Kristin Hersh

Masquerading as a fiftysomething ex-janitor from Capitol Records cobbling together an album from his prodigious record collection, this is actually E cobbling together a hip hop album of sorts, rife with post-modern flippancy. Hammond organs, stiff rhythms and samples from obscure, cheesy old ’60s phonographs instructing you How To Hypnotise Yourself, you know the sort of thing.

This album has its moments, but frankly, unless you’re a jaded goatee-bearded record store clerk attuned to a particularly American wavelength of irony, you’re unlikely to get much from this.

When the debut album by Philadelphian punk-metal trio Burning Brides was first released on a modest indie (File 13) two years ago, it was proclaimed a lo-fi classic. Co-produced by indie troubadour Brian McTear (of Bitter, Bitter Weeks fame), the album had enough mainstream rock appeal to score them a deal with V2. Now that Fall Of The Plastic Empire has been remastered by Howie Weinberg (Nirvana, Sonic Youth), the metallic leanings of singer/guitarist Dimitri Coats have been fused with the pop-inspired basslines in such a way to ensure Burning Brides become more than just peripheral players in the neo-garage rock scene.

You can never pigeon-hole Ben Harper but Diamonds On The Inside is his most eclectic collection yet. “With My Own Two Hands” is roots reggae. The title track sounds like The Band. There are pop ballads, acoustic blues, New Orleans-flavoured R&B, acoustic folk tunes, Lenny Kravitz-style rockers and, on “Picture Of Jesus” (with Ladysmith Black Mambazo), he’s got that old-time religion. The diversity takes your breath away. But where in the past he has often impressed rather than engaged us, here there’s an emotional warmth that makes it by some distance the best record he’s ever made.

Carter Wood

Someone’s gotta coin a snappy name for the genre represented by So Solid and the hordes of MC crews who came in their wake. UK garage doesn’t cut it any more?it’s misleading. Listen to this debut from Leyton crew More Fire and you’ll hear hardly a trace of house’n’garage. 2-step’s swing and sensuality is banished in favour of hard-bounce riddims and punishing textures. More Fire’s primary producers, the Platinum 45 team, draw on the most anti-pop, street vanguard elements in black music history: electro’s angular coldness, jungle’s bruising bass blows, ragga’s lurch and twitch.

“Oi!”, More Fire’s No 7 smash of 2002, made for the most exhilaratingly extreme Top Of The Pops appearance in living memory. For pop punters who like a nice choon and fans of Artful Dodger-style softcore garage alike, “Oi!” had the shock impact of punk: “Is this even music?!?”

The answer, eventually, is “yes”. But it takes several listens before what initially seems hookless reveals itself as contagious. Platinum 45’s idea of melody seems derived almost entirely from video game musik and mobile ring-tones. Their dry rhythms connect backwards through time to Schoolly D and pioneering dancehall riddim “Sleng Teng”, and sideways across space to current rap like The Clipse’s “Grindin”(a drum machine on auto-pilot). If James Brown was a 19-year-old from an E4 estate who’d misspent his youth in a purple haze of PlayStation and hydroponic, this might be his idea of future funk. Factor in the rapid-fire jabber of Ozzie B, Lethal B and Neeko, with its blend of gruff ragga grain and uncouth cockney, and you’ve got music that instantly creates a massive generation gap.

Can this sound, brutally shorn of pop appeal, sustain a whole album? If you make it past the dreary “Intro”you’ll find an album that’s highly listenable. Alongside Platinum 45 standouts “Smokin'” and “Politics”, two killer tracks are guest-produced by members of Roll Deep, hot crew of the moment. Wiley’s “Lock Down”pivots around a bubble-and-squeak bass line similar to Roll Deep’s insidious “Creeper”, while Dizzee Rascal (the MC/producer to watch in 2003) contributes the asymmetrical anti-groove of “Still The Same”, over which he spits rhymes in trademark edge-of-hysteria style.

