It’s fascinating to discover how well Rundgren’s studio whizz-kid genius translates to the live arena. And while this box avoids his early-to-mid-’70s heyday, it’s still full of wondrousness. The two single CDs, Live In NYC ’78 and Another Side Of Roxy, are both vintage pop-rock sets with the odd curious detour (NYC’s twinkling “Never Never Land” and Roxy’s unhinged “Lord Chancellor’s Nightmare Song”). But the two double-disc sets, A Cappella Tour and Live In Chicago ’91, are a must. A Cappella Tour captures a stripped-down Todd and offers swoonsome solo renditions of “Love Of The Common Man” and “Too Far Gone” alongside overlooked gems from Healing and A Cappella. Chicago highlights his soulful early-’90s incarnation, featuring a reworked “Hello It’s Me” and a titanic Marvin Gaye medley. If you love Todd, you need this.

Since Gram Parsons switched him on in the late ’60s, “King Of Pain” Sam Hutt has immersed himself in the history and heartache of country music. Aware of the wafer-thin divide between laughter and tragedy, this time he takes a straighter approach. Though soft on the ear, there’s enough variation to mark out the lovely understatement of “Waltz Of The Season” and a cappella finger-popper “Watcha Gonna Do?” as standouts.

A good time to be a rich Bj

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This became June’s swan song when she passed away shortly before its release. While 1999’s Press On was dotted with originals by June and hubby Johnny, the focus here is on classic Carter Family tunes done in traditional fashion. Like Johnny’s recent albums, it was overseen by son John Carter Cash, and bears the same rugged honesty as the American Recordings series. Today’s neo-bluegrass wannabes wish they could muster up this much soul.

Ever wondered what The Strokes might have sounded like had they emerged a decade earlier? Perhaps this terrific debut by Portland, Oregon’s Thermals gives an indication. Here, jittery, incandescent pop is treated to the sort of lo-fi production familiar to fans of Guided By Voices and Sebadoh in the early ’90s. As with the best bedroom punk records, the bloody-knuckled passion and immediacy of these 13 rapid songs transcends any cavils about sound quality. Put simply: it rocks, it rushes, and you’ll play it through twice every time.

This San Diego quartet have already upset their hardcore peers by wearing Devo-esque insect costumes and signing to a big(ish) label, thereby diluting the precious integrity of the scene. One fanzine even cryptically accused the band of “ruining hardcore for fat kids”. Well, hardcore’s loss is our gain because Plague Soundscapes is an invigorating blast of science friction the band’s Melt Banana/Boredoms racket reminding why the US punk scene has always been more diverse and interesting than its UK counterpart. Rubbery synths weave in and out of breakneck jazz rhythms while vocalist Justin Pearson shrieks lyrics straight from the Zappa book of scatological cynicism. Chaotic but surprisingly accessible.

Graffiti artist and producer Req specialises in instrumental hip hop which shakes, rattles and rolls like a big box of bones. Car Paint Scheme was first slated for release on Skint in 2000, but was shelved in his transition to Warp. It bridges the gap between his work for Skint and 2002’s more abstract and difficult Sketchbook, and it’s fantastic stuff. The lo-fi quality adds to the eerie atmosphere, while the spectral FX and skeletal beats suggest hip hop as reimagined by Sun Ra. Rhymin’ prot

Rising from the ashes of Morphine following the 1999 death of Mark Sandman, Twinemen (named after the latter’s shape-shifting cartoon sketches) comprise that outfit’s Billy Conway (drums) and Dana Colley (sax), alongside ex-Face To Face chanteuse Laurie Sargent. Versed in crawling blues grooves and smoky jazz as much as their old band’s murkier adventures, this is never less than beautifully flowing, sinuous music both mesmerising and heart-quickening. Sargent’s airy warble is a delight throughout, while Colley’s vocal contribution on the outstanding “Golden Hour” and Conway’s lead on slowly pulsing closer “Who’s Gonna Sing” provide masterly contrast.

Tricky customer is young Finley. Aloof, enigmatic, prone to periods of going AWOL, his ability to throw up a high-grade smoke screen to disguise his undoubted talents may have worn all patience thin. Still, he’s got that voice and knows how to wrench sympathetic performances from a supporting cast of Anglo-African players. Quaye’s usual blend of dub reggae, the lightest hip hop and a new shot of weird country are stretched under his often oddball lyrics and idiosyncratic world view. “This Is How I Feel” and “Face To Face” exemplify Fin’s rather unique house style and elusive personality. No change there, then.

