There’s a fine line between winsome and wet, eccentric and affected, but Pete Astor is clearly a skillful tightrope walker. Together with multi-instrumentalist David Sheppard, he’s crafted another album of perfectly pitched DIY pop.

On Torch Division, the pair have dispensed with the lo-fi electronica that distinguished their previous House Of Binary album to the margins, where it fizzes and twitters only intermittently. The emphasis is now on Astor’s songs?sweetly mournful snapshots of the mundane and the miraculous fleshed out with idiosyncratic instrumentation. “Chicken” recalls a malevolent Tom Waits, while elsewhere Neil Young, Calexico and Mazzy Star make their presence felt.

An album of great warmth, engaging oddness and real, ramshackle charm.

Originally released in Greek early last year, Boyatzis’ musical adaptation of the poetry of Nobel Laureate/compatriot George Seferis undergoes an international makeover. Eighteen guest vocalists from both sides of the pond (including Robert Wyatt, Alejandro Escovedo, Mark Eitzel, Steve Wynn and Howe Gelb) add English translation to power-popper-cum-sound-collagist Boyatzis’ delicate noise paintings. Superb offerings from The Czars’ John Grant (“Haiku 14B”) and Sonic Youth’s Lee Ranaldo (“Haiku 12”) are the most linear, but Cat Power’s “Haiku 10” and Carla (Walkabouts) Torgerson’s “Haiku 5” are softer and more smearily beautiful.

With their somnambulistic folk shanties and spliffed-out beeps and blips, Parsley Sounds seem an unlikely acquisition to James Lavelle’s Mo’Wax empire. Neither trip nor hip hop, duo Danny Sargassa and Preston Mead drift in a melodic haze of wistful innocence, sounding like cub scout Stone Roses or wide-eyed Shack wannabes. That’s no bad thing either: even without electronic squelch and burp, tracks like the serenely sullen “Ocean House” stand unencumbered as great songs with proper tunes.

Four bruisers from Melbourne, this band have spent the past year conscientiously building a legend for themselves as fighting, bad-mouthing rock’n’roll archetypes. Perhaps inevitably, their debut album doesn’t measure up to the rhetoric, being an efficient if fairly joyless hybrid of the Stones, AC/DC and Oasis. Unlike Antipodean contemporaries The Datsuns, Jet seem bereft of either wit or self-knowledge: it’s telling that the most impassioned song here is “Rollover DJ”, an attack on the supposed evils of dance music that’s more laughable than inflammatory.

“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