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.

Four-piece The Singles combine their native Detroit guitar flash with a love for the perfect progressions of the ’60s pop merchants. “He Can Go, You Can’t Stay” and “It’ll Never Be The Same Again” identify the correct period boy-girl love-hate thing, lashing loads of harmonies to floppy-fringed rhythms. By the look of them, oil painters won’t be making house calls, but this is bedroom/garage music, best listened to in the lockedup-tight position, and with more hum factor than a silage barn.

It’s an auspicious beginning: the stuttering digital exotica of “Planet Dada” is the most thrilling few minutes of tech-noir since Orbital’s “The Box”, “Trans-Europe Express” remixed by Martin Denny. Elsewhere, as with the recent Kraftwerk album, there’s a feeling the passage of time finds former innovators treading water. There are some great titles, of course (“Don Turbulento”; “Bougainville”; “Soul On Ice”, in particular, cries out for the peacock strut/purple yearning of Billy Mackenzie). In comparison with what passes for mainstream contemporary dance music, this is both wittier and sexier. But by Yello’s own standards, most of The Eye is either simply too familiar or crushingly limp. Several tracks rehash Dieter Meier’s growling vocal riff from their biggest hit, “The Race”, and the once radical fusion of machine music with more fluid, ethnic forms (bossa nova, largely) now sounds cute but pat. Worse, the occasional appearance of a bloodless, not-quite-soul female vocal makes the need for a more characterful collaborator even more obvious. If you’re new to Yello, start with “The New Mix In One Go”.

Art-rock doesn’t, as far as we know, have a glorious reputation in the working men’s clubs of South Yorkshire. Relaxed Muscle, however, suggest there’s a captive market for electro duos in Doncaster, where the regulars suffer half an hour of performance art before bingo. Why else would Darren Spooner?a man for whom the concept of a meat raffle has boundless implications?yelp “Student teachers are sexualised” over cacophonous synth fuzz while dressed as a skeleton?

Perhaps because Spooner is not just a provocateur from a hostile environment, but a man with something to hide. When Pulp brought their career to a possible close at the end of 2002, the consensus was that Jarvis Cocker would try his luck in the film world. Instead, while living in Paris with his new family, he’s been strangely inescapable this year, appearing with The Pastels, Richard X and UNKLE.

Cocker’s slightly disingenuous attempts to avoid the spotlight culminate here with his reinvention as Darren Spooner; forty something club singer with a fine line in brusque hysteria. Relaxed Muscle is Cocker/Spooner’s collaboration with Jason Buckle, Sheffield electro mainstay who figured in The All Seeing I and the Fat Truckers. Together they’ve created a grubby and entertaining fiction, a parody of Northern machismo and art-rock that betrays a love?or at least indulgence?of both.

The album succeeds, though, because Cocker can’t help but write great pop songs. The most obvious template is Suicide’s aggro-electro: “Rod Of Iron”, all malfunctioning drumbox and numbskull menace, is the image of “Ghost Rider”, at least until Spooner gets over-excited and starts snarling “Doe a deer”. Elsewhere, they echo Gary Glitter (“Beastmaster”, with bonus catfight samples), The Damned (“Tuff It Out” is an electroid rethink of “Smash It Up”, essentially), The Stooges (the marvellous “Sexualized”) and a shocking combination of Adam & The Ants and Suzi Quatro (“Muscle Music”).

“This is the sound of a man who couldn’t take it any more,”mugs Spooner on “Billy Jack”, but by the end of the night he’s morphing back into Cocker through a clutch of dirges where pathos triumphs over macho bluster. By some distance the weakest songs on the album, they’re also the ones that prove Cocker is an unusually humane writer, not least when immersed in a project as arch and meticulous as Relaxed Muscle. Even when he creates a monster like Darren Spooner, he can’t resist giving the bastard a heart.