Lyrically, no ground is broken. Haters are castigated, ho’s get humiliated, weed (strictly high-grade) is hymned, and “soldiers, fallen”are mourned as mawkishly as Bone Thugs or P Diddy. But the art of MC-ing doesn’t really involve opening up new areas of content. It’s about finding fresh twists on the same restricted set of themes. What we’re witnessing with this genre-without-a-satisfactory-name that More Fire Crew exemplify and excel at is the final arrival?after many false dawns?of an authentically British rap. No longer a pale copy of the US original, different but equally potent, it’s something to celebrate.

Following a short-lived dalliance with Virgin (left in the cold when new A&R moguls kicked in) and now back on their own label, Goldrush continue to make great music, this seven-track EP more a halfway house between live edge and meticulous studio output. Though Robin Bennett’s tremulous delivery remains a crowning glory, the guitars have a ferocity previously only hinted at (see Flaming Lips producer Dave Fridmann’s remix of “Let You Down” and tour favourite “Counting Song”), with the searing “Intro” suggesting an imminent romp through “I’m Waiting For The Man”.

Alongside membership of Wisdom Of Harry and Ellis Island Sound, multi-instrumentalist David Sheppard’s tenure with State River Widening?with Keiron Phelan and Jon Steele?allows free rein to pursue his languorous blurring of acoustic and analogue, the post-rock sound uncoiling gently, the improv feel gleaned from John Fahey.

Broadening the palette from 2000’s eponymous DIY debut, Early Music’s lush pastoralism and warm tones immediately set them apart from the likes of Pullman and chillier Chicago-ites, steering a course somewhere between Gastr del Sol and The Sea And Cake’s new opulence.

The distinct whiff of an indie phenomenon here, as The Hidden Cameras combine the delicacy of Belle & Sebastian with the massed salutations of The Polyphonic Spree. Essentially the domain of singer/guitarist Joel Gibb, the Cameras number somewhere around a dozen, and sound like it. Typical songs swell from winsome strums to cathedral-sized love-ins whose jauntiness some may find cloying. Fortunately, Gibb’s mixture of gay and Christian imagery is potent, and his vision of music as a grand communal experience is backed up by some memorable tunes.

Mull historical society’s debut loss landed in late 2001 with a bracing freshness British pop had almost forgotten. Mull native Colin MacIntyre, the Society in all but name, sang brightly of islands, severing links, losers, and the recent loss of his father, and gathered tens of thousands to his odd, isolated cause in 2002.

Us initially seems more of the same?as with all strong sensations, the first time’s impact can’t be repeated. But closer inspection reveals clear, happy developments, both musical and emotional. Self-produced again, psychedelic codas and the like soon slot into a unique sonic world with ’70s glam and singer-songwriters buried in its foundations, but with enough eccentrically stroked harps, synthesized organs and ringing chimes to still sound like nothing but MHS themselves.

What really matters, though, after Loss’ celebration of strength in exile and isolation, is MacIntyre’s vulnerable, desperate search for connection this time. “I don’t know how to belong/I don’t know where to begin”, he sings on deceptively triumphal opener “The Final Arrears”, while “Am I Wrong?” and “5 More Minutes” are about regaining lost love, saying he can change, that he saved her life once, that he’ll find the right words in a minute.

Us’ home stretch is an almost unbroken description of a quest for salvation in someone’s arms, and the pain that failure brings, impotently demanding that “somebody else must be with me” while claiming “Asylum”.

“Us” closes the journey equivocally (“I was us when you were you”). But the sense of being closer to others by still risking reaching for them at all is the small, hard triumph MacIntyre ends the Society’s minutes with this time. Poppily uplifting, Us is an album with drowning depths.

Full marks to the man for trying. Robin, always the most inquisitive of the brothers, has ventured here into contemporary R&B. And it so nearly works. Hearing that trademark quaver negotiate the beat minefields of tracks like “Wait Forever” and “No Doubt”?in the latter he even intends to “get my freak on”?what’s striking is how similar he sounds to Craig David. “Don’t Rush” is the obligatory Vocoder track. One of his oldies, “Another Lonely Night In New York”, is updated and Orbison’s “Love Hurts” recast In The Modern Style. Sadly, though, the songs don’t match the ambition. Pity.

