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.

This could be a roaringly great band. The Veils veer at you with a sound both startling and familiar, hints of Smiths and Bunnymen flavouring their joy-of-angst epic rock. A debut part-produced by Bernard Butler features four recent singles, from the Radio Ethiopia rush of “More Heat Than Light” to the charming “The Wild Son”, and each is remarkable, dynamic and lean.

Frontman Finn Andrews (son of XTC/Shriekback’s Barry) wants their image to be one of “quiet glamour”; while he’s working hard on that, his voice is effortlessly narcissistic and pained, like Jeff Buckley, buckling and bold. There’s a new skinny giant in town. Intoxicating.

Never knowingly unambitious, Sushil Dade’s second album proper as Future Pilot AKA opens with a benediction from Philip Glass, proceeds with an Indian folk song featuring Mikey “Bankrobber” Dread and ends up as a spiritual act of defiance in the face of ongoing global doom. Like 2001’s wonderful Tiny Waves, Mighty Sea, Dade soars far beyond his indie roots (bassist in The Soup Dragons, no less) to draw on jazz, funk, dub and avant-pop, and unite diverse strains of religious music. But this time, his imperturbable faith in human goodness and potential is given a polemic focus, most explicitly on “Love Of The Land”, where Vic Godard croons for peace. By the time “Heaven Celebrated On Earth”, reminiscent of both Yo La Tengo and George Gershwin, rolls to a close, you’re tempted to believe?as Dade evidently does?that most things are possible given faith and tenacity. A truly inspiring album.

Confession time. I did, indeed, once declare Detroit’s Von Bondies “the greatest rock’n’roll band on the planet” in Uncut, but back in the summer of 2002 that seemed more than feasible. In the context of this, their second album proper and first since signing to Warners, such enthusiasm seems outrageous. Nevertheless, Pawn Shoppe Heart is a step in the right direction. Where on 2001’s Lack Of Communication their cranked-up Stoogeisms were adorably desperate, here they’re glibly glamorous, energised by a Pixies-like concision (weirdly enough, “Not That Social” really sounds like The Breeders, too). I may be proved right yet!

Even if your instinct is to hurl bricks at bandwagons, leap aboard this one, and leap high. If 2004’s maverick motif is to be a return to intelligence, a post-Oasis state where ‘art’ isn’t considered a dirty word, rejoice. Franz Ferdinand are firing on all synapses, if you please.

The young Glaswegian four-piece may remind you of the days when Postcard Records flung the accurately messy Orange Juice and Josef K at the nation. Equally valid will be claims that Franz are this month’s UK Strokes. Also, you may ask yourself: Talking Heads, Interpol, The Rapture, Wire, Led Zeppelin, The Sweet, Television, Magazine, Sparks? Franz are fragments of then, and figments of now, and they make their own glorious beast, a clinical collage of these elements. This dynamic, direct debut (under 40 minutes) has a gleaming six-pack for a belly and belches lavender. It’s made by funky, punky junk-shop monkeys who strut, swagger and shrug nonchalantly.

“Jacqueline” teases us elegantly before the first clipped, precise guitar line. “Oh I’m alive,” it announces, “and how I know it.” The lyrics throughout proclaim an identity; abstract, peculiar, making only their own brand of foppish sense. First chorus goes: “It’s always better on holiday… That’s why we only work when we need the money.” I mean, what’s that about? But at the same time, what a fabulous pop refrain! “Tell Her Tonight” covers failed chat-ups, faint touches, breath on a neck. “Take Me Out” sashays through its staccato riffs and perverse, powerful structure, sexily. These boys are cheeky and charming: for all the influences, their voice is uniquely, gently mad. While their rhythms are as sharp and clean as a knife, listen close and you’ll hear a cough, a yawn. Further songs deal with infidelity, girls, boys?if “Michael” is overtly homo-erotic, “Cheating On You” brags, “Goodbye girl, yes I’m a loser”. Excellently strange. Previous single “Darts Of Pleasure”, is just excellent, while aggression meets agility in the closing pole-vault of “40Ft”.

Songs that sound like they’re about to come, but not just yet. That good. You want a piece of their war.

Actually recorded over two years ago, this is a sweetener for both the new Silver Ray album and the first solo album from leader Cam Butler, due later in the year. Rivetingly woven around guitar, piano and organ, the richness and simplicity of 13-minute opener “Burning Romance” is offset against the Durutti Column-go-Cure muscle of “Come On Baby”, before the epic title track steals the show:a teasing build-up of threads that quickens and thickens, then snuggles into a blanket of brass, while a gorgeous piano-led melody fends off a squadron of My Bloody Valentine guitars. Tortoise/Godspeed freaks should go a bundle.

