A bona fide collector’s piece, this black box of fun comprises no less than a 60-minute DVD (videos, live footage and interviews), a Lewis-illustrated comic, related stickers, a poster, two seven-inch singles and an original Jeff cartoon (each drawing is unique to each box).

Of the singles, “In And Out Of Night” (with Diane Cluck) and “Six Stories” add rhythmic grace and raindrop patter to Lewis’ sleepy delivery, while brother Jack joins him for the blearily vengeful “Flood”. As storyteller, he’s still happily demented. Sample lyric: “At the general store, there’s Norma Jean/Loved her since I was 14/But she loves a trucker from New Orleans/And she over-charged me for my pork and beans.” It’s a hard-knock life.

Last year’s reissue of desert-drone epic Unknown Spin, seems to have spurred Texan psychedelicists Charalambides into a frenzy of activity. Joy Shapes, their first studio album in years, sees their slo-mo improvisations spiral off into Patty Waters-ish wails, pedal-steel ululations and surprisingly abrasive guitar. After such a demanding, listen, a solo album by the band’s guitarist, Tom Carter, is like avant-garde comfort food. Brilliant, too: Carter is no less unfettered on Monument, but his lap-steel extemporisations aren’t as jarring.

Perhaps the Cowboy Junkies will never top the quiet glory of ’88’s The Trinity Sessions, the transcendent eeriness of which not only redefined new country but pioneered modern lo-fi. Yet every album since has had moments of menacingly forlorn Velvet Underground-meets-Hank Williams beauty. On One Soul Now they come principally from the title track, the haunting “From Hunting Ground To City” (with a Margo Timmins vocal so laid back it borders on inertia), the more upbeat “No Long Journey Home” and the lovely melancholia of “The Slide”. “This ain’t no depression, just notes falling slow,” Timmins moans elsewhere. It’s a fine distinction. Look out for the limited edition featuring a bonus cover-versions EP

Magnus is a collaboration between Tom Barman of superior Belgian noirists dEUS and heavyweight techno DJ/producer CJ Bolland. The dance/rock hybrid is usually an ugly beast, but The Body… represents a meeting of minds rather than a dilution of disparate talents. Live drums augment programmed beats throughout, while sax, Wurlitzer and sampled film dialogue are added to the mix and members of Belgian bands Evil Superstars and Millionaire guest. No one style dominates, but whether affecting the nervy white funk of Wolfgang Press (on “Hunter/Collector”) or imagining a Balearic take on the spaghetti western score (“Buttburner”), The Body… hangs together brilliantly.

You realise 21-year-old singer-songwriter Lerche is a bit different when he opens his second album with a French horn instrumental. It’s an act of extreme confidence but hardly misplaced, for the dozen songs that follow boast tunes that wrap themselves around you like a favourite jumper. Steeped in influences from Brian Wilson and Van Dyke Parks to Jeff Buckley, Lerche can do melancholic troubadour (“It’s Too Late”), shiny pop perfection (“On The Tower”), woozy psychedelia (“Days That Are Over”) and symphonic ballads (“It’s Over”), all sung in the beguilingly lazy voice of an overgrown choirboy. Think swoonsome pop at its most non-cynical but with a left-field twist, like Rufus Wainwright or Ed Harcourt, perhaps. A real find.

Cole Porter’s lyrical and melodic genius is likely to endure as one of the last century’s immortal contributions to culture. Lennon/McCartney, Holland/Dozier/Holland and possibly Bacharach/David may last as long; others currently revered will be forgotten in 50 years. So it’s dandy that they’re making a biopic about him, and fine that “an extraordinary range of contemporary artists” are performing his music for it. Trouble is, these artists are neither extraordinary nor a range.

Consider what could have been risked here. How about giving Mark Eitzel “Every Time We Say Goodbye”? Or asking A Girl Called Eddy to murmur “Night And Day”? Might it not have been an interesting experiment to get PJ Harvey to deliver a dark “Let’s Misbehave”?

What do we get instead? “Anything Goes” is taken nowhere special by Caroline O’Connor. Robbie Williams blusters out “It’s De-Lovely” with his usual lack of finesse. Sheryl Crow snores through “Begin The Beguine”, and Mick Hucknall slobbers sweatily over “I Love You”. Oh dear. One begrudgingly concedes that Elvis Costello’s “Let’s Misbehave”, Diana Krall’s “Just One Of Those Things” and even Alanis Morissette’s “Let’s Do It” are… not too bad. They’re just uninspired; reverential without fire.

The nadir is Natalie Cole’s shaming of her dad’s gifts; she warbles the words “I die a little” like she’s complaining of a mild flu. This was a splendid chance to expose Porter’s precision to a new generation. Instead, it’s de-dreary, de-disappointing and de-dull.

What’s not to love about a score that fills nearly half its running time with diverse versions of Rodgers and Hart’s “My Funny Valentine”? Elvis Costello, Chet Baker (sublime), The Kronos Quartet and pianist Marvin Laird all saunter down its plush chandeliered corridors, its tree-lined boulevards, its narcoleptic nooks and crannies. No less a figure than Van Dyke Parks fills up the residual squares and piazzas, and there’s even a waft of Julee Cruise (and a shiver of Saint-Saens and Bach) to gratify those desiring even loftier highs. Sadly, all this comes from arguably the doziest movie Robert Altman’s ever made.

