Everybody’s doing it. But there are a wide variety of reasons for making an album of standards from desperation (Rod Stewart) to hubris (Robbie Williams). And Boz Scaggs? Listening to the unassuming But Beautiful, you have to conclude that he did it because he loves the songs and enjoys the challenge of getting his sinewy voice around some top tunes. You wouldn’t want him to make a habit of it (the “Volume One” part of the title is a bit alarming). But he does bring a soulful warmth to songs such as “Bewitched Bothered And Bewildered” that you wouldn’t have thought possible.

After the spectoresque maximalism of 2001’s Let It Come Down, with its cast of thousands of horn and string players and backing vocalists, Jason Pierce has throttled back somewhat with Amazing Grace. Each song was rehearsed from scratch and recorded in a day, with the minimum of overdubs, production or processing. It’s an album ready made for the road, its ignition switched on, its engine purring before it’s even left the studio.

Pierce has spoken of how enthused and inspired he was by The White Stripes and their return to the basic principle of slinging a guitar around your neck and simply playing. Yet this isn’t really a ‘back to basics’ album in the minimal, faux-authentic sense so in vogue nowadays. Although turned round quickly, it’s very much in the lavish tradition of Spiritualized’s past work, revisiting familiar themes. Yet it also expands and diversifies, musically in particular, with “Rated X”, for instance, on which extreme improv sax player Evan Parker guests, representing a tentative foray into avant-garde realms. The urge for spontaneity hasn’t resulted in a rough, dashed-off album. A lot has been crammed into three weeks.

Amazing Grace kicks in with “This Little Life Of Mine” and “She Kissed Me (It Felt Like A Hit)” (an allusion to/inversion of The Crystals’ “He Kissed Me [And It Felt Like A Hit”]), all honky-tonk Jaggerlust and fast-moving weirs of fuzztones. These are matched by the bluesy swagger of “Never Goin’ Back”, which gathers a moss of anarchic frenzy of guitar, and “Cheapster”, which starts out like a pastiche of The Stones’ “It’s All Over Now” before catching fire.

However, Pierce, as ever, matches a sense of the holy with the unholy in his songs, as the album title suggests. Aretha Franklin’s astounding 1969 rendition of the hymn, from which the album takes its title, is a touchstone, a hymn quoted on “Hold On”, a swaying plea for redemption through love. Meanwhile, the technologically simple but vast spirit of ’60s pop is recaptured on “Oh Baby”, with its gothic, distorted keyboard drone, and the magnificently abject “Lord Let It Rain On Me”. Another Spiritualized album. Another great Spiritualized album.

The Chorley Four caused a stir with their million-selling Love Is Here. Singer James Walsh mined a rich enough vein as his soaring ballads confronted personal demons, the dead ends of drink and depression. Three years on they’ve hit a wall. Walsh is enthralled by the Buckley legacy but once the stirring “Music Was Saved” fades away, Silence Is Easy falls into an identikit pattern of string-laden sentiment. Having Phil Spector produce two songs, the title track and “White Dove”, is more of a curse than a blessing. Taken individually, some of the songs are respectable efforts, though without the substance to involve one unduly. Silence is a bit too easy.

Clark fits neatly?too neatly, perhaps?onto the Warp roster of electronic mavens. While his earlier records flirted with the avant-acid perpetuated by the label, Empty The Bones Of You is rooted solidly in Warp’s creepy quasi-ambient department. As such, there’s plenty here that’ll appeal to fans of Boards Of Canada and of The Aphex Twin’s more peaceable moments. The discreet melodies, the muddy off-kilter beats and the generally disconcerting air are beautifully realised. But the overall result is rarely quite as haunting or individual as Clark must have envisaged.

Lucinda Williams’ recent World Without Tears showed that hitting 50 doesn’t need to mean a softening of the musical faculties. With his rasping, serrated voice, visions of turmoil and ruin in the heartland and characters caught in various stages of despair, Ovans wears his Dylan influences proudly, but this follow-up to last year’s career r

The transition from cult phenomenon to proper success is a perilous one, as many briefly fashionable groups will testify. A year ago, The Rapture were approximately the coolest band on the planet, chiefly thanks to a raging disco-punk single called “House Of Jealous Lovers” made with the equally hip production team DFA. Since then, the music world has been alive to the possibilities of what we might reductively call an early-’80s revival. Grimy New York warehouses, etiolated funk and marginal legends like Liquid Liquid have become critical touchstones. The Gang Of Four are referenced in most reviews of new bands, and mediocre talents like Radio 4 have been elevated way above their station.

The Rapture, meanwhile, have spent most of 2003 missing the boat, embroiled in a nasty tug of war between major labels for Echoes, the album they largely finished months ago. Now it’s finally arrived, the good news is that these four diffident men based in New York have made a record which transcends any scene’s fleeting credibility. Yes, there are explicit links to dancefloor/punk fusions of the early ’80s: tunes which combine propulsive rhythms with difficult angles; guitars seemingly strung with cheese wire; a pervading atmosphere which alludes to peculiarly nerve-wracking parties.

It’d naive to deny the influence of, say, PiL on the title track. But there’s so much more to Echoes. For a start, The Rapture are commendably eclectic in their influences. One moment they’re engaged in a tense update of early house on “I Need Your Love”, the next they’re revealing their hardcore roots on “The Coming Of Spring”, as redolent of Fugazi as it is of The Pop Group.

The Cure and the Happy Mondays are in here, too. Less predictably, three exceptional ballads, “Open Up Your Heart”, “Love Is All” and “Infatuation”, are weirdly reminiscent of the jagged, visceral songs on Big Star’s Sister Lovers, even if Luke Jenner’s cracked vocals essay love rather than desolation. It’s this surprising emotional core, buried in the DFA’s fluent, genre-splicing mix, which makes Echoes such an enduring record. A humanity which contradicts the chilly academic posturing habitually associated with NYC white-boy funk, and which suggests The Rapture will survive long after scenesters abandon their copies of No New York.

