As vocalist for rap-metal rockers Skunk Anansie, the towering, black, bald and sexually ambiguous Skin became an iconic focus for UK rock during the late ’90s. Her shouty, polemical style was frequently countered by softer, more personally expressive moments, and both sides of her vocal character are exercised on her solo debut. A host of interesting guests appear?David Kosten of Faultline (as producer), Ben Christophers (piano) and film director Mike Figgis (trumpet on “You’ve Made Your Bed”)?but Skin somehow sounds too big for her new role, and a strained adventurousness results.

Obscenely underrated, Sheffield’s Spearmint continue to plough their lonely furrow through crafted, crystalline songs which marry the bile of Buzzcocks and the beauty of Bacharach. Wit and wordplay abound, but all sentiments are genuine as (male) singer Shirley Lee analyses post-relationship survivor guilt, the true value of worldly goods, how books match up to people and why no one likes to buy roses from those in-your-face hawkers at restaurants. Impressive in detail, this white-soul smartness climaxes in riotous applause. Rightly.

The monumental sense of expectation which hangs over any new Radiohead album must be as daunting for the band as it is for fans and critics. As the world’s most creatively ambitious mainstream rock stars, they have set their standards so high that some kind of mythic fall seems inevitable. By aligning themselves defiantly against the anti-intellectual parochialism of Britpop and retro-garage rock, the Oxford quintet have risked alienating friends and foes alike. Perversity, virtuosity and emotional clout have carried them through two desiccated post-rock albums, but the critical consensus seems to be one of patient expectation for a return to the left-field guitar heroics of 1997’s OK Computer.

Deep, broad and sprawling, Hail To The Thief is not that album. But for all its muddied textures and sideways lurches, it is a magnificently engaging and expansive work. Neither a classic-rock climbdown nor a completion of the experimental cycle which began with Kid A but an entirely logical and mostly successful fusion of both styles, throwing out some new hybrids in the process. Such as the weary, washed-out plod of “We Suck Young Blood”, which sounds like some bombed-out gospel choir with history’s worst hangover. Or “Myxomatosis”, which vaults into the space-jazz stratosphere on a spiralling cyclotron of treated speedfuzz guitar. Or the electro-whirr of “The Gloaming”, a hissing sci-fi slither fissured with snaps, crackles and pops.

There is no immediately obvious emotional or lyrical focus to Hail To The Thief. Besides that Bush-bashing title, even the opaquely political lyrics of recent albums have been replaced by bilious inner monologues?a cop-out, perhaps, but Thom Yorke is no Noam Chomsky, and his anti-capitalist musings have mostly existed outside music. Emerging from years of processed vocal abstraction and fragmentary slogans, Yorke’s personal demons loom very large here in a symphony of psychic disgust and parental anxiety, nocturnal gloom and claws-out nature imagery. Couched in a ripe vocabulary of slavering wolves and child-eating vampires, Hail To The Thief feels like some grandly gothic horror film set to music. With his operatic range and fathomless reserves of self-pity, Yorke’s raging persecution mania has finally found its perfect vehicle. Here be monsters.

Any initial disappointment in Hail To The Thief soon fades. Like all great albums, it sounds daunting at first but repays multiple hearings. And for all its baroque sonic trickery, it also contains simply sublime piano-guitar lullabies, from the spectral blue-note sobs of “Sail To The Moon”to the soul-soothing Smithsian folk-pop surges of “Scatterbrain”. There are also enough anthems to appease Radiohead’s more conservative fans. Indeed, the clanging guitars and piercing falsetto sighs of lead-off single “There There” evoke primetime Neil Young, while the honky-tonk piano clonk of “Drunken Punch-Up At A Wedding”is the great vengeful tirade that Supertramp should have written.

Heroically adrift from the zeitgeist, Hail To The Thief raises a gigantic finger to the low ambitions and cramped emotions of the fashion-victim pop minnows all around. The good ship Radiohead sails on into the night with its strange, sad, psychically damaged cargo intact.

Brassy’s debut was a spirited hybrid: the staccato New York punk you might expect from Muffin Spencer (sister of Jon), with hip hop scratches courtesy of Manchester’s DJ Swett. Now they’ve moved to almost pure hip hop, played on by a funk-happy band. In the new (pace Debbie Harry) movement of punky white women rapping, Spencer is more convincing than Northern Exposure but less interesting than Le Tigre. Her drawled venom over the skeletal, bass-driven title track shows Brassy at their best, though elsewhere some bratty energy is lost.

