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.

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.