Within the retro-rockin’ confines of The Black Crowes, Chris Robinson’s bluesy Rod Stewart-isms made perfect sense. On his own, however, he sounds like a man lost amid his own vast record collection. Rather than break free from group restraints and explore virgin musical territory, the solo Robinson merely waters down the Crowes formula to an irredeemably backward-looking soft country rock. New Earth Mud is a muddled debut, suggesting that the singer has yet to find comfort in his own artistic skin.

The psychedelic soul of “Fables” and “Sunday Sound” indicate fruitful new directions, but even the best tunes here cry out to be fucked with in the style of Big Star’s Third Album. Failing that, perhaps someone should slip him Jim O’ Rourke’s digits for the follow-up…

After a brief entanglement with the cruel world of the major labels, Jo and Danny retreated to their Welsh farmhouse and decided to do it themselves. Their third album, which takes its title from a Leonard Cohen line (“We are ugly but we have the music”), proves the wisdom of their decision by sounding like 2003’s equivalent of Fairport’s What We Did On Our Summer Holidays or The Waterboys’ Fisherman’s Blues. Folk flavours, Celtic fringes, subtle touches of electronica, lovely vocals and wonderfully simple but beguiling tunes?you can almost hear them smiling.

File under contemporary pastoral.

Chapel Hill, North Carolina is a vibrant, student-dominated place which tends to throw up a superior type of bar band. The Mayflies USA are symptomatic of the approach whereby poured-out emotion is lashed to the template of raucous guitars. Recalling some of that Southern gothic, R.E.M. style, with producer Keith Cleversley (Flaming Lips, Mercury Rev, Spiritualized) at the helm, Matt McMichaels’ boys live up to their album title on “Malaysia” and the hook-heavy “Written On Every Hour”. Fundamental rock music with no unnecessary frills.

The Bad Plus are a piano trio playing a powerful breed of contemporary jazz using both originals and pop covers such as Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit” and Blondie’s “Heart Of Glass”. Comprising Ethan Iverson on piano, Reid Anderson on bass and David King on drums, the band achieve an impressive impact with a wide dynamic range. These Are The Vistas, their first major label release, showcases their dramatic, occasionally quasi-classical approach with a programme which rises to heights of ferocious intensity and is never less than attention-grabbing.

As Alpha, Bristolians Andy Jenks and Corine Dingley are both tarred with the Portishead brush and unwittingly charged with taking trip hop into new territory. This is a tall order in 2003, but their combination of languid beats, lush orchestration and sophisto-stoner (male and female) vocals still works a certain powerfully seductive magic. UK dance mavericks will hardly be quaking in their boots on its release, but fans of cinematic soundscaping will be euphoric, albeit in a somewhat sedated and somnambulant fashion.

No album defined the nu metal genre better than Hybrid Theory. Released two years ago, the multi-platinum metal and hip hop hybrid turned Linkin Park into a global phenomenon. But today, with genre lynchpins such as Limp Bizkit sounding increasingly dated, the pressure is on nu metal to reinvent itself or die.

Fortunately, Meteora sees Linkin Park make a self-conscious stab at a more diverse sound. This is most effective on the soft-focus, ’80s stylings of “Breaking The Habit” and the stuttering grooves of “Hit The Floor”. Yet despite these flourishes, the vocal interplay between Chester Bennington and Mike Shinoda dominates every track. And, sadly, nothing on Meteora comes close to the piano-laced pathos of previous hit “In The End”.

Remote Control

Speech’s second solo album since his former group Arrested Development’s briefly entertaining career ended in ’95 was recorded at home in Georgia, and shows ambitious diversity (folk and reggae, as well as sandy, sleepy hip hop). Perhaps not dangerous enough to be any kind of alternative and too unfocused to score as pop, there’s still something likeable about his easy shrug of the shoulders. The title track recalls “Mr Wendell” and its breezy feel, and he lightly jibes the “ghetto fabulous” while chit-chatting about his flower-power Volkswagen and being late for his own funeral. Hippie hop, actually.

Judy Collins always relied on other songwriters for her best work, yet all these years on she has suddenly found her own muse via writing fiction. Out of her novel Shameless, she has constructed a set of songs based around the story of a ’60s rock photographer and a female singer with a talent for painting. You can make your own guesses about her role models. The tunes are rooted in the folk tradition, the voice is still pure, and Collins’ lyrical dexterity is a revelation. It’s a pleasant rather than a great record. But at the very least it makes you want to read the book.

University graduates Julie Potash (who served on Hillary Clinton’s 2000 senatorial campaign), Correne Spero and Robyn Goodmark became rappers for a joke. Yet this album isn’t one. Staccato beats navigate fast-moving samples and the trio’s breathlessly vituperative raps. There’s a nimble touch to the see-saw rhymes on “A Thousand Words” and “At The Party”, while sly humour abounds. Impressive stuff, but like the Beastie Boys’ tinnitus-inducing whines, Northern State’s gonzoid yelps suffer from diminishing returns.