While many of St Etienne’s ‘concepts’ have left me cold, this one resonates, perhaps because I’ve just read the enchanting coffee-table tome Classic Cafes by Adrian Maddox and Phil Nicholls. Bob Stanley’s sleevenotes similarly eulogise the faded majesty and allure of “caffs”?”‘It’s for lorry drivers,’ said my mum.” As these temples to a bygone age disappear, they exude the melancholy of half-recalled Donovan songs. In homage to these hallowed halls of grease are kitsch gems from The Kinks, Chairmen Of The Board, The Moments and The Sapphires.

The Beeb are hoping for a kind of Our Friends In The North success with this 1963-79-spanning Soho crime drama. Its author, Jake Arnott, has written sleevenotes for this 44-song double album, which moves from buoyant ’60s hits from James Brown and Dusty to ’70s landmarks by T. Rex and The Jam. R Dean Taylor’s “There’s A Ghost In My House” is exhilarating, Rod Stewart’s “Reason To Believe” is moving, and Bowie’s “London Boys” is seedily weird. And there’s an eerie grandeur to The Walker Brothers’ “The Sun Ain’t Gonna Shine Any More” when followed by The Merseys’ “Sorrow”. Spectral splendour.

Devotional music, as any songwriter who has idolised a lover will testify, doesn’t have to be addressed to a god. In the hands of Joel Gibb, however, the rituals of religious ecstasy are a boundless source of inspiration and metaphor. On Gibb’s third album as frontman of riotous Toronto ensemble The Hidden Cameras, sex and sacramental ritual are combined, and any number of spiritual tropes are used to express earthly desires. Bodies are worshipped, in all their hairy, dirty glory. Music is a transformative, sexualised holy spirit. And ascension need not be to a higher spiritual plane, but merely out of a Godforsaken new town in Ontario.

More than last year’s The Smell Of Our Own, Mississauga Goddam is a compelling rites-of-passage record. On “Music Is My Boyfriend”, Gibb details the comfort he found in music as an adolescent coming to terms with his homosexuality, trapped in a dreary town. “I found music, and he found me,” he sings, “I kissed his ugly gangling greens, he swallowed my pee.”

The lack of squeamishness here about bodily functions finds fullest expression in “I Want Another Enema”, a satire on hygiene fetishists which will doubtless arouse the prurient in much the same way as last year’s “Golden Streams”.

To stereotype them as proselytisers of a gay body politic is, however, missing many of the pleasures of The Hidden Cameras. It’s just that the conflation of explicit imagery, religious metaphor and what continues to sound like churchy music is so striking. Listening to the exuberant chants, you’re reminded of a folk mass written by Jonathan Richman, or something by Belle & Sebastian?which may amount to the same thing.

Occasionally, the sunniness and repetition of the songs can be exhausting, despite the provocative semiotic games Gibb is playing. And while the devotional concept is meticulously executed, and Mississauga Goddam is an effective and affecting mix of content and form, a further album of this ‘gay church folk music’ might be pushing our faith, well, a little too far.

There are many ways to skin the revitalised garage-rock cat, but Fur, the first album from the Archie Bronson Outfit, takes a genuinely distinctive approach. The trio peddle a punky blues/alt.country hybrid that’s broad-minded enough to embrace the likes of Sonic Youth and PJ Harvey, Neil Young, Palace, Fairport Convention and 16 Horsepower.

Theirs is a dark, urgent, viscous sound which suggests that they grew up in the Appalachian foothills rather than Chippenham, but there’s no denying the hammering, near-apocalyptic fervour of “Riders” and “The Wheel Rolls On”, the smouldering intensity of “Bloodheat” or the hypnotic pull of “Pompeii”, which hints at an affection for both “Paranoid” and Liege & Lief.

Of its kind, Fur may well be the best in show.

On one level, The Lilys?Philadelphia-based mavericks who want to be enigmatic so much that they keep telling us they are?are just another group of American alt.rockers, running through the early Pavement songbook with a suitably perverse aversion to conventional structures. Yet as they improve their skills (often a death knell), they become increasingly intriguing. Kurt Heasley now crafts ideas which transcend their influences, and if you catch a glimpse of everyone from The Cure to The Fall in their esoteric meanderings, there’s also a compelling and unique personality, most evident on “Will My Lord Be Gardening?” or “Mystery School Assembly”. They’ve beef (heart) ed up.

How Dave must have got fed up with brother Ray Davies’ endless stream of pop operas when it seems all he really wanted to do was rock out. His first album of new material in two decades is full of the kind of dirty, distorted guitars he first unfurled 40-odd years ago on “You Really Got Me”, although “Fortis Green”, which name-checks both Max Miller and Hancock’s Half Hour, offers a welcome change of pace, and owes more to his old group’s nostalgic brand of English whimsy.

