There’s a certain voyeuristic thrill in discovering music that was never meant to be heard. So it was when Sub Pop released Iron & Wine’s first album, The Creek Drank The Cradle, 18 months ago. A bunch of four-track demos made in the Miami home of the band’s sole member, Sam Beam, these picturesque tales of life in the South had to be teased from him by the label. Beam’s songs were too colourful to be confessional, but the soft intimacy of the recordings and the precise imagery of his lyrics still made the listener feel intrusive, illicit even.

Our Endless Numbered Days is Beam’s first ‘proper’ record. It was recorded largely in a studio rather than his front room, with a band who fill the gaps between his strums and lulling vocals. But the close, secretive atmosphere remains. It’s easy to see Beam as a Southern gothic fabulist with his songs of torched farmyards, junebugs and bougainvillea blooms, bodies in the grass and ravens in the corn. But he delivers them with such understated sensitivity that even a blues sung from the perspective of a condemned man (“Free Until They Cut Me Down”) avoids the hokeyness so common to the genre.

Beam is a master of circumnavigating clich

The eponymous 2002 debut from Kinky received plaudits for its startling fourth-world collision of electro-pop, Latin percussion and sundry ethnic elements borrowed from all over the place. This follow-up doesn’t pack quite the same spicy punch, perhaps because producer Thom Russo (Audioslave, System Of A Down) is at the helm this time: accordingly, the debut’s quirky, multi-faceted pieces have been for the most part supplanted by more direct, hard-rock dynamics. The result is less distinctive but probably more commercial, with much busy riffage and snarling wah-wah guitar over the pounding disco-funk beats of tracks like “Do U Like It?” and “Salta-Lenin-El-Atlas”. There’s still plenty to enjoy about Atlas?Ulises Lozano’s poppy Farfisa organ sound lends a weird, spindly-sounding undertow to some songs, and the band retains their knack for arresting lines like: “My God is so quiet that sometimes I cannot hear Him when he speaks loud.”But it’s a less daring enterprise overall, one which runs counter to the approving claim in “Presidente” that “you paint everything in colours instead of black and white”.

Anyone who spots the DFA production credit and brings their assumptions to this party is in for something of a surprise. Automato have nothing to do with punk-funk revisionism, and rather share the spirit of leftfield hip hop imprint Definitive Jux. Their debut album is a triumph of sample-based, groove-cutting rap that shifts ground with every attempt to pin it down, moving from Can through Afrika Bambaataa and David Axelrod on to the Beastie Boys and then to El-P. The unhinged “Hope” suggests Automato are fans of The Mars Volta, but “The Let Go” sets conscious rhymes against a cool, digi-funk pulse, managing to sound both decidedly moderne and thrillingly contretemps.

In an interview last year, Bob Geldof suggested that the impact of punk had not been entirely a good thing. “It swept away people like Graham Parker, which was a shame because I thought he was fucking great,” he said. Yet despite not having had a hit since 1980, Parker has continued to craft potent songs and make highly listenable albums ever since. Now a New York resident, on Your Country he’s lost the anger of old and instead made an album of mellow country romps and contented roots-tinged rock that in feel is reminiscent of Van Morrison’s Tupelo Honey period. Yet Parker has lost none of his lyrical sharpness on songs such as “The Rest Is History” and the home-thoughts-from-abroad of “Nation Of Shopkeepers”.

A yankee-blooded outcast in the Bible-thumping enclave of his adopted Pensecola, White has unwittingly spent his entire life foraging on the wrong side of the tracks. An itinerant childhood?fetching up in the heart of America’s Christian Fundamentalist movement?brought alienation, nervous breakdown and teenage junkiedom, while the church spat him out like snake poison.

If 1997’s startling Wrong-Eyed Jesus debut was the sound of a man hopelessly adrift in the world, 2001’s magnificent No Such Place?all creepy gothic wipe-out with slithered beats?represented some kind of closure, staring down his ghosts while eyeing up a hopeful future. Drill A Hole… finds White happier, wised-up and more reflective, like eavesdropping on Scrooge the morning after. Still fascinated and repelled by the Southern culture that engulfs him, it’s a meditative rebirth of sorts, exemplified by “Combing My Hair In A Brand New Style” (“Gonna comb out love/Gonna comb out hate/Gonna get me a new look/And I can’t wait”) and “Objects In Motion”, a dreamlike rumination on the futility of clinging to emotional baggage.

