Cody Chesnutt (the “TT”‘s his idea) comes from Atlanta and brings a large amount of peach and preach along with him. A former member of The Crosswalk, he decided that lo-tech was the incoming thing and recorded this sprawling, old-fashioned double album in his bedroom studio, Sonic Promiseland. Cody, a mic and a four-track produced what he calls a “musical diary”, one intended for intimate relations with phones.

Cody comes across like a character in a Tom Wolfe novel. Deeply religious but fiercely ambitious, he is, in the words of his own song, a “Brother With An Ego” who is given to such evangelical outbursts as “God’s truth in music is the sole power by which we are transfixed, transformed and unified. It’s because of this divine authority that we are sustained in our newly accomplished unity.”

His God-fearing tendencies have won him an American fan club that includes The Strokes, Macy Gray, Saul Williams, Res and The Roots, who have recorded his song “The Seed” on their Phrenology CD. ChesnuTT certainly moves in mysterious ways his wonders to perform. Lyrically he’s apt to favour the twin powers of pussy and philosophy on “My Women, My Guitars”. He rants against corporate greed and consumerism during “Boylife In America” and ridicules the deification of Adidas on “Serve This Royalty”.

But one-man-band experiences like Cody’s are rare these days, and his musical accomplishments carry his conceits along for the most part. Imagine a contemporary version of Shuggie Otis and a large slice of soul bro style

Just when you think you’ve got this trio pinned, they jump somewhere else?from Television to Mercury Rev to Pink Floyd. The opening piece of their debut mini album is “What Used To Be French”, seven minutes of wonderfully ascending Marquee Moon menace, a highlight of the recent Yes New York compilation. Dallas brothers Brandon and Ben Curtis and drummer Josh Garza relocated to Manhattan three years ago, and are reckoned to be the city’s best live band, having played with Spiritualized, Interpol and Trail Of Dead. “It’s A Bad Wind” and “Marconi’s Radio” reveal both perverse sonic ambition and grizzled soul. They won’t be secret for long.

Cork’s Simple Kid is making a virtue out of being in the middle of the road, that easy-listening, glam-rock neighbourhood that often produces uplifting music. And this Kid knows his stuff. Kicking off with a tribute to David Essex

Enon’s third LP is essentially two albums in one. When leader John Schmersal replaced bassist Steve Calhoon with Toko Yasuda, she became a singer-songwriter earning equal time. So Hocus Pocus is John and Toko’s Double Fantasy. While Schmersal’s songs are immersed in a post-lo-fi indie sound

With a big audience grown from grass roots, a bull-headed independent ethic, a devotion to Costello and Dylan, and a politicised world view, Thea Gilmore is a worthy role model. Avalanche shows the antique influences this generation-defying girl, still only 23, wore on her sleeve have been absorbed now, till her lyrical voice is her own. As the albums pile up, though (last year’s Songs From The Gutter was a double), other limitations are proving harder to shake.

Take those lyrics first. Where it once sounded like Gilmore had played Costello’s “Pills And Soap” two minutes before scribbling (not a bad thing), on Avalanche she deploys an arsenal of metaphor and allusion amounting to a world view. Though there are perhaps too many shop-talk snarls at music business iniquities, these are mostly suggestive of wider sicknesses. The title track especially finds Gilmore reading the runes of an almost neutron-bomb empty English mid-afternoon, the vapour trails of post-9/11 aircraft entwining with kite-tails as unquiet bones push up from railway sidings, a mood of resigned dread completed by Gilmore’s even murmur, melancholy cello, and softly crashing drums. In this atmosphere, the danger of Pop Idol’s disarming of pop music is clear: “Who’s gonna raise a hand/When all we were taught to do is dance/Who’ll be able to stand/After this avalanche.”

“The Cracks” is among songs, then, describing dangerous, drink-caressed love in the face of this gathering storm, a classic of last-gasp, last-orders romance. Elsewhere, though, Gilmore’s music just doesn’t match her lyrical reach. Though her last album quoted Neil Young’s determination to swerve from the middle of the road into the gutter, her band graze the modern MOR of classic rock, sounding, at their worst, like good Dire Straits. It’s a noise only likely to connect to listeners 10 or 20 years older than Gilmore?not the generations now likely to start the fires she wishes for. Though Avalanche is lyrically inspired, and well worth hearing, another push is needed yet before she matches her idols’ boundary-breaking ambition.

Sceptics might have dismissed the hick-hop of Sparxxx’s 2001 debut Dark Days, Bright Nights as a one-off novelty. But that would be underestimating his raps?wiser and more melancholic than the farmboy image suggests?and the exceptional gifts of his producer and label boss, Timbaland. As his rivals The Neptunes become more minimal, Tim’s sound is increasingly baroque, so “Comin’ Round” supplements Sparxxx’s thoughtful rap with C&W samples, fiddles, intricate beats, acid squelches, a go-go breakdown and great chunks of Missy’s “Work It”. Justin Timberlake, various OutKast affiliates, the Whistle Test theme, Afrobeat and some grisly hair metal appear too, on an album that is as poignant as it is over the top.

