Tenth anniversary “upgrade” with six bonus tracks from the undervalued Ben Stiller film which caught the narcissism of Generation X nicely. These include New Order’s “Confusion” and The Trammps’ “Disco Inferno”, with which there’s no arguing. Also, less happily, songs from Ethan Hawke and Lisa Loeb, whose “Stay”, from here, was one of the biggest US hits of the mid-’90s. Fine flurries, too, from The Posies, Dinosaur Jr, U2 and Crowded House, plus The Knack’s utterly brilliant (you know it) “My Sharona”. A convenient reissue, as Winona Ryder’s probably nicked your original copy.

Originally recorded in 1971, The Residents’ debut The Warner Bros Album was rejected and has remained unreleased until now. Its first outing is as a remix LP, and it’s fabulous. Prime early-era Residents, it’s an idiosyncratic assault on contemporary music (The Beatles, Dylan) and society using chaotic avant jazz/rock/classical weaponry. To hear this already deconstructed music fed through the mincer of contemporary electronica only makes it even more confusing, disorienting, beguiling and downright delightful. German techno-whizz Paralyzer’s remix of 1989’s The King & Eye is far less successful. Lacking in any real sense of alchemy, this is just the original LP overlaid with breakbeats and swathes of synth.

Britain may have wearied of off-kilter college rock around the time that Pavement split up, but in America the audience for self-consciously alternative music continues to grow. Hence the amazing success of Modest Mouse, whose 10 years of diligently cultivating quirks climax with this sixth album. There are some pleasantly elaborate, wayward songs here, particularly when chief Mouse Isaac Brock betrays his debts to The Pixies, Sparklehorse and Built To Spill. Forays into funk and Tom Waits’ scrapyard are cringe-inducing, though, and it’s hard to admire a band gauche enough to call a song “Bukowski”.

We first heard Tom Baxter a couple of years ago on a Kashmir Klub sampler, which revealed him as an acoustic strummer with a voice heavily influenced by Jeff Buckley. His debut album is considerably more ambitious, with piano replacing guitar as the spine and string arrangements that rival Richard Ashcroft for emotional melodrama. The tunes are gorgeous and the songs deal with the standard debut album theme of rite-of-passage-into-adulthood, but intelligently so. The Buckley debt is still evident, but Ed Harcourt and Ben Christophers are the chief competitors and, as both release new albums this autumn, it will be fascinating to compare.

In the mid-’80s Alex Cox, having made Repo Man and Sid & Nancy to some acclaim, was deemed a financially viable punk auteur. This changed after Straight To Hell, his surreal anti-comedy-cum-spaghetti-western, which had a peculiar genesis. Cox had booked a bunch of less than abstemious musicians for a Solidarity Tour of Nicaragua. That tour, due to small matters like a civil war, collapsed, but Cox had the musos under his charge, and somehow talked Island into funding a thrown-together movie using the assembled wasters as cast (for the full story, see the feature on p84).

Surprisingly, the soundtrack was never properly exploited, so Joe Strummer, Elvis Costello and Pogues completists will relish this. Never before available on CD, and extended from a 1987 vinyl release which included less than half the score, it’s remastered by The Pogues’ Philip Chevron and Pray For Rain’s Dan Wool. No less than nine Pogues tracks debut. “The original Stiff album was more a souvenir than an actual soundtrack,” notes Chevron. There are Strummer instrumentals (Morricone meets Carpenter), “Danny Boy” sung by Cait O’Riordan and dialogue from eager wannabe Courtney Love. Pray For Rain “split the residuals”, in their own words, with “the heavyweights on the roster”. It’s torture to my ears, in truth, but a significant and maverick cult collector’s item.

Never meet your heroes, they say. And emphatically avoid jetting off to Iceland and making a record with them. Advice that Jimmy LaValle, aka The Album Leaf, ignores here. After half a decade composing languid West Coast folktronica, LaValle makes the obvious leap by sharing a studio with post-rocking mates Sigur R

A long way from the Afro-pop of “Seven Seconds”, Egypt contains eight tracks paying tribute to Sufi saints of west Africa. N’Dour’s soulful voice takes on the wailing sound of a muezzin calling the faithful to prayer, while the backing is provided by a Cairo string orchestra. This is closer to the devotional music of Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan than N’Dour’s mainstream collaborations, and his non-world music fans may prefer to sit this one out and wait for his next rock album.