With the praise afforded 2000’s Everything’s Fine, WGC seemed to have reached a critical plateau. After the quasi-psychedelic debut album 3am Sunday@ Fortune Otto’s in 1996, the collective built around founder members Robert Fisher (vocals) and Paul Austin (guitar) began purveying a doom-laden strain of alt.country on 1998’s Flying Low and the following year’s Mojave. Central to WGC’s campfire folk sorrow was the exorcising of demons, particularly the self-loathing and emotional dislocation that had driven Fisher to pills and booze at a tender age. By (the only semi-ironically titled) Everything’s Fine, the singer appeared to have swapped the sauce for the healing waters of music. That record, compared in Uncut to Lambchop’s Nixon, seemed unassailable. Until now.

What strikes you first about Regard The End is the sheer bloodied power of Fisher’s voice, around which everything else spins. It is a voice that defines a mood and ushers in depths of feeling that renders much of their back catalogue redundant overnight. On Flying Low, for instance, he was forever vying for space with tough acoustic guitars, drums and studio trickery, so that for every unadorned “Evening Mass”there was the distorted vocal mix of “August List”. Even Everything’s Fine now sounds as though Fisher was holding back, its more conventional band format denying the space around the vocal which puts Regard The End in such dramatic relief. Compared to Fisher’s deep-swamp baritone here, only the former’s “Wicked”and “Ballad Of John Parker”tap into the same wellspring.

The second point of major departure is the way Fisher now delves into traditional folk forms, informed as much by Celtic/European styles as the turn-of-the-century rusticity of Greil Marcus’ “old, weird America”. Recorded in Slovenia (where Fisher hooked up with ally Chris Eckman of The Walkabouts), Boston and London, Regard The End stitches four traditional songs into seven originals without exposing the seams.

This time, Paul Austin uses occasional members, making way for multi-instrumentalist Simon Alpin (most recently seen pumping keyboards on the Teenage Fanclub tour), who also co-produces. With Fisher leading from the front (

Chicago developed from their jazz-rock roots (as Chicago Transit Authority, whose version of “I’m A Man” is essential) into a group whose music was so devoid of edge it was practically amorphous. Listening to these reissues today, there’s a perverse pleasure in the ruthless soft-pomp balladry of megahits “If You Leave Me Now” (from 1976’s X) and “Baby, What A Big Surprise” (from 1977’s XI). Unfortunately, vocalist/bassist Peter Cetera’s sentimental excursions provide only momentary respite from the impeccably played but dishwaterdull boogie on offer elsewhere. XI is partly redeemed by the Little Feat-lite funk of “Mississippi Delta City Blues”, but otherwise it’s horn-dominated monotony all the way.

NYC rock’n’roll troupe Cat Mother had a semi-illustrious history. Formed by Stephen Stills’ mate Roy Michaels (pre-Buffalo Springfield), Roy’s boys packed an esoteric punch with their odd mix of old rocker standards and mandolin/violin/banjo workouts. Jimi Hendrix took a shine to them and semi-produced this disc at Electric Ladyland. They came up with a diverting set, but the Hendrix link is obviously the draw for this first-time CD reissue.

Disillusioned by the bullying that being James Brown’s arranger and trombonist entailed, Fred Wesley happily jumped ship (followed by legendary saxophonist Maceo Parker and Richard “Kush” Griffin) when approached by George Clinton to become part of his P-Funk empire. Augmented by trumpeter Rick Gardner, The Horny Horns blew a storm across a slew of Parliament and Bootsy’s Rubber Band projects before releasing two albums of their own in 1977 and 1979.

Reissued here as a slipcased double CD, tracks include instrumental reworkings of Parliament material (“Up For The Down Stroke”), tunes written by Wesley while in the JB’s yet never recorded (“Peace Fugue”), and a host of funky free-for-alls backed by fellow P-Funkateers such as Bootsy Collins.

The Cabs, of course, did not arrive at “Nag Nag Nag” out of the blue, and this comprehensive, for-fans-only box documents the five years it took them to get there. CD1 (’74/5) is doodling, with simple loop experiments (“Exhaust”) between occasionally arresting nods towards pop (“Stolen From Spectra”) and disturbing newspaper cut-ups (“She’s Black”). CD2 (’76/7) is the real revelation: a sequence of quietly disturbed tone poems which presage the Aphex Twin’s Selected Ambient Works Vol 2. CD3 (’77/8) presents a more familiar picture, with primitive prototypes of Cabs standards like “Baader Meinhof” and “Nag Nag Nag” itself.

