…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You might be expecting this to be a car crash of a second album, an anachronism long since superseded in relevance and sonics by the likes of Dizzee Rascal.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.

This 27-year-old neuroscience major and former school teacher will no doubt elicit comparisons with fellow Canadian Kathleen Edwards, not least due to the sharing of producer Dave Draves and guitarist/mentor Jim Bryson. But Maki is softer and sweeter, with a faint copper tang. There’s something disarming about her gently fluttering country-folk delivery, more akin to Sarah Harmer or Shelly (Blue Ridge Reveille) Campbell. Bryson’s fretwork and Fred Guignon’s lap-steel cushion her in pastel-subtle shades throughout, but she cuts loose with the chicken scratch of “Out Back” and the wildly plucked “Many Thanks” Details at www.katemaki.com

The pick of two near-simultaneous EP releases from the 22-year-old Swede, the four-track Maple Leaves is little short of astounding. While its counterpart, the Rocky Dennis EP, is all soft light and strings, this one swings moods with abandon. A droll miserablist of Smiths vintage, Lekman intones like a baroque Stephin Merritt on the Left Banke-filching “Black Cab”: “Oh no Goddamn/I missed the last tram/I killed the party again/Goddamn Goddamn”. The title track is Morrissey backed by The Avalanches, while the doleful piano of “Sky Phenomenon” curses the social blight of being able to dance the funky chicken. A cover of the Television Personalities’ “Someone To Share My Life With” is the cherry topping.

If 2002’s wonderful Lost In Revelry was Blonde On Blonde rescrambled by Westerberg and barbed by Costello, the more buoyant Fortune thrashes to the classic American assembly-line rock of Springsteen and the choppy pop of early Nick Lowe/Joe Jackson. Shannon Mary McArdle’s Runaways-like “Faithful Brother (Scourge Of The Land)” is typical of the broader, chrome’n’ketchup approach, but?as on the Brooklyn sextet’s previous outings?the finest moments are found in the shadows: the piano smoke of Timothy Bracy and Peter Hofmann’s “Metro Pictures”, the delicately frosted “Will You Be Here Tomorrow?”, and McArdle’s countrified slow waltz “They Never Bat An Eye”.

With 2002’s Shiny Things, the Sacramento quartet seemed to have lost the pizzazz that made predecessor Weightless such an unfettered, sardonic joy, frontman/songwriter Rusty Miller’s lyrical suss seemingly having lost its bite. Thankfully, here he’s back on form, an acute diarist of smalltown suffocation, whether he’s daydreaming of Stevie Nicks (“When We Get Together”), making out in the bushes (“Adventures Galore”) or jacking off in a hotel room (“Charlie Watts Is God”). Musically, they’re a floor-ripping mess of Drive-By Truckers gallop and Now It’s Overhead maelstrom?particularly on the epic “If We Could Go Backwards”?with a country-Stones chaser. Welcome home.

Shining of eye and tenacious of beard, Devendra Banhart appears to have wandered into the contemporary music scene by way of an ancient dream. Forty years ago, in a Greenwich Village backroom, his bohemian invocations of folk and blues might have been more commonplace. But still, you suspect. Banhart would’ve been a happy misfit, a holy fool, too wayward to be easily assimilated.

Half-Texan, half-Venezuelan and wholly inveterate wanderer, Banhart’s free-flowing oddness makes most musical eccentrics seem self-conscious and predictable. A couple of years ago, a clutch of his solo demos appeared as an album?Oh Me Oh My?and introduced the world to a supremely unworldly magic realist. The acclaim which followed has not dissipated Banhart’s charm. Indeed, the 16 songs which make up Rejoicing… are, if anything, better still. Though his whinnying croon and orbiting strums may sometimes be eerie, Banhart always sounds more enchanted than accursed. In stark contrast to the tormented affectations of most blues-derived songwriters, what’s most striking is his capacity for joy: at the miracle of his birth (“There Was Sun, I Know”) or the surrealism of his visions (“This Beard Is For Siobhan”, in which he memorably takes his teeth out dancing). Banhart’s kinship to the wonder and whimsy of early Bolan is pronounced, and “Poughkeepsie” is a kissing cousin of “Deborah”. There are also nods to the aqueous guitar of John Fahey, Karen Dalton’s theatrical blues and the sweet ruralism of Vashti Bunyan (she shares vocals on the title track). Rejoicing… feels like the work of a man in the midst of a prodigious creative spurt.

