Paul McLoone is the man with the least enviable job in power punk history. For many, the idea of The Undertones without Feargal Sharkey's chiselled features and inimitable larynx is simply untenable. But the fact is, with his Sharkey-like vibrato, McLoone has re-energised the band, giving them urgency and hunger. Droll new classic "Everything But You", the blackly humorous "The Cruellest Thing" and the mesmerising "Winter Sun" (as weirdly off-kilter as anything they've ever recorded) inhabit the same ageless corner of garage band heaven as earlier classics. Peerless riffs, brilliantly skewed harmonies and dynamic splendour?a group this good doesn't deserve to be left on the shelf. Rest assured, McLoone has done their legacy proud.

Seemingly unfashionable for wearing glasses, Craig and Charlie Reid's total withdrawal from the music industry in the late '90s, to look after their dying father and numerous children, suggests bullshitless values worth more than hipness. Collins emphasises their raw, unembarrassed emotion, allowing speaker-shredding vocals on punk-folk-soul anthems to wounded people like "Should Have Been Loved". Southern soul, country, even Merseybeat also enter the mix, reminiscent of mid-period Elvis Costello. Only a shortage of really top-notch songs lets them down this time around.

Like Lloyd Cole, Stephen Duffy has been stripped of his '80s hopes of pop success, and now pursues his English visions at a hand-crafted level. This is folk music for the far-flung community whose values were forged by '80s pop culture, picking through the wreckage of the late 20th century, from Blood On The Tracks to the Berlin Wall. Subtly lush, echoing production brings Sun Studios into the equation. "Bank Holiday Monday", meanwhile, is a small classic of longing for England and escape from it. Too media-saturated to cut to the soul, Duffy has still carved himself a resonant niche.

The first British band to fully embrace the mushrooms'n'mildew aesthetic of The Incredible String Band in the mid-'80s, Gorky's have watched a deluge of like-minded souls pile through the paddock in recent years. Happily, though subsequent albums have ironed out many of the quirks, their wonky folk-baroque remains very much alive. More akin to 2000's mini album The Blue Trees than the beachy bounce of last album How I Long To Feel That Summer In My Heart, this is mostly acoustic guitars lovingly plucked, drums delicately brushed, fiddles softly sawn. Childs' delivery is still a sideways treat, tottering like Robert Wyatt throughout. Black sheep of the bunch is "Mow The Lawn", a bucolic glam-slam through Roxy Music's "Editions Of You".

Ho-hum. New album by Wobble. Ambient. World music. Dub. Yawn? Well, no. Except that like most of Britrock's lost souls whose genius is now a perennial cottage industry (of Bill Nelson), Wobble never fails to stimulate or excite even when you think, as here, he might just be going through the motions. Listening to Wobble is like hearing fragments of the national anthems of ideal music-based states filtering and warping back through space to us. The lyrically grumbling simmer of "Just Me And Phil" defies you to know what instrument Wobble is playing, or what plane he's on. A post-punk Olias Of Sunhillow, anyone?

Curious beast, this. Starts off on a Misunderstood/Stooges tip ("She's Dead") before the choppy chug of Ron Asheton-like guitar morphs into a brief Strokes flurry ("Health Food Store") and sets up camp in mutated doo-wop, surf and '50s rock'n'roll. Singer Marcellus Hall?who, along with drummer Dave Varenka, was previously in indie heroes Railroad Jerk?sounds all Bobby Darin one moment, Gordon Gano the next. An unlikely cover of The Hollies' "The Air That I Breathe" only heightens the wonder that it all bleeds together so well. All done in little over a half-hour, it even touches on the anti-folk scuffle of Major Matt Mason with the 'hidden' title track.

Since releasing his awesome Vocal Studies + Uprock Narratives at the beginning of 2001, Scott Herren has headlined Japan's Fuji festival, recorded a new folk album under his Savath + Savalas alias and remixed everyone from Beans to Martina Topley-Bird. The thing he's most proud of, however, is this gorgeous collection of outtakes from his recent One Word Extinguisher album. Familiar beats are surrounded by new layers of drums, piano, Rhodes and percussion while other tracks are stripped down to just a reverberating bass line and witty vocal snippet. Probably one of the richest down-tempo albums since Shadow's Endtroducing.

