Its phonetic appeal aside, the title is a little misleading, because there’s nothing remotely seditious about Sami Liuski and Pauli Jylh

A Nottingham six-piece (indie-rock subverted by violins) who through sheer force of willpower turn their weaknesses into strengths, Seachange are attracting rabid hype for this promising, flawed debut and its gusts of Interpol (or, for older readers, The Sound or Comsat Angels). At times it sounds like it was produced for threepence, and Dan Eastop’s voice is not what technicians call “good”. But he’s proof that it’s what you do with it that counts:urgent as a dying man, he rasps and yelps through his wordy, pleading tirades with such unflappable belief that the band soar to grandeur. Dynamically, it’s full of jagged theatre, and “Glitterball” repeats its charms till you’re seduced.

“Anglokana” is equally insistent, Seachange never losing their nerve. Wave them ahead.

An album surely boasting the best song title of the year this side of Morrissey (a toss-up between “We Didn’t Paint Our Nails When We Fought The Germans” and “We Tried To Drown Our Music Teacher In 1974”), the fourth album from mordant Manc Vinny Peculiar plays like Adrian Mole: The Opera, scored by Leonard Cohen. That his tunes are Prefab Sprout-pretty make these arch reminiscences about vandalism, wanking and homicidal fantasies all the more beguiling. “He had no time for T.Rex” pleads Vinny in defence of that attempted murder. Pthrtht! Should’ve let the bugger drown.

The first single to be taken from this album?”Noir D

Perhaps you wouldn’t expect something this luscious, this sexy or idiosyncratic from a summit between a sometime violinist for Mogwai (Luke Sutherland, who has also made music with Long Fin Killie and Bows), the bass player from To Rococo Rot (Stefan Schneider) and Volker Bertelmann from Dusseldorf electro types Tontraeger. But, as its title suggests, A Heart & Two Stars gathers songs and instrumentals of exceptional sensuality:think Fleetwood Mac’s “Albatross” filtered through Boards Of Canada and the fragile instrumentals from Shuggie Otis’ Inspiration Information. Sutherland half sings, half whispers as a gauze of sparingly chosen chords and twinkling chime, click and whirr wafts around him. This isn’t post-rock so much as anti-rock. Indeed, “Route 66” only bears a resemblance to Chuck Berry’s journey down that rock’n’roll highway if it’s early morning and the sun has only just begun to burn the spangle of frost off the asphalt.

A Heart & Two Stars continues Sutherland’s fascination with the trappings of femininity. “Dynamite” longs for an escape from the yoke of traditional masculinity and the clatter of the outside world; “Boys believe in dynamite, Playboy and The A-Team… Fur back in the fashion mags… Boy bands just escape me… Wish I was in bed again… With you.” It’s somewhere between Morrissey’s effete “everything is too much for me” stance and the drowsy, sensual longing for a return to the womb/dissolution of the self of AR Kane’s 69 and My Bloody Valentine. (Titles from MBV’s Isn’t Anything, “Soft As Snow (But Warm Inside)” and “(When You Wake) You’re Still In A Dream”, pretty much describe the way A Heart & Two Stars feels.) In “Ecstasy” he confesses, “All this homeboy wants is to be a B Girl”?but it’s a dangerous business: “Now got niggers bitching gonna blow me away.” With hearts on sleeves, Music AM are gazing at the stars. Brave, heady music.

Dakar-born, platinum-selling star MC Solaar may have fathered the now rudely French hip hop scene, but denies he is a rapper, rather describing his “talking over” as “underground and popular as the Metro.” True, the Parisian’s warm and sensual, mellifluous rhyming has always been a million miles away from the style of his American peers, and his sixth studio album is no exception. “Mach 6”, however, sees him shifting musically, adding elements of bhangra (on “Au Pays De Gandhi”) and kwassa-kwassa (“Hijo De Africa”) to his familiar jazz-toned and strings-bedecked hip hop. Save for the saccharine polyglot pop of “Today Is A Good Day”, it’ an(other) engagingly poetic outing.

The release of any record made in direct response to an international crisis would normally be a signal to run for the hills but, hot on the (stacked) heels of labelmate Bobby Conn’s politically outspoken Homeland, comes the sixth album from Washington DC’s Trans Am. The title, so heavily ironic it deserves quotation marks, coupled with track titles like “Uninvited Guest” and “Divine Invasion”, make Trans Am’s message clear. It’s delivered via rolling, thunderous rhythms?part Can, part Black Sabbath?moody synths and mournfully melodic guitar, using the slow-build-to-explosion method. The sampled sounds of a helicopter and a Bush speech will do little to calm nervous listeners.

Declan MacManus, who should know a thing or two about singer-songwriters, rates Steven Kennedy as the best thing to come out of Liverpool in the past 35 years (which, by my arithmetic, takes us back well past the likes of the Bunnymen, Teardrop Explodes and plenty more). The Costello endorsement is made manifest by his appearance on the album’s best song, “Autopilot”. But “singer-songwriter” is perhaps a misleading description of Kennedy, for he eschews troubadour tendencies in favour of melodramatic Scouser indie-rock and swirling neo-psychedelia, which at various times echoes the Pale Fountains, Julian Cope and Wah! It must be something in the water.

Seems like half of Detroit’s turned out for James. Outrageous Cherry’s Matthew Smith produces and plays guitar and Hammond, aided by various Volebeats, Dirtbombs and Come-Ons, while Jim (White Stripes) Diamond engineers. But the sound’s non-geographic:echo-dripping ’60s production, heavy on the jangle. Lesley Gore fronting a less frothy Mamas & Papas, with Roger McGuinn on lead. Hope Sandoval in thigh boots and PVC wrap, backed by the Chiffons on Ready Steady Go!. Either way, it demands to be heard.

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.