Frighteningly clever with her first in English from Cambridge, Polly Paulusma might have become an academic or a novelist. Fortunately, she turned instead to music. Scissors In My Pocket is an album for connoisseurs of grown-up songwriting, littered with arresting references, both literary and musical. "Something To Remember Me By" is inspired by Shelley's "Ozymandias". The lovely string arrangement on "One Day" subtly acknowledges "Eleanor Rigby". Yet Paulusma's songs are also strikingly original, and full to the brim with potent melodies, unusual chords, meltingly heartfelt vocals and sharp emotional resonance. Joni Mitchell gave up songwriting after 1994's Turbulent Indigo. A decade on, we may finally have found a worthy successor.

Much has been made of the Blanche-White Stripes connection?frontman Dan Miller and wife Tracee playing in late-'90s Detroit bands Goober And The Peas and Two Star Tabernacle with Jumpin' Jack W; Dan directing the "Hotel Yorba" vid; the Stripes covering "Who's To Say"?and the leg-up has proven invaluable. Arriving on the back of a hugely successful UK tour with their old muckers,...Doctors is an agitated howl of a record, both justifying the hype and whittling a singular identity. Dripping with creepy invention, it's both rollicking and tender, wild of fringe but fragile of heart. Or, as the band themselves put it: "a dolled-up meeting of The Stepford Wives and a Lawrence Welk gospel special". Co-producers Brendon Benson, Warn Defever and Blanche multi-instrumentalist David Feeny inject urgency throughout, particularly on the hateful roil of "Garbage Picker" and the Gun Club's "Jack On Fire". The playing is sinewy?Feeny's preening pedal-steel; Patch Boyle's high-in-the-mix banjo, tricksy as a cactus?while Dan's sour-mash delivery counterpoints Tracee's breathy pout perfectly. The softly-stroked "Another Lost Summer" and "Bluebird" are exceptional, highlighting both the deep human affection and disquieting horror inherent in old-time country. Standout, however, is "Who's To Say": despite Jack White's guitar solo and Boyle's sweet plucking, Miller's clammy tale of unrequited obsession is as sweatily claustrophobic as John Cale's Velvet Underground epic "The Gift". The garage-country revival starts here.

Dug by both new breed and old (from Horse Stories compatriot Toby Burke to Dylan), Kelly has long been Australia's foremost troubadour since emerging from Melbourne's mid-'70s punk scene with a solo ambition that first flourished on 1985's Post. Produced by Tchad (Tom Waits/American Music Club) Blake, this two-CD follow-up to 2001's Nothing But A Dream is smartly conceived. Disc one rattles and blows like Highway 61 ghost-ridden by Hank Williams, a tumble of bordello piano, pedal-steel and blustery guitars. Disc two is more spare, sort of Time Out Of Mind left out in the rain by Warren Zevon.

Alter-ego of The Be Good Tanyas' Trish Klein and Montreal's ex-Fear Of Drinking singer Allison Russell, Po' Girl dish out an invigorating mess of blues-jazz and country grit. There's enough hair in the harmonies and a looser approach to distinguish the duo from the Tanyas' buffed-up chirpiness, plus plenty of silver-spun beauty. Klein's voice sounds folk-mountain fresh throughout, while Russell drizzles the likes of "Wheels Are Taking Me Away" with sleepy clarinet. There's a dash of Cowboy Junkies in its understated approach, a little Norah Jones in its bathtub-soakiness, and more than a little Elizabeth Cotton in the margins.

Who'da thought Blighty's most provocative new country stars would be holed up in Brighton? This six-piece have already been hailed in some quarters as natural heirs to Lambchop, but there's much more besides. "Her Friend The Rain" and "Living And Dead Singers" (BJ Cole on lap steel) weld '70s Cali-troubadour strum to Clifford TWard's bedsit folksiness, while "Elephants" dissolves into an acid-carousel waltz that's as unsettling as Johnny Dowd. The diversity is mind-spinning?country-folk to chamber-pop to burlesque with hip hop beats?and singer Joe Doveton a genuine find.