In most cultures, seven is a magic number. Not in rock’n’roll, where to sustain any degree of originality beyond album three or four is about as rare as a sober Shane MacGowan. So it is nothing short of remarkable to report that Think Tank is the sharpest, most imaginative and downright listenable album of Blur’s career to date?something virtually no other British band has been able to claim seven albums into the game since The Beatles (Revolver) and The Rolling Stones (Beggars Banquet).

Think Tank is also the perfect riposte to Damon Albarn’s detractors, who like to claim that departed guitarist Graham Coxon was Blur’s unsung genius. Think Tank not only confirms that Albarn was the band’s musical visionary. It also suggests that, at 35, he’s matured into the Bowie of his generation, with a seemingly endless capacity to absorb new ideas and come up with something fresh and different every time.

Albarn’s development has taken us by surprise. Cast your mind back to the mid-’90s. Pulp’s Jarvis Cocker was widely held to be the cleverest of the Britpop crew, the ‘arty one’ most likely still to be making interesting music in 10 years’ time. Yet he’s produced nothing to match 1995’s Different Class. It was more predictable that, after Oasis’ early triumphs, Noel Gallagher would be reduced to repeating himself. But few could ever have imagined from the chirpy mannerisms of Parklife that Albarn would prove to have such depth.

These days, he dismisses Blur’s early material as “a joke” (see interview, right)?and, in many ways, Think Tank is not so much Blur’s seventh album as the third album by Blur Mk II. For after 1995’s The Great Escape, Albarn killed off Britpop with the band’s career-changing fifth album, 1997’s Blur, which owed more to Sonic Youth and Pavement than to The Kinks and The Small Faces. Two years later, it was followed by 13, an even more panoramic adventure in hi-fi, lyrically inspired by the disintegration of his relationship with Justine Frischmann.

Since then he’s scored a film soundtrack with Michael Nyman, and dreamt up the brilliant conceit that is Gorillaz, which found him flirting with dance and hip hop. He also discovered world music, started his own label, and released his acclaimed African-fusion project, Mali Music. Now all of this musical voyaging on the high seas comes home to roost on Think Tank.

Not that it is either a world music album (a rumour which started when the band decamped for a month with a mobile studio to Morocco) or a dance record (a theory developed by NME, which claimed that Norman Cook was masterminding the production). Fatboy Slim does assist on a couple of tracks, and Albarn insinuates some subtle non-Western rhythmic touches here and there. But they merely add flavouring to what is a grown-up alt.rock album of breathtaking potency and invention.

“I wanted to write some really great pop tunes and then to make them sound really fucked up,” Albarn told Uncut. It’s a perfect description of Think Tank’s mission and its greatest strength-namely its juxtaposition of audacious and unusual textures, in which you can hear the spirit of Eno, mid-period Bowie and Can, with some of the most heart-rendingly sweet melodies this side of Burt Bacharach. This means that, however ambitious the band’s sonic experiments, Albarn’s melodic skills ensure Blur remain as commercially astute as ever.

Lyrically, Albarn claims the album is about “the personal and the political”. In reality, this means that old-fashioned ’60s mantra, “peace and love”. There’s plenty of tenderness to reflect both his new-found happiness as a family man and his own neo-hippie philosophy. The political content reflects his role in the anti-war movement, with various references to the parlous state of the world today. They’re oblique and, at times, even obscure. But if he rewrote “Masters Of War”, we’d all accuse him of naivet

The transformation of KJP from revivalist bluesman to contemporary singer-songwriter, which began on 1999’s Shine Eyed Mister Zen, continues apace on his fifth album. His songs are now mini stories, sans verse-chorus-bridge restraints, populated by seekers of truth and peddlers of dreams. His lap-guitar style is exemplary, his voice has a heartfelt, rich patina and the backing musicians, including Bill Frisell on electric guitar, create a folk-jazz accompaniment of almost spiritual empathy. “Knock Louder” revisits his blues roots, but only serves to remind us how far he has since come.

Still bashing away at the vanguard of contemporary music, here Czukay is accompanied by Nico-esque diva U-She. The New Millennium is a mixed bag of shape-shifting techno, lent a theatricality by U-She’s semi-improvised interventions. Best, however, are more darkly ambient pieces like “Metropolis” and “La Secondaire”. With remorseless rhythmical heartbeats and Islamic samples, it’s an inadvertently perfect soundtrack for watching the events around Baghdad. The best 65-year-old working in electronica today.

This writer found himself close to tears after a recent Walkman encounter with pulseprogramming’s pristine disco miserablism which, to misquote Morrissey, “said something to me about my life”. Opening track “Blooms Eventually” sets the scene with a breathtakingly sad Vocodered refrain, skittered beats and Geogaddi-like synth drones. From then on, it’s a sustained soft explosion of hushed, aching indietronica.

More linear than Fort Lauderdale, less self-consciously cute than The Postal Service, and with the best song titles in recent memory (“Stylophone Purrs And Mannerist Blossoms”, anyone?), pulseprogramming are the sound of the perfect moment slipping through your fingers.

