In Britain, Christmas records are strictly for the Val Doonican/Cliff Richard end of the market. Yet in America, where they call them “seasonal” albums, even the most credible artists seem moved to sing of those sleigh bells a-ring-a-ding-dinging. Hence gospel veterans the Blind Boys have recruited an impressive cast that includes Richard Thompson and Chrissie Hynde (“In The Bleak Midwinter”), Michael Franti (“The Little Drummer Boy”), George Clinton (“Away In A Manger”) and Shelby Lynne (“The Christmas Song”). Unfortunately, though, a turkey is still a turkey, and the fact that Tom Waits has contributed to the trimmings only makes it more embarrassing. Bah, humbug.

The Lithium Project comprise Jason Farrall and Ken Clarke, and theirs is the sort of jazz-tinged ambient trip hop that can too often congeal into the blandest sort of 21st-century avant-muzak. However, from the opening “Inflow” onward, it’s clear that The Lithium Project are operating many fathoms below the norm?their looped and limpid riffs have a methodical way of lulling you into a sense of insecurity, of beguiling you away from the beaten mental track into unfamiliar terrain. Gently insidious stuff.

Less a farewell album than the musical celebration of a life, Wildwood Flower is as bright and bold as it is moving. Given the recent tragedy surrounding the first family of country (June died in May; husband Johnny in September; daughter Rosey Nix Adams poisoned by carbon monoxide in October), this is both autobiography and a chronicle of generational ebb and flow.

Recorded between October 2002 and March 2003 in Mother Maybelle’s Virginian childhood home in Mace Springs, June is joined by Cash, daughter Carlene, son John (who produces), AP and Sarah Carter siblings Joe and Janette, grandkids Laura and Tiffany and close friends Norman Blake and Marty Stuart. Most striking are the voices-June’s splintered like ageing timber, Johnny’s eroded by disease?but both possess a strength bonded by unconditional love. Their duet on “Will You Miss Me When I’m Gone” (one of seven AP Carter reworkings) is so intimate it almost feels voyeuristic listening in. “Temptation” is a playful take on their relationship, and a fitting companion piece to June’s classic “Ring Of Fire”, written for Johnny. Elsewhere, wartime radio snippets of the Carter Sisters and “Little Junie” appear like bursts of static. June’s humour is never more sweetly evinced than on the intro to “Big Yellow Peaches”, where she recalls being chased around the couch by Lee Marvin, a man who “liked to fight the Second World War all the time”. Her own “Kneeling Drunkard’s Prayer” and “Alcatraz” show a singular compositional flair, leavened by Blake’s sunny acoustic picking and spare use of fiddle, mandolin and June’s own trademark autoharp. Wildwood Flower is raw and achingly human.

The four albums that Johnny Cash recorded with Rick Rubin (1994’s American Recordings, 1996’s Unchained, 2000’s Solitary Man, 2002’s The Man Comes Around) saw the essential core of Cash’s muse excavated to create music of dark vitality and purging beauty. Flawless they were not. But, considering the fact that Cash was seriously considering full retirement from the recording studio in the early ’90s, his quartet of American Recordings amounted to something like a miraculously unexpected final act.

Now for the epilogue. A sumptuous five-CD box set, complete with burglar-stunning clothbound book, offering up no less than 79 songs including 64 of the never-before-heard variety. Which brings us to the first quibble of the morning. Entitled “Best Of Cash On America”, CD5 presents 15 tracks plucked from the four previous Rubin-produced albums. Assuming anyone willing to part with hard-earned for this box will already be familiar with these songs, their inclusion here is somewhat mystifying. Then there’s the selection itself. The underwhelming “Bird On A Wire” and the marginally mawkish “We’ll Meet Again” hardly rank among the most unmissable of Cash’s later work. Then there’s no “Before My Time”, “The Beast In Me” or “Oh Bury Me Not”. With Cash’s last album proper, American V, lined up for a 2004 release, it might have been more expedient to have sat tight, seen to the final mixing, and included that here.