Listening to John Mellencamp’s ‘back to the roots’ album makes you realise what a loss it is that Ry Cooder no longer makes these kind of records. The blues numbers by the likes of Son House and Robert Johnson are dull enough. But there’s a spectacular version of Lucinda Williams’ “Lafayette”, a stirring “John The Revelator” and a nice take on Woody Guthrie’s “Johnny Hart”. Mellencamp even covers “Teardrops Will Fall”, an early Cooder favourite. But if you really want to hear folk-blues played with rock’n’roll attitude then go back to Boomer’s Story or Into The Purple Valley.

This is the second album from Frenchmen Anthony Gonzalez and Nicolas Fromageau, and the follow-up to 2001’s self-titled debut is an intriguing creature. The pair are clearly influenced by the warped guitar and heady neo-psychedelia of My Bloody Valentine’s Loveless, but also nod towards the infantronica of Scotland’s Boards Of Canada on this fizzy collection of waves and drones. Individually their songs are impressive?”Birds” and “Unrecorded” sound like The Russian Futurists getting tearful, while the uptempo “0078h” is unbearably exciting?but after a while the gooey crescendos and relentless sentimentality bring on chronic e-motion sickness, confirming that you can indeed have too much of a good thing.

Daryl Hall is capable of mutant soul genius. Look no further than 1980’s Sacred Songs callaboration with Robert Fripp (see Take 74, p135) and Hall & Oates’ Todd Rundgren-produced 1974 weirdscape War Babies for proof. But that penchant for oddness is disappointingly absent from the overproduced and uninspired white soul of Can’t Stop Dreaming. The voice is flawless, but there’s little here to do it justice. “Never Let Me Go” just about transcends dated production with a stratospheric Hall vocal, and “Holding Out For Love” gives him a decent winding melody to negotiate. But the airtight arrangements prove insurmountable, and the re-recording of “She’s Gone” is completely outclassed by the original. Hopefully the rumours concerning Todd Rundgren’s involvement in the next Hall & Oates album are true.

Ten years since breaking up the band, the prolific Black is slap in the middle of a post-Pixies purple patch. Coinciding with the return of ex-Pere Ubu man Eric Drew Feldman and Joey Santiago, 2001’s Dog In The Sand was the kick-start, compounded by the double shot of last year’s Devil’s Workshop and Black Letter Days. With Feldman and Santiago still around?this time bolstered by Van Dyke Parks, co-producer Stan Ridgway and The Pale Boys?he’s just as impressive. Be it country-rockin’ with Death (“Horrible Day”), doling out desert blues (“New House Of The Pope”) or frantically resurrecting Mott The Hoople (“Jaina Blues”), ol’ Frank hasn’t had this much twisted fun since 1994’s Teenager Of The Year.

Bowie remains the greatest living rock artist, even if what he does isn’t rock so much as swing, think a bit, then swing again. Heathen really was a return to form?even objective people thought so. Reunited with Tony Visconti for the first time since Scary Monsters, he threw aside his well-intended but increasingly flailing attempts at ‘relevant’ sonic shifts and stepped back into himself. He’s much more dignified when he’s irrelevant, unique, alien. Heathen was alternately broody and buoyant, imaginative without being esoteric, and filled with fine songs. Wisely, Bowie’s stayed with Visconti-and with the same band-for his 26th LP, written and recorded quickly this year in New York. And while it’s very much a rock album?”a bit thrusty” is his own description?it kicks in a very ‘now’ way (this ain’t Tin Machine). Over its stomping drums and squalling guitars he drapes lovely, left-handed songs, rich with unexpected angles, daring detours and words which muse over mortality yet emerge seeming upbeat. Reality is lyrically mournful; musically euphoric. It’s pop, frisky pop, but with plenty of couplets about how everything falls away.

“New Killer Star” begins; a riff, a pulse, a yelp in the voice as he nails it: “Oh my nuclear baby/Oh my idiot trance/All my idiot questions/Let’s face the music and dance…” He’s racing from or towards something, with a hint of Ballard’s Crash. “Never Get Old” plays with his past personae; chunky funk, it ends like a spooky fairground ride. “There’s never gonna be enough money, there’s never gonna be enough drugs, and I’m never ever gonna get old.” The album’s littered with both quips and sighs about time passing. There are two covers, Jonathan Richman’s “Pablo

Picasso” (in the manner of the Pixies) and George Harrison’s “Try Some, Buy Some” (in the manner of Ronnie Spector, giving it the big yodel). “The Loneliest Guy” eases the tempo, quivers in like early Roxy, has a narrator denying his loneliness despite giveaway phrases like “pictures on my hard drive”.