In May 2003, Will Oldham travelled to Nashville with a subversive plan, even by his standards. Long championed as a dissident country voice, he decided to give a selection of his best songs a glossy Nashville makeover. A vote on his website had selected most of the material, drawn specifically from the period 1993-97 when Oldham traded variously as Palace, Palace Brothers, Palace Song and Palace Music. Now, he and co-producer Mark Nevers (the Lambchop guitarist who also helmed 2003's Bonnie "Prince" Billy album, Master And Everyone) would round up a band of session players?regularly employed as Alan Jackson's studio crew?and recast these odd, uneasy songs as rousing country classics. The resulting album is, perhaps, the most wilfully perverse stunt ever pulled by Oldham, a man for whom wrong-footing his audience has been a modus operandi rather than an occasional indulgence. On Master And Everyone, the arrangements were so determinedly minimal, with supporting players only a faint spectral presence, that it seemed Oldham had emphatically rejected the ornate. To follow it up with a project as contrary as Greatest Palace Music looks like a wicked practical joke, a way of defiling the songs which his audience, if not necessarily Oldham himself, hold most sacred. Yet there's clearly little ironic about Greatest Palace Music, possibly the most straightforwardly enjoyable album Oldham has produced thus far. It's not his best: 1999's/See A Darkness, his debut as Bonnie "Prince" Billy, is still secure in that position. But Oldham's increasing spirit and confidence, the uncomplicated joy he has from hearing his songs played by consummate professionals, is clear and infectious. As one who's spent most of his career adopting roles and obfuscating his true character, surrounding himself with these fantastically slick players appears to have relaxed Oldham. He sounds more human, less theatrical, touchingly direct: the magnificent "Gulf Shores" is sung here with a tenderness which, for all his quavering conceits, he never managed on the 1994 original. Whether by accident or design, the whole operation highlights just how good a songwriter Oldham has always been, as these 15 tunes are rescued from their idiosyncratic lo-fi origins and turned into standards. If Johnny Cash's version of "I See A Darkness" alerted country conservatives to Oldham's existence, then Greatest Palace Songs is Oldham asserting himself before them as a master craftsman. And if his most obvious role model?Bob Dylan?can be assimilated by the establishment, then so can he. Not only is this Oldham's Nashville Skyline, it highlights a similarly irreverent relationship with his own back catalogue, of which these reinventions are only the latest and most conspicuous examples. In fact, a former Dylan collaborator takes the lead on many of the songs. Hargus "Pig" Robbins, the blind pianist who figured on Blonde On Blonde (which Oldham claims not to have heard in a decade), is an elegant presence throughout Greatest Palace Music, turning "Pushkin"into a languid roll, or the plaintive "I Send My Love To You" into a roistering farmyard hoedown. Pointedly keen to debunk his own morose stereotype, Oldham sounds in hog heaven. Not everything quite works. "New Partner" is sullied by a ponderous electric guitar (played by long-time collaborator Matt Sweeney, once of Zwan), and even the most open-minded loyalist will probably wince, at least initially, at the sunny jogs through "Ohio River Boat Song" and "Horses", or the saxophone solo on "Viva Ultra". Their fears that Oldham has become terminally cheerful may be derailed by the simultaneous appearance of his latest soundtrack mini album, Seafarers Music: four long, pensive and unfussy guitar instrumentals reminiscent of his old sparring partner, David Pajo. Critically, though, Greatest Palace Music proves that exuberance and poignancy, professionalism and veracity are not mutually irreconcilable concepts. Oldham is undoubtedly playing with his audience's expectations: on the most audacious track, the formerly anguished "I Am A Cinematographer" is reworked, brilliantly, as western swing. But in doing so, he's cannily showing us his songs are good enough to withstand any treatment or desecration that he, or any other performer, can impose on them. Better still, the prospect of Oldham's preternaturally twisted songs being played on mainstream country radio is as delicious as it was once unimaginable. It all adds up to a frequently uproarious, deeply affectionate record, full of good jokes worth sharing with everyone.

Grown Backwards features several striking changes in David Byrne's sound and methods. In the first place, the familiar affection for Brazilian tropicalismo which marked out albums such as Rei Momo has been significantly reduced here, its influence lingering mostly in the marimba and percussion on tracks such as "Glass, Concrete & Stone", which first appeared over the end credits of the 2002 Stephen Frears film Dirty Pretty Things. Instead, the instrumental palette is more wide-ranging in a subtler, more subversive manner, taking in Gallic accordion on "Civilization", countrified pedal-steel guitar on "Astronaut", a vaguely New Orleans-style horn-pocked shuffle-groove on "Dialog Box" and lashings of elegant string arrangements popping up all over the place. The most noticeable change, though, is the inclusion of not one but two operatic pieces, Verdi's "Un Di Felice, Eterea" and Bizet's "Au Fond Du Temple Saint", the latter performed as a duet with Rufus Wainwright. Both beautiful songs, it must be conceded, though Byrne's untrained voice strains to negotiate the high notes adequately. There's also a cover of Lambchop's "The Man Who Loved Beer", which one suspects was less taxing to master. As usual, the lyrical content bristles with idiosyncratic concerns, or common concerns given idiosyncratic twists: things like love and loss, bodily awareness and emotional possessiveness, philosophy and civilisation ("It's all about sex/Having a ball on a padded banquette"). And in a few songs, there are sardonic commentaries on the American government's dubious overseas exploits. In "Empire", Byrne mockingly sings of how "tears fill our eyes/In democratic fever/For national defence," sarcastically demanding that "young artists and writers/Please heed the call/What's good for business is good for us all"; while the reference to disturbing a hornet's nest and getting stung surely makes the protagonist of "Astronaut" an ironic cipher for the Bush administration's complacent incompetence regarding foreign affairs: "I surf the Net and watch TV/There's peace in the Middle East/Feel like I'm an astronaut."

