Quite a coup for an unknown electropop musician to have guest vocals on his first album from Elastica’s Justine Frischmann, Cerys Matthews and Ed Harcourt. Clearly, there’s something about Fred Ball. Having spent his childhood worshipping Rick Wakeman, wearing a silver cape in front of the mirror to emulate him, Ball is as guileless and winsome as they come, qualities which rub off on his music. Best is his duet with Frischmann, stylish but aggressive electro-pop, while Cerys is joined in the studio by her mum and grandma, who reads a poem over the album’s gentlest number.

Not quite sure why Kosheen are classified as a dance act. Perhaps it’s because the band’s creative forces go under the rather silly names of Markee Substance and Darren Decoder. The follow-up to their Top 10 debut is a traditional rock album with a few touches of electronica, occupying broadly the same territory as Moloko. Fronted by vocalist Sian Evans, who sounds improbably like Carly Simon crossed with Shara Nelson, there are guitar hooks aplenty. “Blue Eyed Boy” even borrows a motif from Quo’s “Pictures Of Matchstick Men”. But it’s far too inoffensive to change anyone’s young, impressionable life.

Spontaneous though it may be, the debut album by Vivian Sarratt and Edmond Hallas sounds like it was designed by a particularly cynical committee. The formula of boy and girl vocals, primitive electronics and big fuzz bass is novel, but results are more predictable. So Live How You Listen is a bit unhinged, then a bit robotic, fits snugly between the Yeah Yeah Yeahs and ARE Weapons, and also references Devo, The B-52s, Blondie (when Sarratt sings) and The Sex Pistols (when Hallas sings). Lively enough, but you can’t help thinking Mommy And Daddy are a little closer to the zeitgeist than is healthy.

The ’80s revival has already given Gary Numan’s career a kick in the ARP, so it’s only fair that Gazza’s original inspiration should get another pop of the cherry. John Foxx’s enigmatic electro has always been a little too dark, a little too knowing for a mass pop audience, but with Crash And Burn he slots alongside the cultish likes of Miss Kittin and Khan with remarkable ease. The title track and “Sex Video”, for example, are as twisted and cruel as anything Adult. have attempted, while “Dust And Light” exudes a barely controlled hysteria that’s reminiscent of Model 500’s techno classic “No UFOs”. Not content with merely being ‘relevant’, Foxx is still capable of being very good indeed.

Recent young albums like Silver & Gold or Are You Passionate? have seemed aimless affairs, as if their author felt he ought to be saying something but wasn’t sure what. In dramatic contrast, Greendale is (if we must use the term) a concept album, 10 interlinked songs depicting the lives of several generations of the Green family, who live in the fictional town of Greendale.

Young played the album in its entirety at his recent UK shows, using just acoustic guitars and harmonica. On disc, he’s joined by Crazy Horse minus second guitarist Frank Sampedro, and plays it virtually all electric, leading from the front with his own raw and rowdy guitar. The exception is the slow and acoustic “Bandit”, Young de-tuning his bottom string so it rattles and buzzes against the fretboard.

Luckily, Young’s notion of a concept album differs from Emerson, Lake & Palmer’s. Far from sounding overwrought or overblown, Greendale is loose and semi-improvised, the band falling in behind Young’s simple chord progressions more through instinct than rehearsal. The narrative, with its tales of grandma and grandpa, Vietnam Vet turned painter Earl Green, good-neighbour-gone-bad Jed Green and eco-activist teenager Sun Green, is artless and unadorned, leaving plenty of spaces for the imagination to fill. “I just followed the story wherever it went,” Young told me while he was in London recently. “I wasn’t worried about it making sense or connecting. It was kinda like a bird flying around?wherever it lands it sees something, y’know, and that’s the way I approached it.”

Young reckons the death of his father-in-law last year helped start his creative juices flowing, and we probably have George Bush and his war frenzy to thank for giving him a fresh bone to chew on. In some respects, Greendale is Neil coming full circle, still espousing the homespun values of albums like Hawks & Doves or Old Ways but recognising that these are now under threat from power-mad politicians and an intrusive media. As grandpa Green says in “Grandpa’s Interview”, as his house is surrounded by news crews, “It ain’t an honour to be on TV and it ain’t a duty, either,” contrary to the way they think on Big Brother. Sun Green is like a version of the Neil Young of 30 years ago?headstrong, idealistic and determined to fight for her convictions.