Trip hop is the genre that no longer dare speak its name, and in fairness most of its practitioners have outgrown the moniker. This goes, too, for Ilya, whose sumptuous “The Revelation” EP represented a promise only partly fulfilled on this debut album. Mournful blasts of Mexican horn, Balalaikian flourishes occur sparsely against a languid, velvet backdrop as husky vocalist Joanna Swan coos and swoons elegantly. It works brilliantly on, for example, the single “Bellissimo”, but just occasionally these songs amount to no more than the sum of their tastefully assembled parts.

Less than ten years ago, Laura Veirs was struck on being a geologist. Then, exploring a remote desert corner of northwest China with a bunch of fellow students, she was left alone to tend camp among yaks and inquisitive native herders. Wielding her “crappy five-dollar Chinese guitar”, she began a-tinkering. Immediately hooked, she hasn’t stopped since. In translation, the Taklamakan desert reads thus: “You can get in, but you can never get out.” She admits today that that’s exactly how she feels about songwriting. And here, in all its frosted glory, is the 30-year-old’s first masterpiece.

Carbon Glacier?named after the breathtaking black-and-white mass on Mount Rainier’s northern slopes?is one great impressionistic mood-sweep. The first lines of opener, “Ether Sings”, serve as declaration of intent: “My wooden vibrating mouth [ie. guitar]/Sing me your lover’s song/Come with me we’ll head up north/Where the rivers run icy and strong.” And there she pitches camp for the duration. Taking the mythically proportioned American wilderness as giant metaphor (she grew up on the cusp of the Colorado Rocky Mountains), Veirs explores unpredictability, cyclical rebirth and the tortuous scramble for artistic perfection via gently exquisite songs both dark and luminous. Obvious, it ain’t. Where others have used frozen panorama as a symbol for emotional atrophy and exile, these icy wastes glint with the resonance and possibility of life, sounding both grand and intimate in the same breath. If there’s a literary parallel, it’s in the clinking Newfoundland ice-packs of E Annie Proulx’s The Shipping News. Or the awed white wonder of Peter Matthiessen’s The Snow Leopard.

Veirs gained sudden attention?and much praise?with 2003’s Troubled By The Fire (not least in these pages), though it was in fact her third album. Having formed punk bands at college in rural Minnesota, she’d studied geology and languages before her Asian enlightenment fed her into the river of traditional folk-blues. Fetching up in Seattle in 1997, she dabbled as a teacher, maths tutor, science demonstrator and gardener before succumbing to the calling. Inspired as much by Elizabeth Cotten and Mississippi John Hurt as Bikini Kill, her eponymous debut from 1999?done and dusted in under three hours?was a spiky folk-punk affair, followed by the similarly self-released The Triumphs And Travails of Orphan Mae (2001), a softer, subtler soup of old-time ballads. With Troubled By The Fire, she emerged as pretender to Gillian Welch’s sepia-mountain crown. Paradoxically, though, Carbon Glacier shares more common ground with The Triumphs And Travails… Whereas Troubled By The Fire was Veirs scratching different itches (a touch of bluegrass here, a country twang there, a snifter of agit-rock), the prickly Triumphs And Travails was more coherent, more focused. Certainly, the mood and tone of Carbon Glacier has its arctic root in the likes of “John Henry Lives” and, especially, “Through December”.

But mood isn’t paramount here. It’s the voice: faintly metallic, vivid, briny. The voice that made Eliza Carthy weep when she first heard it. Unlike so many of her contemporaries, there’s nothing coquettish or self-consciously vulnerable about Veirs. Like Welch, she relies on the strength of her conviction. No attempt to coo her way into your heart. Of her top-drawer peers, she’s less lonesome than Gillian, less breathy than Jesse Sykes, soulful as Emmylou, less abrasive than Paula Frazer, tougher than Cat Power. Her phrasing, particularly, is exquisite, teasing words into fresh meaning, a jazz singer’s feel for wringing subtle emotion from the faintest of inflections. On “Wind Is Blowing Stars”, for instance, it’s just a simple voice and rolling guitar motif, cupped in a string arrangement from heaven. Stunning.

The Tortured Souls, Veirs’ working band, are hardly slouches either: Karl (The Microphones/Little Wings) Blau on bass and guitar; Steve Moore on keys and brass; longtime producer (and Jim White/Mark Olson collaborator) Tucker Martine on drums/percussion; Lori Goldston, formerly tour cellist with Nirvana; Keith Lowe on upright bass; and the amazing Eyvind Kang, lately a touring staple of Beck’s, on viola. Though Carbon Glacier was often improvised live in the studio, nothing strays from orbit. Typical is “Riptide”, where Kang’s on-the-spot strings nearly steal the show. Veirs herself admitted to Uncut that it blew her mind: “When I hear it, I feel deep black water all around me.”

