Previously only on import, this now gets a British release, because 80 per cent of the UK proletariat like singing along to: “And the dreams in which I’m dying are the best I’ve ever had.” Especially during festive periods. And fair play to them, eh readers? Apparently reprints of Camus and Kafka are now outselling beer, and Lou Reed’s “Berlin” is widely tipped for next year’s Christmas No 1. A mad world, and no mistake. Michael Andrews’ soundtrack is chiefly instrumental, dark and wilfully weird. I’d advise you to get the genuinely good Gary Jules album instead (the guy sings with gorgeous melancholy) if I didn’t think it would be a betrayal of this page.

Welcome back to the car crash that never ends: Courtney Love, Dowager Duchess Of Grunge, has stopped overdosing for long enough to record a new album. The title is so heavy with irony, it’s beyond irony.

Nearly six years after Celebrity Skin, La Love returns with a collection that’s just as brash, slick, jaded and hollow as that final Hole offering. America’s Sweetheart is petulant and self-pitying. Worse, it’s self-righteous. Worse still, it’s musically crass. One leaden guitar chord succeeds another as uncourtly Courtney sneers and rages through her songs of sex, drugs and rock’n’roll?the three most boring subjects in the world.

“They say that rock’n’roll is dead/And they’re probably right,” Love dribbles on the opening “Mono”?the single or lead track or whatever they call it these days. All one can say is that formula punk-metal-pop like “Mono” hardly helps in the resuscitation efforts. In her head, Courtney probably thinks she’s Darby Crash meets Peaches?make that Siouxsie Sioux meets GG Allin?but the dame can’t hold a candle to lady-punks like Sleater-Kinney, who consistently conjure up clich

Guitarist and singer/songwriter Corey Harris hosted the first episode of the PBS TV series Martin Scorsese Presents The Blues, exploring the links between deep southern sounds and their links to Africa. His new album does much the same thing at leisure, fusing West African rhythms to the acoustic blues of black American country terrain.

Assisted by traditionalists like Sam Carr, Ali Farka Toure and the drumming master Souleyman Kane, Harris is working in a field that could appeal to lovers of Ry Cooder and Taj Mahal. Indeed, “Catfish Blues” and “Mr Turner” are forged in honour of their cultural clashes. An admirable companion piece to Corey’s 2002 disc Downhome Sophisticate, this album should soon resonate through European concert halls. Good stuff.

Although he’s been in and out of the band due to his drug problems, and was a latecomer anyway, John Frusciante has frequently been at the heart of most that is interesting about the Red Hot Chili Peppers. His latest solo outing is full of surprising songs with some cracking tunes that step far outside the punk-funk-grunge-metal formula of the Chili Peppers. “Song To Sing When I’m Lonely” sounds more like R.E.M., “Regret” could be a Coldplay B-side, and “Wednesday’s Song” has a touch of Stephen Malkmus. He can’t decide if he’s a sonic terrorist or a wistful troubadour, and he’s not much of a singer, which he vainly attempts to disguise with a range of studio effects. But despite such limitations, people win out over the shadows on a surprisingly likeable collection.

Prolific to the point of exhaustion, John Darnielle is sometime care worker, gonzo rock critic and fanzine publisher while also leading an outfit who’ve now released 12 albums in little over eight years. Mountain Goats records?despite featuring such unlikely collaborators as the Bright Mountain Choir?have essentially served as DIY solo vehicles. Despite 2002’s boozesoaked Tallahassee shunting production values up a notch, the sentiment (or lack of) remained the same. Darnielle’s bedrock is the written word: barbed, spiteful and bristling with thorns or alarmingly blunt, snapping life into focus.

We Shall All Be Healed?inspired by Darnielle’s one-time social circle?swaps alcoholism for junkiedom. If Tallahassee was The Days Of Wine And Roses, this is Last Exit To Brooklyn. In fact, though humour-streaked it may be, Hubert Selby Jr looks like Enid Blyton by comparison. The tunes, too?full band in tow, including longtime cohort Peter Hughes?are fittingly scabrous. Roky Erickson’s influence is obvious on the spitting “Palmcorder Yajna” and “Home Again Garden Grove”‘s chickenwire rasp. Unsurprising given Darnielle’s penning of sleevenotes for Roky’s remarkably similar Never Say Goodbye.