Leftfield New York poet-rapper Mike Ladd has already mapped out an apocalyptic musical future on previous solo albums as well as his Infesticons/Majesticons releases. But this could be his masterwork, a panoramic urban collage of verbal graffiti, syncopated retro-jive talk, gutter-punk street hassle and bruise-black humour?”Dire Straits Play Nuremberg”, indeed. Adding techno belches and pizzicato strings to his gritty gumbo of lolloping anti-folk and junk-shop Afro-futurism, Ladd refreshes the bloodline of stoned-genius one-offs from Sun Ra to Hendrix, from Beck to Kool Keith.

Grime?the latest incarnation of the polymorphous London garage scene?hasn’t yet taken the charts by storm as predicted. And evidently seen by her label as a next-generation Ms Dynamite, here Chanelle “Shystie” Calica tries to straddle underground credibility and more assimilable pop-rap. And, as is usual with this sort of thing. it doesn’t entirely work. There’s no doubting the potency of tracks like “Step Bac”, reverberating with grime’s adventurous mix of rawness, ballistics and the baroque. But a misfiring Kanye West-style overhaul of “Make It Easy On Yourself” suggests that, for now, Shystie may be happier ‘keeping it gutter’ than manoeuvring into the mainstream.

The enigmatic “Client A” and “Client B” (Sarah “Dubstar” Blackwood and Kate “Frazier Chorus, Mrs Alan McGee” Holmes) make progress as pristine as their air hostess uniforms. With cameos from both of The Libertines’ leading men (burbling drunkenly

It’s a tried and tested fast-track to success: talented young artist is taken under the wing of one older and wiser, and groomed for the public. But Micah P Hinson’s story is a little different. Befriended at a young and vulnerable age by a Vogue cover model and rock star’s widow in his adopted hometown of Abilene, Texas, Hinson’s life spiralled out of control until, rather than riding into town on glamorous fur coattails, he was arrested for forging prescriptions and jailed. By the age of 19 he was homeless, bankrupt and rejected by his family.

Fortunately, financial destitution inspired creative wealth in the form of a raft of songs that Hinson?a bespectacled 22-year-old with a cracked but lugubrious baritone?recorded in Manchester with The Earlies (under their Names On Records pseudonym), two of whom were his childhood friends in Texas. Their lushly orchestrated arrangements steer him away from self-pity without detracting from the genuine intimacy of his songs, cocooning their skeletal forms with a full-blooded, human warmth. Had Bill “Smog” Callahan woken up in bed on the right side, he might sound a little like this (as, in fact, he did occasionally on 1999’s Knock Knock), though Hinson himself sees Leonard Cohen as more of an influence.

It’s an ambitious but striking debut that demonstrates how the tradition of acoustic songwriting need not be frail to be authentic or enhanced with electronic glitches to be contemporary. While his vulnerability remains intact on tracks like the eerie “The Possibilities”, “Don’t You Forget” ends in a positively intense fashion and by “On My Way” Hinson is roaring. Any initial thoughts of Hinson as yet another tortured troubadour are dismissed. Truly, a gospel of redemption to believe in.

Recorded live on a reel-to-reel in a disused school, the debut from this London art noise project pivots around a wickedly potent take on the blues. There are echoes of Nick Cave’s From Her To Eternity, but…Bender’s third member, film-maker/curator Geraldine Swayne, navigates them towards eerie folk. Despite the improvised conception, there’s a sinewy discipline about these cloud-rumbling vistas.

One half of the German avant-techno duo Dauerfisch, Andre Abshagen indulges his more nostalgic pop leanings under his Pet alias. Much of Player One Ready deliberately evokes the more clunky, commercial end of ’70s electronic Euro-pop, owing less to Kraftwerk’s sublime austerity than Jean-Michel Jarre’s technoscapes. A few tracks could have been the themes to vintage schools TV shows, while others sport a wilfully plastic sheen of glam-rock glitter. Abshagen clearly has fun in this much-trodden field, even though his pastiches lack the polish or wit of like-minded Berlin neighbours such as Schneider TM.

It’s hard to consider the debut from Chichester’s Hope Of The States without being distracted by its awful backstory: guitarist James Lawrence committed suicide at the studio as the album was nearing completion. Gorehounds who parse The Lost Riots for signifiers to his demise will struggle to find any, however. Instead, HOTS rely on a blustery concept of emotional expression, clearly drawn from close study of OK Computer and Godspeed You Black Emperor!. It makes a change to find a British band acknowledging Radiohead’s complexity rather than (as with Keane et al) oversimplifying it. But the heart of The Lost Riots is drowned in bombast, and Sam Herlihy’s vocals are nowhere near strong enough to compete with the melodramatic, if prosaic, arrangements they’re pitted against.

