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.

After Wilco’s second Mermaid Avenue project with Billy Bragg in 2000, Stirratt hooked up with Sansone to mine a mutual obsession with ’60s Cali-pop. The duo’s 2001 debut The Green Hour was a willowy affair, but this follow-up is expertly realised. Underpinned by delicately picked guitar, soft piano and the odd flurry of brass, harmonies loom and fade like headlights in fog. Sort of The Blue Nile do Bacharach and David in Topanga Canyon. Comfort music for the soul.

Rothko is essentially Mark Beazley, who has moved on from his formative post-rock instrumental phase into ambient glitch territory.

For this extraordinarily potent recording?made in remembrance of 9/11?Beazley collaborated with Washington DC artist Blk w/BEAR. Completed mainly by the two artists exchanging computer files, it reflects the necessarily dislocated nature of such communication, establishing its mood with deep pools of pellucid guitar, sepulchral piano and assorted expressive electronic textures.

Both sumptuous and spare, Wish For A World Without Hurt recalls A Silver Mount Zion and Set Fire To Flames, Durutti Column and Arvo Part, and promises great things for the Trace label, Beazley’s very own imprint.

The movie/musical of Hedwig And The Angry Inch was an East Coast cause c

Depressingly, you can find one of America’s finest underground songwriters holding down a day job at the US equivalent of B&Q. Belatedly following up 1999’s The Gasoline Age, Cornog?who is ERP?continues to fashion beauty from his New Jersey home via a Tascam 388 mini studio. All synthetic texture, drum splutters and sustain, Garbageheads… sounds like Elton’s Madman Across The Water as reimagined by Stephin Merritt; Lou’s The Blue Mask via Baby Bird. As a result, the portraits of social outcasts (he himself was once a down-and-out) are both empathetic and graceful.

Are Hymie’s Basement the post-hip hop version of Mancunian avant-pop duo My Computer? Then again, the thrashing and polytonal harmonising which begin “All Them Boys” brings to mind a slacker Proclaimers before the song suddenly decelerates into a wasteland of indistinct synth tones and solemn, stately piano. Thereafter we detour into funereal, piano-led fantasias like “Ghost Dream”. Most frightening is the neurotic dual chanting on “America One/America Too”; most moving is the careful, acoustic six-minute suicide note “Lightning Bolts And Man Hands”, as profound a wish to disappear as Smog’s “Prince Alone In The Studio”. The closing “You Die” could almost be Coldplay were it not for the drum machine hiccuping, throwing the song off balance. Another possible future for music, if you want it.

It’s been a good year for the still-nascent sub-genre of hardcore punk, which favours light-speed riffing, shrieksome vox and jazzy tempo shifts. Excellent albums from The Locust, Daughters and The Blood Brothers have indicated a possible way out of rock’s current trad trough. Oakland, CA’s The Mass lack the futuristic, synthoid edge of those bands, but their sax-assisted Crimson-meets-Slayer hybrid is a lot of fun. The bloodthirsty verve with which they go about their angular sorties is balanced by excellent musicianship and a keen sense of dynamics. Fripp’d love it.

Wanna hear Colin Farrell sing “I Fought The Law”? Now’s your chance. How exciting! And… he’s Shane MacGowan. I’m not having it. Colin, you sound like a Kilburn High Road dosser and your attempt to be a rock god has lasted 34 seconds with me, most of which were the (admittedly exhilarating) guitar intro. The law won. This is all very Oirish (the film’s set in Dublin), so as well as U2’s “Out Of Control” there’s The Thrills’ “One Horse Town” and something drippy by Clannad. Balance is provided by Fun Lovin’ Criminals’ “Scooby Snacks”, Ron Sexsmith, and the now-rubbish Turin Brakes. Most of which is okay, but Colin’s comical narcissism dominates duffly.

