Chicagoan teen prodigy Felix Stallings had been making house records for 15 years before 2001’s Kittenz And Thee Glitz, the best synth album since Dare!. The high-point of electroclash, Kittenz also established Da Housecat as non-pareil remixer, conferring Euro froideur upon all he touches. Devin Dazzle… comes with vocals from various chicks on speed called Neon Fever, originally intended to be a standalone girl group. It’s more like a compressed version of the American Top 20 circa 1984-6 than it is of 1981 UK clubland?the sort of herky, jerky new wave Molly Ringwald might have bopped to in The Breakfast Club. “Everyone Is Someone In LA” brings to mind Pat Benatar produced by DAF?or the DFA, whose James Murphy appears on “Rocket Ride”, crooning like Bowie had he stayed in Germany for Scary Monsters. “Nitelife Funworld”, “Romantique”, “Neon Human”… this Cali-trash disco almost describes itself.

If some of the material chosen for this covers album is surprising?with songs from The Velvet Underground, Pavement, Ivor Cutler and Big Star alongside the expected quotient of folkie titles?the settings are not, reprising as they do the pastel palette of acoustic guitar, double bass and cello that proved so effective on Kathryn Williams’ previous albums.

As with her own songs, these are largely populated by lonely, wounded souls thrown off-kilter by emotional disruption. Accordingly, Neil Young’s “Birds” is more mournful than ever, and Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah” suitably hymn-like, while the arrangements cast unusual shadows over other tracks. Big Star’s “13”, for instance, is lent an almost painful fragility, while Pavement’s “Spit On A String” is rendered oddly wholesome.

The most appealing is probably Mae West’s “A Guy What Takes His Time”, done as a lazy country-blues with rickety percussion; rather less successful are the portentous drums and chilling squalls of strings that bring too obviously stressed an ambience to Nirvana’s “All Apologies”.

Their best record since 1999’s Zola And The Tulip Tree; Mark Olson and Victoria Williams’ rustic marriages of rural folk, western swing and bluegrass still bubble with contentment. Neither restless nor self-destructive, the ‘Dippers are uniquely postmodern US roots musicians: it’s the sound of what happens once you’re done with the Great Lost Highway. Olson’s “No Water No Wood” and “Rockslide” are open love letters to Williams, equating her to rare south-facing blooms and slivers of light on moonlit rooftops, but it’s romantic?never mawkish?and the music urgent and skittish. Like the thrill of the chase still burns. His musicianship, too?particularly on the soft piano of “Wood In Broken Hills” and the dulcimer delight of “Thirty Miles Of Petrified Logs”?is a joy, coloured by Mike Russell’s jittery violin and Ray Woods’ imaginative percussion.

Victoria’s written contributions may be less (three), but they’re the ones that startle, her helium chirp sounding like something forever teetering on stilts. “It Don’t Bother Me” is a zen-like celebration of the outdoor life over sparkling banjo and ghostly saw, the jerky “Bath Song” finds its girl protagonist unwilling to scrub up until her overseas paramour comes home, and the creepy-sad “Betsy Dupree” tells the tale of the blackwater suicide of a woman scorned, lying floating “in a big old inner tube/Orange lipstick on her… She looked like a party”. Extraordinary.

Bands bereft of bass are nothing new. The Jon Spencer Blues Explosion, The Immortal Lee County Killers and The White Stripes all knew what to chuck out when they decided to go minimal. Now Glasgow’s Sluts Of Trust have joined the guitar-and-drums party. Their debut is a raw, often very rude post-hardcore racket, driven by an intelligence that embraces Fugazi, …Trail Of Dead and Queens Of The Stone Age. “Dominoes” recalls Shudder To Think, while “Leave You Wanting More” offsets an indecently sexy, heavy rock riff with the wiry energy of PiL. Brief (barely 40 minutes long) but exhilaratingly brutish.

“The rumour in Boston back in 1983,” said guitarist/singer Roger Miller recently, “was that the first time you saw Burma, you couldn’t make any sense out of it…The third time, everything suddenly made sense. “Twenty-two years on from their last album, Mission Of Burma still grudgingly reveal their gifts. In the interim, R.E.M., H

It’s taken well over a decade for music to catch up with the hyper-textured innovations of My Bloody Valentine. Alongside Boards Of Canada, Manitoba and Ekkehard Ehlers, Austrian producer Christian Fennesz is a prime mover in this new wave of bliss-out, using laptop-generated interference and treated guitar to breathtaking effect. A more accessible cousin to 2001’s Endless Summer, Venice manipulates blizzards of static and drone for meditative, occasionally rockish ends, fragments of melody threaded through the abstraction. It’s also humanely crafted, with a warmth unusual in the avant-garde. David Sylvian helps shape a song out of “Transit”, but also breaks the mood somewhat:this brave, passionate music needs no earthly mediation.

