It’s been six years now since The Beta Band ended the brief first stage of their career (three bewitching EPs) and embarked on the second: proper albums, coherent gigs, and a prolonged sense of anti-climax. After 2001’s slightly disappointing appropriation of R&B, Hot Shots II, Heroes To Zeros is, sadly, a slightly disappointing attempt to hammer their quirks into a more commercial rock shape.

The way the songs lope around in circles hasn’t materially changed, and there’s still something appealing about Steve Mason’s lackadaisical chants. But the bullish treatments (foul U2-style guitars on “Assessment”, a characteristically prissy mix from Nigel Godrich) are too heavy-handed for such whimsical and fundamentally fragile songs. There’s an air of desperation, finality: an indie label, a minuscule budget and a regression into semi-competence would suit The Beta Band much better.

Showing markedly more musical muscle than on 2001’s marvellous Scary World Theory album, here Lali Puna continue to astound the open-minded listener with their melodic rapture and their lyrical scythe.

Singer Valerie Trebeljahr must be one of the most sensuous female vocalists since My Bloody Valentine’s Bilinda Butcher; witness the opening, very MBV-ish title track where she breathes: “We’ve been done before and now we try to forge ourselves.” Drums are far more to the fore?hear the amazing propulsion of “B-Movie” and the cataclysmic “Alienation.”

Throughout they continue to nibble against the suffocation of capitalism (“You’ve been told/Leave your dignity at home” from “Grin And Bear”), and by the final “Crawling By Numbers” they are truly fixing to die (“Can’t you see six feet underground?”). Another truly wondrous record.

Four years on from the paradoxically titled breakthrough album Broke Down and Austin-based Cleaves is still ploughing familiar terrain?road songs and hard-luck tales for the lonely and dispossessed. With regular producer Gurf (Lucinda Williams) Morlix again on the mixing desk, there’s an unmistakable impression of water being trodden here, but what he does, he does admirably: frayed-at-the-seams country-folk the slender side of Steve Earle, Springsteen blues without the pomp. The title track and fiddle/cello-coloured “Below” are exceptional.

Finally, No Depression magazine co-editors Peter Blackstock and Grant Alden attempt to answer the big one: what is “alternative country”? A return to traditional roots? Soul music for hillbillies? Country stripped of Nashville gloss? Mountain-folk with punk phlegm? The truth probably lies in its scuppering of lazy stereotype. Far from being a repository for mawkish sentiment and conservatism, true country music is dark, heroic and often unnervingly acute. Not to mention beautiful. In those terms, it’s hard to fault this awesome collection, bookended by Johnny Cash’s blood’n’granite take on Willie Nelson’s “Time Of The Preacher”?aided by Nirvana’s Krist Novoselic and Soundgarden’s Kim Thayil?and The Carter Family’s “No Depression In Heaven”. In between, Doug Sahm’s “Cowboy Peyton Place” tips a wink to honky-tonk swing; early Whiskeytown nugget “Faithless Street” points the ruinous way to future days; Buddy Miller offers up the driving old-time fare of “Does My Ring Burn Your Finger?” and Allison Moorer bathes in the soft steel of “Is Heaven Good Enough For You?” The collaborations are curiously evocative, too?Lucinda Williams adding bluesy moan to Kevin Gordon’s “Down To The Well”, Robbie Fulks and Kelly Willis’ playful “Parallel Bars”, Emmylou Harris adding porcelain to Hayseed’s “Farther Along” and Hole Dozen (Mark Olson and Victoria Williams, plus various Gourds and Silos) barrelling through Mickey Newbury’s “How I Love Them Old Songs”. Brilliant.

After 2002’s storming Hollerin’ At A Woodpecker, Minnesota-based Weaver’s latest compounds his promise. The song, essentially, remains the same?chilly steel, sparse banjo, stroked acoustic?but these vignettes sound like gutter-pulpit sermons in a disturbed netherworld. Weaver’s voice?which makes Lee Marvin sound like Aled Jones?lends biblical portent to the most mundane detail. Standout track “John Martin”?its protagonist duped by a sinister drifter?is claustrophobic as hell. A one-man Brothers Grimm with no happy endings. Enjoy.

Emerging in 2001, these Detroit brothers lash the hard-livin’ loucheness to traditional country ache. Frontman/songwriter Kurt Marschke’s wail is Jaggeresque and there’s lonesome balladry aplenty (“27 Hours”, “Such A Crime”) plus enough “Happy”-like fretwork to suggest what might have been had Gram’n’Keef really got it on. “Entitled” pits the sideways chug of The Breeders’ “Cannonball” against early Replacements sneer, and dobro/pedal steel player Peter Ballard tints the big skies with a yearning airiness. Seriously impressive.

