The first instalment of Definitive Impressions remains the best-selling album in the Kent label’s 21-year history. Although it covered everything that was great about Curtis Mayfield’s R&B trio?the way they accommodated black church didacticism within a secular context (“People Get Ready”, “Keep On Pushing”) alongside devotionals to the fairer sex (“I’m So Proud”) and a sociopolitical world view that would find its apogee in Mayfield’s solo ’70s work?there was more in the vaults. Hence Part 2, which comprises single B-sides, album tracks and rarities. More than its predecessor, it concentrates on love songs lushly orchestrated by Johnny Pate, the Thom Bell of the piece, with neo-gospel vocals shared by Mayfield’s near-falsetto, Fred Cash’s expressive baritone and Sam Gooden’s bass anchor, the three swooping and soaring around each other in a series of endless harmonies.

Of all the melancholy slowcore bands of the mid-’90s, Spain were one of the more imaginative:a debonair, blues-tinged group from LA led by Josh Haden (son of jazz bassist Charlie Haden) that frequently sounded like Spiritualized crossed with a cool jazz quartet. Spirituals plucks four songs off their superb 1995 debut, The Blue Moods Of Spain, places them alongside selections from Spain’s decent second album and weaker third and adds some useful rarities (a live version of Willie Nelson’s “Funny How Time Slips Away”). It makes for a neat retrospective, and Haden’s calm dissection of his own doubt and guilt is still unnerving, like eavesdropping on an intimate conversation. The Blue Moods… itself, though, remains the best memorial to this woefully underappreciated band.

Two of Ellington’s most accomplished albums (Afro-Bossa and The Symphonic Ellington) just happen to be among his most overlooked works. Maybe it was the time of the season? The Duke signed to Sinatra’s newly inaugurated Reprise label just as Britain’s beat groups were poised to invade the US. It proved a testing time for many. Once successful careers evaporated overnight, leaving those who didn’t lose their nerve to face the challenge.

The exotic Afro-Bossa and the truly majestic Symphonic Ellington were in the can before the bombardment began, with the latter proving to be one of the few successful fusions of jazz and symphony orchestras ever.

Jazz frequently borrowed its repertoire from Broadway, with mixed results. But The Duke makes a silk purse from a sow’s ear when approaching the Mary Poppins score?a Disney-bankrolled project. Elsewhere, some unlikely jukebox hits are transformed into acceptable jazz performances. Likewise swing era hits. But it’s Duke’s own music that is of core value.

Close to the edge (1972) remains an untarnished pinnacle of ’70s tech-flash, its mammoth title track beginning with a ferocious flourish to rival the most adventurous of post-hardcore ensembles before introducing elements of cosmic funk, Beach Boys harmony and monolithic organ grandeur. Its much-derided 1974 double-disc follow-up Tales Of Topographic Oceans remains a real curate’s egg. “The Revealing Science Of God” is sublime, but the album as a whole lacks the tight structure and focus of its predecessor. Then 1974’s Relayer saw drummer Alan White and Swiss-born keyboardist Patrick Moraz replace the disillusioned Bill Bruford and Rick Wakeman. Moraz introduced a hefty dose of fusion, but by 1977’s Going For The One Wakeman was back on board and a more concise Yes emerged, reining their excesses into a sporadically engaging Euro-rock best illustrated by Jon Anderson’s joyful and triumphant “Wonderous Stories”.

Listen up Strokes/Vines/Hives:garage stomp has never been better than this. Period. Just back from the cleaners, The Sonics’ freshly remastered sides for Etiquette (1964/65) are just as punishing 40 years on. Frontman Gerry Roslie still sounds seconds from a coronary on classics “Witch”, “Psycho” and “Strychnine”, and guitarist Larry Parypa delivers paint-stripping riffs with all the subtlety of a stud bull crashing the Royal Doulton factory. Savage, brutal and fearless.

In 1969, Palance was filming in Nashville, and fell in with an emerging singer-songwriter: Kris Kristofferson. When Palance mentioned he’d toyed with making a country record himself, Kristofferson introduced him to local legend Buddy Killen, who’d started out playing bass with Hank Williams and hit the commercial motherlode recording Roger Miller. Intrigued, Killen rounded up the cream of the Tennessee capital’s session men?like Dylan veterans Kenneth Buttrey, Charlie McCoy and Pete Drake?and unloaded two barrels of Nashville sound, cutting 11 tracks with Palance.

Trainspotting and kitsch appeal aside, though, is the record any good? Well, in places, better than good. Often, Palance resorts to the actor’s standby of talking through a tune, and standards like “My Elusive Dreams” and “Green, Green Grass Of Home” are regular Nashville-machine saccharine. Elsewhere, though, it’s the real deal. A version of Red Lane’s chaingang murder ballad “Blackjack County Chains” stings: Cool Hand Luke remade as low-budget revenge flick, with a score by Lee Hazelwood. Palance’s self-penned, self-mocking “The Meanest Guy That Ever Lived” is mordant novelty in the area of “Big Bad John”, but he outdoes that with “Goodbye Lucy”, a deceptively sugary, late-night singalong, narrated from the perspective of a desperate, deadbeat serial adulterer whose days of swinging are long behind him.

