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.

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.