Now for the rest. CD1, “Who’s Gonna Cry”, is Cash stripped to the last clean-picked bone. Eighteen songs of skeletal guitar and voice as solemn as a slate gravestone, so unrelentingly mournful that I challenge anyone to take them in a single sitting. At their very best (the sepulchred regret of “Long Black Veil”, the lilting loveliness of “Dark As A Dungeon”, a wonderfully spartan “Down By The Train”), you feel like you’re right there, at Cash’s feet, as he mines ripe beauty from the loam of tender fear and resolute resignedness. On the bulk of these opening tracks, however, he sounds so perilously frail, his voice so shambolically unsteady, that you feel like an unwanted intruder as the great man strains in vain to find the right note.

CD2 is equally hit-and-miss. Backfired collaborations with Tom Petty and Carl Perkins, and creaking cover versions of Dolly Parton’s “I’m A Drifter” and Chuck Berry’s “Brown-Eyed Handsome Man”. These are redeemed by a profoundly eerie take on Neil Young’s “Pocahontas”, an uplifting duet with wife June on “As Long As”, and the understated drift of “Drive On”.

The sterling gold is to be found on CDs 3 and 4. The third, “Redemption Songs”, offers us the much-talked-about collaboration with Joe Strummer on Marley’s “Redemption Song”, teams Cash with Fiona Apple on a torched version of Cat Stevens’ “Father And Son”, and finds Nick Cave in mirthful form on the cornball country of “Cindy”. Then there’s Cash’s radical reworkings of “Wichita Lineman” and “Gentle On My Mind”, a rumbling storm of self-regret.

Leaving only the 15 spirituals on “My Mother’s Hymn Book”?the most compelling volume of all. You don’t need to have faith in God to be moved by Cash singing “Never Grow Old” or “If We Never Meet Again This Side Of Heaven”. Only faith in Cash’s ability to convey godlike grace with the slightest turn and twist of his life-worn vocal, his genius for making every line ring resonant with the truth of ages.

Ex-Golden Rough mainman Walker is backed by a full band of buddies on his second solo album, Ashes & Wine, and sounds like someone snug in his own skin. Here he draws on his carpetbag of honky-tonk tricks (“Helpless Guy”), Stonesy strut (“Dissatisfaction”; “Letdown”) and the rough-diamond rattle of early Son Volt (“Please Save Your Tears”). Walker’s voice is equal parts whiskey and gravel?classic rawk and bottom-of-the-glass country-blues -somewhere between Jagger and Steve Earle. Expressive, literate and ballsy stuff.

Up to this point, Piano Magic have been a kind of This Mortal Coil manque, augmenting their line-up with a series of guest vocalists that has included Hefner’s Darren Hayman and The Czars’ John Grant. On The Troubled Sleep…, however, the lion’s share of vocals come from band ideologue Glen Johnson, creating a suite exquisitely uniform in tone, a series of waves that break in cool, mesmeric sequence. The ghosts of Joy Division (particularly “The End Of A Dark, Tired Year”), Durutti Column (the beautiful chimes of “Saint Marie”), even The Cure and early New Order haunt this lovely, unsettling record whose stealthy, witching-hour atmospherics are ultimately utterly overwhelming.

An anomaly, this, from Rephlex, the Aphex Twin’s home for fiendish abstract electronica. Gama is a Portuguese-Angolan musician whose interest in traditional African music has led him to build updated versions of ancient instruments. And these are what he plays on Pangeia Instrumentos?all-acoustic devices that also function as sculptures and political tools; one is a kind of thumb-piano made from a symbolically recycled Angolan soldier’s helmet.

On paper, it looks like portentous conceptual art. But Gama’s music is terrific, full of complex patterns and mysterious resonances that are as reminiscent of Balinese gamelan and Philip Glass as the Angolan sounds which originally inspired him. Beautiful, intriguing and, at the very least, an unusually stimulating chill-out album for avant-ravers.

Some artists are fated to be damned by their very consistency. Since Airs & Graces, her first solo album back in ’76, Tabor has stood apart as the finest female interpreter of traditional and contemporary song in England. Perhaps some of her past experiments with modern jazz and standards seem ill advised but here, returning to traditional song for a collection of epic and dramatic ballads, it’s a welcome homecoming worthy of the fattest of calves. Quintessential English balladry, whether sparsely arranged or richly textured, it’s Tabor’s dark voice, chilling and emotional, that brings these tragic, vengeful tales to life. Her “Sir Patrick Spens” makes the familiar Fairport version sound positively gleeful.