For those unaware of DJ Dave Clarke as a purveyor of anything other than punishing, four-to-the-floor techno, Devil’s Advocate may be something of an ear-opener. His aptly-titled second album sees him steering away from the hip hop which infiltrated his debut and digging deep into the moodiest electro and bass-boosted post-punk. With guests such as Chicago house champ DJ Rush on board, alongside Berlin electroclash queens Chicks On Speed (see p 141) and underground hip hopper Mr Lif, Clarke tears up Bauhaus on his version of “She’s In Parties” (with vocals from COS) and imagines Yello as demented techsteppers on “The Wolf”, offering a dark and attitudinal joyride through the heavier end of electro-funk.

An unfettered performer admired by Thom Yorke and movie stars, a raconteur, a Canadian who’s revered in France, a camp cabaret diva who can in a blink mutate into a cross between Springsteen and Strummer, Hawksley Workman is all things to… well, to half a dozen gushing UK critics at this moment.

The cult of Workman?surely not his real name?is about to explode. There’s major-label oomph behind his third album, and he’s smartly toned down some of the, er, performance art, channelling his undoubted vocal/musical abilities into a?for him?sensible, solid, witty rock record.

Those of you who’ve heard the screaming about Hawksley?allegedly the new Prince, Bowie, Buckley, Waits, even, good lord, the new Sparks?may hear the first track here and experience confusion. “We Will Still Need A Song” is powerful and confident, sure, but it’s U2. The voice the guitars?it’s all chests-to-the-wind anthem. But stick in there, because though the standard-issue soaring and by-numbers yearning does reoccur, Lover/Fighter lifts into altogether more original, arresting terrain. When Hawksley?a man, remember, whose last album bore more class in its title alone, (Last Night We Were) The Delicious Wolves, than is contained in most entire oeuvres?lets loose, a snarling pack of Spanish galleons cruise the sunrise behind him. “Even An Ugly Man” is beautiful with lyrical flair; “Anger As Beauty” is (hypnotically) ugly with rage and bravado. Rarely can a song have lived up to its name as precisely as the heartbreaking “Wonderful And Sad.”

Eventually you twig why he’s refrained from the going-over-the-top of previous outings: he’s bang on the brink here, ballet dancing on rims of volcanoes, and the songs crackle with a frisson seldom sensed elsewhere. “Tonight Romanticize The Automobile” both archly comments on and sexily embodies rock’s cars-and-girls clich

If?as you should be?you’re in love with Luna, who since departing the mothership Galaxie 500 in 1992 have often made the same sleek, sexy, cerebral record, only better each time, you’ll come over all swoonalicious to this subtly sparkling spin-off. Overachieving couple Wareham (voice that, without trying too hard, conveys every emotion half-understood by man; guitar) and Phillips (voice, bass, was once too cool to be a full-on movie star) sing, together and separately, new (very Luna-esque) love songs and interpretations of oddities from The Doors’ “Indian Summer” to Madonna’s “I Deserve It”, from Buffy Sainte-Marie to Opal. You might consider this all very pleasant if inconsequential, but the God’s God of producers, Tony Visconti (for it is he), sprinkles extra stardust on every sigh, turning the bluebirds of their cooing yet knowing happiness into long-legged flamingos who know what a mirror’s for. Honestly, special.

Like much of No Smoking, their debut album of last year, Stories Of God, My Finger And The Strange?also released on the local label set up by Elbow and I Am Kloot members?crams in a wealth of influences. Beefheart and Waits, particularly, continue to throw huge shadows, and there’s an experimental edge to the bone-jarring percussion and some thrilling harmonica-blowing from additional member Julian Gaskell. Best when keeping it natural (“Lost In The City”, “My Finger”), singer Scott Alexander needs to ditch the distortion and breathe his own air. The next record could be something very special.

