“Don’t underestimate me ‘cos I do poetry?my rhyme is sweet but deadly,” Ursula Rucker warns us on “Untitled Flow”. After emerging from Philadelphia’s fertile spoken-word scene, she first grabbed public attention through her work with fellow citizens The Roots, later refining her soulful blending of rap, poetry and scat on her 2001 debut album, Supa Sista.

Her follow-up record, Silver Or Lead, follows a similarly rootsy and righteous path, with Rucker’s fluid rhymes set against musical backdrops that range from ambient house to Afro-Latin as crafted by the likes of Jazzanova, 4 Hero and The Roots. Rucker’s boldly conscious poetics do occasionally smack of self-righteousness, but Silver Or Lead nevertheless confirms her status as a vibrant and refreshingly forthright voice from the hip hop underground.

Apparently descended from Alexander Selkirk, the model for Robinson Crusoe, Melbourne native Burke took inspiration from fellow Aussie Paul Kelly, swiping the Horse Stories banner from a Dirty Three album and hitting the local circuit in the late ’90s. Disillusioned and suffocated by his hometown scene, he fled to LA in 1999 to hole up with his similarly ex-pat attorney brother and try out as a TV writer. Beginning to dabble again with guitar and eight-track, he was soon bolstered by power-popping Texan ace Clinton Stapleton (drums, ex-National) and dub-punker Jeff Holmes (guitar, ex-Dingees).

Last year’s debut, Travelling Mercies (For Troubled Paths), was a triumph, serving notice of smouldering talent. For its follow-up, the trio headed for John Barrymore’s old Pacific mountain hideaway, Indigo Ranch, and fashioned an impressionistic mood piece, substituting blacktop metaphor for all things ocean spray. Burke mines the duality of the sea, finding both freedom and no escape in its vastness.

With Son Volt’s Eric Heywood adding banks of pedal steel, the painterly approach on curtain-raiser “Push My Buttons” is typical:softly churning guitars, a strain of harmonica and Burke’s keening, skyward falsetto. Comparisons with Thom Yorke are inevitable, but Burke’s gentler, less corrosive tone is closer to Jacob Golden or Ben Christophers. Light and shadow are provided by the sidelong skip of “Bottled Train”, accordion/piano-led instrumental “The Calming Effects… Of Rum And True Friendship” and the vocal tour de force “The Rocks And The Waves”. If it all gets too much, there’s “Chanty (For A Drowning Sinner)”?a rum-choked hornpipe replete with shakers, squeezeboxes and rail spikes. Nice.

Joe Strummer’s sudden death last December seemingly brought the career of one of our greatest rockers to an abrupt end. But what makes Streetcore, the album he’d all but completed at the time of his death, so thrilling and fulfilling is that it brings both closure and new meaning to the man’s life and work.

Its 10 songs?seven Strummer originals, one co-write with Danny Sabre (“All In A Day”) and two covers, Bob Marley’s “Redemption Song” and Bobby Charles’ “Silver And Gold”?embrace the full span of Joe’s musical journey. There’s the heartfelt folkie troubadour inspired by Dylan and Woody Guthrie (“Long Shadow”), the possessed missionary on the electric bush telegraph (“Midnight Jam”), the hippie dreamer, acid prankster and punk Godfather (“Ramshackle Day Parade”, “Burnin’ Streets”) and the rocking tribal warrior (“Arms Aloft”).

Streetcore negotiates a resolution between the ethnocentric beats that hallmarked the two previous Mescaleros albums and the classic Clash sound that remained pivotal to Joe’s live performances. It also contains some of the most revealing songs he ever recorded, making it an essential, if ill-starred, trip.

“Coma Girl”, driven by his unmistakable engine-revving rhythm guitar, is classic Strummer, swept along by a Jamaican offbeat; bruising punk clatter collides with reggae-inflected prophesy on “Get Down Moses”, presenting an activist call to arms (“Who’s sponsoring the crack ghettoes?/We got to take the walls of Jericho.”)

Unsurprisingly, these songs are often informed by world-weary experience and the battle-hardened wisdom of a rock’n’roll veteran.