A cursory glance at the guest list alone is enough. Creaming together a fantasy league of Dave Alvin, Kurt Wagner, Mark Eitzel, Otis Clay, Chris Mills, Alejandro Escovedo, Kevin Coyne and others is some feat, but it's both a mark of the admiration afforded Jon Langford within the industry as it is devotion to the cause. Alongside Steve Earle, ex-Mekon/current Waco Brother Langford is the most vehement opponent of his adopted America's death laws within the musical field. Hoping to achieve a similar result to last year's Vol 1 (Governor George Ryan soon waived Illinois' incumbent Death Rowers after its $40,000 success), Vols 2 & 3?benefits go to both the Illinois and national coalitions to abolish corporal punishment?land at once due to the number of names eager to contribute. The greatest moments, however, aren't all where you'd expect. The Meat Purveyors' trembling mandolin-fest "John Hardy" is narrowly edged out as Vol 3's highlight by Coyne's snarling "Saviour", while over on the first CD, Wagner's reading of Tom Waits'"The Fall Of Troy" is almost unbearably heartbreaking. Next to Diane Izzo's take on ultimate anti-racism anthem "Strange Fruit", it's the most extraordinary song on this collection.

Raised in rural New Mexico, Dameon Lee?aka Lowlights?gravitated first towards power pop with Albuquerque combo Scared Of Chaka. In 1999, six albums later, he set about beating a more sepulchral trail of his own. Co-produced by Dustin (Rocketship) Reske, this painterly debut is a sad-slow delight. Nothing maudlin about it either. Lee's voice has an autumn-leaf warmth, carried on swirls of organ noise, understated pedal-steel and shadowed by the faint harmonies of Angela Brown. On "Dim Stars" and "Travelogue" he sounds rather like a young Leonard Cohen stumbling into some roach-bitten outpost in a Sergio Leone flick.

Since big brother Steve first recruited her to sing backing on 1991's The Hard Way, Stacey Earle's gradual career curve has included two unadorned solo albums (1999's Simple Gearle and 2000's Dancin' With Them That Brung Me) before finally sharing centre stage with 'im indoors, Mark Stuart, on 2001's Must Be Live. This new offering is simply the best thing either have ever done. Stuart's classic country voice meshes with Earle's honeyed purr superbly, but it's the bold instrumentation that truly glows. "Spread Your Wings" is a gleeful ragtime jaunt; "If You Want My Love" and "Cry Night After Night" mint-fresh excursions into classic Western swing.

Rouse's last album Under Cold Blue Stars was a concept of sorts, set in '50s America and based around a fictitious couple and their struggle to come to terms with a fast-changing world and its shifting values. Musically, its rootsy brand of Americana ploughed a similar singer-songwriterly furrow to Rouse's first two solo albums and Chester, the collaborative record he made with Kurt Wagner. So in the light of what has gone before, 1972 comes as something of a surprise, if not a total shock, as Rouse goes back to roots of a rather different kind. Taking its cue from the year in which he was born, 1972 embarks on an affectionate 10-track tour around the music of that period. The mood is sunny and upbeat and the world is clearly a child-like place seen through a pair of rose-tinted spectacles. But, hey, he was only eight years old when the decade ended and the harsh reality of the '80s dawned. The tone is set by the opening title track, with "It's Too Late"-style piano chords and a lyric which finds Rouse "grooving to a Carole King tune" on an endless summer afternoon, before it moves into something more gossamer-like with one of those elusively floating melodies of the kind Wagner might have written for the last Lambchop album, Is A Woman. Songs such as "Love Vibration" and "Sunshine" are every bit as retro as their titles suggest?mild but soothing '70s West Coast pop in the tradition of "Me And You And A Dog Named Boo" and "It Never Rains (In Southern California)", or perhaps Captain And Tennille, rather than the jangling folk-rock that influenced The Thrills' equally California-fixated debut album. "James" is funkier but still mellifluous with a magical bass line, like Ace's "How Long" meets Bill Withers'"Use Me". There are other '70s soul influences, and you can hear Rouse and producer Brad Jones making nods towards Stevie Wonder, the jazz-funk of Herbie Mann, Van McCoy's "The Hustle" and even Barry White's Love Unlimited in the arrangements. But it's still filtered through his inescapable troubadour tendencies so that the soul is essentially of the softest, blue-eyed variety. "Come Back (Light Therapy)", for example, would have made a perfect follow-up single to Boz Scaggs'"Lowdown". It's hard to think of anyone apart from that other master of pop pastiche, Nick Lowe, who could have made a record quite like this. Yet it's all done with such obvious love and affection and literate craft, that Rouse has gone and made one of the albums of the year. Even if the year is 1972.

