Following last year’s Sea Dream set, the Randy California estate delivers a companion slab of bluesy home studio tunes, embellished with the occasional moment of poppier light relief. Utilising the last Spirit line-up-Ed Cassidy, Matt Andes, Steve Loria and Scott Monohan?California’s good-natured takes on “Kansas City” and “The Letter” slip beside his Delta obsessions, exemplified on “You’re Gonna Need Somebody On Your Bond”, and the cosmic Maui jams that became his stock once major label backing disappeared.

Blackstreet’s new jack swing anthem “No Diggity” was cool, witty, and one of the slinkiest hits of recent years. Their new album is all about what they’re gonna do to your sweet titties and pink-lycra-clad asses, and is so patently wrong in so many ways that it exhibits a peculiar strain of genius. This, fused with several pop-tastic retreads of The Commodores’ “Brick House” vibe, means it’s guilty as sin and just as much fun.

The band (riddled with new boys) are puppets of producer Teddy Riley; guests include Erick Sermon and, on single “Wizzy Wow”, Mystikal. You have to like the way they work it.

Jimmy Tamborello’s collaborations with other artists on Life Is Full Of Possibilities-his debut album recorded as Dntel?never lived up to the promise of his solo tracks, which makes it doubly rewarding that his new project in conjunction with Death Cab For Cutie’s Ben Gibbard is such a resounding success. Gibbard’s refined, feather-light vocals waft delicately over Tamborello’s indie electronica (with nods toward Prefab Sprout and The Human League), creating a wide-eyed world out of bittersweet love songs and autobiographical daydreams.

The Oliver Stone of rap, Chuck D has gradually softened his incendiary rhetoric and murderously complex conspiracy theories in recent Public Enemy work. But he uses this collaborative project, which foregrounds the rap veteran’s spoken-word sideline, to sharpen his lyrical and verbal dexterity once more. Over a sometimes pedestrian but always solid backing of funk, hard rock, jazz and even calypso, Chuck holds forth on subjects like September 11, the difference between rap and hip hop, and the need to educate yourself. Some of it is high-octane waffle, but much is also funny and humane. Wrapped in a warm, organic, boho coffee-bar feel akin to Michael Franti’s Spearhead project, Fine Arts Militia make party music with brains.

You can ask Julian Lennon or Ziggy Marley about the curse of a famous surname. But at least Abigail Hopkins has the advantage of working in a different field from her old man. You’d be forgiven for expecting a fey, acoustic singer-songwriter record. But Hopkins turns out to be a much feistier figure whose role models are Tom Waits and Bj

Since 1999’s Stephen Street-produced debut The Magic Treehouse, Dan Popplewell’s Ooberman have zigzagged an erratic course: from band-most-likely-to to label castaways and back. If 2001’s Running Girl mini LP was a timely reminder of talent, Hey Petrunko! sees them return to full(ish) bloom. Subtle, painterly pop, this is meticulously crafted exotica awash with strings, piano and tremolo guitars. It’s occasionally overcooked, but there’s no denying the dazzling vision of “Open The Hatch” (an astronaut’s fruitless search for God) or the cinematic perfection of “Where Did I Go Wrong?” Sophia Churney’s voice?like lavender permeating through woodsmoke?is a joy throughout.

A one-man band of drums, shit-hot slide guitar and vocals, Bog Log III makes the same kind of minimalist blues racket as Jack and Meg or Jon Spencer. The difference, though, is that most of Log’s material is a redneck celebration of tits and whisky (combining the two on the perverse “Boob Scotch”?oh, use your imagination!). Sounds smutty? It is, but don’t let that deter you from what remains an exhilarating showcase for a wildly gifted blues-guitar maverick.

Along with the most devilish ‘tache since Terry-Thomas, NoahJohn singer-songwriter Carl Gustav Johns owns one of the most wiped-out voices in modern American music. Since its first somnambulistic entry on 1999’s Tadpoles through 2001’s superb Had A Burning, and now Water Hymns, its impact is drawn less from singular strength and more from its relationship to musical surroundings. Where both the rustic, semi-nostalgic Tadpoles and the more aggressively raucous Had A Burning used Johns’ delivery for contrast, Water Hymns is the first to fully assimilate singer and song into one impressionistic whole. Its trump card is a use of strings (namely Eena Ballard’s viola and Terminal 4 guest-star Fred Lonberg-Holm’s cello) as mood-setting lead instruments, alongside Johns’ and Stephen Burke’s needly guitars.

