Veteran of a couple of albums which, despite rabid acclaim, Island failed to sell to anyone, Lewis Taylor is clearly having some kind of art-versuscommerce crisis. Unfortunately, in attempting to second-guess an imaginary apogee of marketable smooth soul, he’s forgotten his USP: a ravishingly lush and wildly sophisticated prog/soul hybrid that owes as much to Surf’s Up as Let’s Get It On, as epitomised by early songs such as “Lewis III”. He’s singing as beautifully as ever, but there’s little bite or vision left among the perky, preset funk. The epic opening of “Positively Beautiful 2” captivates until you realise it sounds like something Trevor Horn might have dreamt up for Seal 10 years ago, and too many songs have been remade/remodelled from Taylor’s last own-label release. There are glimpses of his unique talent here, but no more. He’s got nothing to lose?he should let rip or, at least, unearth some of the extraordinary material he scrapped between the recording of the two Island albums.

Born into poverty on the West African archipelago of Cape Verde, C

In the close-to-five years since Grant Lee Buffalo, Phillips has toned down the flourishes around that sumptuous voice. Mobilize (2001) was almost a completely solo album, and this, despite bringing in an elegant ensemble of musicians, is his sparsest yet. Not that it’s bleak, as that might suggest. Virginia Creeper winds its way through delicious country-rock melodies, putting its faith in the power of the song, Grant’s touching timbre set permanently on deep and rich, like Jim Reeves or Perry Como. Arguably slight at first, it rewards repeat listening as its seductive, heartfelt stories unfurl. Beginning with the warm, mournful “Mona Lisa”?”you’re the last of your kind”?it carries a strong sense of nostalgia and a love of characters and narrative, both personal and far-reaching. It weaves and climbs, in Phillips’ own words, “like a slow but persistent vine”. Among collaborators, chosen to “respond on their feet without rehearsing for weeks on end,” are former Soul Coughing man Sebastian Steinberg, multi-instrumentalist Jon Brion and harmony vocalist Cindy Wasserman. They too weave, and subtly gel, violinist Eric Gorfain pushing the pathos. “Lily-A-Passion”, “Calamity Jane”, “Josephine Of The Swamps”?the titles are a litany of female names, but rarely utilised in the easily emotive way you’d expect, drawing on 1950s mythology, Native American lore, and in the case of “Jane”, discomfort at the current “war on terror”. “Always Friends” is gut-tugging. In the dark-hearted “Far End Of The Night”, Phillips pines that “time hangs like a noose”. Wasserman dovetails beautifully with his stoic brooding on the closing cover of Gram Parsons’ “Hickory Wind”. Virginia Creeper isn’t a record to beat its chest, Phillips claiming he “left the electric guitar in its cage this time, focusing on one aspect of my writing and personality rather than trying to do The White Album every time I move.” As such, it hums its way, patiently, into your hungry places.

Home Truths, the 2002 debut from one-man-band Mark Cullen aka Pony Club, was a cheap bedroom recording acclaimed by everyone from Morrissey to The Streets for its seedy, swirling synth-songs of domestic grief and quiet desperation. The sophomore offering is even more relentlessly miserable?”and the strain in my life multiplies, and the hurt doubles up”?and we’re repeatedly told we’ re all doomed losers. Sadly the production’s a little thin for the grand ambition. Still, the dramatic opener “Dorset Street” and bleakly comic “Forecourt Flowers” hint at everything from Soft Cell to Pulp to Motown. “Buried In The Suburbs” chants postcodes in a parody of Roxy’s “Remake/Remodel”, and Cullen’s marriage-gone-stale confessions make Larkin seem like Noddy. Powerful sink-estate poetry.

It’s curious that while emo bands initially sought to subvert hardcore, their extreme vulnerability is now the norm in US underground punk. In that context, The Constantines are a relief. Sure, they’re earnest and infatuated by Fugazi (as the stop-start single, “Nighttime/Anytime (It’s Alright)”, proves). But, happily, they’ve heard Mission Of Burma, too, and are defined more by endurance than self-pity: “I’m learning to survive on earthworms and houseflies,” growls Bryan Webb, a frontiersman among sociopaths, on “Insectivora”. The rest is a sinewy mix of punk, dub, soul, good tunes and classic guy-rock, with “On To You” and “Sub-Domestic” justifying Springsteen comparisons. An album that wears its sweat with pride.

The death of Mary Hansen and the break-up of Tim Gane and Laetitia Sadier’s long-term relationship would’ve been enough to destroy less resilient bands than Stereolab. But on this, their ninth full album, even an affectionate tribute to Hansen (“Feel And Triple”) is pulsating rather than maudlin. If anything, the prevailing tone is breezier than ever. It’s also the band’s most organic-sounding record since 1996’s Emperor Tomato Ketchup, with chamber pop, disco and (on the outstanding “Margerine Rock”) actual guitar rock thrown into the polychromatic blender. The problem is, when you’ve synthesised such an individual sound, it’s increasingly hard to transcend it:recent props from Pharrell Williams are more likely to lure newcomers into the clique than another reliably accomplished album like this.

