At first, Sufjan Stevens seems like another baleful, tentative folk-pop singer in the vein of Elliott Smith. All the requisite signifiers are in place:spare, brittle melodies; a hushed intimacy, where every squeak of fingertip on string resonates; a first line which runs, “If I am alive this time next year”. An electric guitar doesn’t arrive until track six, “Sister”, and even then its manoeuvres are discreet, in keeping with Stevens’ apparently subdued aesthetic.

Admittedly, he’s very good at this?for once, the Smith comparisons are deserving. There are pleasing echoes, too, of Will Oldham in the doleful banjo lines, and Low in the way Stevens harmonises with his female backing vocalists, endearingly disconsolate seraphs.

He is, though, nowhere near as straightforward. A part-time member of creepy infantilists The Danielson Famile, Seven Swans is actually Stevens’ fourth solo album. His lo-fi 2000 debut, A Sun Came, was followed by an electronica concept album about the Chinese zodiac called Enjoy Your Rabbit, and then last year’s acclaimed Greetings From Michigan, a lavish chamber-pop suite about his home state.

This eccentric history helps explain the profound otherness of Seven Swans. Stevens’ strumming often has an unwordly quality that transcends folk archetypes and asserts itself halfway through the brilliant “A Good Man Is Hard To Find”, when an organ-led band break the reverie with a plausible impression of Stereolab.

As the album progresses, not only does the music build and intensify, but what seems to be a peculiarly visceral line in Christianity emerges, too. Stevens’ God is picturesque and vengeful, Blakean?the sort that provides such vicarious fascination to unbelievers. “When we are dead, we all have wings/We won’t need legs to stand,” he claims, menacingly, while his banjo plots looming circles round him. By the title track, Stevens is seeing signs in the sky and hearing voices. His choirmates, meanwhile, have been mobilised into an ad hoc Polyphonic Spree, brandishing flaming swords and ready for Armageddon, warning: “He will take you/If you run He will chase you/Cos He is the Lord.” As fire and brimstone rain down, albeit subtly, it’s plain Stevens is far too awkward a talent to be trapped in the confessional. Like the equally mystical Devendra Banhart, he’s more at home in a much broader, weirder and, ultimately, more compelling church.

Considering the insidiousness of their eponymous debut (issued in the UK at the end of last year), this follow-up carries a whiff of disappointment. LeMaster’s narcotic grasp on the quiet/loud guitar dynamic remains intact, but those creeping melodies seem buried somewhere beneath. Both Michael Stipe and Conor (Bright Eyes) Oberst guest, but NIO seem more intent on gazing at shoes than stars. When it does work though, as on “A Little Consolation” and the title track, it’s engrossing stuff.

Russell Churney, those of you with long memories and nothing better to do will remember, was once known as “the lovely Russell” and tickled the ivories for Julian Clary. If you’re thinking that’s a signpost to the (intentional?) campery of this tribute, you’d be right. A healthy appreciation of camp is obviously a prerequisite for any Bowie fan but, really, Des de Moor sounds like a particularly hoarse queen in a piano bar. You have to admire the duo’s brave attempts to include material from Outside in the canon, and for some self-aware acolytes of the Dame, Darkness And Disgrace will provide at least an hour of rib-tickling fun. Still, Moor, Churney and Barb Jungr (another former Clary alumnus turned torch singer) sound like they’re having a ball, which is probably most of the point.

Emerging from Pittsburgh around four years ago as a duo, Modey Lemon have since added another Moog-mangling member, ensuring a refreshingly turbulent take on garage rock. Into the crazed stew of their UK debut LP goes the jabbering energy of Suicide, certainly, but also The Birthday Party’s psychotic blues, the swampy drama of The Cramps and the sci-fi adventurism of Silver Apples. Vocalist/guitarist Phil Boyd’s primal yowl recalls Kurt Cobain for the most part, but he adopts a more restrained tone on “The Other Direction”, where lean-lined rockabilly is added to the roiling blues squalor. Thunder+Lightning is a storming introduction to a scarily capable new talent.

It can be terribly hard to convince people of the Indigo Girls’ worth. An air of plaid-shirted worthiness haunts them and, despite regularly clocking up gold albums in the US, they’ve never been more than a minor cult here. But listen, especially, to 1994’s gorgeous Swamp Ophelia (with guest harmonies from the divine Jane Siberry), the album that finds their immaculate songcraft at its most emotive, and you’ll see them as so much more than lumpy old bleeding-heart lesbians in big boots. All That We Let In, produced with stultifying politeness by longtime collaborator Peter Collins, is not going to change their fortunes in the UK, sadly. Emily Saliers and Amy Ray’s voices still combine to luscious effect, but the combination of tinkling pianos, gutsy strum and homespun wisdom places this very much in the middle of the road. What they really need to let in is air.