“May I remind you of that scene/The spirit is our gasoline” is the rallying cry of “Arms Aloft”, recalling the heyday of “Clash City Rockers”, when anything seemed possible. But elsewhere that spirit is besieged and under fire. On the extraordinary “Ramshackle Day Parade” the funereal synthesizer and baleful chorus describe a post-9/11 march of flailed souls, a toast to “all those lost, unborn and unmade”. “All In A Day” captures an inspired mix of uncertainty, mania and exhilaration, while on “Burnin’ Streets” images of urban decay are suffused with outrage and sorrow.

Even greater is the Rick Rubin-produced “Redemption Song”, a magisterial reinterpretation, Joe’s affinity with Marley’s lyric absolute. The similarly sparse “Long Shadow”, originally written for Johnny Cash, is, as Strummer’s biographer Chris Salewicz indentified, Joe’s own “Redemption Song”. This cowboy ballad is a righteous testament linking Westway anarchists and rocking desperadoes with US Depression-era hobos and chain gangs. It’s a song as deep and lasting as “White Man In Hammersmith Palais”, or any other previous Strummer composition.

Of course there’s a sadness here:a man is gone, and no one can take his place. But Mescaleros Scott Shields and Martin Slattery have served Strummer’s memory well, and Streetcore is something to celebrate, proof that, right up to his death, Joe Strummer was working at the peak of his powers.

Despite recording together for 14 years (much of that as part of The Black Dog), Ed Handley and Andy Turner still explore the syntax of electronica with awe and excitement. Tracks like “Crumax Rins” or the haunting synth fugue “Cedar City” may hint at the tenebrous dissonance of their earlier incarnation, but generally Spokes is passionate and optimistic. A remarkable selection of sound sculptures hewn from taut percussive textures (“Buns”), iridescent stabs of melody (“Get What You Gave”), crunchy beats (“Even Spring”) and quirky bouncing electro (“Upona”), this is intelligent and addictive.

Touted as the next big stink a couple of years ago, Alfie never quite made it. To detractors, they were too twee?too, well, nice. Eighteen months on, after breaking with old label Twisted Nerve and with Coldplay producer Ken Nelson at the helm, they’ve put their backs into it. The pastorale remains (as does singer Lee Gorton’s muggy sweetness), but the album also distills Barrett-era Floyd, Flaming Lips and the psychedelic headspin of the West Coast Pop Art Experimental Band into a flurry of brass, strings and folk-choir harmonies. Of their UK peers, only the Super Furries do this stuff better.

Returning to his day job having picked up a Grammy for producing and writing on Solomon Burke’s excellent Don’t Give Up On Me comeback, Tiny Voices has an even greater concentration on mod con jazz (Ornette Coleman appeared on his last) thanks to clarinettist Don Byron’s sinuous contributions. But Henry’s original incarnation as a North Carolina pop merchant still emerges on tracks like the eye-popping “Dirty Magazines” and the fully-scoped “Animal Skin”.

Big melodies, soothing rhythms and some neat jazz jerks: Tiny Voices makes a quiet noise that’s worth investigating.

Gentleman, internationalist, humanitarian, and one of the most moving singers Britain has ever produced, Robert Wyatt doesn’t make anywhere near enough records. Cuckooland is only his eighth solo album in the 32 years since he was drummed out of Soft Machine, and the first since 1997’s Shleep.

Cuckooland reflects the care and long labour which went into it. A quilted, intricate and absorbing collection of songs that moves Shleep’s fluttering textures into darker territory, it finds Wyatt observing the world with love and bewilderment. He has always been an unusually sensitive political artist, and two songs composed with his wife, the poet Alfreda Benge?”Forest”, about gypsies, and “Lullaby For Hamza”, about Iraq?characteristically avoid didactics and concentrate on the reality of suffering. “Forest”, in particular, is magnificent, a bleary and looping chorale that showcases two of Wyatt’s greatest assets. There’s his ability to write songs with sophisticated historical perspectives, so that here the treatment of Eastern European gypsy asylum-seekers is compared with the plight of their ancestors in Nazi extermination camps. And there’s his uncanny empathy with the disenfranchised, wherever they may come from.