In recent years, a number of groups have attempted to explore the immersive, ambient properties of heavy metal. Godflesh and Scorn discovered parallels between metal and dub, while Earth forged a warped psychedelic ambience out of feedback and amp abuse. Olympia, Washington’s Growing are another band thundering on the fringes of this experimental tradition. Songs begin as isolationist drift before bursting into riffs so heavy they’re practically static. These slowly unfolding harmonic drones may often recall the scorched-earth Neil Young of Arc-Weld and Dead Man, but Growing are charting a wide-open Americana entirely their own.

Underground hip hop has manoeuvred itself into a dead-end these past few months, chiefly thanks to the ubiquity of the overly-quirky Anticon collective. Chicago’s Diverse, though, offer a timely antidote, with a flow as direct and battle-hardened as that of his mainstream rivals, and the imagination to hire a couple of outstanding producers. Prefuse 73 and RJD2 are best known for their leftfield instrumentals (the former choppy and micro-detailed; the latter rockier), but here they dice beats and juggle guitar loops without ever smothering the performance of Diverse. Cannibal Ox’s Vast Aire and the undervalued Jean Grae (daughter of South African jazz pianist Dollar Brand) donate a few verses, and other producers include Tortoise’s Jeff Parker. Still, this is Diverse’s triumph, a rapper notable for his connections, but never over-shadowed by them.

There’s something novel about this concept: the soundtrack of a book. While the realistic word for it is probably “cross-marketing”, the hapless dreamers among us can ponder: are we supposed to listen to the relevant song while reading Hornby’s chapter on it? Even if we don’t possess posh headphones like the pretty model on the sleeve (entirely inappropriate unless the album is also a bottle of conditioner), are we to aim for a music-literature ‘synergy’ experience? I’ve just tried skimming Little Dorrit while headbanging to lggy and, frankly, it doesn’t work. So let’s just assume this is?as the author’s sleevenotes suggest?”a compilation tape. Listen to these songs, enjoy them, spread the word, and keep them to yourself, all at the same time. I don’t think that’s too much to ask for.” While there are nice songs here, and dreary ones, it’d be hard to keep them secret?many are eulogised by Uncut every month, and sometimes you expect Jools Holland to waddle in from camera left to post-ironically holler, “Wasn’t that marvellous?” On the plus side, this may introduce the likes of Paul Westerberg, Mark Mulcahy and The Bible to the biggest audience they’ve ever enjoyed.

There’s no doubting The Nickster’s sincerity. Let’s face it, you’d have to be sincere to have Jackson Browne and Richard and Linda Thompson in there. The aroma of worthy middle-aged blokedom is slightly offset by the stark Ani DiFranco and The Avalanches’ “Frontier Psychiatrist”. The pinnacles are obvious, but pinnacles nonetheless?Springsteen’s “Thunder Road”, The Velvelettes’ “Needle In A Haystack”, even Rod rumbling through Dylan’s “Mama, You Been On My Mind”. There are up-to-muster contributions from Rufus Wainwright, Ben Folds Five and Teenage Fanclub, and the best’s saved for last with Patti Smith’s immortal “Pissing In A River”. Which, in context, serves as an act of noble subversion.

Faithful to its own highs.

Often tagged as “the Australian Belle & Sebastian”, Sodastream are a less demonstrably poppy proposition. They’re actually less interesting when they essay perky than when wallowing in the warm melancholy of “Chorus Line”, subtly shaded with double bass and steel guitar. Singer Karl Smith lets rip on “Constant Ships”, as if touching the raw nerve of profound grief. Music whose lack of sophistication is both vice and virtue.

As befits a man whose debut album appeared to be about birdwatching, David “Minotaur Shock” Edwards is not one to rush things. Two years after Chiff-Chaffs & Willow Warblers, Rinse is more an act of prevarication than a follow-up, collecting Edwards’ early EPs in one handy bundle. Essentially, he operates in the same area as Four Tet?prettified electronica augmented by vague guitars, melancholy pianos and music boxes, the odd sheep. There’s that same impulse to create something rustic out of circuitry, though Edwards is, if anything, more whimsical:the outstanding “Motoring Britain” takes Neu! on a detour of B-roads in a Hillman Minx.