An audio companion to Moore’s most brilliant current comic Promethea, incanted in a doleful Midlands voice that whispers and barks over Perkins’synth beats, it weaves the universe’s story into events around the London hall where it was first performed in 1999. Oliver Cromwell’s excavated cadaver, grief-stricken Victorian horror writer Arthur Machen and Moore’s ’80s creation John Constantine meet in Holborn’s alleys in a vision of humanity clutching its potential through precarious imaginative leaps. A sly and inspiring introduction to the mind of a British underground great.

Barnes left Austin and the Livers for a new Seattle start four years back, but this record’s still rooted in Texas. His voice weaves in and out of the banjo rhythms on the title track, accepting hard times in subtly twisted back-porch phrases, then a track later you’re dancing, cares dissolved. T. Rex’s “Broken Hearted Blues” becomes stately chamber pop, and instruments from pop’s dawn, sentiment from poverty and open-hearted artistry combine in a small near-classic.

Since witnessing an exasperated and bored Mould lift eyes to the sky and sneer at a ruck of floor-slamming H

One of the great triple-pronged US guitar bands, Pavement were always slightly more old-school nuts than the one-dimensional grunge gang they rose beside. Partially bedevilled by their refusal to offer a coherent blueprint, and the tendency for various band members to go AWOL or bonkers on stage, Pavement eventually mutated into Stephen Malkmus and his sundry stubborn visions.

This second solo album still sounds like a wilful jukebox stocked on the disparate taste of someone attempting vinyl hari-kari. The first track, “Water And A Seat”, deviates between English folk-rock, prog-like jerks

Danny Slack’s Yorkie bar boys probably wish they came from New York, since their influences are more Big Apple blossom than white rose. With warm winds blowing through the title, these Halcyon heroes tip the cap to soft West Coast pop and burn an incense stick for Arthur Lee on the standout “We’re All Dying And We Want Our Freedom”. It’s a case of chiming guitars, harmony and harmonica elsewhere, and while the production is embryonic, good ideas and hum-worthy tunes still surface.

A promising beginning.

By first album Dixie Fried (1972), Dickinson’s legendary status as Sun Records/Atlantic sessioneer was assured. Having cut sides with Aretha, Sam & Dave and the Stones, subsequent years producing Big Star, Ry Cooder and The Replacements only compounded the mystique. Six years in the making, Free Beer Tomorrow finds the grizzled old ‘gator re-immersing himself in cajun swamp, fringed with honking sax and barrelhouse piano. There are echoes of Dr John in the N’awleans funk of Eddie Hinton’s “Well Of Love”, but Dickinson?as befits his Mississippi residency?is a Southern soul bluesman at heart. Spicier than hot wings in Tabasco.

A vital blues-rock album in 2003? An odds-against prospect until you read the fine print and realise that this Texan singer-drummer-songwriter has worked not only with Stevie Ray Vaughan (Fitchburg Street’s strongest reference point) but with Texas blues legends like Lightnin’ Hopkins. On Bramhall’s first record since 1994, he goes back to his roots, covering blues and R&B classics by Jimmy Reed, John Lee Hooker, etc. His soulful, rough-hewn voice and no-nonsense approach make this time-tested format glow with warmth and vibrancy.

The disbanding of New York avant-rappers Anti-Pop Consortium was one of the less publicised but sadder splits of 2002. Now sporting a fetching pink mohawk, Beans is the first member to re-emerge, with an album that’s curiously both reassuring and disappointing. On the plus side, the Anti-Pop project of drawing parallels between hip hop and electronica continues. Beans’ pointed use of old-school electro here only emphasises the links. But his idiosyncratic rhyming style?sing-song, hyper-kinetic, hectoring?can grate without the leavening presence of other rappers.

Like Neil Young, James Taylor and Jackson Browne before him, this San Diego native conjures up a melancholic America still littered with battered Chevys and dotted with dirt roads, pawn shops and hissing summer lawns. Frame frames a collection of beautifully crafted alt.country tunes exploring the nuances of love lost and love found via the unlikely detours of heroin abuse and urban violence. Available from www.peterbolland.com