Anyone who bought into The Thrills’ debut will surely love Wilshire. Both are in thrall to the summery vibe of classic West Coast pop and both travelled to California to live out their musical dreams. Micah and Lori Wilshire and the five-piece that takes their name had less far to go than the Dubliners, making the trek from Tennessee. But both records share a love of jangling guitars, live drums and feel-the-melodic-sunshine melodies. There are differences, namely the female vocals and the smooth pop arrangements (particularly lovely are the achingly beautiful strings by Paul Buckmaster on “In Your Arms” and “Tonight”). Think of The Thrills trying to sound like Fleetwood Mac and you’ve got the idea.

Sometimes it’s best to ignore the politico-art agenda and just crank up the volume. Berlin uber-hipsters Chicks On Speed first launched themselves as a ‘fake band’ at the Munich Art Academy in 1997, but are now clearly in it for real, as their third album attests. Guests Peaches (on “We Don’t Play Guitars”), android-voiced rapper Miss Kittin (“Shick Shaving”) and erstwhile Tom Tom Clubber Tina Weymouth (on a cover of their epochal “Wordy Rapping Hood”) join the electro-rock party, which is most engaging on the krautrocking “Shooting From The Hip” and the disco-driven title track. “Sell-Out” and “Culture Vulture”, however, sag under the weight of self-awareness, indicating that Chicks On Speed are best when playing it superficial rather than serious.

Don’t hate ’em for the hype: Brooklyn’s Stellastarr* (you have to love that annoying asterisk… er, don’t you?) have hewn a debut of cutting style and often purple passion. Their jagged stomps are a blatant cross between prime Pixies (right down to bassist Amanda Tannen’s Kim Deal impressions on backing vocals) and Hot Hot Heat on a good night, but the motherlode’s so cool that you let it blast by.

“In The Walls” is compellingly sultry, then “Jenny”, a storming she’s-weird-but-irresistible rock moment, assaults both solar plexus and cerebellum. Straight outta art school, and wearing their quotations proudly, their stealthy, staccato rhythms stalk it like they talk it. Deviant, brainy re:teen angst, slightly arrogant, and they kick ass despite themselves. What’s not to love?

Beginning her career as an alumnus of anarcho-punk institution Crass, Annie made her solo debut with the splintered, electro-torch songs of Jackamo in 1987. Seven years later (and a major deal come and gone with only a single to show for it in the interim), she made a fantastic, witty album of dub storytelling and heartwrenching ballads with Adrian Sherwood. A worldly-wise survivor of much more than just the usual addictions, she’s managed to maintain her deadpan humour (think of her as a sexually liberated, post-punk Dorothy Parker) despite the personal shitstorm she’s weathered in the last nine years. Here, over sparse, haunted glitch-dub her garnet-hued purr dispenses bittersweet reminiscence in languid, smoky melodies: sharp, sleek and deliciously wicked.

Records by singing actresses have a mixed pedigree?see Fifth Element star Milla Jovovich’s two albums?and boutique European label Les Disques du Crepuscule have released more than most. The debut from French starlet Julie Delpy (Before Sunrise, the Three Colours trilogy, Godard’s epochal Detective) looks mainly to America for its inspiration?notably Jeff Buckley and the more reflective side of Neil Young. For the most part this is fragile, late-night fare, although “She Don’t Care” dares to rock out, and “Lame Love” serves up some tidy flute and banjo action. Delpy writes all the material here and is a competent vocalist, but for the most part the songs lack focus, and this, combined with an imperfect grasp of English, means that one track called “Something A Bit Vague” just about sums up the whole exercise.

Since, remarkably, it’s been six years since his friend Jeff Buckley drowned, you might rightly presume Tighe (who sings and writes the bulk of The AM’s songs) has had some (for want of a less American word) issues to work out.

Co-author of “So Real” (from Grace) and “Moodswing Whiskey” (from the live Mystery White Boy), here Tighe explores his Prince, Bolan and Television influences: terse, clipped funk and rattling glam/new wave/psychedelia that’s sometimes (as on “Utopia”) reminiscent of much-missed operatic art-punks Shudder To Think on a budget. An odd, involving record; a showcase trove of marvellously inventive guitar noise with moments of surprising intimacy: The AM deserves both a more spendy production/remix and a life beyond the shadow of its makers’ history.