If its marvels are so intoxicating you can’t wait until Banhart’s next album, Nino Rojo, arrives in September, then Vetiver’s debut album is worth investigating, too. A San Francisco band fronted by Andy Cabic, Vetiver feature Banhart on guitar and backing vocals, as well as guest visits from Joanna Newsom, Hope Sandoval and MBV’s Colm O’Ciosoig. It isn’t as endearingly odd as Banhart’s solo work, but doesn’t try to be. Rather, it’s an intimate collection of very good chamber folk songs that may be more appealing to those who find Banhart’s quirks, however unforced, a little ostentatious. For the rest of us, these are two wonderful albums informed by an artist who sounds more like a contemporary of his idols than a disciple.

If 2002’s seductive Reckless Burning was an exercise in low-key noir, the follow-up is tinted with flash pockets of colour. The premise remains the same?Sykes’ gentle utterances; ex-Whiskeytown guitarist Phil Wandscher’s slow-tremelo picking; Anne Marie Ruljancich’s downcast violin/cello?but in among the glowering gothic is the cowpoke canter of the Lee Hazlewood-like “The Dreaming Dead” and the spectral fog of “Tell The Boys”, where Wandscher finally cuts loose. Crowning glory “House Down By The Lake” is a somewhat improbable triumph of bluegrass reel and brass flurry. Now that’s progress

In their search for ever weirder, more punishing beats, underground US hip hop has been foraging way further into the dark recesses of the European avant garde than Kraftwerk in recent years. Which is why this apparently unlikely collaboration is actually so logical. From its opening, “Imagine What We Started”, with its filthily phosphorescent plume of industrial noise, Faust lay down for NY hip hop trio Dalek an assault course of rusted, twisted metal. Dalek rise to the challenge, using the backdrop as scenarios for their own paranoid, hellish monologues. Gruellingly awesome.

Having taken their claustrophobic brand of sticky black electro as low as it could go, TLS return after a lengthy break as…a decent pub rock band. Disco purists will be amused to hear Andrew Weatherall’s singing voice and Keith Tenniswood bashing out barr

Just when you thought Pharrell Williams had become just another soul lothario, his production style, as one half of The Neptunes, now formulaic and his video cameos mere excuses to bare his six-pack, he and fellow N*E*R*Ds Chad Hugo and Shay Hayley come up with this insanely eclectic art-rock. Fly Or Die has more in common with 10cc and XTC than it does Common. This is the black White Music. Really. “Drill Sergeant” is “Sgt Rock” while the cartoon falsetto on “Thresher” is pure Lol Cr

As the decade that birthed rock’n’roll drew to a close Prince Rogers Nelson (June 7, 1958, Minneapolis) and Steven Patrick Morrissey (May 22, 1959, Manchester) were born 11 months and 3,876 miles apart. Both would make their UK Top 40 debuts in 1983. Prince, again, was first: “1999”, No 25, January. Ten months later, The Smiths’ “This Charming Man” also reached No 25. Prince found a route for black pop out of funk and disco’s apparent dead end into the new decade, with a music whose luxury and ambition chimed perfectly with the lavishness of New Pop (Frankie, ABC et al); his co-opting of white sources?Beatles, Todd Rundgren, new wave?a neat inversion of the New Pop elite’s love of black forms?funk, soul, disco. The Smiths, with Morrissey as solipsism incarnate, took Oscar Wilde, Edwyn Collins and Pete Shelley into uncharted waters, and might have been specifically designed as the most arch antithesis of all this shiny show.

Untouchable icons of the decade, both men ended near flawless runs in ’88 (Prince’s Lovesexy, Morrissey’s solo debut, Viva Hate). Since then, both found themselves eventually drifting between labels, perversely hiding their best material on B-sides or unloved albums. Most spectacularly, Prince recently made a staggering, largely just piano and voice album available only as an extra disc with a three-CD live set available through his fan site.

Now, after a run of profoundly mediocre records and experiments with independence, former ‘slave’ Prince is back on the corporate chain gang with Columbia/Sony. Morrissey, after a seven-year silence, beaches up at Sanctuary, rock’s Dr Barnado’s, his gang of thick-skinned, workaday toughs still, remarkably, plodding along behind him, both giving him wings and dipping even his grandest endeavours in lead.