The legend behind such blaxploitation classics as Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song, an incalculable influence on Tarantino and Spike Lee, recorded this in 1974. Fundamentally, it’s him growling over “funky grooves”. A born philosopher, he opines that “A Birth Certificate Ain’t Nuthin’ But A Death Warrant Anyway”, and, after bemoaning the fact that he’ll never visit every bar in the world, claims that “between a woman’s breast is the thickest thorns you can ever lay your head on”. We’ll look out for that, Melv. Godlike, of course.

Sixteen years and six albums after forming at a Catholic school production of Godspell, The Innocence Mission remain?unfairly?a largely unknown pleasure. Based around the marital harmony of chief warbler Karen Peris and guitarist hubby Don, they’re responsible for some of the most delicately transporting music of our time. Just ask Joni Mitchell, who singled out Karen as the “most interesting” of all the new singer/songwriters, inviting her onto 1991’s Night Ride Home. Or Natalie Merchant, adding a touch of Peris grace to 1998’s Ophelia. Or other collaborative admirers Julie Miller and John Hiatt.

The key to their sound is simplicity. Don’s perfectly enunciated, jazzy pickings create tone poems across which Karen’s early-bird chirp patters softly. Since second album Umbrella (1991), they’ve gradually refined this to an irresistible whisper, and the intimacy of Befriended will leave you spellbound. Aided by surviving original member Mike Bitts on upright bass (the band were initially a quartet), each of Don’s glistening guitar notes is so precisely phrased, so considered, you marvel at how easily it all flows, allowing ample room for Karen’s fragile warmth and occasional flickers of piano. Vocally, she coos like a less narcotic cousin of Hope Sandoval or The Sundays’ Harriet Wheeler. Indeed, “When Mac Was Swimming” could be Wheeler doing Nico doing “The Girl From Ipanema”. The sparse “I Never Knew You From The Sun” (sooooo soft?exhaled rather than sung) is only bettered by the balmy melodies and impeccable craftsmanship of “Martha Avenue Love Song” and the lovestruck closer “Look For Me As You Go By”. For incurable romantics everywhere.

The dazzling rise of Queens Of The Stone Age over the past few years has left most of their psych-metal contemporaries for dust. Not that LA trio Nebula seem to mind, though. The mixing desk presence of Queens affiliate Chris Goss on this, their third album, has done little to draw them out of their closeted, reductive world. Atomic Ritual?that title!?remains a gonzoid pleasure. Riffs are carved from mud, pitched somewhere between Blue Cheer and Mudhoney. Lyrics lurch from sci-fi waffle to biker nihilism. A tribute to Aleister Crowley, “The Beast”, meanwhile, is gormless and innocent enough to pass muster with Nebula’s ultimate spirit guides, Black Sabbath. Good fun.

Since the dissolution of Faith No More, vocalist Mike Patton has established himself as something of an avant-rock renaissance man. He has worked with hip hop producer Dan Takemura and Japanese noise artist Masami Akita, released bizarre albums of solo vocal recordings and co-founded the wonderful Ipecac label. Fant

A week may be a long time in politics, but it’s aeons in dance music. Stand still too long and you risk being left behind. London-based duo Lamb developed an idiosyncratic take on drum’n’bass, offsetting its crisp, tachometric drive with sweetly soulful vocals on their 1997 debut. They’ve made slight adjustments over two subsequent albums, but still see no good reason to mess with a successful formula. Consequently, their fourth casts them as confident modern classicists, as adept at skittering, Dave Brubeck-like tones (“Sugar 5”) as a Debussy-inspired instrumental (“Angelica”). Wisely, Lamb let the bandwagons roll by without them.

Recorded in their new French studios, this mini album represents a first dip in the water for Stereolab following their bereavement, but not too radical a departure in sound. Still, the place they’re at is hardly one from which you would particularly wish to depart. On “…Suddenly Stars” and “Jaunty Monty And The Bubbles Of Silence”, there’s the bracing, fragrant whiff again of ’60s dashboards and lost springs, the usual, unusual variations on their retro-futurist theme. Only the disco-fied “Mass Riff” takes you aback?it’s as if Sophie Ellis-Bextor has walked in the studio. A tangy taster for their album proper in 2004.