After solo flurries, Aidan Moffat and Malcolm Middleton return to their day job of documenting seedy, inebriated nightlife. On recent work, they seemed to lose their way, lapsing into droning charmlessness (the initially amusing drunk you can’t shake off), but this is a step upmusically more diverse, and lyrically as vulnerable as it is vitriolic. Over cunning club beats and plaintive post-rock, yarns are told of shy and retiring lonely brooders, the sexually frustrated, highly vocal pub bores, and, to give you the third track’s title, “Fucking Little Bastards”. Members of Bright Eyes and Mogwai guest. They may have been bought a drink. Under Milk Wood meets Mark E Smith, with flock wallpaper.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again; No-Man are Britain’s most underrated sorrowful sonic architects. At least as good as prime Talk Talk, singer Tim Bowness and multi-instrumentalist Steven Wilson (also a mainstay of Porcupine Tree) embrace the elegies of Eno (though it’s Roger of that name who guests here), Sylvian, Glass, Blue Nile, and, oh, anything with the word “blue” in it.

Tracks on their fifth full album build from gentle melancholy to sturm-und-drang magniloquence, bemoaning crumbled love or just muttering about everyday ennui. “You talk so fast to stop yourself from thinking/You move so fast so you’ll never see you’re sinking. “No-Man here take things slowly, stay afloat.

Already eulogised among Rolling Stone’s Best Albums Of 2002, and known for his guest appearance on the Roots’ Phrenology, this is an awesome declaration of intent from Californian singer/songwriter Cody ChesnuTT. Although decidedly lo-fi, this epic, adventurous and mischievous album bears comparison with Prince and Todd Rundgren (at their respective peaks).

Rockers like “Upstarts In A Blowout” achieve what Kravitz and D’Arby have spent years striving for. While there are occasional dubious comments about women (“Bitch, I’m Broke”), these are exquisitely balanced by desolate ballads (“The Make Up”) and psychotic electro (“The World Is Coming To My Party”). Though it may be hard to track down, it’ll be worth it: this is an album of the year.

The thing about real class is that it isn’t ostentatious: it just glows there till you notice it, confident that, sooner or later, you will. And if you don’t it’s your loss. The Pretenders’ first since 1999’s Viva El Amour is an album that, on first listen, glides by doing nothing wrong. Second time around, you realise that, more accurately, it’s doing everything right, and you’re spellbound.

But I’m making it sound polished and ‘tasteful’. That’d be crap: it’s got it going on. Chrissie Hynde knows what she’s doing after 20-odd years at the top. After a while as world’s best band, then a spell of being not quite sure how to ‘mature’, The Pretenders are now ‘just’ a device for Hynde to keep writing and singing songs, which is all we need, and we need it bad. She was driving new rock and no-cock revolutions back when it cost you something. Perhaps if that voice was less distinctive, she’d be namechecked more often, credited for more copyists. But few are dumb enough to try to ape her.

So it’s the still-swoonsome, breathy, resonant voice which raises the bar on “Time” and “You Know Who Your Friends Are”. Here, rhythms hint at slow funk and reggae, but on “Kinda Nice, I Like It” and “I Should Of” we’re reminded of the early, rocking Pretenders. The latter’s a string-soaked stormer, a reflection of love akin to “Talk Of The Town”, and including the lines: “When we made love, sometimes it was great/But just once or twice, I would’ve called it second rate.” Imagine the 88 front covers any new gal who came up with that today would garner. Miaow.

The cover of All Seeing I’s “Walk Like A Panther” is as feline as you’d hope, and the ferocious fuck-you opener, “Lie To Me”, cut off in its prime, is wicked. The showstopper, however, is “The Losing”, an Eddie & Ernie-meet-Tindersticks tearjerker of flawlessly-drawn pathos and soul.

The Pretenders remain the real thing. Sheer class, but never afraid to get its heart dirty.

A curio for Oldham completists, Slitch is a double-sided disc featuring a DVD movie (Slitch, co-starring Oldham) and, on the flip, half an hour of music composed for it by Oldham and old associate Pajo, bunking off from his day job in Billy Corgan’s Zwan. Pajo, it seems, has the upper hand here, with a bunch of post-folk instrumentals, alternately lulling and unnerving, similar to his first solo work as Aerial M. The last two numbers, however, barrel into new territory for both men, being blokey and ramshackle punkers fronted by Oldham’s unrecognisable bellow. Flaky, but diverting.

Some see Lil’ Kim’s inversion of thuggish male posturing (exemplified on her best-known cut, “Suck My Dick”) as radical, but ultimately there’s nothing more counter-productive than a macho woman. As Kim’s followed double-platinum success by “landing the coveted role of spokesmodel for Mac Cosmetics”, you’ll forgive us for doubting the authenticity of this former puppet of B.I.G. and Puffy. The Notorious one is still credited as exec-producer here, even though he’s, like, dead. A run of foul-mouthed, egocentric rhymes and nondescript beats is relieved only by “Can’t Fuck With Queen Bee”, sampling Deniece Williams’ “Free”. Between cameos from 50 Cent and Missy, there are brief ‘skits’ about farting. Not good.