If familiarity breeds only contempt, Robert Pollard and GBV should be despised more than most. In a little over 20 years, various incarnations and offshoots have yielded over 50 albums and more than a thousand songs. Now, Pollard has decided to focus completely on the solo career that began in 1996 with Not In My Airforce. Free of band baggage, he senses a new “maturity, and even integrity” in the air.

Of course, the curious paradox of the dissolution is that, far from appearing jaded, recent GBV works have been bursting with vitality and colour. Last year’s Earthquake Glue was arguably their best album since 1994’s critical breakthrough, Bee Thousand. So it’s the timing that makes the occasion of their 15th and final studio LP Half Smiles Of The Decomposed a genuine shock.

As a send-off, though, it’s not quite the full parade. Newcomers may not be persuaded to delve deeper into the back catalogue by the stodgy “Closets Of Henry” or aimless “Sing For Your Meat Leon”, but there’s enough golden rain for converts. The punkoid “Everybody Thinks I’m A Raincloud” sounds like the perfect minor chord marriage of The Raspberries and The Motors. “Sleep Over Jack” is a nervy wiggle of skinny-tie pop. “Never Have To Die” brilliantly highlights their USP: driving fuzz-pop, fat hooks, urgent choruses. Acid drops and Beat Boom chops filtered through the haze of America’s mid-’80s college scene and out into the knowing present.

Fiction Man, Pollard’s eighth solo outing, is a palpable release of pressure; bold, inventive, sonically daring. With GBV producer Todd Tobias laying down echo-dripping beds of noise, from the industrial (“I Expect A Kill”) to the string-delicate (“Conspiracy Of Owls”), this is wilfully experimental music that doesn’t forsake melodic muscle. In this respect, it’s probably closer to the explosive hiss of Bee Thousand or 1995’s Alien Lanes. It’s the sound of Pollard reconnecting with the accidental thrill and discovery of the past. At times, he’s like Barrett-era Floyd doing “White Light/White Heat”. Or Bowie fronting ’86 R.E.M. in Spacemen 3’s reverb chamber. Sonic boom music par excellence.

Like Damien Jurado or David Ackles, Toronto’s Rutledge is a master of gothic understatement. This wintry debut?shrouded in slow-tempo melancholy?is slyly addictive. Against spare backdrops of folk-country guitars, mandolin, piano and the odd banjo, Rutledge sounds weathered beyond his twentysomething years. An array of talent is on hand, not least of which is the reclusive Mary Margaret O’Hara (woefully underused on just one track, “A Letter To Heather”). Otherwise, Rutledge judges the balance perfectly.

Three years ago, Skyscraper National Park heralded the arrival of Hayden Desser as heir to the mumbling miserablism of Smog’s Bill Callahan. Like the latter, Toronto-born Hayden’s nagging melodies and deadpan delivery occupy their own peculiar kingdom. His fourth LP finds him applying sonic bluster to the usual sad-slow creep. “Hollywood Ending”, for example, is a raucous tale of being caught up in a blockbuster outside his front door. Longtime collaborator Howie Beck is on board, too, though it’s the Elliott Smith-like “Home by Saturday” that steals the show: a ragged tumble of guitars, waft of steel and those exquisitely crumbled vocals.

Already Uncut-endorsed via two fine LPs as head of wistful country types Horse Stories, Burke’s solo debut finds him in intimate, hushed repose. His acoustic guitar fingering is highly expressive, be it woven into delicate sound webs on the love-torn “Cigarettes”, delving into the country-blues of “Long Face” or lighting up “Which Train’s She On?” with flashes of slide. Burke’s voice remains his crowning glory, though, wringing nuance from the simplest of melodies. Both the folksy “Stop Me” and “30 Seconds”?with dovetailed banjo/guitar leads?are up in Jeff Buckley territory. Some feat.