Thirteen years on from TBOBR’s last record (Sage Advice), leader Howe Gelb continues to spike “new fashion western with that old fashion hardcore”. An outlet for the country pickings denied them within Giant Sand, Gelb and guitarist Rainer Ptacek formed Blacky Ranchette in 1983, along with drummer Tom Larkin. With the latter succumbing to brain cancer in ’97, TBOBR seemed to have faded too. Gelb, however, had other plans. Still Lookin’ Good To Me was recorded ad hoc in cars, studios, hallways. Yet despite boasting cameos from Lambchop’s Kurt Wagner, Neko Case, Calexico, Jason (Grandaddy) Lytle, M. Ward, Richard Buckner and Chan (Cat Power) Marshall, this is quintessential Howe: loose, slippery, surreal, invariably beautiful. His philosophy?as gleaned from Gram Parsons?is to “make music you crave but isn’t available in the shops”, and this is another self-stitched patchwork of thrift-store sorts. Mumbling opener “The Train Singer’s Song” is the tale of a man reborn after digging himself a shallow grave beneath the railroad ties, set to minimal percussion and sleepy guitar, while “Getting It Made” compounds Neko Case’s reputation as the best country warbler since Patsy Cline, and “The Muss Of Paradise” is hilarious for the interruption of a Tennessee State Trooper, urging a guitar-toting Gelb and behind-the-wheel Kurt Wagner to move on. Joyful stuff, and lyrical proof that Gelb continues tripping way off the beatnik path.

The gothic country of Frazer’s ’90s band Tarnation shared much with 16 Horsepower and The Handsome Family?a Georgia-raised pastor’s daughter, the South inspired Frazer’s poetry. While we await the follow-up to 2001’s Indoor Universe, these four-track rarities provide ample nourishment. Some of these songs appeared on Gentle Creatures (’95) and Mirador (’97), but not this nakedly beautiful. Frazer’s voice has a metallic-folk edge which, allied to mariachi guitar, floods “An Awful Shade Of Blue” and “The Hand” with harsh desert light. Yet when the Morricone sun fades, she peals with the white-soul hum of Laura Nyro.

The original story was that Andre Benjamin, aka Andre 3000, one half of OutKast, had recorded his own solo concept album, The Love Below, and that OutKast’s other half, Antwan Patton, aka Big Boi, was so blown away by it that he determined to try and match it with his own solo album, Speakerboxxx. Other stories tell of increasing animosity in their efforts to follow up 2000’s groundbreaking fusion of rap, psychedelia, P-Funk and drum’n’bass, Stankonia. What we have, then, are two solo albums yanked together for convenience under the OutKast brand by two factions whose relationship, if not actually on the rocks, is certainly strained. Hip hop’s White Album, in other words. But is it? And are they any good?

On one hand Big Boi’s Speakerboxxx is a serviceable if average hip hop album bearing too great a debt to George Clinton. It’s noticeable how the opening “Ghetto Musick”, the only instance on either album where the two halves of OutKast work together, towers almost embarrassingly over the rest of the record. Even the song itself veers schizophrenically between Big Boi’s Basement Jaxx-ish electroclash (“Cut me up! Don’t let me down”) and Andre’s deeply sardonic exclamations of “Feeling good! Feeling great!” over a Patti LaBelle sample. Only in the album’s later moments, like the Buggles-meets-Dick Dale of “Hip Hop Star” (featuring Jay-Z) and the doleful ballad “Reset”, do things pick up.

Andre 3000’s The Love Below, on the other hand, has almost nothing to do with hip hop. It is an avant-soul concept album that comprises the most sublime pop music heard on record this year. The introduction finds Andre crooning tremulously over lush orchestration, which is suddenly derailed by post-Sonic Youth guitar squeals before mutating back into the Al Jarreau-meets-David Lynch lounge jazz of “Love Hater”. Then Andre talks to God (“Damn, you’re a girl”) before slamming into the ecstatically neurotic Paisley Park funk of “Happy Valentine’s Day”, which in turn gives way to the fantastic “Spread”?The Magnetic Fields meet Was (Not Was).

The album’s most starkly beautiful track, the desperately gorgeous “Prototype”, where Andre’s bewildered acceptance of the possibility of love is soundtracked by Style Council guitars, is as poignant as Chic’s “At Last I Am Free”, soon followed by the awesome “Hey Ya!”, which sees Andre going power pop with overtones of early-’80s electro; The Knack meet side one of The The’s Soul Mining.