Musically, it’s problematic. For those in thrall to the spikier side of White’s ouevre, there’s nothing as visceral as, for instance, “Handcuffed To A Fence In Mississippi” or “God Was Drunk When He Made Me”. Gently trembling with funky guitar, horns, piano, sax, picked acoustic and the faintest whiff of steel, the sound is richer, quasiorchestral and layered. All pancakes of gauze with an easy kickback?at its sweetest on the Aimee Mann-duetting opener, “Static On The Radio”?it takes some listening before these songs unravel. White himself is understated, a hot whisper in the ear rather than a cattle-prod in the groin. “Borrowed Wings” (with Oh Susannah, Barenaked Ladies and The Sadies on board) is wonderful, like a breath of scented wind, while “Alabama Chrome” blossoms from slight guitar strum and harmonica into fat, gospelly chorus via a burst of bluegrass static. Balmy closer “Phone Booth In Heaven”, backed by Mary Gauthier, is a break-up ballad of delicate, densely atmospheric proportions. With its smoothing of rough edges, it’s likely this record will split opinion, but there’s much to admire for those?like its creator?willing to burrow.

The title’s telling: with their greatest hits again nestling in the Top 10 and that “Mad World” cover nudging our nostalgia, Roland Orzabal and Curt Smith are back together (Orzabal’s solos under the brand name don’t count, surely). And boy, have they come back big. It’s 10cc, it’s Rundgren, it’s Abbey Road?and that’s just the opening track. With production so glossy it’s almost fascist and vocals that shamelessly shunt huge choruses along with a “hey!” or a “wooh!”, TFF love the best of The Beatles like Oasis didn’t. “Closest Thing To Heaven” is like bathing in banknotes, and the ‘moody’ ones?”Call Me Mellow”, “Who Killed Tangerine?”?are more futuristic than retro. To lo-fifans, an obscenity, probably. But when and why did people stop making sumptuous, luxuriant epics like this? A guilty, gleeful indulgence.

With Queens Of The Stone Age seemingly in flux, Josh Homme’s murderous work ethic is focused on the Eagles Of Death Metal this month. Here, he’s unconvincingly disguised as Carlo Von Sexron in a “bluegrass stripper dance” band fronted by his old friend Jesse “The Devil” Hughes. Homme provides ticking drums and unsteady falsetto harmonies for this wicked, dumb?and misleadingly named?project, which references Devo, early ZZTop, T. Rex, Canned Heat and Some Girls-era Stones. Often shambolic and in-jokey, it’s also sensationally good fun. “That was magic,” whispers Hughes at the end of a rickety version of “Stuck In The Middle With You”. If they played your party, you’d be tempted to agree.

It’s now approaching a decade since Tortoise’s masterpiece, Millions Now Living Will Never Die, which seems to have proved to be the beginning and end of post-rock. Since then they’ve shown few signs of escaping their aesthetic cul-de-sac, and It’s All Around You documents a continuing decline. Long since superseded by Godspeeds and Mogwais, Tortoise attempt to emulate the grandeur of the latter on tracks like “Unknown” to little effect. Elsewhere, “Sail The Skies” again proves how useless they are at rocking out; “On The Chin” is pretty in a High Llamas-backing-track kind of way; and one just has to say NO to the pompous “Crest”, which recalls nothing less than early-’80s Mike Oldfield. Tortoise in 2004?what’s the point?

Though her former partner has been dead since 1991, Rendez-vous is only the second Birkin album not to consist solely of songs written, produced or arranged (or all three) by Serge Gainsbourg. But it’s impossible to avoid his spirit; indeed, Birkin’s history is the stuff of opener “Je m’appelle Jane”, a superb calling card written with rising French. world-pop alchemist Mickey 3D, which skips like some gypsy-gangsta brag, Mickey’s Sergeish growls answered with innocent mischief by Birkin the breathy choirgirl.

