. And if the songs here sound like anagrams of others her pure, woody tones have crooned down the years, then that’s to be expected. On the other hand, just because she was one of the architects of a particularly popular strain of pop doesn’t mean she’s duty bound to pursue it forever. Maybe she’ll get around to other styles eventually. In the meantime, as one song has it: “Easy come, easy go, that’s just the way it is.” She’s in fine voice, sounds like she’s having a good time, and if her contributions to Fleetwood Mac are your favourites, you should investigate.

Everyone, it seems, must eventually grow up. Even Adrock, MCA and Mike D, whose brattish attitude, goofball humour and lyrical obsession with pop culture have sustained them through five albums. Their hybridised hip hop appeals almost exclusively to a white, male, middle-class fanbase and aligns them more closely?if uncomfortably?with Limp Bizkit than Eminem. They are, however, relentlessly enthusiastic experimenters: Licensed To III (the first rap-based LP to top the US charts) was essentially an exercise in shouty punk, but Paul’s Boutique delivered a cut’n’paste homage to everything from soul to psychedelia; Check Your Head and III Communication were both brutally monochrome battles between rock and hip hop dynamics; and 1998’s Hello Nasty was, among other things, a post-techno/electro workout. Now, as the ‘Boys’ face 40, they get back to hip hop basics and politics appears on their agenda.

Work on To The 5 Boroughs started around the time of 9/11, so this is perhaps no great surprise. As the title suggests, it’s dedicated to their hometown, as elegised in “An Open Letter To NYC” and, although the lyrics might read like Benetton ad copy. (“Asian, Middle-Eastern and Latin, black, white?New York, you make it happen”), when set against a jittery techno pulse and a chopped-up sample of the Dead Boys’ “Sonic Reducer”, they pack a poignant punch. George Bush cops frequent flak throughout. “We got a president we didn’t elect, the Kyoto Treaty he decided to neglect,” raps Mike D on “Time To Build”. They shift their target in “We Got The”, a plea for military de-escalation with a rallying cry as its chorus: “Who got the power to make a difference? Who got the power to make a change? We got the, we got the, we got the.” All of which suggests that the trio have reappeared after six years as a white, middle-aged, insufferably self-righteous Public Enemy.

Happily not. References to Lorne Green, Miss Piggy, Trekkies, Wile E Coyote and Jabba The Hut show that the Beastie Boys are still hopelessly hooked on media detritus, and their food-obsessed rhyming has hit dizzy, linguistically dextrous new heights, whether solo centre-staging or passing the mic, as on the irresistible “Rhyme The Rhyme Well”. “Now pass me the wok, cos I’m cooking,” Mike D boasts on “Oh Word?” after Adrock has deftly rhymed “awful” with “falafel”. The music is strikingly minimal throughout, the emphasis is firmly on The Word and the Beastie Boys have plenty left to say.

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.