Like The Association and The Fifth Dimension, The Free Design?the four Dedrick brothers and sisters from New York?specialised in a rococo harmony-pop whose vaulting complexities elevated it far above more prosaic easy listening. On their second album, You Could Be Born Again (1968), they’re at their best negotiating a path between extreme joy and willowy etherealism. Occasionally, their covers (“California Dreamin”, “Happy Together”) are merely inoffensive. But when Chris Dedrick’s songwriting and arranging skills are stretched (“Ivy On A Windy Day”, a great take on Duke Ellington’s “I Like The Sunrise”), the results are striking and unearthly. Stars/ Time/Bubbles/Love (1970) is more expansive still, with the likes of “Bubbles” and “That’s All, People” revealed as hygienic, ingenuous rethinks of psychedelia and funk. Whimsical, but lovely.

There’s a fair case for Kristofferson as Nashville’s forgotten hero. Less celebrated than fellow ’70s outlaws Waylon Jennings and Willie Nelson, he brought an outsider’s perspective to Music City’s staid conservatism that drew from the confessional folk of Fred Neil and the freewheelin’ narrative of Dylan. In this respect, he did as much as anyone to replot the sensibility of country songwriting. At a time when Nashville flashed like a tacky rhinestone beacon, he was as hard-luck raw as it got.

This two-disc set?front-loaded with key recordings from between 1969 and 1971?is hardly an even-handed retrospective, but it does underscore his greatest work. While more or less giving up on his post-Highwaymen output, both Kristofferson (1970) and The Silver Tongued Devil And I (’71) are liberally plundered on disc one. It’s here where you find the gold. Lacking confidence in his own voice, Kristofferson’s earliest offerings were peddled elsewhere. Grammy-winner “Help Me Make It Through The Night” went to Gladys Knight And The Pips and Glen Campbell, among others. Janis Joplin scored a colossal hit with “Me And Bobby McGee”?and the original here is as erudite a hobo-hippie anthem as you’ll hear. Kristofferson’s version of “Sunday Mornin’ Comin’ Down”, popularised by Johnny Cash, is a bleary breath of hungover hell, matched only by the Lee Hazlewood-like “Casey’s Last Ride” and “Darby’s Castle” for beat-up-n-blue despondency. Most startlingly, the voice he had no faith in now sounds weatherbeaten to perfection.

Due to its scattershot chronology (attempting to compress 1972 to 1985), the second disc is less impressive. That said, “Border Lord” is as perfect a country-picked rumble as anything he’s recorded, as is the bigot-biting “Jesus Was A Capricorn”. There are duets, too?with then-wife Rita Coolidge and Nelson?along with the famous Willie-Waylon-Johnny foursome on 1985’s “Highwayman”. But Kristofferson’s singular, belligerent vision is made plain on “If You Don’t Like Hank Williams”: “You can kiss my ass”. Well said, that man.

For the first time?eight years in the compiling red tape?the Motown magic of the buoyant boy band (including early, innocent solo Michael) and the slithery disco of the shiny?shirted grown men co-exist on one two-disc collection. And by God, it’s good. Everyone claims rock is ‘visceral’, but it’s hard to imagine music that bypasses your filters and targets the spine like “ABC”, “I Want You Back”, the tearjerking “I’ll Be There” and “Got To Be There”. The light funk of The Jacksons not only stands up well but struts erotically, as “Can You Feel It?” and “Shake Your Body (Down To The Ground)” show you the way to go. The sound of summer nights: pretty much matchless genius.

In many ways, A Certain Ratio were the bridge between Manchester’s punk and house scenes. Originally signed to Factory, they had early support slots with Talking Heads (1979) and seminal New York funksters ESG (1980), helping shape the label’s electronic dance ethos alongside New Order (albeit without the same commercial success). Despite reaching only No 53 in the album charts, 1982’s Sextet received ecstatic reviews for its taut, abrasive swagger?an uncompromising blend of percussive NY dance-funk, avant jazz and African, Latin and Brazilian influences.

Meant to be Mis’tah Chet’s shining hour, Baker’s NATO-sponsored European debut of the poll-winning trumpeter’s brand new quartet grabbed the headlines for all the wrong reasons. Seven days after the final session (October 1955), Baker’s gifted pianist Dick Twardzik (aged 24) fatally overdosed in his Paris hotel room, the ensuing media scrum diverting attention from this album’s excellence.