Ten years ago, as Sonic Boom’s new sleevenotes attest, he and Jason Pierce were “making hypno-monotony” and smoking a lot of grass. Spacemen 3 were a cult on the brink of brimming over, which soon happened with the spin-off of Pierce’s Spiritualized. Their penultimate LP as a pairing was The Perfect Prescription, here stretched to a double with the addition of various demos and unreleased sessions. In two modes, hippie-trance riffery and hushed faux-religious reverence, it’s love-it-or-hate it puritan-rock. The drugs, clearly, worked for them.

Al Kooper & Mike Bloomfield

THE LOST CONCERT TAPES 12/13/68

BOTH COLUMBIA LEGACY

Back in 1968, BB King still had to rely upon the patronage of the Stones and the Mac to reach white audiences while blues-rock celebrities Al Kooper (keyboards) and Mike Bloomfield (guitar) were worrying the US Top 20 with their Super Session albums. Instrumentally, these Dylan sidekicks cut the mustard but, with the exception of Steve Stills, the vocals were often bloodless. The main event of the hitherto “Lost Concert” has to be Texas guitarist Johnny Winter who?just three days away from stardom?overshadows all else with a blistering take on BB’s “It’s My Own Fault”.

At a time when Radio 4 and Liars are receiving plaudits for the ‘innovation’ of adding dub elements to their sloganeering punk-funk, Wild Dub comes as a helpful reminder that others were doing it over 20 years ago, pulling the same tricks with greater skill and conviction. The obvious choices are present, correct, and as startlingly brilliant as ever (The Clash’s “Bankrobber Dub”, PiL’s “Death Disco”) but the genius of this compilation lies in its unearthing of bass-heavy obscurities such as Killing Joke’s chilling “Turn To Red” and Generation X’s astonishingly good “Wild Dub”. Timeless.

As a school boy, morrissey would spend hours in class idly sketching pencil portraits of Marc Bolan. As a teenager, he wrote impassioned letters to the music weeklies in praise of Sparks, New York Dolls and Patti Smith. As a 21-year-old, he bamboozled pen pals with hilariously catty letters scrawled on the back of photocopied record sleeves by Ludus (the band of friend and ‘muse’ Linder Sterling) and Nico.

In one such correspondence, dated December 1980, he comments on the threat of nuclear war: “People have been panicking about the Bomb since the early ’50s. Things haven’t changed. But if it does drop, well, meet me on the desert shore (as the old song goeth)”. Twenty-two years later, the “old song” referred to?Nico’s “All That Is My Own”?appears among 15 others chosen by Morrissey on the first in a new generic series of celebrity playlists (parallel to DMC’s sister franchise, Back To Mine). Not surprisingly, so too do songs by Bolan, Sparks, New York Dolls, Patti Smith and Ludus. If Under The Influence tells us anything about the elusive ex-Smith’s psyche, it’s that Moz, now in his early 40s, is really no different from the awkward young man stewing in his Stretford bedroom nearly 25 years ago.

This is the mix tape of a pathologically obsessive fan whose joy in eking out records alien to the rest of mankind is matched only by the perverse delight of then being able to inflict them upon an unsuspecting public. It’s been the case throughout Morrissey’s concert career, with many of the nuggets here having been previously featured on his similarly esoteric pre-gig interval tapes: Jaybee Wasden’s anti-commie rockabilly boogie “De Castrow” and The Cats’ 1969 ska take on “Swan Lake” included. For those oblivious to his tastes beyond Smiths icons like Sandie Shaw and Billy Fury, there are wonderful surprises. Take Wigan Casino acolyte Jimmy Radcliff (whose “The Forgotten Man” is like Moz gone northern soul), the cajun lunacy of Lesa Cormier, even The Ramones. Shoegazing it ain’t.

One can almost sense Morrissey’s thrill in allowing us to hear Diana Dors’ rare ’60s girl-group foray “So Little Time” or Patti Smith’s “Hey Joe” (B-side to ’74’s “Piss Factory”). And his triumph in subjecting us to Klaus Nomi’s “Death” which, back in the days of The Smiths, he would cite as “the most Biblical” record he owned. Right enough, it sounds like a one-man Armageddon…. Like a self-addressed love letter to his own record collection, this is as musically fantastic as it is biographically fascinating. A priceless insight into the mindset of a lyrical genius.