“True Phenomenon”, the title track and the techno-driven “Life After Life” all betray Davies’ obsessive interest in UFOs and aliens, while the ‘bonus’ additions?live versions of “Susannah’s Still Alive”, “Death Of A Clown” and “Dead End Street”?smack more of earth-bound desperation.

There’s something comforting about Sexsmith’s crumpled croon, like wrapping yourself in a favourite duvet. The more robust Retriever differs as subtly from 2002’s Cobblestone Runway as the latter did to 2001’s country-tinged Blue Boy, but the central tenet remains the same: warmly uncluttered arrangements and the teasing out of emotional truths. In short, the dying art of songcraft, as much in the autumnal McCartney-isms of “Tomorrow In Her Eyes” as in the white-soul of “Whatever It Takes”. A rare treasure indeed.

Her father, Jo

The kind of record likely to have dreary purists choking on their pints, Nouvelle Vague (geddit?) finds two Frenchmen and a selection of kittenish chanteuses recasting unequivocally canonical tunes as acoustic (largely) bossa nova. Think Weekend and Alison Statton’s other post Young Marble Giants work, Astrud Gilberto on the door at the Blitz and mad Mike Always’ mini empire of kitsch,

Rhode Island’s Load label is currently the market leader for a kind of apoplectic left-field music that replaces post-rock’s pensiveness with a snotty, mosh-friendly zeal. Like their mighty labelmates Lightning Bolt, Norwegian instrumental trio Noxagt specialise in churning bass-and-drum passages that frequently erupt into intense noise offensives. The band’s secret weapon, however, is viola player Nils Erga, whose belligerent sawing makes them occasionally resemble a death-metal Dirty Three. It’s exhilarating stuff, made more remarkable by the way Noxagt combine punk vigour with a blustery Nordic grandeur: a bellowed indigenous folk song (sung by Erga’s grandfather) and a lustrous version of Pearls Before Swine’s “Regions Of May” are both audacious, unexpected successes.

The National are intimidated by female beauty, spellbound and damaged by it. They fear it somehow criticises or diminishes them. It’s hurt them; they don’t trust it. They sing of leaving it well alone, for sanity’s sake, but can’t practise what they preach. This is the weak and helpless art of male self-pity at its finest.

The usual names crop up in comparisons: Cohen, Eitzel, Tindersticks, Dulli. But if The National were copyists, this wouldn’t work, it’d be parody. It’s not parody. It’s heinously bitter and twisted, and hurting bad, and you believe it.

Their second album, Sad Songs For Dirty Lovers, broke their cover last year. Five men from New York via Ohio, they are the brothers Dessner, the brothers Devendorf, and singer Matt Berninger. Violinist Padma Newsome gilds the belladonna. Otherwise they’re a rock band, albeit a restrained one. You may sometimes hear in them shades of Interpol, The Sound or early U2. Often, though, they’re gentler, letting Berninger’s defeated voice and outstanding lyrics do the job.

A mini album, this: six new songs and a (very Joy Division) live pass at “Murder Me Rachael” (from the last album). The French call it “dark rock”. Facile, but they’re not wrong. “Wasp Nest” comes in mock-innocent before declaring, “Get over here, I wanna kiss your skinny throat”. Berninger is all candid lust and implicit fatalism, and on the phenomenal “All The Wine” he drawls: “I’m a festival, I’m a parade… I’m so sorry but the motorcade will have to go around me this time” with all the joy of a dying man.

As with all great poetic works of despair and self-loathing, there’s fine-gauge humour here. Also, mandolins like jingly raindrops. “My head plays it over and over”, grumbles one refrain, which will suffice as a summary. “Don’t interrupt me…”

In the wake of Franz Ferdinand’s deserved success, it seems the A&R battalions have embarked on one of their periodic border raids over to Glasgow. First to gain from this activity are Franz’s regular support act, Sons And Daughters. Those expecting vivacious, Postcard-derived art-pop will be disappointed, however. S&D are a quartet with a gory mandolin-powered line in what we might plausibly tag swamp-folk. Trace elements of PJ Harvey, The Gun Club and Tupelo-era Nick Cave are all identifiable, but S&D have a fervid, hypnotic train chug all their own, and some fractious boy/girl vocal duels that betray Adele Bethel’s stint as foil to the curmudgeonly Aidan Moffat in Arab Strap. A handy start.

Granted he has been off most people’s radar for a generation, but surely the creator of Off The Coast Of Me, the man without whom there would be, arguably, no Prince, and, unarguably, no Andre 3000 (imagine “Hey Ya!” as a Kid Creole comeback smash in a parallel world), deserves better than the horrible, cheap, synthetic horns and bargain basement drum machines which dominate and desecrate this new album. Or perhaps not. Worlds away from “Maladie D’Amour”, Darnell now seems to be writing rejects from Five Guys Named Moe?awful sub-Louis Jordan jumping jives like “Let’s Jaml” and the revived flop “Endicott”. To cap it all, there’s a pitiful rerun of “Annie, I’m Not Your Daddy” in “I’m Not Your Papa”. This record has depressed me immensely.