You really want to hate this album. There's Jewel on the cover looking like she's auditioning for Atomic Kitten. The songs include collaborations with Guy Chambers (Robbie Williams) and Lester Mendez (Shakira). Folk-poetess earth mother turns pop diva. What could be more offensive? Except the tunes are stunning, her voice has never sounded better and she makes serious points few others would dare in a pop context. When did you last hear Christina Aguilera or Mariah Carey singing about US foreign policy? An album to reclaim pop music's lost soul.

It's taken four years for FOW to resurface following the acclaimed (but meagre-selling) Utopia Parkway. In the interim, something seems amiss. The lyrics are sly dissections of US life (this time swapping shopping mall hell for big business emasculation), but the fizz seems to have flattened. If Utopia Parkway was the finest power pop action since The Posies' Frosting On The Beater, here they're diminished by trying to touch too many bases, often lapsing into sub-Oasis stodge. And ironically, despite the spunky "Bright Future In Sales", it's the deviations that work best: the lazy disco groove of "Halley's Waitress", or the countrified "Valley Winter Song".

Darren "Mankato" Berry's ambitious and entertaining songs exhibit a warmth and personality reminiscent of British singer-songwriters from the '70s (Hunky Dory-era Bowie, solo John Lennon, Jeff Lynne's ELO output). A confessional, introspective album, its guitar-driven orchestral epics ("Pictures Of The Other Side") are nicely balanced out with throwaway pop ("Fu Manchu") and blue-eyed soul ("High Emotion"). Comparisons with Damon Gough will be inevitable, but Mankato's tunes have a decidedly lighter, less shambolic feel to them.

Living In A Magazine (2001) should have put Zoot Woman at the head of the '80s-retooling queue that became electroclash. Instead, Madonna made a tour offer he couldn't refuse to core member Stuart Price (also known as Les Rhythmes Digitales' Jacques Lu Cont), and the momentum dissolved. With Price returned, their strengths are unchanged: singer-lyricist Johnny Blake's eerily '80s-empathetic white soul voice backed by synths, plus strings and guitars to make it more than a simulacrum. Marked development, though, will be needed soon.

McKeown's studio debut, Distillation, was a wonderful, homespun affair that sounded like a one-woman version of The Be Good Tanyas. The follow-up is even better?echoing with touches of brass, Hammond B3 and Django-style guitar. Grand also drips with old-fashioned pop melodies, all given a noirish charm to create a record of folk-jazz-hip-hop-country-rock-swing that doesn't quite fit anywhere. There are perhaps hints of Rickie Lee Jones, Ani DiFranco, Dan Hicks and Tom Waits. But after just two albums proper, McKeown has forged a quite unique musical identity for herself.

Suddenly, he's everywhere. With excellent career retrospective Impossible But True still fresh on the racks and reissues imminent, rock'n'roll's very own Dorian Gray is more prominent now than at any time since he nurtured the career of The Runaways in 1976. With producer (and Shoeshine label head) Francis Macdonald providing the musical backdrop, Fowley proves the old school pop chops are still intact on the title track and blue-collar rocker "Misery Loves Company". And though the limitations of Fowley's gritty voice are apparent, his playfulness (Randy Newman-like "Armageddon After Dark", Dylanesque "Captured By The Darkness")?allied to his understanding of the danger and sex inherent in rock'n'roll on "22nd Century Boy"?are a joy.

With 2001's Switzerland Heritage, Dune brothers David-Ivar and Andre Herman (and percussionist Neman) laid bare a fraught relationship with the USA: obsessed with its culture, repulsed by its corporate (im) morality. For Mas Cambios, they couldn't stay away. Holed up in Brooklyn, their distinctly dry European folk is spray-canned with distinctly dry American graffiti. The vocals?stumbling over toy pianos, clavinets and the odd stray banjo?alternate between a shoulder-shrug and a sigh, while the spartan-sweet melodies owe much to Smog (for "Show Me The Roof" read "Strayed"), Daniel Johnston (obvious tribute "You Stepped On Sticky Fingers") and much of the anti-folk crowd. "At Your Luau Night" even sounds like Jeff Lewis attempting a Tim Buckley song.