Monochrome minimalists go Technicolor, with startling results Anyone familiar with 2002’s Everybody Makes Mistakes could be forgiven for thinking they’d stumbled on the wrong band here. If that album was austere?a kind of aural porcelain?then Shearwater’s third is a riot of movement and colour. They remain, in parts, as sombre-still as American Music Club, but now add more than a dash of Spirit Of Eden-Talk Talk and a whole heap of ’70s FM pop. Soft-rock chamber music, if you will. The magnificent “Whipping Boy”, for instance, with echo-sodden vocal over knotty banjo riff, sounds like The Moody Blues doing Doc Boggs. It’s a colossal leap of ambition for this most curious of bands.

Shearwater were formed in Austin, Texas four years ago. Frontman Jonathan Meiburg and cohort Will Robinson Sheff also play in Okkervil River, though Meiburg takes keyboard duties in the latter while Sheff is its lead singer. The same duo in two different roles in two different bands. Here, they’re joined by drummer/vibraphonist Thor Harris and upright-bassist Kim Burke.

Meiburg’s vocal quiver brings a trembling tension to Winged Life that never lets up. There’s a shining intellect at work here, too. So easy is it to lose yourself in opener “A Hush”, uncoiling from hypnotic guitar spiral into glistening epic, that you nearly miss the fact it’s narrated by a dead man, fresh from being pulled skyward “on a thousand wings”.

The protagonist of “(I’ve Got A) Right To Cry”is laid up in hospital, a mess of tubes, tortured by the drone of machines “singing to themselves in a language that no one can read”. There’s a wounding sense of loss, of memories set to fade, throughout. “Wedding Bells Are Breaking Up That Old Gang Of Mine”articulates the ache of being alone while everyone else settles into familial domesticity. “The World In 1984″hoves into view over gorgeous, spare piano. Like Devendra Banhart or Iron & Wine, Shearwater are capable of emotional resonance through the most brittle of arrangements. Stunning.

Those who remember him from ’80s country-rock duo Foster & Lloyd, or from his guest slots with Marshall Crenshaw and Steve Earle, will know Lloyd as an expert at country and power-pop fusions similar to Pat Buchanan. The 15 tracks here include collaborations with Poco’s Rusty Young, Peter Case and Beth Nielsen Chapman?whose “Dancing With The Past”symbolises the twangy country/tangy rhythms on offer. Essentially, though, this is a class solo disc with some perfectly executed bittersweet pieces like “Me Against Me”and “Kissed Your Sister”to lengthen the summer.

Much of The Pixies’appeal depended on Santiago’s explosive, expressive guitar-playing. It’s put to good use here, too. With Linda Mallari’s soaring voice (think a less mewling Natalie Merchant), the pair have concocted a snappy, tuneful set of streamlined power pop, cheerleader doo-wop and girl-group stomp. Inevitably, there are mischievous nods to The Pixies (“You Are The One”steals from “Wave Of Mutilation”), but this is more frothy fun than amp-blowing heaviness.

Hailing from Hawthorne, CA, dios peddle a nice line in blissed-out pop that may have something to do with the fact that their hometown’s most famous sons are The Beach Boys. Yet they owe as much to early-’70s Neil Young, and it’s no coincidence that the one cover on this appealing debut is “Birds”from After The Gold Rush. It fits in perfectly with the strummed acoustics, loping rhythms and plaintive vocals from Joel Morales, spliced with bursts of extraneous off-kilter noise in the style of Grandaddy or Wilco. Rather fine.

It’s a measure of dancehall’s emergence as an international phenomenon that Moses “Beenie Man”Davis’third album for Virgin abandons the hip hop crossovers that filled Art And Life and Tropical Storm. There’s no need to mediate this music any more, in the wake of Sean Paul’s superstardom. Hence Beenie Man’s exclusive use of Jamaican producers on Back To Basics. Mainly, this is brilliant pop music: thrusting, crass and immediate on one level; but also genuinely fearless with its squelching and stabbing electronic productions. Intensely sexual, too?though Beenie’s insistence on asserting his celebrated heterosexuality (he styles himself the “Grindacologist”here) can grate. At least feisty appearances by female MC Ms Thing, especially on the fabulous “Dude”single, leaven the machismo a little.