Musically, Greendale presents a quintessentially roughshod Young, frequently relying on that old Crazy Horse plod (as on “Falling From Above” or “Devil’s Sidewalk”), raunching it up on the protest-flavoured “Sun Green” or rolling out a lazy R&B groove on “Double E”. The final track, “Be The Rain”, is a full-tilt anthem in which Neil and a massed chorus insist we have to “save mother earth” and “save the planet for another day”. This broad-brush sloganeering is somewhat less convincing than “Bandit”, with its quietly plaintive refrain of “someday you’ll find everything you’re looking for”.

But the good news is Young has found himself a different kind of voice and some fresh inspiration. My review copy didn’t contain the DVD of Neil’s matching Greendale home movie but, crude as it is, it makes a powerful companion piece to the album.

Book-ended by two songs?”Survivor” and “Time Makes Two”?which gingerly profess anti-war leanings, Cray’s latest isn’t quite the full-scale renewal that he’s claimed. There are contributions from Sly Stone horn players Cynthia Robinson and Jerry Martini, dashes of Latin/Caribbean rhythms and a psychedelic sitar alongside his R&B staples. It all makes Time Will Tell an amiable enough showcase for his road band but, no matter how good the grooves, Cray’s own compositions still struggle to be more than pallid genre exercises.

Plucked from the apparently boundless archives of esoterica, Quantum is an unreleased “journey through sound in two parts” recorded in the early ’70s by soundtrack composer and avant-jazzbo Kirchin. While not quite the consciousness-reshaping phantasmagoria promised by the sleevenotes, it’s certainly absorbing?a soundspace where primitive industrialism, spliced-tape ambience, random babble, wandering improvisers like Evan Parker and field recordings of geese meet and merge. More curiously, it gets weirder with each listen, as the noises become fleetingly, if unreliably, recognisable: is that a dog duetting with the xylophone 15 minutes into “Part One”, or a malfunctioning toilet? Devious stuff indeed.

Up All Night is a continuation of the direction set on Scofield’s previous album,

Founded by Roop, who first emerged on the scene during the acid house years, the Urban Dub collective draw on a righteous and ragged mix of rave, techno, reggae and, distantly, jazz and the avant-garde via their classically-trained saxophonist Marjorie Paris. Explicitly anti-capitalist and arising from squat culture, this is not the dog-on-a-string’s breakfast you might fear. Rather, it’s a series of mighty, mighty detonations combining nuclear dub with a contagiously joyful inventiveness that blows back and forth through every track here. Utterly recommended?go to their website, www.urbandub.com, for more info.

Similar to fellow LA singer-songwriter Warren Zevon in his penchant for shadowy narratives of espionage, foreign policy and unwise excess, Ridgway has if anything an even less prepossessing voice, and self-produces using tinny, cut-price synths. The sleazy Burroughsian rou

Forever changes is one of those ‘classic’ albums that should have dated but hasn’t. Heavy-handedly paranoid, the product of a rock/soul miscegenation, quaintly baroque in its orch-pop/mariachi instrumentation, Love’s third album might easily have gone the way of Days Of Future Passed or other prog/psych/folk abominations.

That the album has endured is proof, to these ears, of pop’s miraculous serendipity. Here was a motley crew of vaguely sinister Sunset Strip hippies that really did just happen to be in the right place at the right time. The right band, in other words, to document life at the cusp of the psychedelic south California adventure. Nothing Arthur Lee has done subsequently suggests he was born to do anything more than that.

The obvious question about Forever Changes Live, recorded at London’s Royal Festival Hall last January, is: why? What can this give us that the original doesn’t? The only differences are negligibly negative: Lee’s voice now has a burry edge that, on “A House Is Not A Motel” or “Bummer In The Summer”, makes him sound like Paul Weller. Both “Alone Again Or” and “Old Man” seem to require the more dulcet tones of their author, the late Bryan Maclean.

The other question is: now that ‘classic’?and even never-released?albums by lost/damaged geniuses (Brian Wilson, Arthur Lee) are being given the full concert hall treatment, how many other cult opuses will be reconfigured for our edification? As fellow Uncut scribe Ian MacDonald writes in his new collection, The People’s Music, nostalgia has become an industry.