Cut from classic troubadour cloth, North Carolinan Holcombe has been recording for 20 years, though dogged by bad luck (dropped by Geffen, his previous album, A Hundred Lies, was only released after fans Steve Earle and Lucinda Williams found him a label). His husk of a voice and country-blues finger-picking is reminiscent of Eric Andersen and Tim Hardin, but closest to JJ Cale. The 48-year-old’s stream-of-consciousness lyricism is unique, though, bearing the scars of a troubled past. The tender “Love Abides” carries the line: “My past is old and black as Gunga Din/Her mem’ry’s sweet and young as Magdalene.”

A decade ago, Neil Hannon engineered a reputation for himself as a bookish young fogey on the periphery of Britpop. An awkward dandy whose self-consciousness heightened his appeal, it also helped that much of his music?romantic orchestral fantasias, mainly?measured up to his lofty pretensions. By 1998’s Fin De Si

Ian McLagan is one of the Blokes?quite literally, having spent the last couple of years in Billy Bragg’s band. He excels as a sideman, as a list of employers from Dylan to the Stones testifies. As the frontman with his own band, the Bumps, he’s less convincing, due to an anonymous voice and derivative songs. That said, Rise & Shine! is an enjoyable effort that revives the spirit of ’70s pub rock?Brinsley Schwarz with an added touch of Dave Edmunds rock pastiche, maybe. You’d be damn lucky to have Mac next to you in the lifeboat if the ship was sinking. But that doesn’t mean you’d want him on the bridge giving the orders.

Berlin-based To Rococo Rot have been steering a neat course around micro-house, ambient techno and post-rock for nine years, turning out beautifully tailored electronic instrumentals as light and playful as their palindromic name. Hotel Morgen adds percussion, Wurlitzer, grand piano, bass and vibraphone to the usual overheated laptops, synths and samplers to sensuously melodic effect. “Feld”?connecting the dots between Pink Floyd and Orbital?and the languidly grooving “Miss You” are highlights, and Luddites still unconvinced that digital technology is capable of emotional expression should make this their first stop on the road to enlightenment.

Italian singer Montecorvino has been around for some time, but this should be her international breakthrough. With a nicotine-stained voice like an Italian Marianne Faithfull, and in conjunction with producer Eugenio Bennato, she revives ancient Neapolitan standards like “Guaglione” and “O Sole Mio”, but marries them with Algerian and Tunisian musicians and arrangements to produce something genuinely new and startling; a real picture of the bustling international port which Naples once was. She can tantalise (“Dove sta Zaz

They sound like they’re singing each other to sleep, weaving glinting strands of remarkable imagery (“If blue-eyed babes/Raised as Hitler’s little brides and sons/They got angelic tendencies/Like some boys tend to act like queens”?”Terrible Angels”) into a drowsy, intoxicating reverie. A writer more prone to hyperbole might imagine a post-digital Karen Dalton possessing the bodies of conjoined twins raised in the crumbling decadence depicted in Kennedy-scion documentary Grey Gardens. Self-produced, La Maison… is an eerie, sparse, haunted record; instrumentation that sounds like field recordings, or sounds transferred from well-worn 78s, threaded around unfussy synthetic clicks and glitchy backing and delicate harp runs, lovely as unexpected pools of sunlight. Then there are the voices:a lilting, jazzy rasp (very Karen Dalton), oddly child-like sighs, a soaring but never overbearing operatic trill, like the return of an echo. They sing words that twist and turn, resisting interpretation but operating, surely, by their own internal logic, dipped in a kind of Southern gothic both sensual and ominous. Their own lines, “A mumble so dreamy/A soft sound so creamy”, go a little of the way towards capturing the magic of this curious, bewitching record; a kiss in the dreamhouse, indeed.

You won’t have ordered these bewitching noises; in fact, you won’t even have seen them on the menu. In a world of stodgily male indie rock un-surprises, the debut album from early-twentysomething Southamptonites Delays swoops in like a trilling, shimmering, frankly feminised confection of the angelically unexpected and the marketplace defying. Even if you’ve a notional grasp of what The Cocteau Twins covering The La’s might sound like?probably still the best thumbnail sketch of this lot on offer?it hardly prepares you for the startling swoon of fearlessly Liz Fraser-voiced singer Greg Gilbert and a portfolio of sweet, melancholically jangling vignettes.

Viewed in the sober light of rock history, of course, Delays’ musical touchstones are as easy to plot as they are difficult to reproduce?should anyone be so inclined, and on the evidence these are the only four English boys presently thus driven-with such starry-eyed charm. Gilbert’s harmony-festooned vocals summon up Fraser’s helium arabesques and David McAlmont’s Thieves-era testosterone defiance, underpinned with a delicious sugar-and-grit echo of Lee Mavers.