Prince, on the other hand, has dispensed with his band almost entirely, the raggle taggle credits of recent albums replaced by the gloriously monomaniacal “All instruments and voices by PRINCE”. Where, say, The Rainbow Children felt like an endless jamboree, Musicology has focus and lightness of touch. Morrissey, who could just about manage a one-finger piano solo, will never be in that position: as if somehow handicapped and tragically dependent on carers, he is an eternal collaborator. More than that, he is doggedly content to work with musicians who are never going to challenge him, and a reputed suspicion of expensive session players has latterly prevented the use of real strings. Here, the cheesy keyboard string lines either undermine the grand ambitions of “I Have Forgiven Jesus” and “Come Back To Camden” or tint them with a shabbily English, perfectly Morrissey, wonky Wurlitzer pathos.

As Morrissey relentlessly pursues the singular business of ‘being Morrissey’, so he has become his own genre. Yet for all the talk of how ‘influential’ he is, his influence is pretty hard to spot. Prince’s, meanwhile, is everywhere. As surely as American R&B has become the lingua franca of pop, so through that runs a broad vein of Prince; indeed hegemonic cool rulers N*E*R*D (/The Neptunes) have just made an album that picks up where the genre-melding of Around The World In A Day left off. ‘Prince’ is everywhere, too, on Musicology, which might be a primer for his various selves, so redolent are individual tracks of previous songs. The deliciously dislocated gauzy needlebeats of standout “What Do U Want Me To Do?” recall nothing so much as “The Ballad Of Dorothy Parker”; the deep digi-funk of “Illusion, Coma, Pimp & Circumstance” is “Gett Off” right down to a brief echo of melody; the wan “Life O’The Party” is the dark side of “It’s Gonna Be A Beautiful Night”. This cannibalism feels more like nostalgia than retread; the genius indulging in well-earned self-referential game-playing. Is it disappointing or dignified that he doesn’t feel the need to compete in the quest for the most futuristic beat? Then again, maybe he is but he’s just not sharing the fruits yet: Prince was always autistically prolific and Musicology might just as likely represent some stuff from the cupboard that hangs together well as the coalface of wherever his muse is digging right now.

Morrissey’s muse, of course, digs in the same, small, intermittently fertile patch of damp ground. The second half of You Are The Quarry sags with the weight of four songs which reference court cases or “uniformed whores” or “Northern leeches” (Mike Joyce, presumably). You’d think he’d been turfed out onto the street by the bailiffs and publicly birched. Similarly, it would seem a song called “How Could Anyone Possibly Know How I Feel?” (a plodding, very Southpaw Grammar grind) must be the product of a psyche permanently stunted in pouting adolescence, though there’s raw and clich

South London five-piece Hot Chip made their entrance earlier this year with an EP, Down With Prince, the neatly ambiguous title of which revealed both their puckish sense of humour and a weariness of the hip hop/R&B fraternity’s insistence that they’re hip to Mr Nelson’s trip. It set out their stall with lo-fi soul, minimal electro/glitch and decidedly idiosyncratic funk, all of which are present and correct in Coming On Strong.

Like their EP, the album was put together in the bedroom of one particularly tolerant Chip using synths/keyboards, programmed beats and whatever toy instruments were to hand. As recording methods go, this is nothing radical, but Hot Chip’s (sample-free) tunes are refreshingly resistant to DIY typecasting. Beats programmer/vocalist Joe Goddard would undoubtedly ‘fess up to a fondness for The Beastie Boys, Rodney “Darkchild” Jerkins, De La Soul and cLOUDEAD, vocalist/keyboard player Alexis Taylor for Four Tet, Smog, Bobby Womack, Palace and?yes?Prince, but Hot Chip range far wider (and less obviously) than that. Thus, “Keep Fallin'” is a daringly minimal, highly personal homage to Stevie Wonder and Marvin Gaye, the darkly groovy “Playboy” recalls Armand Van Helden, “Bad Luck” and “Shining Escalade” dabble in pastoral Krautrock, while the lovely, lilting “Crap Kraft Dinner” suggests Arab Strap given a deep house makeover, but still comes up trumps.

A mordant humour is central to Coming On Strong, much of it expressed in the soft, reedy tones of Taylor, who detonates sly reality bombs in lines like: “All the people I love are drunk”, “I haven’t got the time for a jerk-off loser” (both from “Crap Kraft Dinner”) and?most memorably?”Fuck you, you fucking fuck”, as murmured in deceptively sweet lament “Bad Luck”.

Restlessly inventive, Hot Chip also manage what many bedroom eclectics don’t: crafting a genuinely organic, proper album, and the relaxed enthusiasm that drives this debut is absurdly infectious. Nice and (gr)easy does, apparently, do it.