The recording of Bob Dylan’s 1966 Manchester concert, for so long erroneously attributed to the Royal Albert Hall and finally released in Columbia’s official bootleg series six years ago, owes its legendary status to the electrified second half of the performance and the notorious “Judas” exchange. It has to be the most famous case of audience participation in rock’n’roll, and it’s undeniably a pivotal moment. But the power of its mythology has served to eclipse the edgy brilliance of the acoustic first half of the concert. The next volume in the ongoing officially-sanctioned trawl through Dylan’s massive unreleased archive revisits another memorable acoustic performance 18 months earlier, at New York’s Philharmonic Hall on October 31, 1964. And although?or perhaps because?the Halloween date finds him less wired and drugged-out than on the ’66 tour, the performance is arguably even more potent.

The illicit concert recording has long been one of the most highly rated Dylan bootlegs among collectors, both for its content and for the exemplary sound quality?the tapes were pirated directly from Columbia, whose engineers recorded the show for a planned live album. A sleeve was even produced, and the catalogue number 2302 assigned. That it never appeared in the shops had nothing to do with any lack of quality. Rather, it was that by then Dylan was moving so fast that there was no time to schedule its release.

Within nine months of the Philharmonic Hall appearance, he’d delivered two new studio albums in Bringing It All Back Home and Highway 61 Revisited, and controversially ‘gone electric’ for the first time at Newport. A live acoustic album would have been out of date almost faster than they could have pressed it up. Then a sequence of further tumultuous events, followed by Dylan’s subsequent retirement from touring for seven years, meant that we had to wait until 1974’s Before The Flood for his first official live album.

What we now get, 40 years later than originally planned, are 19 songs that capture Dylan as he stands trembling on the cusp between Woody Guthrie-influenced folk protest singer and Rimbaud-inspired rock’n’roll poet. This is Dylan in headlong motion, snapped in a unique, brief and vital transitional moment in his development as his comet blazes across the firmament of popular culture.

Early protest songs that never made a studio album such as “Talkin’ John Birch Paranoid Blues” and “Who Killed Davey Moore?” sit alongside five songs from his then current album Another Side Of Bob Dylan. Three tracks apiece from The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan and The Times They Are A-Changin’ jostle with the pure pop of the unreleased “If You Gotta Go, Go Now” (soon to be covered by Manfred Mann) and three as-yet-unrecorded masterpieces that would imminently appear on Bringing It All Back Home, the record that marked his full-blown metamorphosis to electric messiah.

His rapport with the audience is extraordinary. He’s kidding around, revelling in the adulation, funny, charming and irresistibly sharp and self-confident. And yet oddly innocent. When it comes to the encore, the crowd calls out for favourite songs, and one wag has them in peals of laughter by yelling for “Mary Had A Little Lamb”. But nobody upstages Dylan in this mood. “Is that a protest song?” he deadpans. Then he sucks his harmonica and starts to sing, “I ain’t looking to compete with you.” As he continues the song, the falsetto on the first “All I really want to do” of the chorus is so outrageous that he can’t suppress an involuntary but delightful giggle.

“Don’t Think Twice” is unbelievable, as he toys joyously with its familiar melody, taking it to the edge and beyond and exploring the familiar lyric with such wide-eyed wonder that it sounds as if he’s singing it for the first time. “The Lonesome Death Of Hattie Carroll” is delivered not only with a burning intensity; as he rails against the injustice of the murder of “a maid of the kitchen” who “gave birth to ten children” and “never done nothing to Wiliam Zanzinger”, there’s a heart-rending humanity that is living proof that he was full of bullshit when he later cruelly told Joan Baez that he had only ever sung protest songs for the money.

Indeed, he sounds genuinely happy when Baez, the self-appointed keeper of his conscience, steps up to duet on a tender “Mama, You Been On My Mind”, an impassioned “It Ain’t Me Babe” and a committed “With God On Our Side”. On the 1965 tour of the UK, captured by DA Pennebaker in his classic documentary Don’t Look Back, Dylan was vicious to Baez, freezing her out and pointedly never once inviting her on stage with him. Yet here he’s even content to be her sideman, contributing discreet harmonica embellishments while Baez’s pure, soaring soprano flies solo on “Silver Dagger”. It is, perhaps, the apotheosis of their fleeting joint reign as folk king and queen.

