Hugely successful but painfully average, Krall has regularly supplied incontrovertible evidence that contemporary jazz singing is in a bad way. Full marks at least, then, for ditching the supper-club fare for something notionally edgier.

Along with a cover of Elvis’ “Almost Blue” there are six Costello/Krall co-writes (the first time Krall’s committed a self-composition to record), all of which noticeably bear hubbie’s imprimatur, though his own way with a melody has often borne a jazz inflection, too. But it’s Krall’s voice that has always been her biggest problem: a dry-throated, husky, rock-ish thing, it’s hardly a jazz instrument and conveys little emotion; consequently these songs feel like elegant but bloodless conceits. She doesn’t get any juice out of Tom Waits’ “Temptation” either and, as jazz appropriations of Joni Mitchell’s “Black Crow” go, Krall’s take was always going to have a hard job matching Cassandra Wilson’s. As a pianist, she’s okay, her solos amiable but unsurprising. To paraphrase him indoors, TGITOR is almost touching, it will almost do.

Always more popular in Europe than in their native America, Tuxedomoon’s best work remains a brace of groundbreaking No Wave albums on The Residents’ own Ralph label. This new set might just be their best since the passing of the era they helped to define, and reunites the core trio of Steven Brown, Blaine Reininger and Peter Principle, now scattered between Mexico, Athens and New York City. Happily, the far-flung geography benefits the music, which ranges from idiosyncratic string stylings on “Baron Brown” to scribbly electronica on “Annuncialto Redux”. DJ Hell, who reissued the seminal Half Mute album on Gigolo International in 2000, provides the unobtrusive pulse on “Here Til Xmas”, and elsewhere Tarwater, Juryman and John McEntire of Tortoise collaborate to good effect.

The angst quotient may have dipped since their heyday, and Winston Tong remains missing in action, but these enigmatic moodists still do night, fog and rhumba like nobody else.

…in the company of Throwing Muses bassist Bernard Georges and drummer Rob Ahlers. Just to throw us off the scent of last year’s Muses reunion comes a mini album of the most visceral, convincing and goddamn rockingest rock songs Hersh has written for years. She sounds reborn. These six songs put virtually everything released by the vanguard of the so-called New Rock Revolution (not to mention the whiney new Courtney Love album and, it has to be said, the last three Muses records) to shame. A brutal, buzzing blizzard of vicious riffage with Hersh’s gorgeous blasted rasp at its centre, 50 Foot Wave is an entirely thrilling, utterly unexpected blast out of the blue.

You might be expecting this to be a car crash of a second album, an anachronism long since superseded in relevance and sonics by the likes of Dizzee Rascal. But A Grand Don’t Come For Free is in fact an extraordinary thing?a concept album, possibly the first garage opera, with a storyline that magnifies the frustration and decay captured so brilliantly on 2002’s Original Pirate Material.

The story details a particularly ruinous week in Mike Skinner’s life; focusing on the loss of his

The Devon-based country diviner, assisted by longtime guitarist James Walbourne, picks through 10 selections from 1999’s career high-point Normal For Bridgewater and 2002’s lovely Ends Of The Earth, while dusting off 1996 debut album Cannibal for a run at “I Want You”. Easy-going, slung-in-a-hammock country-pop made sweeter by the New Zealander’s natural airiness (“Here Comes The Swells” is the greatest song Joe Pernice never wrote), its unplugged format tends to bleed things into one comfy whole, sometimes softening Bruntnell’s darker lyrical corners. However gentle, though, quality craftmanship shines through.

In the last quarter-century, very few people can truly be said to have been the architects of a new sound. My Bloody Valentine’s Kevin Shields is one of them, and so is Robin Guthrie. Lately, he also co-founded Bella Union (initially intended as a self-sufficient home for the Cocteaus before the band split), which has released extraordinary records by Lift To Experience, Czars and, more recently, Explosions In The Sky and Laura Veirs. Crushingly, his own career seems to have run aground?not that there isn’t music on Russian Doll that’s as lovely as any he’s made, but it’s brought crashing down to earth by deeply average singer Siobhan de Mare (formerly of trip hop also-rans Mono). With all the evocative timbre of a Pop Idol finalist, she chooses the most banal melody lines possible to carry the most banal words. Frankly, she isn’t fit to share studio space with Guthrie, who should be bathing in the kind of cultish acclaim now afforded Shields.