A decade ago, Paradinas was set to be techno’s Syd Barrett with albums like 1994’s Bluff Limbo, but now he has turned into techno’s Rick Wakeman. Titles such as “Johnny Maastricht” indicate that nothing has progressed in Paradinas’ world since 1999’s Royal Astronomy, and the likes of “Meinheld” and “Grape Nut Beats” reheat the same old, tired drill’n’bass rhythms. The best effort here is “On/Off”, which sounds like Prince being mangled in V/VM’s filters before morphing into Psychic TV’s “Mad Organist”. The vocalist’s name-Mike Dykehouse-evinces more imagination than anything else here.

This collection combines Robertson’s heritage-finding discs Music For The Native Americans and Contact From The Underworld Of Red Boy, including the songs he delivered at the 2002 Winter Olympics. These projects are clearly very close to the artist’s heart but the uninitiated may have some, er, reservations.

Robertson’s increasingly ambient music finds lustre in “Golden Feather” and on the Howie B remix of “Take Your Partner By The Hand”, although you’ll need to be a very onside Robertson fan to pick up on all the smoke signals.

It’s impossible to begrudge Cassidy’s vast success, long after her 1996 death from cancer (for a while in 2001, she was the most popular artist in the world). But these rehearsal tapes of standards, from “God Bless The Child” to “Yesterday”, confirm my first impression on hearing Songbird: that Cassidy was a strong, natural singer, but no more. It’s not her genius for interpretation but rather her tragic life, and nostalgia for a time when such good clubland voices were plentiful, that explain her success. And these cutting-floor scrapings do her memory no favours.

Everybody’s doing it. But there are a wide variety of reasons for making an album of standards from desperation (Rod Stewart) to hubris (Robbie Williams). And Boz Scaggs? Listening to the unassuming But Beautiful, you have to conclude that he did it because he loves the songs and enjoys the challenge of getting his sinewy voice around some top tunes. You wouldn’t want him to make a habit of it (the “Volume One” part of the title is a bit alarming). But he does bring a soulful warmth to songs such as “Bewitched Bothered And Bewildered” that you wouldn’t have thought possible.

After the spectoresque maximalism of 2001’s Let It Come Down, with its cast of thousands of horn and string players and backing vocalists, Jason Pierce has throttled back somewhat with Amazing Grace. Each song was rehearsed from scratch and recorded in a day, with the minimum of overdubs, production or processing. It’s an album ready made for the road, its ignition switched on, its engine purring before it’s even left the studio.

Pierce has spoken of how enthused and inspired he was by The White Stripes and their return to the basic principle of slinging a guitar around your neck and simply playing. Yet this isn’t really a ‘back to basics’ album in the minimal, faux-authentic sense so in vogue nowadays. Although turned round quickly, it’s very much in the lavish tradition of Spiritualized’s past work, revisiting familiar themes. Yet it also expands and diversifies, musically in particular, with “Rated X”, for instance, on which extreme improv sax player Evan Parker guests, representing a tentative foray into avant-garde realms. The urge for spontaneity hasn’t resulted in a rough, dashed-off album. A lot has been crammed into three weeks.

Amazing Grace kicks in with “This Little Life Of Mine” and “She Kissed Me (It Felt Like A Hit)” (an allusion to/inversion of The Crystals’ “He Kissed Me [And It Felt Like A Hit”]), all honky-tonk Jaggerlust and fast-moving weirs of fuzztones. These are matched by the bluesy swagger of “Never Goin’ Back”, which gathers a moss of anarchic frenzy of guitar, and “Cheapster”, which starts out like a pastiche of The Stones’ “It’s All Over Now” before catching fire.

However, Pierce, as ever, matches a sense of the holy with the unholy in his songs, as the album title suggests. Aretha Franklin’s astounding 1969 rendition of the hymn, from which the album takes its title, is a touchstone, a hymn quoted on “Hold On”, a swaying plea for redemption through love. Meanwhile, the technologically simple but vast spirit of ’60s pop is recaptured on “Oh Baby”, with its gothic, distorted keyboard drone, and the magnificently abject “Lord Let It Rain On Me”. Another Spiritualized album. Another great Spiritualized album.

The Chorley Four caused a stir with their million-selling Love Is Here. Singer James Walsh mined a rich enough vein as his soaring ballads confronted personal demons, the dead ends of drink and depression. Three years on they’ve hit a wall. Walsh is enthralled by the Buckley legacy but once the stirring “Music Was Saved” fades away, Silence Is Easy falls into an identikit pattern of string-laden sentiment. Having Phil Spector produce two songs, the title track and “White Dove”, is more of a curse than a blessing. Taken individually, some of the songs are respectable efforts, though without the substance to involve one unduly. Silence is a bit too easy.

