Quite what makes a 21-year-old from Macclesfield reinvent a bunch of traditional English folk songs with beats is an interesting question. But Sweet England makes you very glad he did. Cleverly mixed by the Afro-Celts' Simon Emmerson, Moray's inventive rearrangement of such familiar ballads as "Early One Morning" and "The Raggle Taggle Gypsies" may just be the most significant new development in English folk music since Fairport Convention's Liege And Lief. There are some clumsy moments. But it's a bold signpost that moves far beyond the trad revivalism of the likes of Kate Rusby.

Jazz guitarist Metheny here puts aside his electric for an acoustic baritone guitar and a special tuning which he explores over a series of gentle ruminations recorded in a late night session alone in his home studio. Originally done for his own pleasure, these pieces certainly warrant release, and anyone who enjoys acoustic guitar excursions in reflective mood will be drawn to this album.

Boston-based miserabilists Staind have made a career out of providing a musical outlet for angry white males and social misfits. But for music fans outside this demographic their habit of picking at emotional scars smacks of self-indulgence. On their follow-up to 2001's Breaking The Cycle, Staind offer little relief from neo-grunge's vapid whining and automated guitar angst. The upbeat "Yesterday" could secure them a hit while "Zoe Jane", a tribute to singer Aaron Lewis' daughter, manages to stay the right side of mawkish. Still, with 14 tracks lasting over four minutes each, at times this album seems interminable.

Every so often a voice emerges from the world music scene with an indefinable ability to cross over to a wider audience. Bebel Gilberto was the most recent example, and Portugal's Mariza is set to follow her. Singing the mournful, blues-like music of her country (called fado), she combines a spectacularly expressive voice with stunning looks and a charismatic presence that lies somewhere between Grace Jones and Maria Callas. Her music is deeply rooted in tradition and yet somehow it also sounds totally modern. If the last world music album you bought was Buena Vista, make this the next.

Lisa Gerrard, spiritually intense wailer and ex-Dead Can Dance member is, we'll wager, no close relation to Steven Gerrard, the Liverpool midfielder. But you never know. She's gone all Maori on us here for a New Zealand indie film, and aren't they the fellas who do those scary war-dance routines before playing thug-ball, or rugby, or whatever it's called? Lisa, after working on Gladiator, Ali and others, is now a big Hollywood soundtracks player, which is comically absurd but blissfully reassuring. "Very low, very dark Maori shell flutes" have been used here, and "traditional female Maori vocals". Just this once, I'll admit to cluelessness concerning the genre.

More wonder and thunder from down under. Mick Harvey's extensive track record (Bad Seeds, PJ Harvey, Crime & The City Solution) more than qualifies him to score a coming-of-age issue movie set in "a small coastal town in Australia". Interestingly, the debuting director, Paul Goldman, shot the videos for Boys Next Door's "Shiver" and The Birthday Party's "Nick The Stripper", so he and Harvey have been communing aesthetically for a while. Harvey's been getting award nominations already for this, and it seems there's little he can't turn his hand to these days. The sooner he dumps that one-trick Cave charlatan the better. This is a grower, a heat haze.

The Pastels always seem to find their wheelbarrow positively overflowing with acclaim, though some of us have struggled for over a decade to remember what they actually sound like. Here they wibble along, inoffensively enough, through a 25-minute accompaniment to the recent Brit road movie directed by David Mackenzie. It climaxes, if that's not too bold a word (it is), with a Jarvis Cocker collaboration, "I Picked A Flower", a parody of a pop hit which demonstrates that Cocker used up all his parody power a while ago. A limp cover of Sly Stone's "Everybody Is A Star" is physically embarrassing. For diehards only.

Country-rock was superseded as a description long ago by new, alt. and insurgent country, not to mention the catch-all 'Americana'. But the old '70s terminology should surely be revived to describe Austin five-piece Reckless Kelly, who sound more like Pure Prairie League than Uncle Tupelo. Led by the brothers Willy and Cody Braun, the band's third album stomps rowdily on tracks like "Let's Just Fall" and "Nobody's Girl". They get more reflective on "Desolation Angels" and "Everybody", but are soon rocking again on "Mersey Beat", a tribute to George Harrison and surely the first song ever recorded in Nashville to mention cricket.