Despite recent anti-war and anti-Bush protests, agitpop remains as stubbornly unfashionable as ever, still distantly associated with joyless shades of grey. ADF consistently give the lie to that, not least live, where their mix of cavalier guitars, panning samples and synths and tabla’n’bass vibrations are enough to fire up even the most apathetic and ‘post-political’ of souls. This LP captures something missing on the studio albums?a spark, a full-on charge as they connect with audiences across Europe. “Free Satpal Ram” retains its ability to boil the blood long after the authorities grudgingly did so. Glorious.

Is there no end to Luke Vibert’s talent? Over the past six months, the dextrous DJ and producer has released retro-jungle as Amen Andrews and, for Warp, YosepH, an LP of classic acid doodling. Now, with Kerrier District, his best record in years, he returns in spirit to his West Country roots for a sumptuous freestyle disco voyage. The mid-Cornwall council region where Vibert was raised, Kerrier District is also a playful dig at Metro Area, NYC’s just-so disco-house duo. Vibert shares their passion for generous grooves and bubbling synths, blending bell-bottomed staples like handclaps, cowbells, nimble funk and dippy melodies in fine fashion. Far from an exercise in nostalgia, Vibert makes this style his own. Pure joy from start to finish.

Too often, perhaps, contemporary artists mine the past in search of authenticity rather than exploiting old musics for their phantasmagoric possibilities. Heron King Blues, the third album proper by an audacious Chicago collective named Califone, is the work of men who’ve plainly heard thousands of old blues and folk songs. But Califone invoke the weirdness, the ritualism, the creak and spook of Harry Smith’s Anthology Of American Folk Music without ever trying to reproduce its sound exactly.

Heron King Blues presents a ghost world wherein a nightmarish bird-god emerges from Tim Rutili’s dreams to lurk in his stream-ofconsciousness lyrics. The exceptional “Sawtooth Sung A Cheater’s Song” may begin as a rustic meditation, but gradually the conventional songform is sublimated by strafe and drone, until everything collapses into an industrial/tribal drum passage that recalls Can at their most transported.

As on last year’s Quicksand/Cradlesnakes, Califone’s twinning of roots music with an experimental imperative aligns them with their Chicagoan contemporaries, Wilco. But in fact, Rutili has been a subversive force for over a decade, beginning with the menacingly debauched Red Red Meat in the early ’90s. Red Red Meat’s mangled extrapolation of the blues (of which 1995’s Bunny Gets Paid is the best example) was rather overshadowed by that of Royal Trux, and eventually Rutili and drummer Ben Massarella regrouped as Califone in 1998.

Califone’s underappreciated career thus far has followed two parallel paths: broadly conventional albums such as Quicksand/Cradlesnakes; and looser, largely improvised collections of film scores and projects like last year’s Deceleration Two. Heron King Blues unites these two strands, orbiting between the heartbreaking acoustic sketches (“Wingbone”) and the intense, crotchety trance-jams such as the title track, wherein Rutili’s avowed desire to make a record like Captain Beefheart’s Mirror Man really makes sense.

The Beefheart comparison is especially useful since, like him, Califone understand traditions but aren’t trapped by them. So Heron King Blues is a free and forward-thinking kind of record, but also one that taps into forgotten, mythic resonances of American music without ever sounding ersatz, hokey or remotely contrived.

Named, somewhat appropriately, after a meaningless knock-knock joke told by the younger sister of one of the band members, cLOUDDEAD’s not-quite-skiffle-hop collages and skits sound on first listen like one big stoner indulgence. Persevere, though, and you realise this is very clever indeed. Now based in Oakland, California, this trio (beatmaster Odd Nosdam and lyricists Doseone and Why?) forge something genuinely original with their wigged-out word play. Whether singing about gun culture or Minnie Mouse, everything they do is infused with an undeniable, albeit sometimes unfathomable, psychedelic spirit. Don’t forget to leave the hidden track running.

At first seeming slavishly indebted to the US guitar underground greats, particularly Sonic Youth, Bikini Atoll bear investigation for the careful, surprising details they add to the template?as on the pastoral “Black River Falls”, where guitars pulse like a heartbeat under Joe Gideon’s latter-day beat lyrics, and post-rock lullaby “Perfect Method Flawed”, with its spectral harmonies, soft distortion and geiger-counter crackles. Lacking the ambitious sonic dynamics of labelmates Explosions In The Sky, Bikini Atoll score instead with subtly versatile mood music.