EVERYTHING PLAYING

BOTH BUDDHA/RCA

Dubbed “America’s most underrated band” by no less an authority than R.E.M.’s Peter Buck, The Lovin’ Spoonful nevertheless still command a great deal of respect for their evergreen ’60s pop. John Sebastian’s songwriting was sugar-coated, with just enough dirt under the fingernails to avoid the saccharine sappiness of more acclaimed, less canny hippie tunesmithery, and the late Zal Yanovsky’s innovative guitar work now seems oddly prescient of new wave heroes like Tom Verlaine. Hums… (1966), their third studio album, is a dream-pop delight, boasting country picking (“Darlin’ Companion”), drifting psych-lite (“Coconut Grove”) and 24-carat Sebastian pop mastery (“Summer In The City”). By the 1968 follow-up, Yanovsky had gone solo, but the band compensated brilliantly via the use of then-new 16-track technology. Sebastian’s golden touch is audible on the exuberant “She Is Still A Mystery” and the incredible “Six O’Clock”, while multiple overdubs create a shimmering soundscape of strings’n’horns, especially effective on bassist Steve Boone’s swoonsome instrumental “Forever”. Sebastian’s final album with the Spoonful, Everything Playing bids farewell to an era in fine style.

DE LA SOUL IS DEAD

BUHLOONE MINDSTATE

STAKES IS HIGH

ART OFFICIAL INTELLIGENCE: MOSAIC THUMP

AOI: BIONIX

BEST OF…

ALL TOMMY BOY

They’re here, though sometimes it seems they don’t want to be. Run-DMC, Public Enemy, A Tribe Called Quest and Wu-Tang Clan have all been split, slaughtered or sidelined in hip hop’s rush to world domination, but De La Soul, of all people, have stayed the course, although the album 3 Feet High & Rising may still define them.

But a group who seemed doomed to be a one-hit footnote, even shooting themselves in both feet like trench veterans unable to face more fire with its follow-up, De La Soul Is Dead, have somehow become rap elders, in the middle of an album trilogy?Art Official Intelligence?that’s as ambitious as anything they’ve done.

The story told by these reissues (plus a singles-only not-really-best-of) is still one of soured hopes as much as sustained ideals. But it begins, at least, with a burst of possibility-broaching brightness which has few equals even now.

When 3 Feet High & Rising was released in March 1989, De La Soul’s oldest member, Trugoy the Dove (aka Dave Jolicoeur), was just 20, while fellow rapper Pos (Kelvin Melcer) and DJ Mase (Vincent Mason) were only 19. The expansive confidence of youth’s first flush flows through its grooves. Listening to it now, you’re also reminded how much it was part of a general reversal of ’80s culture’s worst traits, and helped usher in the ’90s. With its swinging soul beats, pervasive laid-back horns, and samples ranging from The Turtles to Ben E King (and Steely Dan, and Hall & Oates…), it reclaimed and re-channelled the then-discredited ’60s, as the Stone Roses’ debut did the same year in Britain. With their Afrika pendants and flowery clothes, De La, all middle-class boys from Long Island, also revived bohemian black style in the face of the street-simple gangsta rap then starting to burgeon (N.W.A.’s Straight Outta Compton fought back that August; Soul II Soul’s “Back to Life”-including Club Classics, meanwhile, mirrored De La’s attitude in black Britain, a mere month after 3 Feet High).

A new community of like-minded New York-area rappers, the Native Tongues, was also introduced here (A Tribe Called Quest and founders the Jungle Brothers being the most prominent), along with a philosophical era, the D.A.I.S.Y. Age. “DA Inner Sound, Y’all” was the nearest De La got to defining it. But play 3 Feet in 2003 and it still sounds like “the new speak” they claimed then?Pos and Trugoy rapping a little too fast, casually and lightly, in language you can’t quite understand. This De La lingo’s secrets rest in childhood, with the whispered schoolyard taunts of “Can U Keep A Secret”, and the almost embarrassing De La fable “Tread Water” (including a rap from “Mr Squirrel”). The genuinely funny game-show sketches (beginning rap’s ‘skit’ obsession) which link tracks, in which musical styles flash by as if producer Prince Paul is channel-hopping, show the overall spirit of easy invention. In the same year Public Enemy drilled racial schisms with “Welcome To The Terrordome”, De La Soul were still, somehow, able to revive Motown’s vision: a new Sound Of Young America.

But then, two years later, they said it: De La Soul Is Dead. In the time between, The Turtles had sued them for their uncleared sample, and fame and industry demands had torn the Native Tongues apart, rubbing 3 Feet High’s innocence away. You can hear the change in single “Ring Ring Ring (Ha Ha Hey)”. “Hey, how ya doin’, sorry you can’t get through,” runs the numb showbiz-fake answerphone message that passes for a chorus. 3 Feet High’s game-show skit is meanwhile replaced by a sourer framing device, as a teenager announces to his gangsta-fan friends, “I just found a De La Soul tape in the garbage,” and begins to play De La Soul Is Dead. The youths act as a Greek chorus, accurately predicting audience disgust: “Stop it, stop it, I can’t stand it any more!”, one screams after “Ring Ring Ring”, and the idea that this is rap’s longest suicide note, widespread in 1991, still tempts.

