Glowering from the CD cover like murderous East End repo men, The Solarflares?comprising two members of unsung garage delinquents The Prisoners (bassist Allan Crockford and singer/guitarist Graham Day), Buff Medways drummer Wolf and Dutronc organist Parsley?serve up the kind of maximum GBH usually reserved for much newer kids on the block. Astonishingly, Day’s Steve Winwoodesque, white-soul-boy tonsils, ravaged guitar lines and knack for a winning tune have remained fiercely intact.

At times reminiscent of classic Who (“State Of Mind”), Hendrix (“Hold On”) and The Pretty Things, this is a perfect assimilation of ’60s R&B and punk clatter for those in thrall to The Hives, Von Bondies and their ilk.

Gigolo Aunts

Satellite is Jonny Green, a one-time painter with echoes of Ed Harcourt as well as McAloon in these songs of harmless, surreal insanity set to cheap, bleeping sequencer symphonies. It bounces along in open-hearted style, with love only ever an unlikely lyric away: “I don’t know why a psychopath like you went for me/I’m only glad that I got the chance to see what we could be…”

Arising from the ashes of unloved indie-rockers Hofman comes a bird of far more promising musical plumage. When songwriter Steven Adams took himself off to Austin, Texas, he came back a changed man, and with a 10-gallon-hat full of wonderful, fractured, off-kilter alt.country compositions that sounded like Will Oldham might if he’d been born in Brixton. A full Broken Family Band album will follow in 2003, and on this showing it should be a stunner.

One suspects that notorious avantist Masami “Merzbow” Akita and Aphex ally Russell Haswell believe that Lou Reed’s Metal Machine Music is for lightweights. Their first album together, Satanstornade features some very fancy knives on the sleeve and applies the aesthetics of death metal to improvised electronic noise. The desire to be extreme can be a little wearying, but mostly this is gripping stuff: as meticulous as it is brutal; a chal enge for headbangers; and useful mood music for those romantic nights in the abattoir.

The producers of 8 Mile expect it to do for hip hop what The Blackboard Jungle did for rock’n’roll and Saturday Night Fever did for disco. As Eminem is already far and away the biggest-selling recording star in America, you kind of wonder where there is left for him to cross over to. Nevertheless, word is the movie’s a highly successful Rocky-type dream-fulfilment tale of poor-kid-becomes-rap-star. The soundtrack, however, isn’t some nightmare hybrid of “Eye Of The Tiger” and “Stayin’ Alive”. It’s a nightmare hybrid of angry Eminem and funny Eminem, and?this from an avowed sceptic?it’s absolutely fucking wicked, from the first “sometimes I just hate life” to the last “you think all I do is stand here and feel my nuts??”

A frighteningly powerful record, it’ll bring out your inner adolescent. And then beat the crap out of him. It’ll make thousands of disgruntled teenagers run away from home, and make their parents jealous. It’s breathless, furious, and all the things pop too often isn’t. The point of Eminem becomes blindingly clear.

He snarls through “Lose Yourself”, the best ‘you can do anything you set your mind to’ song since heyday Dexys, and “8 Mile”, where his “insides crawl” across six minutes of painfully intense tripped-up trip hop. On “Rabbit Run” he leaves you no space to think: this is hardcore, but he can toss in jokes without destroying the momentum. Nas, Rakim, Jay-Z and Macy Gray are among the supporting cast. “Love Me”, Eminem’s collaboration with Obie Trice and 50 Cent, is inflammatory, swiping at R Kelly, Li’I Kim, Lauryn Hill and others, and proving romance isn’t dead with a vitriolic “shut your muthafuckin’ mouth and show me love, bitch”. It’s too late to lock up your children: Eminem statistically rules the hearts and minds of a generation. You can run, hide, or decide this has energy and irony, together in perfect disharmony. It’s time to cave. He’s got it.

Danny Boyle’s arty horror flick started brilliantly, ended badly, and was scored by a fast-rising Brit, John Murphy. But the musical highlight is Blue States’ “Season Song”, which is both chilling and reassuring. Brian Eno’s “An Ending (Ascent)” is also ambivalently touching, while Grandaddy are, as ever, incapable of dullness. Not sure why Godspeed You! Black Emperor’s efforts for the film don’t feature, but Perri Alleyne’s “Ave Maria” should cheer up disappointed crazed extremists. In the name of research I recently asked Boyle for his favourite music of all time?he went for Led Zeppelin, The Clash, Ziggy Stardust and Underworld. I’m pretty sure you could locate the spirit of most of those here, given a capacity for lateral imagining.