This album from Detroit electro-garage band, Electric Six, invites the listener to consider two obvious reference points. One being Dynasty, the abysmal 1979 disco album by stadium rock clowns Kiss, the other being the inside cover of Daft Punk's 1997 debut Homework (a collage of grubby teen paraphernalia?comics, rock stickers, Chic seven inches). Electric Six nail a kitschy hybrid of '70s rock and disco?AC/DC & The Sunshine Band, if you will?but repeated plays reveal little charm and less real humour. There are a couple of admittedly killer riffs, but the stench of music industry in-joke is overwhelming. It's all too easy to imagine Electric Six ending up in a novelty niche/rut similar to that of Fun Lovin' Criminals?unable to get arrested in their homeland, destined to play end-of-term balls until their career sputters out.

Last year's intense and compelling live double album, Resistance Is Futile, was one of the jazz releases of 2002. This follow-up employs most of the same musicians plus flautist/vocalist Malik Mezzadri. A predominantly introspective record which emphasises its lack of a chordal instrument with unusually sparse textures, On The Rising Of The 64 Paths further pursues Coleman's fascination with ancient Chinese divination. Subtle and elusive, this album only slowly reveals its inspiration. Best to try the aforementioned Resistance Is Futile first.

Although long-serving Bad Seed Jim Sclavunos sounds uncannily like St Nick himself on opener "The Big Bang", The Vanity Set are a very different kettle of fish to that being boiled up on the Seeds' recent Nocturama. There's doom and melodrama right enough, but would Mr Cave ever allow glam guitar solos, hysterical theremin surges, circus techno and?gadzooks!?a Bee Gees cover ("I Started A Joke")? Track five, "Imp OfThe Perverse", nicely sums this up. File under Goth Comedy.

Brooklyn rapper/producer Tes' whiny delivery may be an acquired taste, but once in, the listener is richly rewarded with 12 tracks of sharply intelligent and highly addictive hip hop. "New New York" is notable for being a post-9/11 address that avoids mawkishness, while "Fooltime" tackles the more mundane subject of shitty day jobs ("Fooltime, but I can't break free/Time spent racing rats running laps of luxury"). Tes drops in his samples with a spare, dub-like delicacy, leaving wide open spaces through which to access his lyrical meditations on the urban treadmill.

If you've ever, via hallucinogens, expanded your mind to Dark Side Of The Moon, all you need to do is change your drug of choice and Dub Side... might easily sound like the best thing you've heard, if you inhale deeply enough. Even without a spliff, it still sounds pretty fine as a bunch of rastas take a voluptuous dubbed-up trip around the Floyd's psychedelic masterpiece. Highlights include Ranking Joe's toast on "Money" and Kirsty Rock's bonged-out yodelling on "The Great Gig In The Sky". It fits so perfectly you wonder why it took 30 years for someone to think of it.