A snapshot of Dylan’s state of mind at the time is provided by the prose poem “Advice For Geraldine On Her Miscellaneous Birthday”, which he wrote for the Philharmonic concert programme. In it, he warned against going “too far out in any direction”, for people will “feel something’s going on up there that they don’t know about”. Before you can explain yourself, “revenge will set in” and they will “start thinking of how t’ get rid of you”.

As a prophecy of the turn his own career was about to take, it’s uncanny, and there are fascinating signposts to the brave but dangerous new world that awaited in early sketches of “Mr Tambourine Man”, “The Gates Of Eden” and “It’s Alright, Ma (I’m Only Bleeding)”. Just seven months later, in May 1965, Dylan would play his last show as a folk troubadour before he courted the boos of the Newport crowd and headed off in pursuit of that “wild mercury sound”. Pretty soon he’d be cranking up his amp and angrily telling The Hawks (about to become The Band) to “play fuckin’ loud”. But this live recording proves his genius crackled with electricity long before he ever plugged in.

No matter how good a singer is, if they are to sustain a successful career, invariably they are dependent upon just how user-friendly the songs they’re given to sing are. To his credit, Jimmy Ruffin quickly found his niche in the conveyor-belt competitiveness of the Motown operation, where it was not uncommon for a number of artists to record the same song, with the hottest star of the hour bagging the release.

Ruffin’s forte wasn’t frenetic dance tracks but well-crafted ‘lost-love’ hits of the calibre of “What Becomes Of The Broken Hearted”, “I’ve Passed This Way Before”, “It’s Wonderful” etc?all great singles that comprise the first part of this two-CD anthology. However, there was far more to Ruffin, as can be detected on the accompanying rarities CD, which shows how Jimmy fashioned his trademark style via a snap’n’ fingerpop version of “Too Busy Thinking About My Baby” and the truly sumptuous “That’s You Girl”. Still in fine voice, all that Jimmy Ruffin requires are those elusive new fail-safe hit songs.

If ever a record was deserving of the sobriquet “sunshine pop” it’s Keith’s 1967 Top 20 single “98.6”. Even though it was a winter hit, its breezy charm and staccato chorus are right up there with the Summer Of Love’s finest. Keith never quite had that recipe again, and some of the less inspired tracks here sound like vain attempts to recreate “98.6”‘s winning formula. He got closest with “Daylight Saving Time”, a minor chart success in the USA and a big favourite among the more pop-oriented factions of the northern soul crowd. The best of the rest?”Mind If I Hang Around”, “I’ll Always Love You”?would give Len Barry a run for his money in the blue-eyed soul stakes.

Eight examples of the state of the crooning art on four 78 records in a hefty cardboard casing, now that’s an album. Indeed, one of the first to be so conceived. Sinatra had been doing his lovelorn, vulnerable, sexy thing to the delight of the US’ young female population for a few years by 1946, but it was here that everyone else started admitting the kid (he was 30) could sing. A warm, full tone, a gently subversive way with a phrase and an unmatched sense of full-hearted longing. Swoonatra is right.

Good as Frank is, however, this remains aspic pop. The Axel Stordahl arrangements?with string quartet and discreet rhythm section?may not be quite as ’40s-bound as his fuller work of the period, and Frank is a shade or two groovier than on his bel canto sides, but compared to what he would achieve in the ’50s, this is juvenilia from Squaresville. Of the eight songs, three (“Why Shouldn’t I”?Cole Porter having a shocker?”I Don’t Know Why” and “Paradise”) are corny rubbish and were rightly consigned to the ’40s dumper. “You Go To My Head”, “Someone To Watch Over Me”, “Try A Little Tenderness”, “These Foolish Things” and “A Ghost Of A Chance” were all improved on in the next decade when the arrangers were hipper and Sinatra was older, wiser and realer.

Still, your Connicks could do worse than to listen again to this era of The Voice to hear what that ring-a-ding Sinatra they’re so in thrall to was built on. Sound but unshowy technique, deep sensitivity for a lyric and refined musicality. He may have got deeper, but he was never sweeter.