From then on in, every tangent is explored: the hilarious Jeeves and Wooster skit which prefaces “Behold A Lady”; “Pink & Blue”, which opens with an Aaliyah sample and threatens to turn into Throbbing Gristle’s “United”; a moving tribute to Andre’s mother, “She’s Alive”, which, with its minimalist piano and strained falsetto, is practically Radiohead; the hysterical duet with Kelis, “Dracula’s Wedding” (“I wait my whole life to bite the right one”); the purring, stabbing “Vibrate”; and the concluding “A Life In The Day Of Benjamin Andre (Incomplete)”, where he sends the whole album, and his life story, into a backwards loop. Whatever happens to OutKast next, these 78 minutes of wonder alone?sorry, Big Boi?prove Andre the genius and Antwan the artisan.

Cleary’s career has included drumming in psych-poppers The Essex Green, stints in The Pants and Famous Potatoes, mandolinist in contra-dance string bands and a 1997 release under the moniker Stupid Club (Made To Feel). Once resident of Austin, he now calls New York home, but sounds Tennessee in spirit. Confused? You should be, but Numbers Add Up sounds like the happy nesting of a restless muse. Tapping into a literate strain of country-folk, his mellow delivery is as easy to swallow as James Taylor’s, but glows with lasting warmth. Buffeted by accordion and lap steel, the likes of “Hometown” and “Your Next Move” prove that simple is superior.

An instrumental collective from the post-rock hive of Louisville, Kentucky, the pensive, neo-classical style of Rachel’s pre-empted that of Godspeed You Black Emperor! by some years. While Godspeed’s music is designed for crypto-anarchic ends, however, Rachel’s are more comfortable in orthodox cultural salons.

Hence this collaboration with the SITI company of New York, a second venture into theatrical music following 1996’s marvellous Music For Egon Schiele. Systems/Layers introduces new elements into Rachel’s’ sound: field recordings, a vocalist (Shannon Wright, on the torchy “Last Things Last”), and a new edginess, too. But mostly, familiarly sombre patterns of piano and string quartet dominate this lovely album.

Almond is certainly up for a challenge. But, in gathering some of the finest Soviet songs and singers of the last century to invoke the spirit of Mother Russia, has he gone a steppe too far? Well, though the sleazy tunes of the Weimar Republic might be more up his strasse, he finds much of himself in the romance, tortured self-analysis and mawkish melodrama here. Singing partly in Russian, backed by desolate violins, discrete keyboards and the odd naval choir, he keeps it respectful which, despite the lack of Russian wildness, makes it all the more moving.

Hard to believe Marc Bianchi, Her Space Holiday’s mainman, was once a purveyor of Californian hardcore. Such sun-drenched thrash is a world away from the sharp intelligence and exquisite layering of the music he makes now.

Here, his soft voice is brilliantly backed by quietly mutating electronics and hip hop beats, with mediaeval flavours, some tinkling piano, glockenspiel and sudden dramatic bursts adding further colour. But the greatest interest lies in the lyrics?intriguing, charming, highly insightful and sometimes violently confessional, often on a par with the very best of Elliott Smith. It’s melancholy but genuinely uplifting, both heavy and ethereal. Class.

She still manages, here, to sound unlike anyone else?Rickie Lee Jones deserves immense respect. You can sense, through the diversity, dexterity and determination on display throughout her first self-written album in six years, that it’s a point of pride for her not to be influenced by much outside her own distinctive back catalogue. And world events. Apparently the George Bush tragi-comedy has been significant in luring Jones out from self-imposed reclusiveness, where she had “neither impetus nor inspiration to write”. Praise be to dopey Dubya: fired up, she’s in tremendous form.

Not that it’s a right-on rant?Jones’chosen idioms and vocal phrasings are personal and intimate, warm: the tracks wind and weave, barely linear but beautifully focused. Rarely since the heyday of The Blue Nile and Mary Margaret O’Hara has a white singer so instinctively understood when to push and surge and when to take the foot off the gas. As a feel thing?aside from its themes?this is both a dawn and a twilight, a glowing slow burn.

Reacquainting herself with songwriting (she did the covers thing on 2000’s It’s Like This), she’s called in David Kalish, who collaborated with her on 1981’s Pirates (for many of us, her masterpiece), and various top-of-the-range musos (there are vocal cameos from Grant Lee Phillips, Syd Straw and Ben Harper). From writing a song every few years, she found she was often recording four in a day. Thus the feel:like “Let’s Get It On”, it’s like everyone involved is shrugging at your compliments and saying, “Oh, this old thing? Just slung it together.” Quality oozing from every pore, blending blues, folk and jazz, but never for a moment sterile or slick.