“Icebound Stream”?lyrically alive with lightning bolts and flowers blooming in reverse?is a vocally supple tour de force, almost chopping at the words. Against weird bursts of noise and sunny acoustic, Goldston’s sawing cello break is jaggedly, bleakly beautiful. “Rapture” addresses directly the artist’s powerlessness in the face of nature’s immaculate design, comparing Monet’s Giverny gardens and Japanese poet Basho’s “plunking ponds and toads” to the tree that writes “great poetry, doing itself so well”. Namechecking Kurt Cobain (“junk coursing through his veins”) and Virginia Woolf (“death came and hung her coat”), Veirs asks: “Love of colour, sound and words/Is it a blessing or a curse?” against barely plucked guitar and lovely, melting piano topple.

“Lonely Angel Dust” tackles the same artistic dilemma of trying to bottle nature’s easy beauty, where rose petals and ice crystals formed from flakes of heaven are bound to eventually fall. Veirs is fully aware of the stark lesson: that, audience or no, creation itself is the true artist’s only reward. Even if they’re ultimately doomed. Elsewhere, “Wind Is Blowing Stars” uses the outdoors as physical?as well as spiritual?panacea, urging us to “take jumps in wintry lakes/Feel the water’s skin and face/Huddle up close, nice and tight/We might absorb enough moonlight.”

Only the greasy feedback gobs of “Salvage A Smile” gatecrash the overall mood, ushering in the instrumental sea-squall of “Blackened Anchor”. Likewise, “Chimney Sweeping Man” flashes a clean pair of heels when it comes to Dylanesque narrative, its lonely protagonist locked into a life pattern of squandered promise, writing letters to pass the time. Bookending all three are the liquid country-blues of “Anne Bonny Rag” (with toy piano ragtime and blasts of trombone), followed by “Snow Camping” (a tickle of keyboards, jazzy guitar and a happily tuneless neighbourhood-kid chorus giving it the same eerie wash as Smog’s similarly-baggaged “No Dancing”) and “Riptide”, where Veirs uses lost-at-sea for lost-in-the-world. The album’s closing verse bristles with mad hope: “I’ll float here with the shrimp and brine/And on my cheeks and hair/The salt will always shine/And with this phosphorescence map/A sailor’s chart, a mermaid’s hand/Something I’ll find.” You bet she will.

All done, Carbon Glacier is the unmistakable sound of a songwriter hitting their stride, pouring herself into each syllable, flexing into new life. Miss Veirs’ feeling for snow is something else.

The reissue of 1974’s audacious Inspiration Information a couple of years ago suddenly brought Shuggie Otis to a new audience. How had this teenage modernist, an obvious precursor to Prince and Andre 3000, and one who had rejected the opportunity to join the Stones when Mick Taylor left, fallen out of view?

By choice, it seems. Otis retired in his early 20s, leaving only four albums, of which Inspiration Information was the last. 1969’s Here Comes Shuggie Otis was the second, recorded when he was 16 with the assistance of his father, bluesman Johnny Otis. Split between sometimes baroque blues instrumentals and frail psychedelic pop, it portrays a teenager grappling with eclectic influences, but not quite gelling them together. 1970’s Freedom Flight is more organic, with Otis often coming on like a sweeter, more vulnerable Hendrix. Glimpses, too, of Inspiration Information’s magical oddness, in the paisley-patterned reverie of “Strawberry Letter 23”.

Continuing Revola’s policy of digging up lost classics from the ’60s, Euphoria offer soft focus, multilayered pop with a touch of kitchen sink so prevalent in its day. Pleasant, lysergically whimsical songs are set in a mode ranging from delicate folk to Area Code 615-type bluegrass to full sweeping orchestral dramas. It’s remarkably seamless despite being recorded across three cities and two continents over 12 months. Yet A Gift From Euphoria is not simply a classic by virtue of obscurity?lovers of effectsladen psychedelic guitar will certainly not be disappointed.

After stints with Columbia and Capitol, Acuff’s legend was still in the making when he formed Hickory Records with Fred Rose in ’54. Backed by his Smoky Mountain Boys, Once More rounds up his primitively recorded hillbilly 45s: skeletally arranged, sharpening the edges of Acuff’s trademark lonesome whine. 1962’s King Of… (the same year he became the first living member of Country Music’s Hall Of Fame) is superior, rewiring his ’30s/’40s hits for the stereo crowd and frequently besting them (“Unloved And Unclaimed”; “Night Train To Memphis”).

Twenty years on, even the groups who emerged after New Pop’s glory days, choking on ABC and Culture Club’s white funk dust, seem great. Hateful at the time, but now, with no brainy pretty boys in the charts, these groups with their self-penned, self-played music and literate pseudo-intellectual lyrics sound like avant-garde geniuses compared to today’s karaoke clothes horses. China Crisis were Liverpool’s other synth-duo after OMD and they specialised in wistful ballads with gently experimental Byrne/Eno-lite ethno-rhythms. Leighton Buzzard’s Kajagoogoo were Duran also-rans reviled for their ridiculous garb, and yet their first hits?No 1 “Too Shy”, “Ooh To Be Ah” and the exquisite “Hang On Now”?offered an alternate pop universe triptych of effete miserablism to rival the virtually contemporaneous first three singles by The Smiths.