In the early ’90s, My Bloody Valentine’s influence was everywhere, suggesting a new dawn for guitar pop. But a growing attachment to rock classicism derailed many a nascent shoegazing band. The Radio Dept. recall that giddy moment before sounding like the Stones was considered revelatory. Only these Swedes re-tweak the formula, sounding, if anything, better than Ride, Slowdive, Lush, Boo Radleys et al. Besides FX-driven dream pop, The Radio Dept. are also in reach of New Order and their brutally ascending rushes. The frazzled velocity of “Why Won’t You Talk About It?”, “Against The Tide”and “Ewan”are powered by some kind of internal momentum rather than lumpen muscle.

Glistening opener “Too Soon”and the lovely “Slottet, #2″make cheap, whirring Casios sound quite beautiful. What’s remarkable is that this album was recorded on a portable home studio. Yet the condensed hiss of a C90 only complements their bleached-out sound. It’s doubtful whether the mournful drone of, say, “Keen On Boys”and Johan Duncanson’s wan vocals would have been so effective with the clinical precision of digital equipment.

The Radio Dept. aren’t just interested in constructing sonic Taj Mahals. Their fuzzy contours perfectly express lovesickness and heartache. “It’s Been Eight Years”and “1995”see Duncanson re-experiencing the ecstatic anguish of a failed relationship, almost relishing the pain of loss. Best is the closing “Lost And Found”. With its lump-in-the-throat refrain of “I’ll see you someday”, the neon-lit melancholia of Sofia Coppola’s Lost In Translation is effectively distilled into four woozy minutes. A distant cousin, in fact, of The Jesus & Mary Chain’s prettier, tender moments.

Too often, Brave Captain has indulged rather than harnessed Carr’s creativity, with eclectic sound collages merely papering over poor material. Once again, Carr wrestles the rock canon (Dylan touches, “Eleanor Rigby”strings) with spluttering tech beats and chewy dub. A few songs are better this time, notably the lovely title track and the dewy-eyed, Wilson-tainted “Big Black Pigpile”. As ever, though, Carr’s ambitions outrun his abilities (the neo-rap on “Flow Machines”), and he still sounds tentative even when attempting to be bold.

For his third album as Blue States, Sussex-born Andy Dragazis is joined full-time by singer/guitarist Chris Carr and drummer Jon Chandler, and The Soundings eschews the soft-focus soundscapes of its predecessors in favour of gliding, minor chord-driven songs which fall somewhere between Talk Talk and the Bunnymen. Opener “Across The Wire”sets the tone with its refrain of “Under the grey skies”, while the autumnal guitar of “For A Lifetime”and “The Last Blast”riff on Strange Times-era Chameleons. Closer “Sad Song”is a starburst of horns, a widescreen, symphonic climax that leaves you in little doubt they’re on their way to glory.

A glitchy West Country contemporary of Aphex Twin and

If the Scissor Sisters are New York’s retro-homage to ’70s chart cheese, and The Strokes are the city’s retro-homage to its own garage-punk heritage, The Mooney Suzuki are NYC’s retro-homage to America’s spandex pop-metal scene. Some indication of their priorities is the strictly apolitical slant of “Shake That Bush Again”, while “Primitive Condition”actually celebrates its protagonist’s tumescent stupidity. Even Spinal Tap would struggle to come up with anthems as crass as “Loose’n’Juicy”, “Hot Sugar”, “Naked Lady”and “Messin’In The Dressin’Room”.

After singing on Elbow’s second album last year, Cathy Davey’s first solo album teams her with Elbow/Blur producer Ben Hillier, who avoids presenting her as just another female singer-songwriter. Rather, he’s cut an adventurous rock record with obvious parallels to both Think Tank and Cast Of Thousands. It’s a setting perfectly suited to Davey’s barbed lyrics and unusual voice, which veers from the Amy Winehouse-style “Swing It”to the girlish Avril Lavigne-like “Come Over”, via an obvious Kate Bush influence.

A Scandinavian duo in their mid-20s, singer Susanna Wallumr