Recorded one steaming Chicago day in July 2001, this record oozes doped summer heat from every pore, from the creepy hush of “They Will Call” to narcoleptic closer “Rabbit Reprise”. In between, moments of sublime country, splintered rock and near-gospel bleed through the haze. There are at least a couple of toe-tappers-the quasi-hillbilly reel of “Two Members” and freight-train chug of “First Communion”-but it’s Johns’ vivid conjuring of universal experience via small-town claustrophobia that’s impossible to shake. The latter, for instance (described by its author as a kind of hicksville Graduate), delivers both sin and salvation through its protagonist “knee deep in the creek with Arlene”, while “Promise Breakers” explores private faith while wedged inside a stadium of 60,000 fellow Christians. Most movingly, “Ballad Of William Roy”. is a wake for Johns’ cousin, drowned off the South Carolina coast in 2000.

After the early patronage of Howe Gelb, Oregon’s Matt Ward dished up 2001’s End Of Amnesia, one of the most breathtaking albums of recent years. Transfiguration…is another masterclass in deft guitar picking, smudged with piano, harmonica and a voice like honey drizzled onto a dry creekbed. The behind-a-screen-door quality of production adds to the strangeness, while the likes of “Undertaker” often stop, start, scuff around then veer off at a tangent. Somewhere between a Gelb bothering to finish off songs and The Band at their most bucolic. And look out for the unlikeliest version of Bowie’s “Let’s Dance” you’ll ever hear.

After the largely unheralded triumph of 2001’s Tremendous Efforts, Toronto brothers Dallas and Travis Good-along with Sean Dean and sometime Pernice Brother, Mike Belitsky-serve up their finest yet. With Blue Rodeo’s Greg Keelor replacing old producer Steve Albini, their trademark mix of Sergio Leone twitch, surf, cowpunk and desert-rock is cushioned with Lee Hazlewood-like ballads (“Oak Ridges”, “The Story’s Often Told”), fat horns (“Mile Over Mecca”) and spooky duets (Dallas and mother Margaret’s “A Steep Climb”), without compromising intensity. Meanwhile, the Cramps-flogging-Highway 61 fireball of “Tiger Tiger” is further proof they’re the best roots-rollers since early Blasters.

2000’s music witnessed Madonna successfully, if belatedly, absorbing the sound of French house with the help of Gallic sound scientist Mirwais Ahmadzai. William Orbit also came along for the ride, still hanging on after the successful career resurrection of 1998’s Ray Of Light.

This time around, Orbit has been kicked to the kerb and Mirwais is her Madgesty’s sole collaborator, resulting in a more coherent album-more coherent, that is, because everything on American Life sounds unhinged even by today’s avant-mainstream standards set by The Neptunes, Dr Dre, Timbaland et al. Mirwais has been given carte blanche to create a fizzy, brightly-coloured poptopia for his mistress’ voice.

The title track opens with disorientating FX-swoops and bleeps that do to one’s hearing what American TV does to one’s vision, which is appropriate as the song casts a critical eye over an unjust USA which still values beauty, might and privilege above humanity. Madonna smartly summarises the paradoxical allure and repulsiveness of the American Dream, her declaration that “this type of modern life is not for me” clashing with the later admission that it’s the “best thing I’ve ever seen”. Hardly Noam Chomsky, but not bad for a million-selling celebrity goddess. “Hollywood” reduces the perplexity of the American Life to a single question?”How could it hurt you when it looks so good?”?and reintroduces the jangling West Coast psychedelia first evinced on 1999’s “Beautiful Stranger”. What seemed a throwaway movie tie-in at the time (Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me) actually presaged a stylistic shift to come, the results of which are scattered all over this album. Hardly a track goes by without some subtle form of six-string assistance, as on the Garbage-y “I’m So Stupid” and the quietly introspective “The Process”.

It wouldn’t be wildly inappropriate to identify American Life as an early 21st-century update of Love’s Forever Changes, effecting as it does a similarly eerie ambivalence with its fusion of mind-altering sonics and mellow acoustics.

This may be the truest Madonna LP since 1992’s Erotica. Her vocals are more relaxed when backed by Mirwais, and if she leans a little heavily on the Vocoder at times, at least the sub-operatics encouraged by Orbit are absent.