But it’s not all so cut and dry. Often, the music?as on “Your Belgian Things” or “Mole” (the latter a spine-shivering visit to a friend handcuffed to an intensive care bed)?is sweet, black and subtle: downcast piano, small skips of guitar, plops of violin. Darnielle’s ugly-urgent voice is expressive too?a nasally folk bleat (forgive the pun) somewhere ‘twixt Erickson and Phil Ochs. “Linda Blair Was Born Innocent” opens like an old Open University theme before, with strings and softly chugging guitar, it blooms like a dark orchid, while “All Up The Seething Coast” is just gorgeous: lightly powdered acoustic, spoken words and bassy rumble. It’s the best thing he’s written.

Despite?or perhaps because of?its viscous air of paranoia, this record is unputdownable.

Their first new material since 1995’s The Real Woodstock Festival, New York’s original radicals (the current line-up’s been together nearly 20 years) re-emerge with bile overflowing. Not surprising. Their original manifesto?personal freedom, no more war or poverty and lots of fun?has taken a pasting under Dubya. “Go Down, Congress” is startling in its uncovering of connections between Capitol Hill and Bin Laden, while the epic “Perpitude” (FBI tapping of Lennon) and “Government Surveillance Yodel” capture the indignant paranoia of life under Bush Jr. A highly original, enlightening, profane and inspired affair.

Raiders Of The Lost ARP is the charismatic solo project from Rome’s Mario Pierro. Best known as the tall one in car-boot electro duo Jolly Music, he excels himself here with a seductive album of rich, driving analogue funk and streamlined melodies. The beauty of 4 lies in Pierro’s uncommon ability to extract a wealth of emotion from just a few notes on his synth. At times, as on “City Lights” and “Workflow”, the glossy production evokes the airbrushed perfection of an Athena poster; it’s almost too sentimental. Otherwise, this is immaculate.

Kept alive by loyal Internet-rallied fans, guitarist Marty Willson-Piper’s work ethic and perhaps even a dab of Donnie Darko magic?its soundtrack featured the band’s lone US hit, 1988’s shimmering “Under The Milky Way”?The Church are, against the odds, still a dreamily appealing proposition. Led, as ever, by the lusciously intimate vocals of Steve Kilbey, they’re still essentially serving up an Antipodean franchise of Echo & The Bunnymen’s sweeping neo-psychedelia. And while this album’s best moments?confidently dramatic opener “Sealine”, the shiveringly anthemic “Telepath”, the sweetly elegiac “Maya”?don’t equal their past glories, Sydney appears to be edging out Liverpool in the ageing-gracefully stakes.

Tim Rose’s surly baritone was a suitably scourging late-’60s presence on apocalyptic protest songs such as “Come Away Melinda” and the classic “Morning Dew”, but there were fewer opportunities for prophets of doom in the hedonistic ’70s, and he soon slipped from view.

Cover versions by Nick Cave and Robert Plant revived interest decades later, and Rose made a return to performance in the mid-’90s, recording three more albums before finally succumbing to cancer in 2002, leaving behind the material that comprises Snowed In, a collection of murder ballads (“Hanging Tree”, “Down In The Valley” and a re-recorded “Long Time Man”), loser’s laments (“I Need Saving”, “So Much To Lose”) and reflections on life’s vicissitudes (“Come What May”), some co-written with producer Colin Winston-Fletcher.

Best of all is Winston-Fletcher’s title track, an atmospheric monologue about enforced solitude set to evocative sheets of synthesiser, which makes good use of the grizzled, weatherbeaten tones that had secured Rose voiceover work on ’80s commercials. An intriguing new departure, it was sadly a style discovered too late to affect his career.

Growing up in Quebec with Mexican parents meant Lhasa experienced a blend of cultures. Now based in France, she sings in Sp

Like Johnny Marr and Bernard Butler, Squire suffers from the lead guitarist’s desire to take centre stage. Like Marr and Butler, too, he doesn’t have much of a voice?an oddly Americanised, strangled Peter Perrett squawk of extremely limited range which actually sounds painful to produce. Apparently these 11 songs are inspired by Edward Hopper’s enigmatic Americana, but there’s nothing that evokes the curious conflation of homeliness and unearthly stillness in Hopper’s painting. Rather, it’s a functional selection of unspectacular power pop with the odd pastoral bit. Hard to believe that this was the man responsible for the fluid, susurrous funk of “Fool’s Gold”: he needs what he probably wants least?a collaborating vocalist?to really fire him up.

