Thanks to the star guests on albums such as The Healer and Mr Lucky, John Lee Hooker sold more records in the final decade of his life than he had in the previous 40 years. Face To Face was in the making when he died in 2001, and includes collaborations with Johnny Winter, Robert Cray, Canned Heat, George Thorogood and Van Morrison. The delay in its release suggests a certain posthumous touching-up was required, and his voice was clearly in decline. But the spirit is still there on new versions of Hooker classics such as “Dimples” (featuring Morrison) and a dirty-sounding “Boogie Chillen”.

Probably the best blues album in the world…ever!

Martin Scorsese’s seven-part TV series on the blues has had mixed reviews in America. But it’s impossible to fault the accompanying five-CD box set, which must qualify as the most comprehensive blues compilation ever released. With 116 tracks chronologically sequenced and expertly annotated, there’s hardly a big name in the genre who isn’t represented.

Nevertheless, the set raises fundamental questions about why anybody should still bother listening to the blues. The music, after all, came from a specific set of economic, geographical, cultural and social circumstances that pertained to the Mississippi Delta in the first half of the 20th century. When the say-it-loud-I’m-black-and-I’m-proud revolution happened in the ’60s, African-Americans no longer wanted to be reminded of their former share-cropping oppression. Ironically, it was left to white British musicians to sustain and revitalise the blues tradition.

Scorsese provides several answers. First, by presenting the likes of Blind Willie McTell, Charley Patton, Son House and Robert Johnson in context, Discs One and Two revalidate a body of work that may today sound scratchily ancient and from an experience almost totally beyond our comprehension by proving it can still speak with a voice of awesome emotional power and dramatic resonance.

Secondly, the set is subtitled A Musical Journey, and, as the old clich

Look closely at the cover of Dylan’s Bringing It All Back Home, and you’ll see a copy of Robert Johnson’s King Of The Delta Blues Singers. Released in 1961 but recorded a quarter of a century earlier, the Stones, Cream and Led Zeppelin all plundered it for source material, making it arguably the single most influential album on ’60s rock. All 29 sides recorded by Johnson in his short lifetime are included here, and if you don’t already own them, now’s your chance. That they come with a second disc rounding up 25 of Johnson’s contemporaries from Bessie Smith to Son House is a bonus.

And he can’t (stop). The Reverend Al Green (some of his Memphis flock have to be told he was once a pop singer before he forsook it for gospel) has decided to record some secular songs again. His first since ’94’s Don’t Look Back (itself a “comeback”), and?more significantly?his first with Willie Mitchell, the producer behind his greatest hits, since ’86. I think all fans of old-school soul will join me in getting rather excited about this and saying: wow.

The dream team parted in the mid-’70s, Green opening his own studio and making the immaculate The Belle Album, then lesser works. They did regroup for two middling mid-’80s records. Al’s focus is on The Lord Jesus these days, and no whining music critics will change that, but once every decade or so something in his unique wiring tells him he fancies a flirty shimmy, just for the heaven of it. I Can’t Stop is great. It’s not amazing; I’m not going to sit here and tell you it’s up there with his classics (not when The Lord Jesus is looking on, anyway), but it’s great. Green’s voice still does insanely beautiful things, and he knows it, and so does them often.

The sad ‘rumour’ is that Mitchell is now in pitifully poor health, and that Green got together with him at Memphis’ Royal Studio for this as a gesture, a send-off. Which, of course, makes it all the more poignant. That they’ve re-ignited the magic even in flashes, under such circumstances, is a wonderful thing. If a couple of tracks are a bit ploddy, nothing special, several really do take off and fly. Just as Green is well aware of what people want him to do with the box of tricks that is his voice, Mitchell’s hip to exactly how to support and bolster that charmed instrument. The strings sob, the organ slides (on “Raining In My Heart” there’s a cheeky echo of “How Can You Mend A Broken Heart?”), the horns and rhythms are impeccably restrained yet rambunctious. The title cut and “Play To Win” frolic; the six-minute “My Problem Is You” is a concerted attempt at the big, slow, slushy epic. With a little goodwill, it gets there.

Let’s not damn this with faint praise. It may not kiss the sublime, as this pairing has done in the past, but it’s heavenly to hear their happy, heartbreaking Wall Of Hug one more time.

The duo of singer-songwriter Anna-Lynn Williams and guitarist-producer Matt Brown create lovely narcotic hymns to hope misplaced and opportunities lost that at times recall the lazy, hazy soundscapes of the Cowboy Junkies. But there’s also a definite shoegazing affinity, and fans of Liz Fraser and Hope Sandoval will love Williams’ dreamy voice. It quietly passes you by at first, but persist and it will suck you in, enveloping you like a blanket of snow. The mysteriously hushed version of Ride’s “Vapour Trail” has to be heard to be believed.

Bristol’s Movietone belong to a tradition of dolorous, mizzly, very English music like Weekend and The Marine Girls. On this fourth album, their trademark sound?wistful chamber-pop with jazz and folk influences that drift in and out like sea frets?is enhanced by location recording on a beach near Land’s End. Rachel Wright’s vocals are a pensive murmur, and the most disruptive noise comes from the seagulls that invade its last track, “Near Marconi’s Hut”. But; like 2000’s superb The Blossom-Filled Streets, music that initially seems wilfully understated becomes compelling after a few listens.

Neighbours at the edge of the Californian desert, legendary producer Fowley plays with ex-Misunderstood drummer Swedeen as two-thirds of The Bluebird Trio, alongside this splinter. Swedeen proves himself a multi-instrumental dynamo, tackling everything from cactus blues and roadhouse ramalama to outlaw country and beyond. Assorted friends pitch in (notably ex-Kaleidoscoper Chris Darrow on lap-steel), but Fowley’s low snarl summons a stealthy menace on these songs inspired by Little Steven, Johnny Cash and, um, Wal-Mart.

He is a coal miner who also happens to rap. He is a crossbreed of Alan Partridge, Eminem and Half Man Half Biscuit. His debut album is an impassioned cry of anguish at 21st-century Britain, from public transport (“Waiting”) via twats (“Two Twats”) to Blue (“What’s The Point?”). He dreams of true love in the local Everything For

Given that most of its practitioners ape Birmingham’s lovely Black Sabbath, the stoner metal boom has had curiously little impact on British bands. Bristol’s Gonga aim to change that, chiefly by looking like druids and specialising in the kind of neolithic bottom-end sludge-rock we’ve come to associate with Southern California in recent years. Criticising their debut album for sounding dated is a bit like condemning Stonehenge for having no central heating. Suffice to say, Gonga invokes the spirits of the ancients in suitably monumental fashion, and has enough hooks (check the surprisingly Nirvana-ish “Stratofortress”) to raise it way above the fuzzy morass. Good, too, to see Geoff Barrow (chief of the Invada label) keeping busy during Portishead’s indefinite hiatus.

The popular Esbj

Taking a dozen or so songs extracted from Dafydd Morgan’s much-lauded Pembrokeshire-influenced trilogy of albums, Sonic Boom has reworked them into a musique concr

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.