Gene Vincent was the real deal and, together with his backing group The Blue Caps, fronted The First Gang In Town. With Cliff Gallup and later Johnny Meeks on lead guitar, they, as much as The Crickets and Chuck Berry, defined the sound of rock’s classic three guitars and drums line-up.

Though originally pushed as Capitol’s answer to Elvis, Gene wasn’t nearly as orchestrated as the Memphis Flash. He walked it as he talked it and, on “Pink Thunderbird”, it’s clear he frequently felt the hot breath of the Beast on his face and reacted accordingly.

Physically and mentally damaged goods up until his death, aged 36, Vincent always worked on the edge. Truly, a man possessed, be it on the more familiar “Be Bop A-Lula” or his lesser-known take on “Over The Rainbow”, Vincent was never one to sell himself short, and neither does this must-have compilation.

When soulmate and duet partner Gram Parsons died in September 1973, Harris appointed herself keeper of the flame, vowing to build on the momentum that flooded his GP and Grievous Angel albums with such trembling beauty, albeit feeling “like my life had just been whacked off”. With Parsons’ Hollywood manager Eddie Tickner scoring her a Warners deal, she gingerly corralled Gram’s studio hire into the Hot Band (then fast becoming country’s own Wrecking Crew), admitting she was awestruck by their abilities. Her salvation, of course, was THAT voice. A crystal blade flashing in the sun.

A folkie at heart?her early heroes were Baez and Judy Collins; she’d even made a misshapen 1969 LP, Gliding Bird?she came untainted by Nashville country code, blessed with an outsider’s feel for words, tone and phrasing. With 1975’s elegant-pure Pieces Of The Sky, she seemed like a cut-glass decanter in a roomful of chipped tumblers. For the most part, it’s sedate, immaculately groomed country, though for every heartsick diamond (self-penned Gram paean “Boulder To Birmingham”) there’s an underlying sense of dislocation from her covered material, admiring a song’s skin rather than slipping inside it. Elite Hotel (1976)?her first Grammy-winner?was less starchy, proving she’d absorbed the passionate economy of traditional country music while allowing herself to bleed into the bones of the love-torn “Together Again” and “Satan’s Jewel Crown”. With ace guitarist Albert Lee and Emmylou’s own prot

Amazing what 86 quid could buy back in the ’80s. In Wreckless Eric’s case, it paid for TLBC’s entire debut, recorded in Upchurch village hall with ex-Milkshakes men Russ Wilkins and Bruce Band and still sounding startling as hell. Amid the spitting feedback and mudslide guitars, however, Eric’s caustic satire and artless pop sensibility claw through, particularly on “Young, Upwardly Mobile…And Stupid” and “Someone Must Have Nailed Us Together”. Imagine Reg Presley and the Sonics stomping in a phone box. Not big, but certainly clever.

As with most supergroups, Air Force roared in tight and punchy and staggered out again sprawling and paunchy?and not a little junk sick. When it blows its stacks, this album is very, very good. Harold McNair and Chris Wood are on blistering form on flutes and saxes, and the presence of Graham Bond brings more than a little holy magick to the table, particularly on “Early In The Morning” and “Aiko Biaye”. “Toad” completists will undoubtedly be thrilled by another version of that solo, but by the end they’ve just about exhausted the dynamics of the reprised theme, and that second drum solo on “Do What You Like” is definitely one too many.

When sunny Philadelphian folkateer Croce died in a plane crash in September 1973 (the day after Gram Parsons’ demise), he was just starting to peak. “Time In A Bottle” soon became a posthumous US chart-topper, but?as Parsons went on to canonisation?Croce’s star had all but faded by the 1980s. A pity, because he popped out airy melodies by the handful, picked guitar sweetly and sang like a blue-collar James Taylor. Includes the sprightly “You Don’t Mess Around With Jim”.

A South African Jew, Tandy emigrated to the UK in 1964 where she tried, but failed, to establish herself as a pop princess. Despite the promise of early singles like the exquisitely lovelorn “Perhaps Not Forever”, Tandy ditched pop to become a soul-singing wannabe Modmother. She signed to Atlantic, recorded at Stax in Memphis (before Dusty) and even vied for a PP Arnold/Small Faces arrangement by teaming up with second division freak-beaters Les Fleur De Lys for 67’s rambunctious “Hold On”. But her voice lacked the alabaster-cracking trill of truly great white female soul sirens like Timi Yuro. As a plea for her reassessment, there’s sadly nothing here to elevate Tandy above the level of a footnote.