Powerful, pulsating angst-rock which evokes both Stooges lggy and Bowie lggy, but also shudders with shadows of Leonard Cohen, Tindersticks and good goth. This Norwegian band's third (but first UK) album, recorded in Berlin with producer Head, is yet its own master, its own slave to doomed love. Sivert Hoyem can croon romantically (the single, "Majesty", is velveteen) or snarl bitterly, and the band surge like cheetahs (the aggressive "Lucy One") or slide like a bassline-bejewelled submarine (as on the addictive "Hands Up?I Love You"). Madrugada is the Spanish for "the hour before dawn"?which is around the time when, if you're on the appropriate roll of psychic starvation and physical excess, they sound like one thrilling, compelling rock band. Munch on this.

When Norah Jones first arrived in New York from Texas in 1998, she gravitated to Nublu, the Lower East Side club run by Ilhan Ersahin. When he heard her sing, he knew he'd found the perfect voice for his band, Wax Poetic. Jones stayed with them for more than a year before launching her solo career. Now, five years and nine Grammies later, she's returned to record her two signature songs from her time in the band on Wax Poetic's debut album. Both tracks have an acid-jazz flavour, and it's fascinating to hear her operate in a funkier style than we're accustomed to hearing. Other guest vocalists include N'Dea Davenport, poet Saul Williams and Jamaican legend U-Roy, all of whom help create an impressively sophisticated postmodern Manhattan cocktail.

Anyone lucky enough to experience the ramshackle epiphany of Hidden Cameras live last year?complete with dancers in Y-fronts?can testify to their uniqueness. Last year's debut album, The Smell Of Our Own, offered explicit gay sexuality (at last!), DIY baroque arrangements and a delicate, lilting Phil Ochs-ish voice that sounded as if it came out of a mouth in which butter wouldn't melt, even though that clearly wasn't the case. Passing the time until their soon-to-come second album proper are these six session tracks, mostly lovely if, as expected, a little under-realised, and including some previously hard-to-find songs. If you're a convert, you'll want this. If not, head straight to The Smell Of Our Own and be ravished.

Perhaps never given the proper credit for his awesome work on Young Americans and Station To Station (not to mention with Lennon and Jagger), Slick has called back a few favours for his first solo album in 12 years. And far from a middling vanity project, it's taut and tasteful. Bowie's quick to turn up, hollering the enchanting "Isn't It Evening (The Revolutionary)" with cool conviction and a daft title. It could easily be a Heathen outtake. The Cure's Robert Smith shrieks through "Believe", Spacehog's Royston Langdon forgets Liv Tyler long enough to warble the title track with comic Bowie-ness, and Def Leppard's Joe Elliott is, um, here. Sweetest surprise is Martha Davis, once of The Motels, eulogising the East Village on "St Mark's Place". Slick by name...

"If one pricks up one's ears and listens," Tilda Swinton reads from Kafka at the start of this album, "when everything round about is quiet, one hears, for instance, the rattling of a mirror not quite firmly fastened to the wall." Superficially, Richter's second album consists of benign classical ambience. But following Kafka's imprecation to listen closely, deeper layers of content reveal themselves. Blue Notebooks is full of deceitfully tranquil, borderline supernatural music:string-led and redolent of Michael Nyman, often augmented by the sort of pulses and field recordings favoured by Boards Of Canada. Uneasy and absorbing.

Whereas just about every other genre of the late '60s and early '70s is now revered, jazz-rock remains deeply unfashionable. That hasn't deterred Summers, who has made a string of albums that combine his love of jazz virtuosity with his appreciation of rock dynamics. Earth & Sky is classy, all-instrumental stuff. But it also displays all the reasons why, Pat Metheny apart, jazz-rock fusion has been in the doldrums since the days of McLaughlin and Hancock. The suspicion of showing-off is never far away as tunes get buried in layers of noodling. Music to admire rather than love.

In Francis Ford Coppola's liner notes to this extended, remastered release of the soundtrack to his 1982 classic, he confesses he told Tom Waits and producer Bones Howe, "What I really want you guys to do is make an album called One From The Heart and then I'll make a movie that goes with it." In the event, both were deliciously melancholy works of art. The film was panned. The music, however, was universally loved from the get-go. It's the best thing Waits has ever done. The horror is that it could so nearly have been Bette Midler, not Crystal Gayle, duetting with Tom. Fortunately Midler had, Coppola reveals, a "conflicting schedule" (phew!), and Waits suggested the then little-known Gayle. Coppola took one look (he says), developed "a respectful little crush" and applauded Waits' musical taste. Her vocal sweetness and Waits' gruffness complement each other blissfully through a series of sublime love songs. Every Waits couplet on "Picking Up After You", "Old Boyfriends" or "Little Boy Blue" is a potential design for living. The title song's a deal-breaker if you're considering investing emotion in someone. Two bonus tracks?"Candy Apple Red" and "Once Upon A Town"?maintain the standard. Beyond all doubt the most integral and affecting soundtrack of the last quarter-century.