Another day, another Bond movie. Forgive me if I can’t get worked up about the McConcept, although David Arnold is, by any standards, a slick operator who does as much as anyone could to keep the formula fresh. Paul Oakenfold has a stab at remixing the James Bond theme, and, of course, Madonna and Mirwais concoct that title song. Here Madge contrives to sound like a tracheotomy victim rattling through an outtake from the Music album. “Sigmund Freud,” she croaks. We wonder why. Then we realise she’s simply trying to tell us she read a book once. Something she’s been trying to tell us for years and years. We’re not having it. You don’t marry Rodney Trotter if you’ve read a book. Uh-uh.

It’s the 20th anniversary?already?of the groundbreaking TV pop show where enigmatic New Order vocalist Barney once furrowed his brow, stared at Paula Yates’ arse and said to me: “Cor, I wouldn’t half mind shagging that.” Ah, melancholy ’80s indieland, where the boys were poets and the girls were, if they had any gumption at all, somewhere else having a life. A splendid 37-track compilation this, as much for Wham! and Frankie as for Echo And The Bunnymen, Iggy Pop, U2, The Human League and The Jam. You’ll be succumbing to the beat surrender, sparing us the cutter and hungry like the wolf. Whether you’ll be investigating “The Politics Of Dancing” with Re-Flex is less certain.

Marking public enemy’s 15-year journey from the pinnacle of the rap game to a less populist but still vital position as fractious elder statesmen and industry-baiting online evangelists, Revolverlution is part-skewed retrospective and part-flawed experiment.

The smattering of muddy live tracks, sampled phone calls and earnest messages about staying in school are low points for these hip hop pioneers who once constructed albums with surgical precision. Musically, new cuts such as “Put It Up” and the title track itself draw on the same simmering cauldron of ’70s funk, bass-heavy grooves, declamatory rhetoric and impolite guitars which have dominated PE’s work since the mid-’90s. The grinding “Son Of A Bush” takes a none-too-subtle sledgehammer to Dubya (“Son of a bitch! Son of a bad man!”) while Flavor Flav does his obligatory bendy-legged Jim Carrey routine on “Can A Woman Make A Man Lose His Mind?” and Professor Griff auditions for Rage Against The Machine with “What Good Is A Bomb?”.

A more revolutionary aspect of the album is its remixes of classic PE cuts, downloaded from the band’s website and overhauled by novice studio contenders across the globe. Thus Scattershot’s “B Side Wins Again” emerges as a splice’n’dice noise salad, Vienna’s Functionist sculpts “Shut ‘Em Down” into a trip hop juggernaut, Argentina’s Jeronimo Punx slather “Public Enemy No 1” in ragged lo-fi Beastie beats, and so on. Energy levels are high, and the egalitarian concept borders on radical.

Chuck D’s righteous rapier rage and piledriver propulsion may have slackened, but in terms of challenging lazy music business norms with brutally eloquent, anti-authority cyber-funk, PE are still fighting the powers that be.

Veteran French bassist Henri Texier here leads his Azur Quintet through a two-CD set of elegant and atmospheric compositions, aided by a string orchestra arranged by Claude Barthelemy. With especially attractive soloing by Sebastien Texier on soprano sax and clarinet, these pieces are evocative, intriguing, and always immaculately realised. Add the harmonically exploratory contributions of Bosnian pianist Bojan Zulfikarpasic and you have one of the best European jazz albums of the year. Another winner from the dependable Label Bleu.

Adrenalin rushes like The Ramones are virulently addictive. No surprise, then, that guitarist Dee Dee and drummer Marky couldn’t let it lie. Back in June 1999 at the Continental, and accompanied by Dee Dee’s wife Barbara Zampini, they raced once more through that ageless back catalogue. They’d lost a yard or two of pace?a mere 21 tracks in 40 minutes?and Dee Dee and Barbara’s vocals lacked Joey’s heart-warming dumbness, but their enthusiasm was touching nonetheless. For completists only.

