With ace previous LPs Guest Host and The Naked Dutch Painter, Stew pitched himself as a boho-Sondheim with the melodic chops of Bacharach and the withering wit of Randy Newman. Ditching those records’ surreal blasts of Weimar cabaret and creepy, Love-like pop for a more linear approach, this ‘2 am kinda record’ is warmer and less pessimistic. The pithy social critique of “LA Arteest Cafe” and “Kingdom Of Drink” is a joy.

Conceived as a black Woodstock in ’72, an act of healing seven years after LA’s Watts district had been all but burned down in race riots to the chanting of “burn, baby, burn”, Wattstax was also, in truth, a masterful idea for a showcase of all the Stax acts of the time. Still, hell of a concert?112,000 people watched seven hours of Isaac Hayes, The Staple Singers, The Bar-Kays, Rufus Thomas etc, and a legend was born. As well as the movie, there have been various recorded versions since, but now those lovely people who care even more than you or I about such matters have trawled through the original tapes and compiled a new three-CD set.

To squeeze the juicy stuff in, they’ve made some tough decisions. As most of the music from Hayes and Albert King is available on separate releases, they’ve cut them cruelly. And the absence of Isaac’s storming set, apart from “Shaft”, is a big loss. On the plus side, this means they’re able to extend The Staple Singers’ section and bring in one or two subs. Of which, Louise McCord’s “Better Get A Move On” blisters the paint from the walls.

From a Rev Jesse Jackson-preached intro to some Richard Pryor rants, from The Bar-Kays’ underrated “Son Of Shaft” to David Porter’s plaintive “Can’t See You When I Want To”, this is exhilarating stuff. The well-known songs?Mel & Tim’s “Backfield In Motion”, Carla Thomas’ “B-A-B-Y”, Rufus’ “Funky Chicken”?are fired up by the occasion; The Staples take you there. Frederick Knight (“I’ve Been Lonely For So Long”), William Bell, Johnnie Taylor and Eddie Floyd knock on wood. The gospel is true as an arrow.

Forty-seven tracks from the festival and film, 17 previously unreleased. Hey, sure beats a bunch of stoned hippies sitting around with flowers in their hair. Turn yourself loose.

With the final series of Buffy over (and how could they kill off Anya so glibly? But don’t get me started…), all that’s left to console us sad (in both ways) fanatics is the music from the show, here slickly marketed with sleevenotes by Joss Whedon. Kicking off with The Breeders’ blast at the theme tune, it rolls through the Dandy Warhols, Dashboard Prophets, Aimee Mann, The Devics and Laika. There are score fragments, too, notably Christophe Beck’s “Dead Guys With Bombs”. Poor substitute for the real thing, though I heartily recommend series four of Angel as better than cold turkey.

One man’s admirable determination might well be another’s absurd bloody-mindedness, but whatever their view, no one could ever call Robin Proper-Sheppard a quitter.

As singer-songwriter and guitarist with The God Machine, a power trio who relocated to London from their native San Diego in 1991 and soon made a name for themselves in the underground with their near-apocalyptic live shows, Proper-Sheppard has had his crosses to bear. His band’s mix of heavy and hypnotic, quasi-classical metal and starkly vocalised emotion was never fully understood by his record company, and consequently attracted no more than a cult following. Additionally, on the eve of the release of their second album, 1995’s One Last Laugh In A Place Of Dying, drummer and school friend Jimmy Fernandez died suddenly of a brain haemorrhage. Both professionally disillusioned and personally traumatised by this loss, Proper-Sheppard released the album as a mark of respect before withdrawing from writing and performing altogether to concentrate instead on running his own record label, The Flower Shop.

Sophia is his post-God Machine project, now seven years old and with three albums to their credit. The third, People Are Like Seasons sees Proper-Sheppard and the mutable “Sophia collective” shifting away from the acoustic minimalism and mournful, almost morbid beauty of their first two albums towards something rather more tough and meaty. Previous comparisons with Red House Painters, Mark Eitzel and Sparklehorse are no longer exclusively appropriate; it seems of late Proper-Sheppard’s been cranking up the volume on his Joy Division, Mogwai and Black Rebel Motorcycle Club records, too.

Take the beats-driven “Darkness (Another Shade In Your Black)”-whose title now sounds wryly self-aware rather than portentous, as it once might have?which recalls Soundgarden messing with Massive Attack’s Mezzanine. Or the driving “If A Change Is Gonna Come”, where Proper-Sheppard stamps hard on the fuzz pedal and wraps his distorted vocal around the line, “Life’s a bitch?and then you die”, somehow avoiding clich

Generic horror film, scored by Nathan Barr with contributions from the man who ups the eerie ante for David Lynch Angelo Badalamenti. Also has spooky-in-context songs from The Turtlenecks and Your Mom. Deliberately nerve-jangling: when I wanted to take it off, I couldn’t. Most entertaining are Barr’s sleevenotes: “After the score was completed I checked myself into the local psychiatric facility for various tests and shock therapy. They released me after a month with an electronic monitoring bracelet. The voices in my head have now turned from shouts to whispers.” You don’t get quality like that from John Williams, do you?