Aside from Twardzik’s “The Girl From Greenland”, the remaining eight tracks were composed by the pianist’s shadowy Bostonian buddy Bob Zieff, proving quite the reverse to Baker’s familiar romanticism.

It should have upped the trumpet star’s game. It didn’t. Baker went on to become a latter-day Flying Dutchman, while the album remains one of his finest studio moments.

Some music from the 1970s has not dated at all well, and this misbegotten album is a case in point. Throughout, the pop instincts of Slapp Happy mainmen Peter Blegvad and Anthony Moore seem stifled by the oppressive, dreary, sub-Brechtian politicking of the Henry Cow camp?and however good an interpreter of Brecht singer Dagmar Krause may be, she understands pop not a jot. Frustratingly, the tracks where Slapp Happy have their say unhindered-“Riding Tigers”, “Strayed”?are excellent mutations of Eno-esque meta-pop. The best track here is the quite spellbinding “Caucasian Lullaby”, a long, patient study in chordal decay almost worthy of Morton Feldman.

These days it’s all too easy to equate Ray Davies with a stereotypical Englishness, the Albion of old maids bicycling to church, and all that other Arcadian claptrap that John Major promoted a couple of parliamentary terms ago. But it does him scant justice as a writer to gift-wrap his recorded legacy in the red, white and blue and then stick it in the “Grandfathers Of Britpop” section of your local record shop.

Maybe this cosy (and conveniently marketable) state of affairs has been allowed to develop because the perennially semi-detached Davies has occasionally been a wayward barometer of his own muse. Indeed, that wry distancing that he frequently adopts as a public persona has always seemed at odds with the clarity and bite of his songwriting. Or maybe it’s because Davies has always made his craft look so deceptively simple. He wasn’t a stream-of-consciousness symbolist like Dylan in his pomp. He wasn’t a zeitgeist diviner like Townshend. He didn’t do yoof anthems or quick-fix platitudes of any kind. And?despite the tendency to lump him in with the angry young playwrights and the kitchen-sink realists?he was never overtly polemical enough or, come to think of it, angry enough to fit in with that kind of company.

If anything, his legacy is Orwellian, not in the modern dystopian sense but in terms of his unaffected humanity, his economy of description, and his singular inability to pen a dull sentence. It would also be easy to see Ray Davies as a 1930s essayist, perpetually worrying about the little man in the era of Big History, meticulously documenting emotional stasis and ennui in the context of societal upheaval. Davies wrote about the other ’60s, the Eng-er-land that didn’t swing, a world where the factory windows and the steam trains hadn’t been cleaned for 20 years, a world where people took pictures of each other “to prove that they really existed”. These are the themes that underpin Village Green Preservation Society. Time has done nothing to diminish their resonance.

Take the crushing d

Given the unfolding and increasingly tragic saga of The Libertines, it’s a miracle this record even exists, let alone has any artistic worth. For, in the two years since their extraordinary debut album (2002’s Up The Bracket), the story of this erratic but enthralling group has taken in serious drug addiction, a prison sentence and?during the making of this record alone?three failed attempts to get frontman Pete Doherty through rehab. Indeed, on the eve of release, Doherty has temporarily been removed from the Libertines line-up.

The second Libertines album is all about this. It’s an unflinching, vicarious and occasionally romanticised portrait of the tempestuous relationship between Doherty and Carlos Barat, the other half of The Libertines’songwriting axis. And, as such, it’s by turns confused, heartbreaking and thrilling.

All of which would mean nothing if the songwriting wasn’t of such a remarkably high standard. The Libertines’first album placed Doherty and Barat in a defiantly British lineage, taking over from where The Kinks, The Clash and The Jam left off, and that’s a tradition they lovingly continue to exploit here.