With seven-figure sales in their native Brazil and a Latin Grammy under their belts, Tribalistas have become an “international priority” for EMI. Sadly, they’re not going to sell many records in insular little old Britain, if only because they sing entirely in Portuguese. Tribalistas is a one-off project and its three members?Marisa Monte, Carlinhos Brown and Arnaldo Antunes?are all major solo stars in Brazilian music. Together they’ve stepped outside the usual commercial dictates of their careers to make a relaxed acoustic album of laid-back and languid songs that sounds like a cross between Crosby, Stills & Nash and “The Girl From Ipanema”. It really is quite magical.

Readers bewitched by David Sylvian’s Blemish will have noticed the key contributions of veteran contrarian guitarist Derek Bailey, and here he’s simultaneously pushing the boundaries of improv and going back to its roots. Presenting a never more unlikely instrumentation of bass saxophone (Tony Bevan), clarinet (Alex Ward), dictaphone (THF Drenching) and, if you will, bricks for drums (Sonic Pleasure), this incredible record sounds like a collision between Test Dept’s determinism and the Bonzo Dog Band’s mischief. Drenching’s dictaphone squeals and cackles like a virtual saxophone. A highlight is the 17-minute “Charity Singles Ball”, wherein Bailey’s guitar seems to join previously unimaginable dots between Charlie Christian and The Edge before the band’s closing collective screams threaten to demolish the speakers. Brilliant.

One of alternative Nashville’s most potent female singer-songwriters, Kate Campbell sets her own songs aside on Twang On A Wire to pay tribute to a dozen pioneers from country music’s senior sorority. Backed by a fine band that includes Uncut favourites Jeff Finlin and Will Kimbrough, she runs through a dozen great songs made famous by the likes of Lynn Anderson (“Rose Garden”), Tanya Tucker (“Would You Lay With Me In A Field Of Stone”), Jeannie C Riley (“Harper Valley PTA”) and Dolly Parton (“Down From Dover”). The lusher Nashville pop sound of the originals is replaced by a more stripped-down, alt.country feel to make Twang On A Wire an unexpected delight.

In New Zealand, where she grew up, the 26-year-old Bic Runga is bigger than Madonna, breaks bread with the Prime Minister, and felt compelled to leave the peninsula and move to Paris because she got sick of seeing herself in the papers. Her debut album, 1998’s Drive, was the biggest-selling in NZ history (Crowded who?). Beautiful Collision, the follow-up, has already trounced it, having spent 52 weeks at No 1. The only thing stopping Runga from repeating this success elsewhere thus far has been, as she puts it, “the paralysing distance” between her homeland and the rest of the world. Now that she’s in Europe, well, watch out Dido.

Don’t worry, Runga is only superficially Dido-esque. Despite being one of the loveliest collections of songs in recent memory, there are no facile quandaries about “bf” here. Through nuance and shade, you can tell Runga reads more Elizabeth Smart than Helen Fielding. Backstage at a Blondie gig in London, she took exception to something this reviewer said and whacked him about the head. Would Dido do that? Probably not. Beautiful Collision is lovely, but it’s a loveliness that, at a guess, conceals trauma and neurosis. Radio 2 will love it. So will xfm. Even “A Day Like That” and “Honest Goodbyes”, which are in waltz time. Runga describes the record as “whimsical”, but there is something unsettling about these fragrant reveries. They catch you off guard. Think of them as the missing link between Julee Cruise and Julie Andrews. It’s like being sung to by the girl in the attic. Songs such as “She Left On A Monday” and “Counting The Days” are deceptively, delicately cutting. They’re not lullabies, they’re lullabites.

Runga wrote all the music and words on Beautiful Collision, produced and arranged it all, played everything from piano and guitar to drums and dobro. Only Coldplay’s engineer, Michael Brauer, and the odd stray male like Neil Finn (vocals on “Something Good” and “Listening For The Weather”) and Joey Waronker (occasional “drum sounds”) shatter the mood of solitary female yearning. In fact, the only real sorethumb moment is the grunge-lite of “Good Morning Baby”, a duet with Dan Wilson of Semisonic. The rest is unashamedly, exquisitely MOR-ish. These kisses feel like hits.