Shaun Ryder's weird artistic odyssey now appears to be forming some kind of pattern. Each new venture hits the ground running and burning with revolutionary intent, delivering words and music of mangled-up, category-defying magnificence (Happy Mondays' Bummed and Pills'n'Thrills And Bellyaches, Black Grape's It's Great When You're Straight... Yeah). Then the class-As begin to take their toll and words/music get sloppily, grossly self-indulgent and pitifully self-parodic (the Mondays' Yes Please, the Grape's Stupid Stupid Stupid). After which, Ryder downs tools and pretty much disappears from public gaze to concentrate on adding yet more lurid chapters to the ongoing soap opera that is his life. Imagine Corrie directed by Quentin Tarantino and Vincent Gallo, with hair-raising plot twists involving drugs, guns, divorce, overdoses, rehab, car crashes, meetings with aliens, bankruptcy, psychic breakdowns, more drugs... That's Ryder's life. Then, just when his bonkers lifestyle threatens to eclipse all memories of his deranged musical legacy, back he bounces and, once more, all bets are on. So it goes with his latest project, which sees him holed up for two years in Australia, fomenting mischief in a shed belonging to Perth-based producer Pete Carroll. Ryder and Carroll are joined by a trio of musicians (as well as, on several tracks, Stephen Mallinder of Cabaret Voltaire) including the excellently-named Lucky Oceans, whom older readers will recall from '70s country boys Asleep At The Wheel. If there's any 10-gallon influence on these eight tracks, Ryder's band are keeping it well camouflaged. As you might expect, though, just about every other genre and sub-genre is included in the general mash-up. At a time when much scholarly ink is being spilled over the brainwave of "soundclash", in where two songs from different musical genres are spliced together to make a single atom, it's worth remembering that Happy Mondays used to sound like six different bands playing six different songs at once. It might have been put together in a shed, but so dark and seedy and drug-addled does it sound that Amateur Night In The Big Top might as well have been cooked up in a Moss Side crack den. Reports of Ryder adopting a pipe-and-slippers lifestyle in Oz have been exaggerated, at least on the evidence of this latest stream of derailed consciousness. Opener "The Story" has Ryder gibbering about a Persian-necking weekend to the accompaniment of a pounding rhythm that drills into your skull like a dose of ketamine. At which point you might as well fasten those seat-belts for this trip to the hinterland beyond the reaches of sanity. Which is what this is right up to the finishing line, although closer "In 1987" finds Ryder in rare reflective mood, longing for the lost pre-Madchester Eden when "the MDMA was pure". Between these startling bookends, he sounds like a man living beyond the edge of himself, trapped but strangely liberated by the realisation there is nothing left for him to lose. Ryder's barking raps tell of futures narrowing, of inner cities overrun by headless zombies, of short-cut escapes (drugs, cheap sex, fast entertainment) leading to dark cul-de-sacs rank with the stench of death and decay. As on the nightmarish, spaced-out dub of "Monster", or the funked-off paranoia of "Long Legs (Parts 1,2,3)" where Ryder sounds like a man grabbing onto the jump-leads of anxiety because there's nothing left to hold. It's terrifying, exhilarating stuff. "Where do you think you're going with that big red fucking nose," he wonders on "Clowns", a rare moment of levity. And this in a song all about the pathological fear of being beaten to death by circus turns. And there you have it. Another wildly implausible Shaun Ryder comeback. Just when we needed one. All things considered, you wouldn't want to be inside his head. But there's times when you need him inside yours. Fear for his sanity and his general wellbeing, by all means. But embrace his demented soul vision. Because it speaks some uncomfortable truth which, in its own fucked-up way, reasons the way ahead. See Shaun Ryder Q&A, page 74

Previously, Dillon was a gravel-throated angst-rocker midway between PJ Harvey and a female Tom Waits. The tragic death of Dillon's husband and musical partner Steve Bywater, however, has changed that. Collaborating with Kinobe's Julius, and featuring guest appearances from Heather Nova, Nobody's Sweetheart mixes Hammond organ with brisk, syncopated electronics. Kinobe's downtempo brand is palpable on "It Must Be Love", wherein Love's "Red Telephone" makes a swooping cameo. Equally impressive is the cyber ballad "Shoreline". But while chill-out suits Dillon, this is just too prosaic for an already saturated arena.