The mighty Nyman’s 60th birthday has been marked by six remastered re-releases. One, Decay Music, was produced by Brian Eno in 1976 and has never been available on CD before. Eno’s written sleevenotes. It was one of the first significant contributions to ‘minimalism’, a word which Nyman, writing in The Spectator in the late ’60s, was the first to apply to music. After mastering this means of expression, Nyman decided: “I don’t believe that the best film scores are the ones you don’t notice. I refuse to provide just background. I prefer bold statements to musical wallpaper.”

And so, collaborating chiefly with Peter Greenaway, a friend since his teens, Nyman went on to become the soundtrack composer non pareil. His music doesn’t slide easily onto the floor or merely underscore the actions on screen. Often it openly and aggressively overdoes things; sometimes it actually pulls against the director’s intended emotional tug, creating an ironic reaction which somehow amplifies the film’s feel. He doesn’t tell you what to experience; he acknowledges that you have senses of your own, and that they have their own demands.

His approach has proven richly rewarding. Here in all their melancholy wonderment again are: The Piano, A Zed And Two Noughts, The Draughtsman’s Contract, Drowning By Numbers and The Cook, The Thief, His Wife And Her Lover. The first of these, for Jane Campion in ’93, sold a million. The most successful on any other level is Drowning By Numbers, which mutates Mozart to make something so beautiful and sad that, by comparison, Philip Glass is Peter Andre. Nyman’s music is “Bravura In The Face Of Grief”, as one title puts it. For him, dancing about architecture is a daily pleasure.

Even the director of this film, recounting the tale of how road manager Phil Kaufman stole and burned Gram Parsons’ corpse, was surprised when Parsons’ wife and daughter okay-ed the use of his music. Parsons’ “A Song For You” and “Love Hurts” and The Flying Burrito Brothers’ “Wild Horses” evoke the era, along with Country Joe and Eddie Floyd. Gillian Welch tackles “Hickory Wind”, and Starsailor handle “Hot Burrito No 2” bombastically. But The Lemonheads, Wilco and trend-whores Primal Scream just seek cred by association. Twangy.

This is the perfect album for your inner schizo Francophile hippie. Factually based in the late ’60s, but so wilfully mixed up it’s very postmodern-ly now, one of its personalities is fuzzily made up of Hendrix, The Doors and the Grateful Dead (plus actor Michael Pitt murdering “Hey Joe” with his band). The other’s stylishly into nouvelle vague, with blissful borrowed excerpts from the scores to The 400 Blows, Breathless and Pierrot Le Fou, and warblings from Fran

Back with a vengeance, the second of Tarantino’s Uma-in-yellow action epics gives good dialogue?excerpts included here. The music’s deliberately eclectic, built around a spine of appropriated Morricone. Johnny Cash rumbles through “Satisfied Mind”, Charlie Feathers chirrups old-time rock’n’roll, and there’s a hidden track from Wu-Tang Clan, “Black Mamba”. Malcolm McLaren?presumably Quentin admires his media scams?gives us the sultry samples of “About Her”. Best thing by a nu-country mile is Shivaree’s “Goodnight Moon”, a lost single we told you was gorgeous three years ago. If this finally makes Shivaree hip, that’s all good.

Arriving with almost indecent haste just a few months after the UK release of Catalpa, this latest album by the former Be Good Tanya member Jolie Holland continues in the same vein of what she calls “new-time old-time?spooky American fairy tales”, albeit with a band in tow this time. The emphasis here is more on departure and escape, with several songs either lamenting her abandonment or celebrating her own intention to “fly down that road till I get where I’m going to”, as she asserts on opening track “Sascha”.