Five years ago, Uncut was sent a tape of a dreamy song full of dark, lacerating wit called “Lose That Dress”, the first dispatch from Chicago-based singer-songwriter Kevin Tihista. Since then, his career has encompassed two fine albums, one on a major label (Don’t Breathe A Word) and one on a tiny indie (Judo). His British debut gig remains one of the most painfully shy, wish-I-wasn’t-here performances we’ve ever seen. At one point, Kevin produced a box of chocolates and passed them around the audience to break the tension. There were so few of us, there were still several left after the box had been round twice.

Six months ago another Tihista album turned up, without any track listing or title. Just a home-burned disc of 17 skewed pop masterpieces on which Tihista tests his fragile state of equilibrium to its limit. This, it turned out, was Wake Up Captain.

In effect, it’s a song cycle that charts Tihista’s struggle to keep on an even keel. “I have finally hit the ocean floor,” he sings on “Real Life”. By “Oh”, he’s still “drowning in the ocean”, wondering if his life is worth saving. Briefly, he gets his head above water, only to go under again on “Godsend” and “Family Curse”, a devastating observation of teenage anxiety. Alienation then gives way to madness. “Goodwings” sounds whimsical, almost like a nursery rhyme. But despite the levity of the tune, the subject matter is dark as hell as he jumps off a building expecting to fly, only to find “when I woke up in the hospital, the doctor said I shoulda been dead”. Then there’s “Freakshow”, a brilliant Smile-style mad-as-Brian pastiche, and “Yummy”, an even more bizarre Ohio Express parody (“yummy, yummy, yummy, I’ve got drugs in my tummy”). But they seem to work.

By “This Is An Offering”, at the end of the cycle, he’s promising, “Nothing on earth is gonna tear us apart, we’ll make a brand new start”. Typically, though, the lyric is juxtaposed against doom-laden piano that suggests the demons that inspired this beautiful and disturbed record are still lurking in the shadows.

You may have forgotten about Teena Marie. It has, after all, been a decade since her last album, the independently released Passion Play. And in Britain she is remembered, if at all, for her 1980 hits “Behind The Groove” and “I Need Your Lovin'”. But, in the US, Teena was one of the biggest stars of the ’80s, producing numerous hits and albums which continue to shame the Ciccones of this world with their intelligence and innovation, including 1980’s self-produced Irons In The Fire, 1981’s It Must Be Magic and 1986’s jaw-dropping Emerald City.

Well, it’s time to jog your memory. La Do

Mojave 3’s stoned country was a radical departure from Slowdive’s billowing space-rock. Goswell, with co-writer Joe Light, goes even more organically rustic here. But while her parent band draw on prairie-wide Americana, Waves Are Universal moves closer to English and Celtic folk. Furnished with flutes and glockenspiels, the fresh clarity of “Gather Me Up” and “Deelay” magnify Goswell’s introspective and breathy voice. At times songs pass by too easily, but “Coastline”‘s overcast atmospherics are bewitching.

The Flatlanders played precious few gigs in their early-’70s heyday, and all thoughts that live recordings existed of those honky-tonk and living-room sessions had been dismissed. But here it is?the 1972 Flatlanders, in all their glory, plus musical saw-player Steve Wesson, playing extraterrestrial honky-tonk before a couple of dozen souls at Austin’s legendary One Knite club. Save for a couple of Butch Hancock originals, the band hew out a Texas roots primer, but it’s still an unexpected, fly-on-the-wall delight. The sound quality is ragged but serviceable, like an AM signal beamed from another galaxy. The musical and historical value, though, is priceless.

Frontman with Kinky Machine and Rialto and model for Vogue, Eliot had an interesting ’90s. Now he’s decamped to Cornwall to record his solo debut, pitched as echoing Neil Young or Elliott Smith. Despite some sweet I’m-a-mature-father-now lyrics, it fails to convince. The better songs are half-built “Wonderwall” retreads, the rest are dismayingly bland, making Lloyd Cole sound like Nat King Cole. “She Is Moving On” declares, optimistically: “I told her I was nearly famous”.