It’s reassuring to know that artists as well as journalists get themselves into a semiotic tangle about genres. On “Wot Do U Call It?”, Wiley mocks those who’d call his music garage, urban or 2-step, preferring the latest label, grime, or his own neologism?”eski”. The track’s great: erratic, ballistic rhythms; tiny video-game melodies; darting string samples. But the parochial concerns highlight the weaknesses of Wiley’s debut album. His productions are every bit as fresh and dynamic as those of Dizzee Rascal. “Doorway”, especially, is terrific, updating the zen kinetics of Photek’s mid-’90s drum’n’bass. His raps, though, lack Dizzee’s wit and poignancy, or the indignant originality of his timbre. Perhaps even Wiley knows his talents are best suited to producing: “Do you think I’m a waffler, mate?” he asks anxiously?and necessarily?at the start of “Goin’ Mad”.

Ramble Jon Krohn emerged as RJD2 in 2002 with his Deadringer album, a moody exercise in cut’n’paste hip hop that some saw as overly in thrall to DJ Shadow’s Endtroducing… No danger of such an accusation with the follow-up, for which RJD2 wrote original music and lyrics and arranged the orchestration.

Here, solid song structure replaces ambient abstraction and, rather than limiting himself to the vintage funk and old-school hip hop that this genre relies on so heavily, RJD2 ranges across Latino jazz, stadium rock, soul and pastoral glitch. Thus, “Since ’76” reconfigures Sergio Mendes, while “Through The Walls” plunders The Cars, then adds piano. A cool, well-timed curveball.

Loretta and Jack? Scratch below the somewhat unlikely premise and there’s a sense of synchronicity about the twinning of Nashville’s Hickory homesteader with Detroit’s golden boy. In Jack White’s case, the motive appears to be simple fandom. The Stripes’ third album, 2001’s White Blood Cells, was dedicated to Lynn, while a cover of 1972 classic “Rated X” popped up on the “Hotel Yorba” single. Introduced to her music via Coal Miner’s Daughter (the 1980 biopic of Lynn, with Sissy Spacek’s remarkable Oscar-nabbing turn as Loretta), White has since declared her the greatest female singer-songwriter of the 20th century.

For the 70-year-old girl from Butcher Hollow, Kentucky, the appeal of the White stuff?despite the obvious hipster kudos?is more complex. As one third of the Holy Trinity of Country Queens (alongside Dolly and Tammy), Lynn was by far the most pragmatic, her spirit steadfastly rooted in the soil, even amid the deluge of dollars and gongs, and the acquisition of an entire town-cum-personal ranch in Tennessee. Where others slipped relatively easily into Nashville’s mainstream, Loretta’s songs of death, sex, familial dysfunction and?above all?female empowerment, were radical free swimmers. From 1966′ s “You Ain’t Woman Enough” through housewife lament “One’s On The Way”, “Fist City” (revenge on the other woman), the philanderer butt-kicking of “Happy Birthday”, “Rated X” (a divorcee leered at by men, ostracised by women) and “The Pill” (championing contraception in the same year Tammy hit big in the UK with “Stand By Your Man”), uproar was part of the deal.

A headlong rush at life, too, suggested a reckless soul: married at 13, mother of four by 17, star at 25, grandmother at 29, country’s first millionairess before she’d hit 40. No half measures. She began suffering blackouts in the early ’70s, evincing a fragility in the face of fame described in Randall Riese’s Nashville Babylon as “like a thin cotton summer dress on a brutally windy day”.

Apparently alerted by daughter Patsy to the album dedication, when she first heard The White Stripes, Lynn remarked that it sounded “like someone was breaking into a bank”. Soon after, she joined them on stage at New York’s Hammersmith Ballroom, duetting on “Fist City”and “Louisiana Woman, Mississippi Man”. Then, while White recovered from the busted finger he sustained in a car crash in Detroit, he offered to produce her first album for four years in Nashville.

So much for the build-up. Does it deliver? However you judge the Stripes shebang?and will they really be seen in 20 years’ time as anything more than totems of an age when music had little to offer apart from a celebratory reel around its own past??White does a magnificent job of stripping away Loretta’s customary Music Row gloss and achieving the objective of “something raw, like she really is”. The sound can be a little muddy, but White’s wilfully basic approach is what gives Van Lear Rose its freshness. Perhaps only legendary Patsy Cline producer Owen Bradley (see 1967’s Singin ‘With Feelin’ or the following year’s Fist City) has ever drawn such visceral might and intuitive heat from that mighty larynx. “Have Mercy On Me”, for instance, is astounding: huge ’60s-reverb production with staccato guitar, Lynn’s fat Kentucky twang and a 12-bar freakout at its coda. Loretta and white noise? You’d better believe it.