After this caper, wistful melancholy descends, but in other ways its Romany hop sets the pace. While a thoroughly French affair, Rendez-vous, with Birkin calling in collaborators from around the globe, extends the world-tripping of her last recording, Arabesque (which saw her transpose Gainsbourg to north Africa). Contributors include Francoise Hardy, fellow veteran of France’s bubblegum scene, duetting on the gorgeously orchestrated teen lament “Surannee”; Brazilian legend Caetano Veloso, providing lazy bossa-tropicalia on “O Leaozinho”; Yosuke Inoue, the ‘Japanese Dylan’; Beth Gibbons, whose characteristically spooked and lonely “Strange Melody” sees Birkin’s singing become spoken-word, exhaling bruised drama; and Bryan Ferry, who helps remodel “In Every Dream Home A Heartache”?if the notion of duetting on a song about solitary erotomania seems contradictory to the point of perversion, remember: perversion is the point. Here, Ferry’s atrophied vocal almost out-creeps the original.

Birkin’s greatest weapon has always been the exquisite tension aroused by her own perfectly imperfect voice, between cut-glass naivety and emotional candour; how close that fragility can come to breaking. Although occasionally here the voice does break (Alain Chamfort’s lachrymose “T’as Pas Le Droit d’Avoir Moins Mal Que Moi” is a little ragged), care has been taken throughout to provide the most complementary frame; the styles are eclectic but always minimalist, never intruding on Birkin’s deeply personal space.

It’s not flawless (Brian “Placebo” Molko’s composition of adolescent angst, “Smile”, for example, is as subtle as a donkey in a lift), but Rendez-vous amply demonstrates that Birkin retains a passion for adventure that puts divas one-third her age to shame. When she’s good, she’s very, very good. Still.

Now Johnny Cash has gone, it’s just her and Dylan. No one else can summon up such visionary, elemental weariness, with a voice that echoes within the deep well of shared human experience.

Trampin’ balances the concerns of the three previous albums Smith has made since her comeback: the epic outpouring of grief on Gone Again (’96), the more domestic (but no less intense) Peace And Noise (’97), and the broader, more political canvas of Gung Ho (2000). There’s grief, sure, but it’s mediated in the reflective “Mother Rose” (a lovely, languid strum graced with one of Smith’s prettiest melodies, written for Smith’s late mother), where transcendence seems altogether a more homely business. Many of the strongest songs here inhabit similar territory: “Cartwheels”, “Trespasses”, “Peaceable Kingdom”; gentle music deriving substantial gravitas from the woody, infinitely wise timbre of Smith’s voice, which just seems to get better and more supple with the years.

When Trampin’ doesn’t work, though, it plods, though never as badly as the worst bits of Gung Ho. “Ghandi” feels strained and worthy, and rhyming ‘Ghandi’ with ‘candy’ is spectacularly clunky. While it’s perhaps unfair to expect musical innovation at this stage in her career, you wish the band were able to match the panoramic scope of Smith’s words (Tom Verlaine contributions are much missed). The otherwise gripping anti-war tirade “Radio Baghdad” builds over 12 minutes, but just as Smith is at her most excoriating (just try to quell the goosebumps as she sings “They’re robbing the cradle of civilisation” over and over again at the song’s climax) the band run out of steam, with nothing to match such righteous anger but mundane, churning riffage. No wonder Smith sounds exhausted on what follows?”Trampin'” itself, an old gospel song learnt from Marian Anderson, just Smith’s voice and her daughter playing piano. It’s the perfect way to end this record, as with all her recent records, the testament of a survivor, bloody but unbowed?Smith as Mother Courage, clinging to what’s left of her family as the world ends around her. We should be grateful she still feels inspired enough to testify.

Who’s Todd Rundgren calling a liar? Materialists. Bible-bashers. Dance artists who think they’re creating R&B. George Bush. Even former paramour Bebe Buell for writing a book about him (2001’s Rebel Heart) in which he’s portrayed as the worst serial philanderer this side of Warren Beatty (and she should know). Rundgren’s got them all in his sights on Liars, his first new LP proper since 1995’s The Individualist and his first to receive proper UK distribution since 1989’s Nearly Human. At the age of 55, the Runt has gotten angry.