This is cooler than cool. Probably a guilty pleasure, as the movie appears to be a thinly-veiled remake of Flashdance starring Jessica Alba, but it swings like a narcissistic cat. Missy Elliott (who cameos in the film) lures us in with “Hurt Sumthin”, and it just gets better from there. Tweet’s “Thugman” is delicious, Nate Dogg’s “Leave Her Alone” is beat-perfect, and Erick Sermon and Redman’s “React” causes you to do just that. Best of all is “Closer” by Gospele, which slinks and purrs like nothing since Brandy and Monica’s first hit (keep up, kids). The pure R&B answer to 8 Mile, it drips and oozes in all the right crevices. Sweet.

The American underground is currently full of unashamedly cosmic bands, like Sunburned Hand Of The Man and Tower Recordings, who mix folk and psychedelia with an unusually fluent understanding of improvised music. Unfortunately, most of their records are difficult to track down, as they’re only released in tiny, elaborately packaged quantities. Thanks to Kranky, then, for reissuing Unknown Spin, previously a limited run of 300 CD-Rs. Charalambides are a Texan trio specialising in a kind of desert drone constructed from guitar, wordless female harmonies and spectral pedal-steel. It’s hardly the most immediate music, but over four lengthy tracks what initially appear to be ambient meditations accumulate into something graceful, unpredictable and gripping.

Producer Webster remains best known for giving Shara Nelson’s post-Massive Attack career a much-needed boost with Presence’s “Sense Of Danger” in 1999. The album he released two years later under his own name is an understated classic of gentle, soulful house?without any of the ghastliness that generally ensues when the words “soulful” and “house” are combined. Collaborators seem to have been chosen to subtly beef up the mood without wrecking the overall poise. Webster’s own bubbling Presence dub of “Your Life”, Brennan Green and Daniel Wang’s deliciously old-school-funky “Forget The Past” and the eccentric precision of Herbert’s take on “Ready” are highlights on an album whose consistency can’t be faulted.

Dublin five-piece Woodstar are superior Flaming Lips copyists. Singer Fin Chambers does a great Wayne Coyne, while the four players strive, and sometimes achieve, the luscious bombast of Lips instru-mentalists Drozd and Ivins. The credits on Life Sparks are impressive: Stephen Street produced five tracks, while Ben Hillier (of Blur’s Think Tank fame) did the honours on “Time To Bleed”, easily the best thing here, a sm

Voodoo Child is the alter ego (one of five, in fact) of Moby, allowing him to make what he describes as “hard, sexy, straightforward dance music”. Baby Monkey is his second full-length outing and was apparently designed to remind him of “the best underground clubs that I had been to over the last couple of years”. It thus lays no claims to experimentalism and is rather about tapping into the memory of shared euphoria. Its connection to the tough, Detroit techno of Jeff Mills is obvious, but standout tracks “Electronics”, “Harpie” and “Strings” rather recall the British post-techno of Orbital and Underworld. An interesting addition to the artist’s varied oeuvre, rather than a vital record in its own right.

Enough to warm the cockles of the bleakest midwinter, My Lost City rubberstamps the promise of debut The Days We Found The Sun with sighing choruses, skyward harmonies and more bounce than a beachball. Irresistibly swoonsome in a Teenage Fanclub vein. “For A Fool” is the Undertones'”Got To Have You Back” for the Thrills crowd; “First And Last” could easily come summer-raining from The Icicle Works’first album; “You Can Change The World” is sweeter than a New Seekers Pepsi ad. Bring me sunshine, indeed.

Over the past five years, San Francisco’s Miguel “Kid 606” Depedro has provoked, invented and exploited many electro trends, mixing up aggro-techno, drill’n’bass, hip hop bootlegs, plunderphonics, vandalised pop, and anything else that can enhance his reputation as a punky noise entrepreneur. Surprisingly, Kill Sound…is his first proper album for three years. As such, it endeavours to show off his full arsenal of quirks, from brattish, squitting gabba rave-ups (“Ecstasy Motherfucker”) and pummelling dancehall mutations (“Buckle Up”) to the Eno-esque “Parenthood”. It’s undeniably entertaining, but perhaps while Depedro has been busy with his flourishing Tigerbeat 6 label, at least one of his roster?the terrific DJ/rupture?may have superseded him.

It’s so long since we heard from Dead Can Dance we must assume the pairing of Lisa Gerrard and Brendan Perry has shuffled off this musical coil. Gerrard now composes soundtracks (Gladiator, MI:2), and on Immortal Memory she teams up with Irish classicist Patrick Cassidy. As background listening, this sounds like high-class Enya, but listen harder and dense textures and nuances lie beneath the surface. As for Gerrard’s voice, it’s hard not to descend into such clich

It seems as if culture’s dowsing rod is forever fixing on some new city or other and declaring it cool: Reykjavik one month and Stockholm the next; a year later Melbourne; then Detroit and, more recently, NYC. Or, specifically, Brooklyn.