More than that, though, The Libertines is a record of such raw autobiographical honesty that it carries a weight few others in 2004 can match. The group’s manager, Alan McGee, has often said he thinks it’s the record that can make the band as big as The Clash. Whether that’s true or not (and given Doherty’s chaotic behaviour, it seems unlikely), it certainly confirms The Libertines as Britain’s most culturally important group, albeit a very different one from those that have gone before them. Whereas the landmark British records of the ’90s (Parklife, Definitely Maybe, OK Computer) were made by artists who were self-consciously striving for greatness, The Libertines have reached this summit by a more accidental route. This is not a self-appointed great record. Like Tracey Emin, The Libertines have arrived at a point where their lives are their art, and their art is their lives.

That they’ve got this far remains a marvel in itself. They emerged as part of the class of 2002, a British counterpoint to the so-called New Rock Revolution of The Strokes, The White Stripes and The Hives. On top of their adrenalised music, they offered a back story too good to ignore. Since 1996, various incarnations of the band had been part of a boho scene centred around Filthy McNasty’s Whiskey Caf

Mark Lanegan is, you suspect, rarely surprised by what life deals him. But when the first song on his latest album is called “When Your Number Isn’t Up”, it seems possible that even this most unflappable of rock nihilists may be amazed by his survival. For much of the ’90s, hearsay suggested the hedonistic Lanegan would, like his friend Kurt Cobain, be a Seattle rock fatality. The records he made?both as a solo artist and as frontman of The Screaming Trees?seemed preoccupied with an inescapable procession towards death.

They did not, however, take into account the man’s stubborn constitution. Cleaned up, but still preoccupied with mortality, in recent years he has become a glowering, totemic fixture on Queens Of The Stone Age records as well as his own; an ominous presence by which rock’s outlaws and transgressives measure themselves. As a result, Bubblegum finds Lanegan in the midst of wild and disparate company, all feeding off his dark energies.

Mainly the music is provided by Josh Homme, who arranged the songs with Lanegan, and the extended Queens family (drawn from Mondo Generator, Earthlings?, Eleven and Masters Of Reality). But others pass through: Guns N’Roses renegades Izzy Stradlin and Duff McKagan; neglected grunge auteur Greg Dulli; and PJ Harvey, who spars with Lanegan on the catchy “Hit The City” and the tremulous “Come To Me”. It’s a departure from previous Lanegan solo LPs, which have focused on grimy exhumations of folk and blues, and painted him as a US counterpart to Nick Cave. This time, Lanegan is looser, open to both experimentation and, once more, full-on rock. So “Methamphetamine Blues”and the superb “Wedding Dress”, fired by sputtering drum machines and a distinct junkyard ambience, betray a kinship to Tom Waits. And the garage-psych of “Can’t Come Down”and “Sideways In Reverse”are the closest he has sounded to the Screaming Trees since their last album was released in 1996.

At heart, though, this is an entirely consistent record from a man who’s yet to make a bad one, and whose rasping gravitas has made him one of the great voices of our time. As ever, Lanegan portrays himself on the verge of oblivion?”I see the smoke from the revolver/Will I get hit? I hardly care,”he notes in “Bombed”?and waiting to be judged. He still has little hope for his soul, so even when he appropriates the form and language of gospel (on the beautifully understated “Strange Religion”), he rarely seems so sentimental as to countenance redemption?or at least redemption as we conventionally understand it. “This life might eventually just be the end of me,”he sings. If it is, few will have addressed it with such calm, rueful dignity.

Acclaim across the Atlantic has a tendency to change bands, but not intransigent tykes Clinic, whose last album Walking With Thee wowed America’s indie elite. Buoyed by this success, they play to their strengths on Winchester Cathedral, crafting another delirious half-hour of, mainly, mannered asthmatic psychobilly. Having spent six long years honing their singular style of claustrophobic voodoo blues, Clinic finally sound content, loosening up on neuro-disco oddity “The Majestic #2″and queasy spectral waltz “Vertical Take-Off In Egypt”. Remarkably, this bizarre outfit just got weirder, and how it suits them.

We’ve had the new everyone else, so why not Tom Petty? The potent melodic rock of the third album from Ben Arthur packs a similar punch to Petty’s 1976 debut and, even if there’s nothing quite as catchy as “American Girl” , tracks like “Mary Ann”, “End Of The Day”and “Broken-Hearted Smile”are all vivid roots-rockers, as tight and muscular as the early Heartbreakers. A change of tone comes on the rustic stomp “Keep Me Around”, while “Tonight”, with its brooding lyric, is more traditional singer-songwriter fare. Hardly innovative, but rather fine in its modest way.

