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.

Cody Chesnutt (the “TT”‘s his idea) comes from Atlanta and brings a large amount of peach and preach along with him. A former member of The Crosswalk, he decided that lo-tech was the incoming thing and recorded this sprawling, old-fashioned double album in his bedroom studio, Sonic Promiseland. Cody, a mic and a four-track produced what he calls a “musical diary”, one intended for intimate relations with phones.

Cody comes across like a character in a Tom Wolfe novel. Deeply religious but fiercely ambitious, he is, in the words of his own song, a “Brother With An Ego” who is given to such evangelical outbursts as “God’s truth in music is the sole power by which we are transfixed, transformed and unified. It’s because of this divine authority that we are sustained in our newly accomplished unity.”

His God-fearing tendencies have won him an American fan club that includes The Strokes, Macy Gray, Saul Williams, Res and The Roots, who have recorded his song “The Seed” on their Phrenology CD. ChesnuTT certainly moves in mysterious ways his wonders to perform. Lyrically he’s apt to favour the twin powers of pussy and philosophy on “My Women, My Guitars”. He rants against corporate greed and consumerism during “Boylife In America” and ridicules the deification of Adidas on “Serve This Royalty”.

But one-man-band experiences like Cody’s are rare these days, and his musical accomplishments carry his conceits along for the most part. Imagine a contemporary version of Shuggie Otis and a large slice of soul bro style

Just when you think you’ve got this trio pinned, they jump somewhere else?from Television to Mercury Rev to Pink Floyd. The opening piece of their debut mini album is “What Used To Be French”, seven minutes of wonderfully ascending Marquee Moon menace, a highlight of the recent Yes New York compilation. Dallas brothers Brandon and Ben Curtis and drummer Josh Garza relocated to Manhattan three years ago, and are reckoned to be the city’s best live band, having played with Spiritualized, Interpol and Trail Of Dead. “It’s A Bad Wind” and “Marconi’s Radio” reveal both perverse sonic ambition and grizzled soul. They won’t be secret for long.

Cork’s Simple Kid is making a virtue out of being in the middle of the road, that easy-listening, glam-rock neighbourhood that often produces uplifting music. And this Kid knows his stuff. Kicking off with a tribute to David Essex

Enon’s third LP is essentially two albums in one. When leader John Schmersal replaced bassist Steve Calhoon with Toko Yasuda, she became a singer-songwriter earning equal time. So Hocus Pocus is John and Toko’s Double Fantasy. While Schmersal’s songs are immersed in a post-lo-fi indie sound

With a big audience grown from grass roots, a bull-headed independent ethic, a devotion to Costello and Dylan, and a politicised world view, Thea Gilmore is a worthy role model. Avalanche shows the antique influences this generation-defying girl, still only 23, wore on her sleeve have been absorbed now, till her lyrical voice is her own. As the albums pile up, though (last year’s Songs From The Gutter was a double), other limitations are proving harder to shake.

Take those lyrics first. Where it once sounded like Gilmore had played Costello’s “Pills And Soap” two minutes before scribbling (not a bad thing), on Avalanche she deploys an arsenal of metaphor and allusion amounting to a world view. Though there are perhaps too many shop-talk snarls at music business iniquities, these are mostly suggestive of wider sicknesses. The title track especially finds Gilmore reading the runes of an almost neutron-bomb empty English mid-afternoon, the vapour trails of post-9/11 aircraft entwining with kite-tails as unquiet bones push up from railway sidings, a mood of resigned dread completed by Gilmore’s even murmur, melancholy cello, and softly crashing drums. In this atmosphere, the danger of Pop Idol’s disarming of pop music is clear: “Who’s gonna raise a hand/When all we were taught to do is dance/Who’ll be able to stand/After this avalanche.”

“The Cracks” is among songs, then, describing dangerous, drink-caressed love in the face of this gathering storm, a classic of last-gasp, last-orders romance. Elsewhere, though, Gilmore’s music just doesn’t match her lyrical reach. Though her last album quoted Neil Young’s determination to swerve from the middle of the road into the gutter, her band graze the modern MOR of classic rock, sounding, at their worst, like good Dire Straits. It’s a noise only likely to connect to listeners 10 or 20 years older than Gilmore?not the generations now likely to start the fires she wishes for. Though Avalanche is lyrically inspired, and well worth hearing, another push is needed yet before she matches her idols’ boundary-breaking ambition.

Sceptics might have dismissed the hick-hop of Sparxxx’s 2001 debut Dark Days, Bright Nights as a one-off novelty. But that would be underestimating his raps?wiser and more melancholic than the farmboy image suggests?and the exceptional gifts of his producer and label boss, Timbaland. As his rivals The Neptunes become more minimal, Tim’s sound is increasingly baroque, so “Comin’ Round” supplements Sparxxx’s thoughtful rap with C&W samples, fiddles, intricate beats, acid squelches, a go-go breakdown and great chunks of Missy’s “Work It”. Justin Timberlake, various OutKast affiliates, the Whistle Test theme, Afrobeat and some grisly hair metal appear too, on an album that is as poignant as it is over the top.

A decade ago, Paradinas was set to be techno’s Syd Barrett with albums like 1994’s Bluff Limbo, but now he has turned into techno’s Rick Wakeman. Titles such as “Johnny Maastricht” indicate that nothing has progressed in Paradinas’ world since 1999’s Royal Astronomy, and the likes of “Meinheld” and “Grape Nut Beats” reheat the same old, tired drill’n’bass rhythms. The best effort here is “On/Off”, which sounds like Prince being mangled in V/VM’s filters before morphing into Psychic TV’s “Mad Organist”. The vocalist’s name-Mike Dykehouse-evinces more imagination than anything else here.

This collection combines Robertson’s heritage-finding discs Music For The Native Americans and Contact From The Underworld Of Red Boy, including the songs he delivered at the 2002 Winter Olympics. These projects are clearly very close to the artist’s heart but the uninitiated may have some, er, reservations.

Robertson’s increasingly ambient music finds lustre in “Golden Feather” and on the Howie B remix of “Take Your Partner By The Hand”, although you’ll need to be a very onside Robertson fan to pick up on all the smoke signals.

It’s impossible to begrudge Cassidy’s vast success, long after her 1996 death from cancer (for a while in 2001, she was the most popular artist in the world). But these rehearsal tapes of standards, from “God Bless The Child” to “Yesterday”, confirm my first impression on hearing Songbird: that Cassidy was a strong, natural singer, but no more. It’s not her genius for interpretation but rather her tragic life, and nostalgia for a time when such good clubland voices were plentiful, that explain her success. And these cutting-floor scrapings do her memory no favours.