The opener, a superb, crystal-clear cover of Lane’s rolling rover’s anthem “Brother River”, is the undoubted highlight, Palance’s resigned, from-the-bar-room-floor voice caught midway between Cash and Kristofferson on a song with the sweep of the big country, tumbling along on light, silvery pedal-steel. “Dancing Like Children” is something else again: apprehensive psycho-melodrama such as wouldn’t seem out of place on Scott 3, Killen conjuring an insidious atmosphere while Palance whispers memories of long-gone love, the whole thing sickly sweet as dying flowers.

It’s this track that best mirrors the eerie beauty of the album’s cover: Palance’s reptilian features?part-sculpted by surgeons after a bomber he was piloting crashed during World War II?caught in a stark, midnight mugshot. Like a rhinestone vampire.

A kind of country companion to the Stills/Bloomfield/Kooper Super Session (without the tedious blues riffing), Muleskinner was a bluegrass supergroup stumbled upon by chance. Invited onto LATV alongside Bill Monroe, the quintet (ex-Byrd Clarence White, Richard Greene, Peter Rowan, Bill Keith and David Grisman) were left centre stage when Monroe’s bus conked out en route. The result was a one-off deal with Warners. The musicianship is impeccable (White’s Telecaster often defying belief), full of fevered mountain fiddles, brass-bell banjo and mandolin. A landmark ensemble jam.

Inspired by The Mothers Of Invention, Hendrix, the space programme, the hippie scene, haystacks of dope and huge vats of acid, George Clinton’s Funkadelic confounded both white and black audiences by their insistence on playing free rock, exposing a segregationist confusion in the supposedly freed minds of ’60s audiences. Of course, sheer sweet fatback soul coursed often unnoticed through Funkadelic’s veins?this was rock invading funk, and funk invading rock. In today’s resegregated era, this sounds as wild as ever, from the clarion call of “Free Your Mind And Your Ass Will Follow” to the blazing guitar sustained throughout “Maggot Brain”. Glorious.

Post-punk art strumpet Mercier Descloux has been so completely forgotten you could almost take her for the latest darling to squeeze the vogue for late-’70s/early-’80s NY. Yet she is the real thing?a Parisian who shared a SoHo loft with Patti Smith, gigged like a putative Peaches and recorded a handful of LPs for Ze and Polydor between 1978 and 1986.

Her style is new wave yapping meets gamine French chicklet. Debut Press Color is archetypal No Wave disco: all bubblegum-free-jazz-groove (man). Follow-up Mambo Nassua, recorded at Compass Point, plumps for a hotter, Fela Kuti-ish sound. Both irresistible.

Released the same year as Hall & Oates’ Abandoned Luncheonette and like that lost classic produced by Arif Mardin, AWB had sufficient grit to appease the purists, but enough melodic and rhythmic hooks for it to reach No 1 in America. “Pick Up The Pieces”, the attempt to out-funk Ohio Players and their mid-’70s ilk, now sounds as much of a novelty contrivance as Stock Aitken Waterman’s “Roadblock”. But “Person To Person” is authentically Stax-like and “Work To Do” is as Philly-fabulous as The O’Jays. “Nothing You Can Do” is horn-driven and harmony-drenched, “Keeping It To Myself” has the midtempo insistence of an Al Green hit, while “Just Wanna Love You Tonight” is almost in the “She’s Gone” white soul superleague.

On the 25th anniversary of the death of Belgium’s most famous son comes a 40-track double album of the existential Gallic cool that influenced David Bowie, Ray Davies, Leonard Cohen and Scott Walker, among others. Such masterpieces as “Amsterdam”, “Ne Me Quitte Pas” and “Le Moribond” (later reinvented as “Seasons In The Sun”) are all present. But the selling point?and cause of some controversy?is five previously unreleased tracks. A letter from Brel shortly before his death asked for them not to be released. Why is unclear?this blatant disregard of his wishes reveals at least two of them, “L’Amour Est Mort” and “La Cath

Terrific to see the old Track logo resurrected and equally good to hear Ronnie “Plonk” Lane again. In 1973, he boldly left The Faces two years before Rod Stewart to pursue his interest in rural blues, folk and jug band music. To be frank, a single album without the live tracks probably would have sufficed. But there’s no denying the unassuming bonhomie of most of these 36 songs, kazoo solos and all. The hits “How Come” and “The Poacher” are here, but even better are a fantastic version of Derroll Adams’ “Roll On Babe” and Plonk’s own, lovely “Tell Everyone”.