Perhaps it’s because Wyatt himself has never fitted in musically?at least not since the Canterbury scene’s demise. Consequently, Cuckooland remains happily adrift of conventional genres. The disparate clutch of guest musicians, including Brian Eno, Paul Weller, Dave Gilmour, fine Israeli saxophonist Gilad Atzmon, singer and harmonica player Karen Mantler, sound way out of context, sublimated to Wyatt’s idiosyncratic vision. As he admits, Cuckooland is a refinement of the music he has always made?although his love of jazz is more pronounced than usual. Wyatt plays plenty of trumpet as a result, in much the same way as he sings, drums and plays his piano and gauzy synths: tentative, without affectation, within a tight tonal range. The trumpet helps out with the high notes he can no longer reach with his voice, since age has cut his range by half an octave. But it’s that voice which is still the most remarkable thing. On 1974’s classic Rock Bottom, its frailty echoed the mood of a man trying to come to terms with both profound love and physical disability. Now, gracefully disintegrated further, it’s the tool of one approaching 60 whose concern for the world, and desire to improve it, is stronger than ever.

Emocore?or emotional hardcore?is currently a big deal. It invariably entails girlfriend-free teens in skinny T-shirts bawling about their luckless love lives over a sub-Fugazi punkish racket. In songwriter Christopher Carraba’s case, he’s dispensed with the grittier elements and plumped for a straightforward US college rock backing, with dismal results. “Ghost Of A Good Thing” and “Carve Your Heart Out Yourself” come across not as works of tortured genius but as the mitherings of someone who could do with getting laid. He’s also 27, so he should probably know better.

Rubber-stamped by New Order, Garlic’s 2002 debut The Murky World Of Seats brought comparisons with Neil Young and, crucially, Stephen Malkmus. This time, Pavement passions are (intermittently) dampened for a broader outlook, though comparisons with The Flaming Lips (“Never Gonna Let You Go”), Grandaddy (“One Thing Or Another”) and Lou Reed (“Philmore”) are unavoidable. Mostly backlit by hearty acoustic strum, frontman Mike Wyzgowski’s niftily-skewed songs are best when shorn of affectation, as on the softly defocused “A Weird Wood Soul” (spot the infamous UK nanny anagram) and charabanc-a-long “100 Miles”.

Though Sharon Shannon, formerly of The Waterboys, has been a bold musical adventurer, her accordion playing has always remained deeply rooted in Irish tradition. Libertango could well be her most audacious set yet:there are the usual Celtic jigs and reels, but then there’s the voice of the late Kirsty MacColl on the title track’s tango and more Latin flavours on “Whitestrand Sling”. Sin

Occupying a similar niche to the Black Eyed Peas, Spooks are hip hop for people who baulk at the vulgar (yet more interesting) likes of Eminem or 50 Cent. That said, there are signs that Booka-T, Hypno, Joe Davis and Ming-Xia may be tiring of being nice. A couple of the tracks here flirt with a little signposted nastiness (“Crazy” and “Wild”) and there are some encouragingly alien textures in the outro to “Hell No” and “Spooks” that indicate better things to come.

More no-fi than lo-fi, this rough, bootleg-quality document released on singer Paul Haig’s own label acts as a companion to 2000’s excellent Crazy To Exist (Live). You need to be a fan to sift through the murk in search of what made the band?who barely managed to release an album during their mayfly career?special, but once your ears adjust to the gloom, the caustic glory of Haig and Malcolm Ross’ twin guitar rattle is well worth the effort. Magical, if muddy.

So, farewell then, Ben Parker and Jason Hazeley. The gentle English duo’s three albums of melodic heartache, pitched somewhere between Tim Buckley and Badly Drawn Boy and all released between 1999 and 2001, made them firm Uncut favourites. But dropped by their label Go Beat, they decided they’d had enough banging their heads against a wall of indifference. Sod’s law dictates that their farewell album (posthumously picked up by Setanta) is the most potent of their career. From Ben’s acoustic guitar musings on “510 Miracle” and “Orphans” to Jason’s heart-rending piano ballads and exquisite string arrangements on “A Star In Nobody’s Picture” and “You’re The Reason”, they’re still singing like a pair of bruised cherubs. A nation should mourn. Instead, nobody cares. Shame.