As before, there’s a quirky, haunted quality to the songs, which have a mythopoeic weight comparable to authentic old-time traditional folk tunes. Set to a lazy back-porch ambience of quiet vibrato guitar chords and the occasional well-placed finger cymbal, a song like “Black Stars” proceeds like a stoned stream of consciousness: “The moon is wizened and it is old as a toad in a Chinese story/The fallen glory of my ego Is laid at the foot of all our purposes And my purpose is to keep on dreaming. Sung in a mild, feathery voice akin to a less damningly cabaret-competent Katie Melua or Norah Jones, the effect is of floating dazedly above worldly matters, like a figure in a Chagall painting.

Occasionally, Holland comes back to earth with a bump, the meandering “Do You?” stumbling dissatisfied to a close with: “What did you do when I called/Did you hear me at all?/You motherfucker, I wanted you”. But there’s a lightness to the arrangements, even when drummer Dave Mihaly is at his most industriously attentive, that ensures the songs are allowed to find their own altitude. The settings are varied but rarely derivative, ranging from the old-time Tom Waitsian horns of “Old Fashion Morphine” to the fragile combination of ukelele, bowed saw, kalimba and whistling with which she serenades her “Darlin’ Ukelele”.

The result is another relaxed but enigmatic foray into modernist roots territory to stand alongside records by Gillian Welch, Laura Veirs Sparklehorse and Bonnie “Prince” Billy.

Of course this music has atmosphere. Delicate minor themes played on a grand piano with cavernous reverb. It’s not hard. However, whether Craig Armstrong giving us his latest thoughts in the saddest of all keys is actually any good is another question. A lauded film composer and mood merchant (for Baz Luhrmann, Massive Attack and, particularly gruesomely, Richard Curtis), Armstrongese stripped down to black and white keys is pretty thin stuff; middlebrow minimalism masquerading as depth. It barely approaches the romantic wit of Badalamenti, the substance of Nyman or the sheer yearning of Barry, and compared to the Scandinavian misery-meisters (Svennson, Gustavson et al), it’s child’s play. Too much of it sounds like another-day-another-doodle sketching?the giveaway that’ll-do signature of an efficient jobbing composer.

There’s been an awful lot of snooze-worthy muzak generated in the name of nu-jazz, a post jazz-funk/fusion genre deeply in hock to classic ’70s work by Airto Moreira, Flora Purim (both of whom guest here), Deodato, Lonnie Liston Smith, George Duke and others, often with a smooth electronic sheen. Intuit wins by generating real organic warmth, and through some stellar guest spots. Heady nine-minute opener “Crianca Das Ondas” puts Airto and Flora to good use, and also tips its hat to Talking Book-era Stevie Wonder. Underused and under-sung jazz legend Andy Bey gilds “Western Sunrise” and “Planet Birth” with his deliciously burnished bass?a voice that owes as much to gospel as to jazz; “A New Beginning” is like Rotary Connection for the 21st century. Much the best record in this field for a long, long time.

For someone apparently adrift in unrelenting misery, Dekker?aka GLS?makes an inviting noise. These 10 tales of spiritual dislocation amid “never-ending dark” are sparrow-delicate and keenly articulated: a gentle vocal burr against powdery acoustic guitar, ripples of piano, accordion, the low hum of crickets and a muggy production that acts to frame him behind thin sheets of gauze. In doing so, Dekker squares the circle between Nick Drake, early Neil Young and Will Oldham. If there’s a gripe, it’s in sacrificing variety for mood, but even so, emotional retreat has rarely sounded sweeter.

While we await the next wildly futuristic move from Timbaland et al, EW&F have produced the soul album of the season by recapturing their late-’70s sound. EW&F were the gods of exorbitant symphonic dance. Oddly beloved of straight white casuals, with their jazzy polyrhythms and cosmological paraphernalia?the pyramids! the bacofoil spacewear!?they were like some insane hybrid of Yes and Funkadelic. But they haven’t made a decent album since 1981’s Raise! The sluggish attempt at contemporaneity that was 1990’s Heritage and its tepid follow-ups (1993’s Millennium and 1997’s In The Name Of Love), plus the fact that the chief architect of their epic funk is suffering from Parkinson’s disease, hardly augured well for this comeback. Miraculously, The Promise is full of the sort of joyous, juicy orch-funk that made EW&F the black crossover superstars of the ’70s.

With their commercial heyday long since past, EW&F’s 19th long-player is released in the UK by a small independent. And yet they’ve hardly scaled back in terms of lavish sonics. Conceived, as per their peak albums Gratitude, All ‘N All and I Am, by occasional vocalist, songwriter, producer and bandleader Maurice White, the Duke Ellington of disco, The Promise is refreshingly unconcerned with new developments in R&B. The majority of its 17 tracks are beautifully arranged midtempo beat-ballads, which is hardly damning them with faint praise when you consider that, with “After The Love Has Gone”, EW&F invented today’s “slow jamz”.