“The forward-looking fascination with things to come,” he writes, “and its consequent wish to make music with the language of today but the sound of tomorrow, has dwindled away.”

Perhaps Forever doesn’t Change after all.

The Zephyrs’ desolate sound describes their war-torn history. First Scottish label Southpaw folded the same week it released their last album. Then a literal-minded rock revival forced their soporific sea shanties off the radar. Now signed to Setanta, things are looking up for the Edinburgh-based quintet who, with this third album, have created an unhurried portrait of emotional disquiet. The outstanding “Go Slow” canters buoyantly home on a country guitar and organ loop while “One Year Many Mistakes” (with vocals by Arab Strap associate Adele Bethel) is so modestly evocative that the lyrics about stained coffee cups and seaside abodes almost seem overstated.

Comprising Dean Honer, half of the All Seeing I, and Jarrod Gosling, I Monster provide us with an intermittently inspired album of warped electro-MOR. The memorable creepiness of “Daydream In Blue” is reproduced on unsettling tracks like “Sunny Delights.” “Hey Misses” suggests a pact between Tahiti 80 and My Computer, while ballads “Heaven” and “Who Is She?” conjure up the spectre of Joe Meek communicating by ouija board. If the air of camp (“Backseat Of My Car” is low-rent Miss Kittin, “Stobart’s Blues” is bad Chemical Brothers) prevents this from being anything beyond Carry On Vulnerabilia, there’s still-enough blood here to keep you interested.

Following the promise of last year’s mini LP The King Will Build A Disco, TBFB’s nefariously enchanted pot of country, weird pop and deconstructed folk remains a heady brew. With the Folk Orchestra’s Timothy Victor at the controls, and Samantha (Be Good Tanyas) Parton guesting on “Devil In The Details”, this carries the same strain of bastardised rural tradition as labelmates Candidate, a sexual twistedness akin to Lyndon Morgans’ Songdog (“Don’t Leave That Woman Unattended”; “Hitting Women”) and wordplay reminiscent of Stephen Malkmus. Daubs of pedal-steel and banjo add allure. File somewhere between Pavement and the prairie.

BEATIN’ THE HEAT

Arena Rock are currently reviving US indie with a slew of rainbow-hued rock groups, and the label’s loopiest hopefuls are Mink Lungs. This experimental psych-pop quartet merge post-punk guitars with growled cartoon vocals on this, their second album. “Men In Belted Sweaters” is joyous punk frippery while “Sad Song Of Birds” moves into mock-mournful, country-inspired territory. The result is as eccentric as an Edward Lear illustration.

But without the strong melodies or metaphysical beauty of The Flaming Lips, it borders on being novelty rock.

They may hail from Lowestoft, but The Darkness are Britain’s most triumphantly OTT rock band. The four-piece?who have in Justin Hawkins a falsetto-favouring frontman of awesome capability?tap into a genre so time-honoured it’s positively Pleistocene and, although their debut is an unashamed composite of AC/DC, Van Halen, Bon Jovi, Thin Lizzy, Kiss and Cheap Trick, it’s no less effective for that. The Darkness are genuinely in thrall to the power of stadium rock in all its bombastic, unreconstructed glory, and that they recreate it without recourse to irony is a testament to their talent. Silly? Quite possibly, but staggeringly skillful, and a strangely touching expression of unbridled joy.

Ocean Colour Scene are inextricably linked to a mid-’90s era which now seems hideously pass

In the current garage-rock feeding frenzy, The Star Spangles, though no doubt signed as Strokes knock-offs, have honestly raucous intent. Co-produced by Daniel Ray (The Ramones) and fitting in a Wayne Kramer/Johnny Thunders cover, they have natural, swinging guitar punch, sometimes forced down such tight sonic channels that they roar. But with strictly 1978 sleeve and clothes, and no new ideas, they just don’t matter like their models did.

Initially introduced to the world via Stereolab’s Duophonic label, Broadcast have perhaps benefited from their relative cultural isolation (they’re based in Birmingham) to cultivate a brand of avant-indietronica that is truly unique. Broadcast deploy an arsenal of electronic devices both antique and modern to complement and scar Trish Keenan’s often unnervingly childlike vocals. In a world supersaturated with electronica, Broadcast are nonetheless bold, rare and crucial.