Actually, Toddheads will be familiar with Rundgren as piqued ideologue. After perfecting the art of pop songwriting on his early albums, culminating in 1972’s Something/Anything?, he got first political then metaphysical on our ass with his unsurpassed series of mid-’70s records: A Wizard, A True Star, Todd, Todd Rundgren’s Utopia and Initiation, all zany melodies and zen mysticism. His mind expanded by psychedelic drugs and with the compassion of a true moralist, he explored the nature of consciousness and bewailed the collapse of ideals. Liars is his finest sustained assault on the corruption of all values since that heyday. “I watch society crumble and I just laugh,” he sang on 1974’s “Heavy Metal Kids”. He’s still laughing.

On the sleeve Todd’s wearing a toy rabbit’s ears and nose (although on the Japanese version you get a bisected brain). Why? Because the Easter Bunny, according to Rundgren, is the first myth promulgated by parents. And the lies keep coming. “We are raised to believe things that can’t be proven,” he told this writer, because at Uncut we can get cult superhero acid visionaries on the phone like that. “People are terrified of the truth.”

Rundgren sounds energised by the Liars concept, more so than he has for the longest time. The hermit of Hawaii, idol of the young Prince and the musician who has done more than any bar Stevie Wonder to glamorise the idea of the studio monomaniac, performed and produced every note here. With limited resources (those Bat Out Of Hell royalties don’t last forever) and employing a “rack of virtual synthesisers”, the doyen of DIY runs the gamut of electronic styles. Liars is futuristic machine-beat pop like they?specifically, Horn and Lipson at ZTT?used to make.

It’s not all ’80s techno-flash. Eclipsing Bowie, Rundgren gives good drum’n’bass on “Future” and “Wondering”, his knowledge of jungle gleaned from car commercials and Stereolab CDs. “God Said” is mellifluous, blasphemous chill-out. “Mammon” is a blast of symphonic thunder. Todd recaptures his white Philly-boy peak on “Past” and then “Afterlife”, etherised synth-soul every bit as luscious as “Can We Still Be Friends”. The quinquagenarian wunderkind, in astonishing voice throughout, sounds like Air on the Vocoderised verse and multi-tracked seraphim on the chorus.

“Living” is a revelatory six-minute synthburst that finds Rundgren at the edge of the universe, tears metaphorically streaming down his face, daring you to share the experience as he prepares to confront his mortality. Liars climaxes with the apocalyptic electro-funk of “Liar”, but it’s on “Flaw” that the contrast between heavy lyrics and heavenly music is most striking. “You could be my everything,” Todd croons over gorgeous digital doo wop. “So why you gotta be such a lyin’-ass motherfucker?”

The consummate pop craftsman, the rock’n’roll messiah, has returned. No one else would make a record as unfashionable and open to ridicule as this. Rundgren’s determination to say something meaningful about what the hell we’re all meant to be doing on this planet is, in this dismal age, nothing short of revolutionary. Liars is his best LP for over 25 years. Let him refute his existence. You want the truth? Todd is God. Again.

Opening with a blast of discordant brass from the Juarez Bull Ring Band, Tom Russell immediately transports you to the Mexican border that he now calls his home. Suddenly you’re saddling up with General Black Jack Pershing for “Tonight We Ride” and hunting down Pancho Villa across a desert “so dry you couldn’t spit”. Driven by Joel Guzman’s Tex-Mex accordion, this is a brilliantly visual narrative that sets the tone for the entire album.

Indians Cowboys… is Russell’s third album since 1991’s Cowboy Real to exclusively explore contemporary Western music. It’s by far the most committed, mixing original songs with highly personalised covers to produce a seamless evocation of the real West. No better is this highlighted than on his revision of Marty Robbins’ “EI Paso”, done as a border corrido. Hardly the clean-cut, pop version, here the gunfighter hero is an unshaven, drunken, lascivious Warren Oates-type figure. The centrepiece of the album is a compelling reading of Dylan’s “Lily, Rosemary And The Jack Of Hearts”, almost Shakespearean in the way it’s acted out by Russell and guests Joe Ely and Eliza Gilkyson, the drama underpinned by spooky Dylaneseque Hammond B3 organ. There’s a second, more obscure Dylan cover, a sorry tale of injustice, “Seven Curses”, typical of Dylan’s 1964 output but here re-shoed and with haunting electric guitar from Russell’s regular sidekick, Andrew Hardin. Elsewhere, Russell takes Linda Thompson’s heart-tugging “No Telling”, changes a few words and recasts it as a lament for an old cowpunk.