Musically, the band’s chiming, shyly pristine three-minute pop sweeps past the twin peaks of “California Dreaming” and “Hazy Shade Of Winter”; Teenage Fanclub at their blessed, blissful best; The Stone Roses at their least laddish and most gossamer (album closer “On” is a tumblingly instinctive hymn to “Waterfall”) and The Bangles’ imaginary-Merseyside yearnings.

From lump-throated start to regretful finish, it’s all shot through with a dreamy, nostalgia-soaked vulnerability peculiar, perhaps, to the young and stubbornly out of step.

Ultimately, it’s that out-of-time devotion?along with soaring choruses to put most contemporaries to shame?which makes this a debut record to cherish. From the first eye?wideningly girlish falsetto of opener “Wanderlust” through the irrepressible uplift of singles “Nearer Than Heaven” and “Long Time Coming”, all the way to a giddily sunshine-soaked “Hey Girl” that’s patently and brilliantly a “There She Goes” about sweethearts other than smack, Faded Seaside Glamour is an of-the-moment event of its own unlikely making.

The Yorkie Mekons celebrated their 25th anniversary two years ago with a heady reconstructed blast at their considerable back catalogue of hit tunes like “Never Been In A Riot”, “Fight The Cuts” and associated agit prop revelry recorded in Chicago and Amsterdam. Always ahead of the game but slightly too left-field to clean up, Clash-style, the Mekons were doing socialist folk and country punk long before most of the competition, so the combination of fiddles, banjos, accordions and lean rock’n’roll sound just right. They remain funny, fly and fit for the future. Dan Dare would approve.

One of the many bewildering details about The Darkness’ grim rise to superstardom has been the number of comparisons to AC/DC they’ve garnered. In truth, The Datsuns and Young Heart Attack?one of The Darkness’ old support bands?deserve the reference much more. Mouthful Of Love captures the overdriven, lascivious boogie of the Bon Scott era, throws in nods to classic Detroit rock and The Who, and adds girl-group backing vocals for a breathlessly entertaining 35 minutes. As ever with this sort of thing, it’s hard to tell what’s impassioned and what’s ironic: the title’s weary innuendo, the flying-V in the band’s logo and (admittedly excellent) production by Gay Dad’s Cliff Jones may suggest the latter. But, then again, YHA’s version of the MC5’s “Over And Over” is so audaciously brilliant that fretting over authenticity seems more pointless than ever.

Venerated by their New York peers since forming from the ashes of Jonathan Fire*Eater in 2000, at full pelt The Walkmen, like The Strokes, appear in harmonic pursuit of the ultimate chugging post-punk chord change. Unlike The Strokes, thankfully, they’ve a third dimension above and beyond clotheshorse cool. This brawnier follow-up to 2002’s muted Everyone Who Pretended To Like Me Is Gone is sodden with emotional profundity. It’s there in the titles (“No Christmas While I’m Talking”), the tunes (“Little House Of Savages”, like the clattering coda of “Love Will Tear Us Apart” looped ad infinitum) and not least the bilious rasp of singer Hamilton Leithauser (wouldn’t Casablancas just kill to have penned a complex, self-loathing hate rant as spectacular as “The Rat”?). If it’s Franz Ferdinand’s ambition to make girls dance then it seems as if The Walkmen’s rightful responsibility is to make girls cry. Bows And Arrows should, by the bucket.

Recorded in the wake of last year’s Clemency, this between-albums boredom-killer is an unlikely triumph. Less countrified than its predecessor, leader Zachary Gresham’s ‘accidental’ Yamaha tinkering has birthed a smearily psychedelic song suite: delicate lunar lullabies somewhere between Mercury Rev (Gresham’s a dead ringer for Jonathan Donahue) and Yo La Tengo. “Capsized” is matched for brittle beauty only by the finest George Harrison cover ever, “Behind That Locked Door”, all marshmallow limbs in zero-gravity limbo.

Pianist, percussionist and producer Ellis is best known for his work with PJ Harvey, but also bangs his own highly distinctive drum. His band, Spleen, have released two albums, and Ellis made his solo debut with 2001’s Music For The Home. The follow-up is another bold adventure in contemporary classical composition, rather less soothingly ambient than the Eno-like title suggests. A collection of pieces written between 1994 and 2003, it’s more likely to inspire serious DIY activity than soundtrack a civilised soiree. Varese, Cage, Ligeti and Stockhausen are Ellis’ kindred spirits but, despite their unsettling and fragmented nature, his scores stop precisely the right side of dissonance.