“Ugly Man” and “Tell Somebody” are the most overtly topical, “Bitchenostrophy” is light funk (and lyrically mystifying), and “Little Mysteries” is as seductive as John Martyn’s “Sweet Little Mystery”. There’s lust for detail within the wordscapes of “A Tree On Allenford” and “Mink Coat At The Bus Stop”, and the d

One of the most decent blokes in rock music, South African-born Matthews has sold 25 million albums in America with the band that took his name, yet in Britain sales have been counted in hundreds rather than thousands. His first solo album is unlikely to change that, which is a shame, for it suggests there’s far more to him than the anonymous middle-of-the-road college rock for which the Americans have such an insatiable appetite. On the evidence of Some Devil, much of which is largely acoustic, he belongs more in the Springsteen camp than in the Hootie/Matchbox Twenty stockade. He’s nowhere near as potent a songwriter, of course. But full credit for trying something different.

As part of Fife’s celebrated Fence Collective, Tom (U.N.P.O.C.) Bauchop shares a healthy do-it-yourself aesthetic with labelmates James Yorkston, King Creosote and Lone Pigeon, whose Concubine Rice was one of last year’s overlooked jewels. With only drummer Stu Bastiman aboard, Bauchop’s frenzied overdubs of guitar, harmonies and tambourine rattle suggest Doolittle-era Pixies and Pet Sounds-era Brian Wilson scratching eyeballs over the bedroom four-track. Hints too of Joy Division and Skip Spence, but the multi-layered “Come In” and “Here On My Own” are the idiosyncrasies of an acute pop brain.

Ah, autumnal strum and well-turned couplet, chime and vaulting chorus. Much as scouring the pirate radio waves to keep up with the latest avanturban musics (anyone for eight-bar?) has an eternal appeal, you can’t beat ’em. New Zealander Alan Gregg, formerly of Kiwi favourites The Mutton Birds, has crafted 11 songs whose lightness of touch is matched by their casually heart-melting profundity. Songs that delight in little sensory details (“You can smell the bread baking”), a devastatingly neat sense of rhyme, and the domestic push-and-pull of love. For anyone who’s had their heart alternately broken and buttered by Stephen Duffy’s Lilac Time (“Be careful not to use/All of your’I love yous’/On the first one who makes an offer you cannot refuse”, from “Anytime Soon”, is pure Duffy), The Go-Betweens and Fountains Of Wayne, Marshmallow is a lifetime of Christmas mornings.

Evidently, too much is never enough for Basement Jaxx. If Simon Ratcliffe and Felix Buxton’s first two albums suggested a frantic and greedy appetite for music then Kish Kash is the delirious blow-out. It’s a high-density, higher-intensity attempt to compress a vast and eclectic selection of sounds into functioning pop songs, to overturn prissy concepts of genre. To give you an idea of the unpredictable turns Kish Kash takes, a roll call of the guest vocalists might help: boy du jour Dizzee Rascal; the enduringly witchy Siouxsie Sioux; JC Chasez, once Justin Timberlake’s oppo in N’Sync; Lisa Kekaula, a force of nature largely wasted in her day job with LA garage rockers The BellRays. The one artist most suited to this madness, Prince, chose not to return their calls. It’s a decision he may live to regret.

Kish Kash is more than a manifesto against minimalism. It’s a truly exhilarating 50 minutes of music. Once feted as Britain’s foremost house producers, a kind of Brixton correlative to Masters At Work, Ratcliffe and Buxton have moved far beyond the confines of dance music nowadays. Kish Kash remains music you can dance to?it defies you not to dance, in fact?but at the heart of all the frenzied detailing are conventionally structured songs. So opener “Good Luck” is an accelerated hybrid of ’60s orchestral soul and Timbaland’s futurist R&B, pivoted on Kekaula’s proud kiss-off to an ex-lover. “Right Here’s The Spot”, meanwhile, is a hyper-detailed update of Prince at his most gymnastic (“Housequake”, perhaps) with Me’Shell Ndeg

Despite, on occasion, resembling the Cocteau Twins jamming with Roni Size at an elevator muzak convention, this collection of electrojazzydrumandbass from Margaret Fiedler and Guy Fixsen soothes and seduces with its supine grace. But beneath the sheen lurks a malevolence, like a dorsal fin forever threatening to break the surface of the water. It’s present in Fiedler’s lyrics (“That’s how I got here/With pockets full of nothing and a head full of fear”), the jittery percussion of “Falling Down” and the off-kilter electro loops of “Fish For Nails”. Spookily smooth.