That voice comes into its own on the ballads. “Love Profusion” and “Nothing Fails” are beautiful low-key cyber-lullabies. She negotiates these winding melodies with enough grace to make you forget she’s singing about Guy Ritchie. Whatever one thinks of her extra-curricular activities, La Ciccone can never be accused of skimping on the pop music side of things. We may be left-idly dreaming of Felix Da Housecat or Aphex Twin team-ups, of ventures into electroclash or nu R&B, but then, if she did all we wished, she wouldn’t be Madonna-more or less in tune with, but ultimately distanced from, the mythical cutting edge.

According to the sainted Manson this his fifth album, is heavily influenced by Weimar cabaret. It’s hard to see how, frankly, given that The Golden Age Of Grotesque seems to be his regular m

This album could be retitled Kid A Meets Hanns Eisler And Ivor Cutler In Glitch Conference. Momus has enterprisingly employed young Michigan-based “reproducer” John Talaga to remix and generally mangle these 15 songs. This avant-laptop input helps Momus achieve his most purposeful work in some time.

The “cabaret concr

Credit Atomic Kitten for one thing?their version of “Eternal Flame” is partially responsible for this Valley High reunion. Susanna Hoffs’ acting career (with her mum) is a thing of the past, so the chief Bangle has motivated her crew to come up with an assured, if airbrushed, female power pop disc that’s loaded with tooth-kind melodies: “Stealing Rosemary” and “Single By Choice” are instant brain worms. Whether demand for the Bangles’ cute Cali cool exists today is open to debate. Hurrah for big hair, anyway.

One-time Ed Kuepper cohort Hancock has been in various Australian bands since the ’80s, and it shows across her maturely enthralling solo debut, on which she sounds like a less fractured Marianne Faithfull. Backed by a fine band who effortlessly blur the boundaries between rock, folk and jazz, her own compositions are marked by arresting observations on the war of the sexes. Yet best of all are her extraordinarily haunting covers of David Crosby’s “Everybody’s Been Burned” and, more improbably, Joy Division’s “Love Will Tear Us Apart” done country-rock style.

This battery-packed example of the New Orleans groove is released to chime with the Big Easy’s sultry jazz and heritage festival?undoubtedly the most fun anyone can have with or without undergarments on.

Rocking origins are tempered by Rod Hodges’ and Rene Coman’s rediscovery of some Caribbean funk lying on their doorstep, which means that swift-fingered nuggets like “Machetey Maiz” and the cajun-toasted “The First Kiss Is Free” are powered up on pedal steel, accordion and the ever lyrical bajo sexto. Sounds best taken with a six-pack and a bowl of gumbo. Good eating, in other words.

Jazz-funky torch songs sung by vampish frontwoman? In 2003? Anyone? Those anticipating a gabba freakout or speed-metal oblivion from the title will be disappointed by Brighton collective Chungking’s debut album. The more forgiving listener, though, will be rewarded with a refreshingly expansive take on the Portishead/Morcheeba template. Chanteuse Jessie Banks has an impressively mellifluous voice, while the music, as on “We Love You”, occasionally approaches the immaculate slickness of Aja-era Steely Dan. “Angel Eyes” is the standout, and soars into Cinematic Orchestra league with its meld of antique synthetics and lush orchestration, while the rest gives off a studied, smoky insouciance. 007 composer David Arnold should be taking notes.

Herbert assembles a 16-piece big band whose playing he attempts to subvert with electronic processing, but sadly he has done little with the resources available.

The arrangements suggest “hello Third Stream” and their utterly conventional nature places Herbert closer to John Dankworth than Sun Ra. Various vocalists try to liven up the torpor, but even Arto Lindsay’s patented Tropicalia croon on “Fiction” has little effect, and at its worst (“Chromoshop”) one thinks: bad Leonard Bernstein. By far the most affecting track is “The Three Ws” sung by Plaid’s Mara Carlyle, which tellingly makes virtually no use of the big band.

Huey Lewis’ Plan A was Clover, one of the great unsung San Francisco hippie bands of the early ’70s (and backing unit for Elvis Costello’s debut LP). When that didn’t work, the fallback was the 1980s AOR hit-machine he called The News, who gave us “The Power Of Love” and other radio favourites before Lewis abandoned music in the ’90s and adopted Plan C-an acting career. Now he’s rediscovered that effortlessly soulful voice and gone back to Plan B. At best, its good-time blues rock evokes memories of the likes of Boz Scaggs and Nick Lowe. It’s strictly bar-room fare. But of the very highest class.