Curious times, these, when the latest advance in dance music is a subtly tweaked revamp of deep house. This is the basis of Digital Disco, where clean lines and theoretically soulful vocals are enhanced by the latest laptop dub techniques and four-to-the-floor beats are gently mutated by the pops and clicks of micro-electronica. Occasionally, cheese triumphs over invention. But the highlights are lovely, especially contributions by tricksy Montreal wonderkid Akufen and the peerless Vladislav Delay (using his Luomo pseudonym), who adds real depth and guile to music habitually dismissed as glossy and vacuous.

The Sea And Cake are the sort of band who tend to slip under the media’s radar. They regularly issue quality-assured albums with the quiet fastidiousness of cabinet makers. The sort of band people fail to take into account when complaining that nothing’s ‘happening’. One Bedroom, featuring Stereolab producer and Tortoise man John McEntire, isn’t ‘happening’. But it’s very fine, glowing with an oblique, poppy sensibility that’s theirs alone. If there had never been bossa nova, this is what it might sound like if someone tried to invent it in 21st-century urban America.

Unlikely as he is?a white, upper-class rapper who positively revels in his Ivy Leaguery?Paul Barman offers a surprisingly fresh take on hip hop clich

Translating as “100th risk”, international club-pop label Bungalow’s latest offering celebrates its 100th release. This double pack features a 16-track CD of brand new unreleased songs by Bungalow artists (including Stereo Total, Le Hammond Inferno, Yoshinori Sunahara and Maxwell Explosion), and a DVD featuring all 28 Bungalow videos. Snazzily packaged with a 40-page booklet detailing Bungalow’s history, this is one of the most desirable items in record stores right now.

Hot on the heels of the hype surrounding The Hives come The Venue, a Scandinavian quartet who sound like they just walked out of 1965. Rough, tinny production backs up songs that walk an aural tightrope between Herman’s Hermits and The Seeds. As an exercise in ’60s-style garage rock it’s all perfectly respectable, but the nagging question here is why bother with The Venue when you can hear the real thing?

Thirty-two years and 32 albums into their existence, The Residents’ gradual move away from frenzied experimentalism has taken them into a parallel universe of avant garde muzak and theatrical lyrics.

As with Bruce Springsteen’s The Rising, there are no explicit references to the World Trade Center attack itself, but this is an album full of despair, isolation, loss, pain and?hopefully?redemption. Its folksy, disembodied keyboard washes and softly intoned lyrics convey a sense of confusion without attempting to supply any simple answers. Disturbingly packaged, as always, by The Residents’ own design company, PoreKnow Graphics.

Remember an era, not so long before the stylised ’70s rehash of The Strokes or the morose, risk-averse, trad-indie of Stereophonics et al, when there was such a thing as experimental guitar music? An era when it was still thought that Hendrix hadn’t drained every last liquid drop of sonic possibility from the fretboard? When the likes of Bark Psychosis, Sonic Youth, AR Kane and MBV immersed and irradiated themselves in the very grain of the instrument’s shriek, its drones, its reverbs, its feedback, and imagined the possibility of an entire new virgin world of sound?

Of course, the arrival of electronica meant that such new sound worlds could be more conveniently, albeit less thrillingly, arrived at by twiddling a few knobs or pushing blocks around on a PC screen. Thus the guitar was busted down to its present retrograde status, the trad museum piece for tonal, crowd-pleasing conservatives.

The enigmatic Guitar, a project on the Berlin-based label run by Thomas Morr, doesn’t actually add to the lexicon of possibilities created by the avant garde school of 1988-93, but it’s a wonderfully nostalgic reminder of a short-lived post-rock subculture of anti-nostalgism. The opening title track, in particular, with its see-sawing guitar frottage, makes the cerebral nerves stand on end, reawakening afresh the memory of hearing MBV’s “To Here Knows When” for the first time. Sunkissed is a brainbath the likes of which you won’t have experienced in years.

The line between inspiration and madness was never finer than in the improvised portions of post-bop jazz, where a player can temporarily take leave of his senses in pursuit of some abstract ideal. This occasionally happens on the present disc when pianist Danilo Perez gets his stormy ‘Late Romantic’ thing going and starts messing with cluster-chords.

At times it’s as if leader Wayne Shorter were playing against, rather than with, Perez. When it works, the excitement is considerable, climaxing spectacularly courtesy of Shorter’s superb rhythm team of John Patitucci (bass) and Brian Blade (drums). Between the lapses, there is some formidably searching music on this album, especially on tracks like “Masquelero” and “Aung San Suu Kyi”. Try it.