Given his possession of a sweet soul voice in the vein of great gospellers like Claude Jeter, Al Green and Sam Cooke, a Smokey gospel album ought to be cause for anticipation. But Food For The Spirit is stuffed with clich

Behind Watts’laid-back air of Afro-topped stoner mellowness, this West Coast nu-soul balladeer is a phenomenally well-connected chap. Produced by the team behind Black Eyed Peas and Soundgarden, and namechecked by legendary “Daisy Age”rappers De La Soul, Simplified is a seductively silky hybrid of old-school R&B with unobtrusively left-field, largely electronic production.

Alternating between rich baritone and soaring falsetto, Watts warbles comfortably into Curtis Mayfield and Al Green territory at times. His debut album’s slushy, slow-motion pace is a little too relaxed, but the New-Order-meets-Seal “Broken Dreams”and the Morrissey-meets-Prince “Your Day”redeem its more snoozy moments.

Small wonder that Van Dyke Parks and The High Llamas are up to speed with the songs of Jason Maclsaac and Andrew Watt: their sunny surf anthems and sad saltwater ballads touch on the orchestral terrain of their hero, Brian Wilson. Which doesn’t mean they’re blatant copyists. Their geography and their sound are poles apart, lending the spooky pop of “Try Telling That To My Baby”and the grandly structured “Fall On My Sword”real artistic punch. Spiritual survival is the name of the HBs game, and they carry it off, too.

Like Nick Lowe, Glenn Tilbrook is a classy purveyor of crafted ’60s/’70s pop that straddles a narrow line between quirky individuality and pastiche. “Untouchable”sounds like Graham Nash-era Hollies. “Lost In Space” owes a debt to early-’70s Stevie Wonder. Elsewhere there are echoes of Ray Davies and Macca, but the main interest is the resumption of his writing collaboration with Chris Difford for the first time since Squeeze split in 1999 on the Lennon-esque “Where I Can Be Your Friend”. That it isn’t even the album’s best song is testament to Tilbrook’s increasing confidence as a solo artist.

Rightly f

Raised in the psychedelic era of light shows and rock jams, North Carolina’s Chris Stamey was always something of a minimalist. He first came to prominence as part of the scene that spawned Big Star and the second Memphis explosion, becoming a cult figure thanks to the power-pop records he released fronting The Sneakers and The dB’s in the ’70s. But after a run of fine albums, including It’s A Wonderful Life and Instant Excitement, Stamey appeared to have put his solo career on hold. Instead, he turned his hand to production in the ’90s for Whiskeytown, Le Tigre, Flat Duo Jets and a raft of country and electronic acts, and dabbled with prepared guitar excursions, besides the occasional reunion with old dB’s pal Peter Holsapple.

Travels In The South, however, finds Stamey in fine form again, jamming hard when the mood dictates on “Ride” and “Kierkegaard”, yet willing to take a reflective view on the title track and the haunting soundscape of “In Spanish Harlem”. Ben Folds, Ryan Adams and Jefferson Holt help out, but this is no cosy old pals’ act. Instead, the songs take a meditative look at Stamey’s generation, “when the Summer of Love became the Summer of Drugs”.

The presence of fellow southern star Don Dixon and Greg Reading’s delicious pedal-steel ensure an uncluttered feel, while the wracked, emotive pop tunes associated with early Stamey still suggest themselves in “Insomnia” and the lush, harmony-soaked “14 Shades Of Green”. It all results in an album every bit as good as anything from Stamey’s more exalted contemporaries. It’s good to have this genuinely nice guy back on board.

Elmer Bernstein’s classic score to the 1960 western, perhaps the last hurrah of traditional, pre-graphic-violence heroism. The film tanked at first in the US before European plaudits prompted re-promotion, and the Oscar-nominated music wasn’t officially released until as late as the ’90s. The title theme’s unmistakable, and the sleevenotes to this package reveal two cute ironies. That theme, licensed out, sold more cigarettes than any other tobacco ad. Second, Bernstein was outside a Barcelona caf