As 50 per cent of Smith & Mighty, he was?along with Massive Attack and Portishead?responsible for ‘the Bristol sound’, a brooding blend of hip hop-primed beats and noir-ish, textured soundscapes. Smith is a pioneer of what later became trip hop, but his solo effort is much more than the coffee-table accessory that might suggest. Its roots lie in dub, drum’n’bass and ragga, encompassing both the smoothly urgent, deep house of “Living In Unity” and “Great Escape”, where measured orchestral sweetness seeps through a monstrously baffled bass.

It’s finally time to forget if not forgive that hideous voicebox on “Show Me The Way”. Now a resident of Cincinnati, Peter Frampton has made a self-produced album of roots-based, gimmick-free American-influenced rock.

From the lovely minor chord acoustics of “Not Forgotten” to the blues shuffle of “Flying Without Wings” via the lo-fi lullaby of “Mia Rose”, the tone is warm and engaging. Even the version of “While My Guitar Gently Weeps” can be excused?George was an old friend, and Frampton played on All Things Must Pass. Mind you, it’s still salutary to remember that punk’s annus mirabilis was also the year in which we somehow bought 16 million copies of Frampton Comes Alive.

Possibly reacting against his deification by the new garage rock elite, Billy Childish seems to have slowed down his work rate of late. Roughly a hundred albums into his career, 1914 is only his first of 2003, though the time away seems to have been spent cultivating his moustache rather than plotting any vast aesthetic shift. Twelve tracks of the same old crotchety, valve-driven rock’n’roll, then, often with the same old tunes (the everfaithful “Troubled Mind” crops up this time as “All My Feelings Denied”). The hit rate isn’t quite as high as last year’s essential Steady The Buffs. But still, Childish’s memorials to teenage girlfriends, and his tireless efforts to expose the modern world as an iniquitous sham (“Hedge strimmers are bogus!”), mark him out as one of Britain’s most energetic and cherishable nostalgists.

Frustrated after failed business negotiations pushed the release of their American Whip album back into 2004, boy-girl duo Joy Zipper entered a New York studio with indie legend Kramer (Shimmydisc proprietor, producer of Galaxie 500 and many others) and knocked out this 21-minute mini album in a couple of days. Gratifyingly, their bad feelings didn’t erupt into a maelstrom of punky catharsis. Rather, they’ve produced a chugging, grungey three-chord pop of rare intimacy and warmth. Of the six tracks here, two (“Gun Control” and “Check Out My New Jesus”) are reworkings of old songs, the other four being split between Vincent Cafiso and Tabitha Tindale. All of them are marked by a brave, embattled innocence.

Guess something’s going right in rock’s resurrection when we can cite reference points like The Gun Club and Crime & The City Solution without being dragged out to the paddock and shot. As The Duke Spirit are a London five-piece with a female frontperson in Liela Moss, these comparisons highlight their willingness to delve beneath the predictable: co-produced by Simon Raymonde, who we’re legally obliged to describe as “former Cocteau Twin”, this six-track debut mini album isn’t afraid to let a mood build, a groove grind up and down, a darkness descend. Echoing, scrawling white blues, with plenty of messed-up love, crystal-clear hate, whisky rants and horny demons.

As DJ Spooky, Paul D Miller has helped elevate the status of the turntable from humble DJ tool to an instrument in its own right. His scratch skills may be dazzling, but he’s equally drawn to John Cage and Sun Ra as Kool Herc, Prince Paul and Grandmaster Flash. An almost academic approach to slipmat arts has seen him work with everyone from Scanner to Thurston Moore, but here his collaboration with producer Ryan Moore (aka Twilight Circus) results in the anchoring of the former’s darkly textured atmospherics by the latter’s deep, rootsy dub. It’s potent, postmodern magic.