But lest we lose sight, this is Loretta Lynn first and foremost. Thirteen Lynn originals, fleshed out by the Do Whaters?White and The Greenhornes’ Patrick Keeler and Jack Lawrence. At times, it’s unerringly beautiful and soft. At others, it howls like a blue mountain banshee.

It’s deeply autobiographical, too. While “God Has No Mistakes” is a weary acceptance of the Man’s Grand Plan (one that robbed Lynn of her first-born son, who drowned at 34) with the lines, “Why is this little boy/Born all twisted and out of shape?/We’re not to question what he does/God makes no mistakes”, the chilly peal of steel cupping the lovely “Trouble On The Line” underscores a crisis of faith. An open letter to God?”We have nothing left in common/Your thoughts are not like mine/Oh lord, I’m sorry/But there’s trouble on the line”?bristles with the static of a dialogue fizzling in the ether.

There are tales of how Dad met “belle of Johnson County” Mom (“Van Lear Rose”), cheatin’ ballads (“Mad Mrs Leroy Brown”, “Family Tree”) and dirt-poor childhood snapshots of stolen booty (“Little Red Shoes”). White may be no Conway Twitty, but “Portland, Oregon” is a stunning barroom duet with flashing slide and tom-toms?a wry nod to 1968’s “Your Squaw Is On The Warpath”, perhaps??that simultaneously boils and blossoms. “High On A Mountain” is pure joy?a rowdy country-gospel hop that Lynn describes as “like ev’rybody’s uncle hollerin’ in the front room drunk”. A kind of debauched cousin to Uncle Tupelo’s “Screen Door”, it’s the simple sound of life.

Predictably, it doesn’t always work. “Little Red Shoes” is a remarkable stream-of-(unself) consciousness with the intimacy of a toasted-fireside tale, but the band drown her out like crockery crashing in the kitchen. Likewise, the poignancy of “Women’s Prison” is swamped by drums way too high in the mix. Minor quibbles, though. Van Lear Rose closes with “Story Of My Life”, a panoramic look back across 70 years full of candour, humour and little regret. (Of the Coal Miner’s Daughter flick, she remarks: “It was a big hit/Made a big splash/But I wanna knows/What happened to the cash?”)

In a way, whether or not Van Lear Rose kickstarts a commercial revival is immaterial. If you thought Rick Rubin’s Johnny Cash reinvention was impressive, wait’til you grab a fistful of this.

A highly able sideman to the likes of Neko Case, Calexico, The Waco Brothers, Sally Timms and Kelly Hogan, Tucson-based Rauhouse’s prior form included seven years with bluegrass traditionalists Southwind?where his command of pedal-steel was honed by watching Jimmie Dale Gilmore cohort Mike Hardwick?before joining Arizona alt.countryites The Grievous Angels. Reunited with ex-Southwind picker Tommy Connell soon after, the temptation to further explore the instrument’s nuance and shade resulted in 2002’s solo debut, Steel Guitar Air Show. Raised within pickin’ distance of cotton fields and with a bronco-riding brother (pictured on the inner sleeve), the thematic sequel was inevitable.

Roping in the same Air Show players (including Case, Timms, Hogan and Carolyn Mark, plus Calexico’s John Convertino and Joey Burns), Rauhouse’s gift for the unexpected is a delight on this balmy batch of originals and idiosyncratic covers. Timms, for instance, coos her goosepimply way through “(There’ll Be Blue Birds Over) The White Cliffs Of Dover”, while Nick Luca’s piano and marimba canter through “Powerhouse”, first commissioned for a Warner Bros cartoon and one of 10 instrumentals here. There’s a Hawaiian-hammock swing throughout, not least on Hogan’s pouty “Smoke Rings” or guest vocalist Howe Gelb’s springy reworking of the Artie Shaw version of “Indian Love Call”. Rauhouse even digs out the banjo for “Jennifer’s Breakdown”, aided by the missus (of Pennsylvania bluegrassers Jim & Jennie & The Pinetops). The instrumentals adhere to the brief (“Widowmaker” refers to every circuit’s resident psycho nag; “Ropin’ The Goat” is a kiddies rodeo thing) as much as they stray (the bizarrely wonderful “Perry Mason Theme”). Rauhouse, meanwhile, makes a commendable vocal debut on “Wishin'”, “Work Work” and “Corn & Coffee”. Seriously laid-back splendour.