There are many fine additions to the quiet-storm catalogue on The Promise, and although the titles are blandly generic (including “Where Do We Go From Here?” from 1978’s I Am sessions) and the lyrics romantic pabulum, they are made sublime by the hooks, euphoric singing?leads taken either by White or the octave-leaping Philip Bailey?and superlative musicianship. Only White, his superfreak bro’Verdine, Bailey and percussionist Ralph Johnson remain of the classic line-up, but today’s EW&F retain the near-robotic efficiency of yore. Rhythmically, only Kraftwerk are this tight. Factor in the strings and horns and you’ve got some rapturous aphrodisiac muzak.

One of pop’s most consistent hit machines, with a chart run to rival The Jam, Blondie or The Police, EW&F are braving daytime radio’s current revulsion towards Old Artists and releasing “All In The Way” as a single, on which co-stars The Emotions shoo-bee-do just like they did on “Boogie Wonderland”. There might not be anything as ecstatically infectious as “September” or “Shining Star” here, and some tracks are OTT-ishly syrupy, but for sustained sumptuousness The Promise knocks most “nu soul” into a cocked hat.

Dissatisfied with the rock business, this former Greenwich Village folkie?whose songs were being sung by Delaney & Bonnie, The Dillards and Barbra Streisand?handed back the advance Warners had given her and left LA with her husband to woodshed in Massachusetts.

They eventually became the reclusive family band The Stone Coyotes, who influenced Elmore Leonard’s Be Cool.

With their music about to surface in the movie of that novel, excellent reissue label Water has taken the trouble to unearth Barbara’s parting shot.

Her voice is a strident thing, like a cross between Judy Collins and Grace Slick, occasionally lacking in colours, but with a pure, back-porch timbre that suits the country-flavoured songs fine.

Her original of “Free The People” carries some gospel clout and the playing, by Lowell George, Spooner Oldham and company, is just right.

Top rock satires are thin on the ground, so Fee Waybill’s inventive mothers seemed ahead of schedule in 1975. The Tubes’ debut and the Young & Rich album don’t sound so ground-breakingly funny now but their musical trickery stands up well.

The gorgeous “Up From The Deep” and the game-show sleaze of “What Do You Want From Life?” are highly hummable, whereas Waybill’s Quay Lewd persona is too rocky horror yuck yuck for most mainstream tastes.

With Al Kooper and Ken Scott helming the sessions and Jack Nitzsche arranging gooey treats like “Proud To Be An American” and “Pimp”, they produced quality disco groove before Urge Overkill.

Great sex, drugs and rock’n’roll artwork, too, if you like girls dressed in rubber and stolen credit cards (see above).

Those who recall 1986’s TV series Edge Of Darkness will remember the moment when Joe Don Baker’s maverick CIA agent takes to the podium and produces a block of plutonium, brandishing it aloft, scattering the room. There are parallels between that act of showmanship and that of Throbbing Gristle. No one was ever in mortal danger at a TG gig, though they did boast of deploying sonic frequencies which could make the listener physically shit themselves. They were often accused of being out to shock for shock’s sake, deliberately harvesting tabloid epithets like “wreckers of civilisation” for their apparently salacious use of porn or Holocaust references (“Zyklon B Zombie”). However, shock was merely the byproduct of their agenda. Their real purpose was graphically to present to their audience the implications of the society in which they lived, and thereby jolt them out of their docile passivity. Throbbing Gristle weren’t amusical opportunists but highly moral and, incidentally, highly influential.

Always wishing to exact a toll on their listenership, TG were true to their traditions in prefacing their comeback with two packages of unremittingly scabrous live material, in 24-hour and 10-hour packages respectively. However, a ‘proper’ reintroduction is appropriate at this time as they prepare to regroup. Here, new fans will find a surprising blend of chromium-clean proto-synth-pop (“Distant Dreams?Part Two”) interspersed with filthily radioactive, elongated bursts of noise like “Cabaret Voltaire”?sheer sonic S&M. There’s self-abasing scatology (“Something Came Over Me”). There are even ‘love songs’, though TG were apt to de-and re-construct gender relationships