Rigby wowed plenty with her 1996 debut, Diary Of A Mod Housewife, which featured Hal Hartley’s favourite son Ira Kaplan of Yo La Tengo. Rigby’s literate, punchy songs are enhanced this time by country nouveau and power-pop types Ken Coomer, Duane Jarvis and Will Kimbrough, keeping her up to speed with everyone from the No Depression crew to lifestylers like Rolling Stone regulars. Standouts include US radio hit “Are We Ever Gonna Have Sex Again?” and “Break-up Boots”, which figure Amy as a bard of relationship mess. She’s obviously aiming higher than clique status, too, as country cat Todd Snider guests on the title cut. Those Nashville suits better watch out.

On the back of the undervalued Soft Cell reunion album Cruelty Without Beauty comes this live double, shaved from their European tour. Opening with the bubbling “Memorabilia”, Almond and Ball then focus on newer material before launching into a savage onslaught of stabs and scars from The Art Of Falling Apart. The second half is crowd-pleaser time, and this crowd is certainly pleased. “Torch” burns with yearning, “Tainted Love” keeps the weekenders happy, “Say Hello, Wave Goodbye” remains the best poem of self-loathing anti-romanticism not written by Philip Larkin. Absinthe to the Pet Shop Boys’ vanilla.

It could have been a catastrophe, right enough. Belle & Sebastian meet Trevor Horn: Tigermilk meets “Two Tribes”? Chalk meets cheese, more like.

But in a year that began with Horn frogmarching nymph-lesbian duo Tatu to No 1, is it so strange he should end it in cahoots with a band as similarly outside the pop norm as these fey lairds of indie? Ought we really be surprised that Belle And Sebastian, sad sensitive observers of “The Loneliness Of A Middle Distance Runner”, would find a kindred spirit in the man responsible for The Buggles’ ‘faded film star’ tearjerker “Elstree”? Of course not.

Horn’s influence is surprisingly subtle, merely emphasising the band’s playful idiosyncrasies (working titles for this album included “Wanker’s Forest”, “Nazi Sinatra” and “The Six Guns Of Henry The Arse”). Hence its dozen tracks, one of which shares its name with former Catchphrase host “Roy Walker”, heave with mischievous appropriation. “Wrapped Up In Books” shamelessly pulls the rug from under Sir Cliff’s “In The Country”, while distinct outlines of Jackie Lee’s “Rupert”, Costello, Magazine and Adam And The Ants are elsewhere?so no wonder another working title was “If You’re Going To Be Hung For Stealing A Horse You Might As Well Shag It”. Lo and behold, they do just that on the outstanding “I’m A Cuckoo”, embezzling the dual guitar harmonics of “The Boys Are Back In Town” and then namedropping Thin Lizzy in the cheekiest rhyming couplet of the new millennium so far.

Such larceny would be that and nothing more if it weren’t for the songwriting chops of Stuart Murdoch and Stevie Jackson. From “Lord Anthony”, the saga of a bullied posh kid with transvestite yearnings, to laments for relationships soured by the humdrum couch-potatoism of cheap vino and I Love The ’90s-type telly, it’s by far the strongest collection of songs the band have ever assembled. If they entered the ring with Horn as talented greenhorns, by the final fade of the epic new romantic finale “Stay Loose”, they exit as accomplished pop epicures. A catastrophe in name only.

The backing tracks for Down Beat were recorded in just two days by a formidable ensemble, live and often improvised, and the range of material here is extraordinary, from some humorously mellow sax variations on the theme to The Waltons to the jazz-streaked, curiously-truncated “Kalimba”, which rolls out with the thunder of John Coltrane. Although his fellow Llamas loan him some instruments, that’s where the debt to his band ends. The best moments are often the gentlest, such as “You Said You’d Built Some Wings”?imagine if Miles Davis and Gil Evans had got together to orchestrate the band in Trumpton.