Like Dylan’s similarly provocatively titled, pressure-dispersing Self-Portrait, though, De La Soul Is Dead no longer sounds like one long “Fuck you!” Loose, fractured and inconsistent, deliberately smashing the 3 Feet style that might otherwise have choked them, the bad temper of some tracks is balanced by wild humour, social conscience and ragged invention. It’s 3 Feet High’s forgotten cousin, bitter but still bright.

Buhloone Mind State (1993) couldn’t regain lost innocence, but used live musicians, including the JBs’ Maceo Parker, to return to 3 Feet High’s sunny sound. “We felt like we’d dispelled the tension”, Dave Jolicoeur recalls. “Now let’s just do some music”.

But it was on 1996’s Stakes Is High that they found their true mature voice. Faced with sales declining so steeply that De La might soon really be dead, and rap’s growing, gangsta-happy commercialism, they retired “the new speak” to re-engage with this new reality. Dispensing with Prince Paul for a simpler sound, the boy wonders were now street elders, railing against rap’s self-harming state. “Stakes is High” itself, introduced by a homeless man’s exhausted rant, saw De La address “sick” black America in apocalyptic terms over dark, pensive brass loops. Their bleakest album, it was also their biggest US hit, returning them to the mainstream from where, rejuvenated, they began AOI’s trilogy. Mosaic Thump (2000) was interesting enough (and their first US Top 10 album), but 2002’s Bionix was a mature masterpiece. In many ways it was a gospel record, as with “Hold On”, where gravelly female vocals and churchy organs (partly drawn from Al Green’s old Hi studio band) achieve a transcendence beyond its hater-dissing lyric.

On the closing “Trying People”, the travails of black America and hip hop are interwoven with Pos’ marital strife, over cyber-choirs turning Curtis Mayfield’s old promise to a question: “People, are you ready?” “Yo, Maseo, we need to hold on,” Pos pleads. They still are, and that’s good.

Originally conceived by songwriter Jim Steinman as a rock opera based on Peter Pan, Meat Loaf’s unashamedly excessive 1977 debut soon took on a life of its own, selling by the million and laughing wildly in the face of the then-emergent punk and new wave. And why not? This is cheese of the highest quality, enhanced in no small way by the input of one Todd Rundgren, whose lavish production and buzzsaw guitar echo that of his own sterling output of the time (see the following year’s Hermit Of Mink Hollow). Loaf himself plays the lovelorn behemoth to perfection, especially on the title track and epic ballads “You Took The Words Right Out Of My Mouth” and “Two Out Of Three Ain’t Bad”. Ambitious, yes. Ludicrous, certainly. But who could get away with this nowadays?

Produced by King Crimson’s Robert Fripp and conceived as part of an “MOR Trilogy” which also included his own Exposure and Peter Gabriel’s second eponymous solo album, this prog-rock-soul oddity was recorded in 1977, only to be shelved by a too-timid RCA until 1980 (and deleted soon after). Time has not conspired to make the pairing seem any less bizarre, but Sacred Songs is, in fact, a true lost classic, a genuine one-off?and, along with Hall & Oates’ Todd Rundgren-produced opus from 1974, War Babies, further evidence of the grit beneath the shiny surfaces. Hall’s voice is predictably mellifluous throughout, while Bob’s guitar runs the gamut from angular skronk (“NYCNY”) to Frippertronic ambience (“Urban Landscape”, “Without Tears”). Best of all is “Survive”, a dignified, schmaltz-free FM rock ballad which sounds like a blueprint for Jeff Buckley’s swoonsome “Last Goodbye”. Radical yet tuneful, this is an album ripe for rediscovery.

In the late ’60s, Trojan’s Tighten Up series of cut-price reggae compilations not only showcased the label’s wealth of talent but, by adopting a policy of ‘stack’em high and sell’em cheap’, instantly made them accessible to Jamaican youth, a demographic generally excluded from the decade’s swinging prosperity. One such youth was dread auteur Don Letts, who pays tribute to this hugely influential imprint with The Mighty Trojan Sound?a natty skank through the vaults in the company of Gregory Isaacs, Lee Perry, the Heptones and many of the label’s other heavy hitters.