Clark fits neatly?too neatly, perhaps?onto the Warp roster of electronic mavens. While his earlier records flirted with the avant-acid perpetuated by the label, Empty The Bones Of You is rooted solidly in Warp’s creepy quasi-ambient department. As such, there’s plenty here that’ll appeal to fans of Boards Of Canada and of The Aphex Twin’s more peaceable moments. The discreet melodies, the muddy off-kilter beats and the generally disconcerting air are beautifully realised. But the overall result is rarely quite as haunting or individual as Clark must have envisaged.

Lucinda Williams’ recent World Without Tears showed that hitting 50 doesn’t need to mean a softening of the musical faculties. With his rasping, serrated voice, visions of turmoil and ruin in the heartland and characters caught in various stages of despair, Ovans wears his Dylan influences proudly, but this follow-up to last year’s career r

The transition from cult phenomenon to proper success is a perilous one, as many briefly fashionable groups will testify. A year ago, The Rapture were approximately the coolest band on the planet, chiefly thanks to a raging disco-punk single called “House Of Jealous Lovers” made with the equally hip production team DFA. Since then, the music world has been alive to the possibilities of what we might reductively call an early-’80s revival. Grimy New York warehouses, etiolated funk and marginal legends like Liquid Liquid have become critical touchstones. The Gang Of Four are referenced in most reviews of new bands, and mediocre talents like Radio 4 have been elevated way above their station.

The Rapture, meanwhile, have spent most of 2003 missing the boat, embroiled in a nasty tug of war between major labels for Echoes, the album they largely finished months ago. Now it’s finally arrived, the good news is that these four diffident men based in New York have made a record which transcends any scene’s fleeting credibility. Yes, there are explicit links to dancefloor/punk fusions of the early ’80s: tunes which combine propulsive rhythms with difficult angles; guitars seemingly strung with cheese wire; a pervading atmosphere which alludes to peculiarly nerve-wracking parties.

It’d naive to deny the influence of, say, PiL on the title track. But there’s so much more to Echoes. For a start, The Rapture are commendably eclectic in their influences. One moment they’re engaged in a tense update of early house on “I Need Your Love”, the next they’re revealing their hardcore roots on “The Coming Of Spring”, as redolent of Fugazi as it is of The Pop Group.

The Cure and the Happy Mondays are in here, too. Less predictably, three exceptional ballads, “Open Up Your Heart”, “Love Is All” and “Infatuation”, are weirdly reminiscent of the jagged, visceral songs on Big Star’s Sister Lovers, even if Luke Jenner’s cracked vocals essay love rather than desolation. It’s this surprising emotional core, buried in the DFA’s fluent, genre-splicing mix, which makes Echoes such an enduring record. A humanity which contradicts the chilly academic posturing habitually associated with NYC white-boy funk, and which suggests The Rapture will survive long after scenesters abandon their copies of No New York.

Imagine Stephen Foster?or at least Van Dyke Parks?armed with a laptop and you’re close to understanding the extraordinary charm of Californian duo Matmos’ fifth album. Like 1999’s The West, The Civil War negotiates a fragile entente between Americana and electronica, but does so on a bigger, constantly astonishing scale. Fireworks explode, battlefield drummers march across John Fahey’s porch, Dr John is reconstructed out of glitches, an entire track is made from samples of a rabbit pelt, and “The Stars And Stripes Forever” is reduced to a postmodern shambles. Drew Daniel and Martin C Schmidt’s purposes seem to be both satirical and affectionate, but it’s the latter that ensures this is among 2003’s best albums: one that appropriates the indefinable feel of its sources as well as their historically resonant sounds.

Guitarist Barthelemy has spent much of his career working with orchestras, both jazz and classical, and on this album he teams up again with the 13-piece Orchestre National De Jazz. Stylistically various, the programme here ranges from wild free-form to tightly arranged passages, sometimes in pastiche mood. Whether this adds up to a convincing whole is problematic. At its best, this is exciting, exploratory Euro-jazz; at its worst, it seems somewhat aimless.

A Derbyshire-bred, Manchester-based group formerly known as the Dakota Oak Trio. DOT loiter pleasantly at the dewy, bucolic end of post-rock. Fridge are, perhaps, their closest contemporaries. And just as Kieran “Four Tet” Hebden’s solo output outshines his work with Fridge, there’s a sense DOT’s Dave Tyack and James “Pedro” Rutledge make much better records on their own. Plenty of ramshackle virtuosity, crafty folktronica hybrids and limp singing amongst these 10 tracks, but the earth remains resolutely unshattered.