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.

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.