“Looking For Water”?”I can’t live in this cage, can’t eat this candy”?thuds in again with braggadocio, but there’s a sort of a cappella moment which recalls those blissful Young Americans peaks, and the lines: “I lost God in a New York minute/I don’t know about you, but my heart’s not in it”. “Days” is a bit plinky-plonk, but both “She’ll Drive The Big Car” and “Fall Dog Bombs The Moon” are schizo, ferocious but fractured, the former like “The Ballad Of Lucy Jordan” rewritten by Iggy, the latter a scratching, twisting, martial “Heroes”. Both should enter the all-time Bowie pantheon, given that’s a pretty huge building.

The title track is heavy, pounding?perhaps, like “Hallo Spaceboy”, too much so?and cranium-piercing. “Now my death is just a sad song” begs reference to his Brel days, and, “I’ve been right and I’ve been wrong/Now I’m back where I started from” contradicts the pierrot who’d never done good things or bad things. Any lingering scepticism is sucked away by the startling, jazzy snake that is “Bring Me The Disco King”, which he’s been tampering with for a decade.

Nearly eight minutes long, it’s like Sinatra or Scott Walker tilting at Brubeck’s “Take Five”, Mike Garson on avant-piano, many-limbed percussion; our man reminiscing about “killing time in the ’70s… rivers of perfumed limbs, good time girls” before fearing invisibility and our ultimate “dance through the fire”. Ah, it was a very good year. It’s a very, very good sexy-angst album. For real.

Maffia’s infectious, good-humoured smash about sexily dancing your week’s cares away, “All Over”, was the first real good news for So Solid Crew since their debut, They Don’t Know, two years ago. First Lady bypasses the Crew’s paranoid tendencies, and the largely undeserved witch hunt that has subsequently justified them, but also rarely matches “All Over”‘s cheeky spirit. Instead, the So Solid production team has kept just the right side of slush in chasing the garage-inflected R’n’B dollar. Maffia’s lyrical angles on south London single motherhood, murder and romantic strife are heartfelt, meanwhile, if disappointingly superficial. A lightweight but likeable beginning.

After a stint as frontman with renowned Scottish art-punk heroes Josef K, Paul Haig went on to release a batch of solo albums, many of them fusing state-of-the-art ’80s electropop with elements of ’60s spy themes and French film scores in a way that predated today’s obsession with “imaginary soundtracks”. Haig’s latest addition to this long-time-coming series (Volume 1 appeared in 1991, Volume 2 in 2000) mixes up electronic dance and filmic sci-fi themes with an unswerving emphasis on melody. If these new cuts resemble what he was doing 20 years ago, that’s only because the contemporary scene is finally catching up with him.

There is something about the female psyche that enables women to make the best music of their careers in their 50s in a way that their male counterparts find almost impossible. Because male artists tend to swagger their rampant way through their 20s and 30s, the onset of middle age comes as a confidence-shattering shock from which few recover.

Even Dylan suffered from it, although he pulled through magisterially and is still making memorable music in his 60s. Robert Plant, once the priapic king of cock rock has surprisingly and cleverly found a way of dealing with it. So, too, has Jackson Browne. Neil Young continues to show intermittent flashes of genius. But the experience of his old cohorts Crosby, Stills and Nash is more typical of the inability of male rockers to grow old if not gracefully then at least creatively. Not a decent record between them in more than 20 years.

Women, in case you hadn’t noticed, are different. Mostly, they don’t do swagger. They’re not allowed to strut, except on a catwalk. Instead, we patronise them and ask them to sing backing vocals and get them to record songs written by other people?usually men. That is when they’re not baking bread or raising kids.

So sometimes it can take years for their creativity to blossom. While playing this waiting game, they finesse their craft and nurture their art until the world is ready. Maturity becomes them. As Lucinda Williams recently remarked in these pages: “It never occurred to me that I wasn’t going to go on getting better. I’ve never understood people who make one or two great records when they start their careers and then that’s the end of it. Poets don’t even get to be respected until they’re into their 50s or 60s, and they’ve honed their craft.”

Williams was 45 when she made her craft-honed, career-defining album, the Grammy-winning Car Wheels On A Gravel Road, and 50 when she released this year’s World Without Tears?arguably an even better record. Emmylou Harris is another who has found that, far from creative life ending with the appearance of the first grey hairs, it can be a new dawn.

When Harris was 48, her renaissance began with 1995’s Wrecking Ball. Produced by Daniel Lanois, its sonic landscape was a paradigm shift away from anything we’d heard from her before, her wraith-like voice swathed in layers of shimmering, distinctly non-country sound. Yet the songs, however expertly chosen, were still all covers of compositions by the likes of Neil Young, Steve Earle and Bob Dylan.

By the time Harris released the follow-up, Red Dirt Girl, five years later, she was into her 50s. Lanois was gone, replaced in the producer’s chair by his prot