Gillian Welch, with her hard 'g', is indisputably a Good Thing. Tall and gawky, decidedly non-photogenic, Gillian gives hope to all of us who contend that talent should triumph over Nu-Nashville cuteness. No less than the revered Ralph Stanley, Gillian?along with paramour/accomplice David Rawlings?deserved the newgrass shots-in-the-arm that were O Brother, Where Art Thou? and Down From The Mountain. I saw Gill'n'Dave just when they were setting off on their scholarly alt.bluegrass path in early 1997. They were a match made in heaven, Dave's soft tenor exquisitely shadowing Gillian's stark, vibrato-less alto as their guitars?a 1935 Epiphone for him, a big, reddish-brown Guild for her?intertwined. Backstage they struck me as two of the most decent, honourable?and super-talented?musicians I've ever encountered. More power to their ascetic Appalachian schtick, said I. Of course, back then there were mutterings about the provenance of these blue-ridge ballads of orphans and Walker Evans hillbillies. Wasn't Gillian Johnny Carson's daughter or something? Authenticist baloney. If music had to be sociologically correct we'd never have had Tom Waits, Steely Dan, Prince and innumerable others. Rock's biggest pitfall is the delusion it should be a transparent medium for a singer's 'identity' (whatever that is). Which is why musicians conflate their fame with their self-intoxication and fuck up so badly. Gillian Welch doesn't pretend she's some Alabama miner's daughter. She just loves this music, studies and inhabits it, revives it in the most caring and compelling way. How great those first two Almo records were: is there a better alt. country song than "One More Dollar" (from Revival)? Did AP Carter ever write a more moving ballad than "One Morning" (Hell Among The Yearlings)? Which was why I felt the teensiest bit let down by Gillian's post-Almo Time (The Revelator). To me it felt like Gill'n'Dave were striving to move beyond their old-timey scholarship?commendable in itself?and not quite making it. Gill's front-parlour DIY banjo playing was nice but the songs simply weren't special enough. Not as special, at any rate, as "Orphan Girl", "Pass You By", "My Morphine". Which is why it gives me so much pleasure to report that Soul Journey is a highly satisfying bridge between the log-cabin museum pieces of Revival and Hell Among The Yearlings and a more rockin', Basement Tapes-ish Americana. Of the 10 tracks, at least two ("No One Knows My Name", "I Had A Real Good Mother And Father") are dependably stoical acoustic statements of sorrow and orphanhood. "No One Knows" is Welch directly addressing the small matter of her own adoption. Along with "One Little Song" and "Make Me A Pallet On Your Floor", "I Had A Real Good Mother And Father" also gives us the previously unheard sound of Welch performing without Rawlings or anyone else?just the gal and her guitar, recorded at home in Nashville. The flipside of Soul Journey is a clutch of songs ("Lowlands", "Wrecking Ball") that feature a soup of scrunched electric guitars, loping Richard Manuel drums, scraping Scarlet Rivera fiddle and muted Garth Hudson/Al Kooper clapboard-Baptist organ. The drumming on the album is by Welch and Rawlings themselves, and very Manuel-esque it is, too. Among the other players helping out: Son Volt bassist Jim Boquist, dobro wizard Greg Leisz, fiddler Ketch Secor and guitarist Mark Ambrose. "Wrecking Ball", which closes the album and has nowt to do with the Emmylou Harris song of the same name, is just terrific: a very Dylan-ish piece of reminiscence looking back on life as "a little Deadhead", no less. Did Gillian "play bass under a pseudonym"? Did she meet a "lovesick daughter in the San Joaquin"? The song is possibly more autobiographical than "Miner's Refrain" or "Caleb Meyer", for what that is worth. Almost as good is the spare, thuddy "Lowlands", which is more Neil than Bob, Harvest to "Wrecking Ball"'s Basement Tapes/Rolling Thunder hybrid. If Gill isn't delving into her own past or channelling Depression-era orphans, you can usually find her running around with good-time boys and gals. The sauntering, dobro-licked "Look At Miss Ohio" and the blithe fatigue of "Make Me A Pallet On Your Floor"?the album's opening tracks?set this tone for Soul Journey. Similarly occupying the middle ground between the family-bible bereavement of "I Had A Real Good Mother And Father" and the electric tie-dye sweep of "Wrecking Ball" are the can't-go-home-again lament that is "Wayside/Back In Time" and the morose "One Monkey"?the latter the darkest patch on what Welch herself rightly regards as a fairly sunny soundscape. "I wish I were in Frisco with a brand new pair of shoes," she sings wonderfully on "Wayside", "[but] I'm sitting here in Nashville with Norman's Nashville blues." Whoever Norman is... Soul Journey's one unarguable masterpiece is the penultimate track "I Made A Lover's Prayer", possibly the most perfect thing that Gill'n'Dave have ever created. It's so simple, so unadorned, so dreamily lovely that I can barely find the words to describe it. Some braided guitar lines, some words about a beloved boy, a puff or two on a harmonica?all combining to make a mood that's almost divine. Otis Redding eat your heart out: Soul Journey would be worth buying for "I Made A Lover's Prayer" alone. Loose and laid-back, Soul Journey is a porchlight songbook of a record, a close-to-perfect soundtrack for a country summer. Get on board without further ado.

OMD were always the most reasonable of electropoppers, and much of their eponymous 1980 debut album resembles a sixth-form music project with songs ranging from the endearingly daft ("Red Frame/White Light") to the accidentally profound ("Messages"). Organisation, released six months later, is what they turned into after they had listened to Joy Division; few hit singles have been as darkly ironic as "Enola Gay". But 1981's Architecture And Morality was a commercial and artistic peak, a luxuriously bleak collage of avant-garde lullabies ("Souvenir") and proto-ambient soundscapes ("Sealand") culminating in the end of the world ("Georgia"). How the hell did singer Andy McCluskey end up inventing Atomic Kitten?