Lesser talents might argue that they were there first, but such crass proprietary claims are beneath Oneida. Formed as a quartet in 1997 in Williamsburg?then a wasteland of abandoned warehouses and boarded-up basements?they established a vibrant, community-based culture of now-legendary parties that owed more to Warhol’s Factory ‘happenings’ of the ’60s than it did to the Manhattan rock club circuit. Yeah Yeah Yeahs and Liars might subsequently have garnered all the acclaim, but it’s Oneida’s freaky flag that first marked the spot.

Now a trio, Oneida peddle a sound so heroically out of temper with the times that they may as well be a barbershop quartet. Theirs is a maniacal mish-mash of seemingly incompatible musical styles?Krautrock, psychedelia, no-wave, prog, synth-pop, ’70s stoner rock and punk?wrought from a deeply felt, genre-leaping love of challenge.

The anarchic intelligence of Bobby Matador, Hanoi Jane and Kid Millions is the driving force. Inside Oneida’s apparent chaos, though, there are throbbing grooves and enough irresistible keyboard riffs to satisfy diehards. Thus, although the energy of “$50 Tea” suggests Suicide dallying with Beefheart and “Caesar’s Column” recalls both Neu! and Acid Mothers Temple, “Wild Horses” is as gnarly as anything by Neil Young. “Changes In The City” is the closing, 14-minute-plus instrumental wig-out, its title suggesting that although Brooklyn made Oneida what they are, now, the world beckons.

K7!

Given her wonderfully insolent and vital contributions to Matthew Herbert’s previous musical endeavours (most notably on 2001’s Bodily Functions), this debut album from singer Dani Siciliano is long overdue. Indeed, the record has taken some three years to come together, Siciliano having invested in a basic home studio and learnt from scratch how to assemble the 11 performances featured here. And how do they sound? Like a more minimalist yet more generous version of Goldfrapp without the fatal smugness, with a view to deliciously warping R&B and glitch rather than recycling glam rock.

Besides and beneath all the mischief displayed here, though, there is an undertow of melancholy gravity, never better expressed than on the techno fugue of the album’s stunning nine-minute opener, “Same”. Building up from a basic “O Superman”-style one-note loop, Siciliano’s voice emerges from a babble of glitch to state mournfully: “You don’t look the same.”

Other musical elements are added one at a time, and the rhythm very artfully evolves from jazz to samba to deep house and finally to a grieving orchestral climax, Siciliano all the time sounding as though she’s about to be swallowed up by her laptop.

Her radical recasting of Nirvana’s “Come As You Are” is almost worth the price of the album in itself. With only nodding melodic references to the original, Siciliano instead offers a sultry Latin mood, underscored by a lugubrious French horn arrangement and a rhythm which seems to be made from samples of a gun loading (“And I swear I don’t have a gun”). As with Prince, the defining factor in Siciliano’s music is what she leaves out; consider “Walk The Line”, where her emotionally blank vocals (very No Wave) are met by lunging synth belches which seem to have escaped from a 1991 rave. Similarly, songs like “Extra Ordinary” and “Red” are just that crucial spoonfed beat away from being hits for Britney or Xtina, though here Siciliano understands that suggesting a beat is often far sexier than mechanically emphasising it (“I just can’t get by on insincerities”). “Extra Ordinary”, in particular, with its faux-coy vocal and catchy but lethal chorus, could almost be an updated Lynsey De Paul (and that’s meant as a compliment).

“All The Above”, a vocal duet with guitarist O Mugison, updates Grace Jones'”Libertango” for the faceless age (“To forgive is to forget…all the above make love”) while “She Say Clich

There’s so much space to breathe in this immaculate record, which concerns itself with how the difficulties of communication obstruct one’s ability to love. From the dislocated meditation on a spent relationship that is “Visitor”?Biosphere does Stockhausen’s “Stimmung”?through to the brilliant use of the “Can’t Get You Out Of My Head” beat in the splendid isolation of the title track, Luomo’s instinctive architecture is breathtaking. The point in “Tessio” in which, at 5:51, choirs of electronica suddenly emerge into view, is comparable with stout Cortez’s first sight of the Pacific Ocean. And if the Donna Summer-esque vulnerability of the closing “Shelter” doesn’t move your soul to tears, you deserve your Dido records. Music for this most uncertain of winters.

Kitt knows a thing or two about the up and the down, the joy and the pain, the minor chords and the major heartaches. Low-slung beats and bursts of brass and strings wrap themselves around sparse, electro-acoustic melodies.

In places, it sounds like it could have been recorded for the Sarah label?but thankfully swaps the debilitating tweeness for a lyrical bite (or at least a nibble) and a winning way with feedback.

Experimental and enchanting, equally.

Compared to her former Sugarcubes colleague Einar