A maverick who’s already saddled with accusations of genius, McCombs is a Baltimore-based singer-songwriter whose brief history involves gigs with Will Oldham. The surprising twists and curls of his music may well inspire devotion similar to that thrust at Prince Billy. His voice?a cracked, chipped Dion?brooks no logic, slurring and sliding through arrestingly odd but sincere lyrics and ramshackle, extended structures, sometimes evoking Neil Young’s On The Beach. Instant outsider classic “I Went To The Hospital” welcomes us in with a fear-of-death saga, and titles like “A Comedian Is Someone Who Tells Jokes” and “Aids In Africa” tell you this will be either challenge or chore.

Take the plunge: anyone singing “I wanna be famous for falling in love” is clearly singing from the only place worth singing from.

If Alfie or Gorky’s yank your chain, chances are Obi will too. As on 2002’s sprightly mini album The Magic Land Of Radio, there are nods to classic American heritage (country-fiddler “Chewing My Soul”; “The Tale Of Old Rodriquez” trumpeting Arthur Lee-isms), but this is distinctly English fare, a latterday Lilac Time with Ian McCulloch out front. The La’s without the shoulder chips, perhaps. Leader Damian Katkhuda’s easy ear for a melody makes sad-sweet work of “Sleep Well Dear Friend” and the lovely “To Some Folk” which, wedded to Dom Hazlehurst’s soothing arpeggios, partly compensates for the lack of cutting edge.

Twenty years on from Japan, Karn is still the bass player’s bass player, only a lot less dull than that might sound. His consistently groundbreaking, idiosyncratic technique has bubbled and brooded through a series of solo LPs and “No 1 in the Far East” collaborations. This self-made slab of serenity sees him melding guitars, clarinet, samples and spoken word in nine mood pieces which swing from winningly funky (“The Jump”) to cinematic noodling (“The End Gag”). I can’t imagine anyone into Eno, Sylvian, Talk Talk or, for that matter, the better Radiohead tracks finding it less than transporting and beautifully optimistic.

Those who consider Andy Partridge to be among the select few pop songwriters to possess an artistic spirit almost troubling in its creative rigour and intellectual irreverence have been frustrated over the years by the relative paucity of his output when compared to what they know to be his productivity. Just what does Andy get up to in that Swindon shed of his?

Thanks to his own label, Ape, we now know; loads of spanking good demos (appearing regularly as volumes of Fuzzy Warbles) and stuff like this, a fascinating poetry&sound recasting of the Orpheus fable, recorded piecemeal over a 13-year period in collaboration with academic, poet, musician and left-field legend Peter Blegvad.

Blegvad intones his fractured, elliptically resonant lines of sinister whimsy in fruity Americanese (whispered, cooed, hissed, barked) while Partridge constructs aural backdrops and scenescapes behind, around and within the spoken text. XTC heads may spot a little familiar material (themes from what became Nonsuch’s “Omnibus” float in and out of “The Blimp Poet”) but the sounds are mostly of the abstract expressionist variety. The effect recalls Godley & Creme’s sonic illustrations of Peter Cook’s apocalyptic playlet on their 1977 Consequences album, though the atmosphere and material here is darker and harder.

This noise-and-word orgy is initially such an onslaught on your attention resources, it’s hard to know what to concentrate on and tempting to dismiss it as the rarefied indulgence of artsy-for-artsy’s-sake eggheads. But live with it for a while, study the beautiful booklet and printed text, turn off the light, soak it up as an organic whole and sure enough?just as the creators would have it?your own movie unfolds in your imagination. Blegvad and Partridge haven’t just made a record?they’ve made a whole other world.

With 15 years’ profitable independence to her credit, beat poetry-spinning Buffalo gal DiFranco remains, to those outside her loyal fan base, more inspirational as a concept (or as Hamell On Trial’s label boss) than a musical experience. It’s time, perhaps, to sample the word-drunk intelligence of her 16th-or-so release, which?in the moody, percussive shiver of “Bodily” and “Company”?reads like a minimalist, politicised take on Joni Mitchell’s Hejira. Paradoxically, its spare, solo-voice-and-guitar format?a sharp U-turn from 2003’s jazzy horns-and-all Evolve?comes closer to matching DiFranco’s charismatic live performances than prior band-driven efforts, carrying off the incantatory dissent narrative of standout “Grand Canyon” with striking authority.