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.

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.