In the early ’70s Lee was the best country picker in London, and a pioneer of early British country-rock with Heads, Hands And Feet. Then he took over from James Burton in Emmylou Harris’ Hot Band. On Heartbreak Hill, he pays tribute to the lady with a collection of songs from her repertoire. He’s accompanied by Nashville’s finest, yet the focus always remains the brilliant guitar work of the “skinny, half-gypsy Englishman whose blistering solos and passion for American music knocked us off our feet,” as Emmylou puts it in her liner note. Meanwhile, can anyone explain the lack of a Heads, Hands And Feet best-of.

Stephin Merritt, whose piquant playfulness with The Magnetic Fields has seen him described as this generation’s Cole Porter or Irving Berlin, may not be quite ready for that league?not just yet. But his sanguine voice, shrewd words and mauve melodies do mark him out as a songwriter of genuine, um, merit. Here he colours Peter Hedges’ new film with five new songs and five drawn from his albums with the Fields and The 6ths. There are clever couplets and wry winks, but the melancholy is authentic. Of the new stuff, “All I Want To Know” and “One April Day” will linger longest, while “Stray With Me” (what a knowing title!) is so arch it touches its toes.

Like everyone, I’m prone to enthuse how utterly electric the jiggling phenomenon known as Beyonc

A four-piece comprising just two guitars, bass and drums, Explosions In The Sky seek to capture, examine and elongate moments of high emotion, awe and desolation through playing which rises in cascades of manna and static, then ebbs to a subdued and pensive pulse. Unlike notional peers Godspeed! You Black Emperor, they deliberately limit their sonic options by not deploying strings, synths or samples. This purity, though, gives the music a particular aliveness. Listening to The Earth Is Not A Cold Dead Place is not unlike watching the motions of some great white underwater organism. Explosions are part of the extremely fertile Texas scene which also threw up the extraordinary Lift To Experience (the bands are friends), whose debut album, The Texas-Jerusalem Crossroads, was Uncut’s Album Of The Month back in July 2001 (Take 50).

There are just five tracks here, each of which seeks to capture the mood invoked by their titles. The high tides and clashing sound waves of opener “First Breath After Coma” conjure the onslaught of ambivalent feelings that come as consciousness returns. The silvery, urgent writhing of “The Only Moment We Were Alone” could be a transcription of the blurry black-and-white photo of a decisive moment seized, the unspoken possibilities of a few seconds extrapolated.

“Six Days At The Bottom Of The Ocean” was inspired by the harrowing fate of the Russian nuclear submarine Kursk, whose crew perished, stranded on the sea bed in 2000. An anxious key change seems to signify the realisation of their tragedy, and there’s a disturbing sense throughout of the last gasps of life bubbling away in the horrible quiet of their tomb. Yet it’s also a strangely magnificent and defiant piece, a requiem perhaps. “Memorial” twines slowly and vertically, panning back to reveal something quite monumental.

Profoundly romantic closer “Your Hand In Mine” captures the impulse of this overwhelming music?an affirmation of love and connectivity in a world which sometimes seems to fight against these things. A formidable demonstration of what can still be done with guitars.

The late Tupac Shakur won’t lie down, or be allowed to. This documentary (just released in the US) is struggling to get a UK release, but the album’s an impressive mix of grave-robbing and creative necrophilia. Over a foundation of greatest hits, there are three new tracks. Eminem produces “Runnin’ (Dying To Live)”, which fuses 2Pac and Biggle, while the 8 Mile animal himself raps on “One Day At A Time”. 50 Cent tackles “The Realist Killaz”; there’s actually a crackle, a frisson, to setting him up against the sainted 2Pac, and the track makes great street theatre. There’s nothing to match “Lose Yourself”, but it’s intense and itchy.

One suspects that Brooklynite Jason Forrest chose the pseudonym Donna Summer to cause as much trouble and confusion as possible. His six tracks on this heroically noisy split album are virtuoso plunderphonica, where myriad samples are squished to oblivion. Summer’s hyperactivity has an obvious parallel with Kid 606, but his party trick is to sling florid ’70s guitar solos into the hard disc grinder. It’s tremendous stuff, which slightly overshadows the pieces by Ove-Naxx (aka Tokyo splattercore aficionado Isao Sano). Naxx is an avant-junglist in the vein of DJ Scud, but it’s a measure of Summer’s multifarious brutality that, in this company, he sounds relatively staid.