The best of the Russell originals, offset by a Scarlett Rivera-style fiddle part, is an impassioned political broadside on how the New West has raped the old. “The Ballad Of Edward Abbey” is a tribute to the modern-day outlaw who wrote “The Brave Cowboy”, which became the Kirk Douglas movie Lonely Are The Brave.

This is a wonderful album of inspired writing and fiery performances, depicting a love of the West, its people, traditions and threatened culture. If American music needs an heir to Johnny Cash, Tom Russell might just be the man. He’s the real deal.

Frankly, it’d be more startling if a Bill Callahan-produced debut by a Will Oldham collaborator, featuring Smog vocalist Sarabeth Tucek and Will’s bassist brother Paul, didn’t sound like this: literate, Papa M-droning meta-folk channelling southern rock through a treacle-and-sulphur mix of creepiness and sweet consolation.

The pleasant surprise lies instead in the sheer calibre of vocalist/guitarist Colin Gagnon’s homage: “Fingerless Children”, a redemptive “Cruxes, Cruxes” and the title track are as elliptical, haunted and affecting as Rain On Lens or Arise Therefore. As an added bonus, Gagnon’s cheeky pastiche of Natural Bridge-era Silver Jews in the sly, slouchy wit of “Central Control” is laugh-out-loud perfect. What’s not to love, in other words?

Fans of a certain kind of orphaned Americana are likely to fall on Post To Wire like apostles on The Grail. By which I mean anyone who’s been touched where it hurts by American Music Club, The Replacements, Uncle Tuoelo, Ryan Adams, Dave Alvin or Gram Parsons will soon be entirely enthralled with this dark and mesmerising masterpiece. Who are Richmond Fontaine? I was just about to ask the same question.

Turns out they’ve been going, to my great surprise, for nigh on a decade, and Post To Wire is their fifth album. They were formed in 1994 when songwriter Willy Vlautin quit his native Reno, where not a lot that was good happened to him, and moved from Nevada to Portland, Oregon, where things started to look up after hemet Dave Harding, a local bass player who shared Willy’s enthusiasm for H

The only constant fixture in the Byrds’ line-up, McGuinn was thus able to satisfy a myriad of musical cravings, which is perhaps why his solo career never produced the kind of intensely personal masterpiece that his ex-bandmates Gene Clark and David Crosby did with No Other and If I Could Only Remember My Name respectively. Nevertheless, his eponymous 1973 debut is intermittently brilliant, not least “My New Woman”, a smeared-harmony offcut from that year’s ill-fated Byrds reunion (Chris Hillman, Crosby and Clark guest) and the perfectly-feathered “Bag Full Of Money”. Elsewhere, Dylan and Bruce Johnston help ring the changes from folk and gospel to space-rock and surf. However, the disappointing 1974 follow-up, Peace On You, suggests a distracted muse.

In that well of disregard cemented over by critical consensus soon after punk resides the reputation of The Strawbs, a hearty folk-rock act whose albums are now practically forgotten. Up front, the reedy, earnest and distinctive voice a little like Cat Stevens belonged to Dave Cousins. His solo set was a Strawbs album in all but billing?but crucially without the band’s pop conscience, rhythm section Hudson and Ford?recorded in a busy year when the unsteady band also released breakthrough album Grave New World and then split acrimoniously. Its ambitious mix of hymnal ballads, portentous suites and solid rockers is overshadowed by the title track, a floaty folk-psych gem. Otherwise, probably best left to Strawbs aficionados.

A further welcome reissue from the LTM label, who have unearthed an improbable number of gems from the crannies of ’80s obscurity. Anna Domino was too much of an outsider and rootless internationalist by nature to win popular favour. Although she worked as a maker of furniture, this is not furniture music, despite its smart contours. There are too many cracks running beneath the varnish, evidence of a troubled, foraging soul “searching for the straight line”, as she declares with deceptively detached hauteur, but perpetually straying from it. Domino’s tainted torch songs are not for placing discreetly in the background but well worth the trouble of engaging with.