Imagine Stephen Foster?or at least Van Dyke Parks?armed with a laptop and you’re close to understanding the extraordinary charm of Californian duo Matmos’ fifth album. Like 1999’s The West, The Civil War negotiates a fragile entente between Americana and electronica, but does so on a bigger, constantly astonishing scale. Fireworks explode, battlefield drummers march across John Fahey’s porch, Dr John is reconstructed out of glitches, an entire track is made from samples of a rabbit pelt, and “The Stars And Stripes Forever” is reduced to a postmodern shambles. Drew Daniel and Martin C Schmidt’s purposes seem to be both satirical and affectionate, but it’s the latter that ensures this is among 2003’s best albums: one that appropriates the indefinable feel of its sources as well as their historically resonant sounds.

Guitarist Barthelemy has spent much of his career working with orchestras, both jazz and classical, and on this album he teams up again with the 13-piece Orchestre National De Jazz. Stylistically various, the programme here ranges from wild free-form to tightly arranged passages, sometimes in pastiche mood. Whether this adds up to a convincing whole is problematic. At its best, this is exciting, exploratory Euro-jazz; at its worst, it seems somewhat aimless.

A Derbyshire-bred, Manchester-based group formerly known as the Dakota Oak Trio. DOT loiter pleasantly at the dewy, bucolic end of post-rock. Fridge are, perhaps, their closest contemporaries. And just as Kieran “Four Tet” Hebden’s solo output outshines his work with Fridge, there’s a sense DOT’s Dave Tyack and James “Pedro” Rutledge make much better records on their own. Plenty of ramshackle virtuosity, crafty folktronica hybrids and limp singing amongst these 10 tracks, but the earth remains resolutely unshattered.

Formerly linked to the late-’90s big beat movement, Barry Ashworth’s Dub Pistols have become one of the UK’s leading exponents of political dubtronica. Jamaican Studio One veteran (and sometime Massive Attack collaborator) Horace Andy adds guest vocals to opening track “Sound Clash”, eclipsed in the surprise stakes only by the appearance on “Problem” of former Specials frontman Terry Hall, making his first outing over a ska beat for decades. Electro, jazz, dancehall, hip hop?everything’s here, mashed up in a smoky dub haze.

Trying to pin down The Method is like attempting to bottle buttered fog, but one thing’s certain?there’s madness in there. This four-strong crew met six years ago when promoting (and DJing at) their own eclectic club night and a similar, anything-goes philosophy underpins their debut LP. It’s hip hop, but also absorbs rock, electro-funk, orchestral lounge, punk and nu R&B. “Baby You’re So Funky” is Beck gone big beat, while “Sexy Potatoes” makes like Barry White guesting on 3 Feet High And Rising. Elsewhere, Beastie Boys, Happy Mondays and Prince breeze by. Bewildering, but (almost) brilliant.

Karl Bartos

Contemporaries of Sebadoh and Pavement, San Diego’s Trumans Water missed out on the acclaim awarded their lo-fi rivals on account of their unwillingness (or inability) to write a hummable tune. Instead they practised a kind of freeform artcore that took Beefheart and the wilder end of Krautrock as first principles. After seemingly releasing an album a week, they dropped off the radar completely?until now.

Not much seems to have changed in Trumansworld. They are still as scratchily psychedelic and wilfully obtuse as ever, with ‘songs’ like “Meteorites And Troglodytes” turning rock on its side before pushing it over a cliff and recording the resulting din. Hints of melody surface now and then, but the group never allow it the upper hand over their patented harmolodic rock.

Elusive cult figures on the German techno fringes, Dopplereffekt are frequently namechecked by electroclash front-runners such as Miss Kittin, despite having carved themselves a unique niche in electronic music which nods more to avant-garde ambient and classical music than disco sleaze.

A couple of the six lengthy tracks on their second official album nod to dancefloor rhythms and structures, but they are bookended by great buzzing clouds of sculpted, pulsing, highly textured machine noise rejoicing in titles such as “Niobium Resonators” and “Higgs Mechanism”. Whether precious high-art boffins or playful postmodernists, there is a dedication to purity and originality here which other techno acts pay lip service to but rarely deliver.

Favourites of both Fugazi and the Super Furry Animals, Dead Meadow have a reputation for bone-crunching volume at their live shows. That doesn’t translate here, but their riff-sprawling heaviness does captivate. “I Love You Too” and “Everything’s Going On”, for instance, emerge midway between Black Sabbath and Pink Floyd and make testosterone aggression sound hazily dreamlike. Singer Jason Simon’s airy vocals are stoner-rock incarnate, but their gloomy acoustics show they’re not one-dimensional riff-mongers. Still, best experienced/endured live.

A survivor of the Great Electroclash Fiasco of 2002, Merrill “Peaches” Nisker’s second album is a triumph of style and content. Performance artist, potty-mouthed rapper and sexual assertiveness lecturer, Peaches also makes pretty useful music these days. Fatherfucker pillages Missy Elliott, Suicide and “Justify My Love”-era Madonna, and even outfoxes the Yeah Yeah Yeahs (notably “Kick It”, a duet with Iggy Pop). All her talk of dicks and tits, meanwhile, is funny rather than provocative.

A British duo lurking behind a remotely beautiful moniker, Aurelie’s music ranges from Eno-esque piano pieces to the likes of “Mariposa”, with its lush swathes of guitars and effects that ghost in and out like changes in climate. The exception is “Divisible By Three”, which is practically Mot