Country-rock was superseded as a description long ago by new, alt. and insurgent country, not to mention the catch-all ‘Americana’. But the old ’70s terminology should surely be revived to describe Austin five-piece Reckless Kelly, who sound more like Pure Prairie League than Uncle Tupelo. Led by the brothers Willy and Cody Braun, the band’s third album stomps rowdily on tracks like “Let’s Just Fall” and “Nobody’s Girl”. They get more reflective on “Desolation Angels” and “Everybody”, but are soon rocking again on “Mersey Beat”, a tribute to George Harrison and surely the first song ever recorded in Nashville to mention cricket.

This album from Detroit electro-garage band, Electric Six, invites the listener to consider two obvious reference points. One being Dynasty, the abysmal 1979 disco album by stadium rock clowns Kiss, the other being the inside cover of Daft Punk’s 1997 debut Homework (a collage of grubby teen paraphernalia?comics, rock stickers, Chic seven inches). Electric Six nail a kitschy hybrid of ’70s rock and disco?AC/DC & The Sunshine Band, if you will?but repeated plays reveal little charm and less real humour. There are a couple of admittedly killer riffs, but the stench of music industry in-joke is overwhelming. It’s all too easy to imagine Electric Six ending up in a novelty niche/rut similar to that of Fun Lovin’ Criminals?unable to get arrested in their homeland, destined to play end-of-term balls until their career sputters out.

Last year’s intense and compelling live double album, Resistance Is Futile, was one of the jazz releases of 2002. This follow-up employs most of the same musicians plus flautist/vocalist Malik Mezzadri. A predominantly introspective record which emphasises its lack of a chordal instrument with unusually sparse textures, On The Rising Of The 64 Paths further pursues Coleman’s fascination with ancient Chinese divination. Subtle and elusive, this album only slowly reveals its inspiration.

Best to try the aforementioned Resistance Is Futile first.

Although long-serving Bad Seed Jim Sclavunos sounds uncannily like St Nick himself on opener “The Big Bang”, The Vanity Set are a very different kettle of fish to that being boiled up on the Seeds’ recent Nocturama. There’s doom and melodrama right enough, but would Mr Cave ever allow glam guitar solos, hysterical theremin surges, circus techno and?gadzooks!?a Bee Gees cover (“I Started A Joke”)? Track five, “Imp OfThe Perverse”, nicely sums this up. File under Goth Comedy.

Brooklyn rapper/producer Tes’ whiny delivery may be an acquired taste, but once in, the listener is richly rewarded with 12 tracks of sharply intelligent and highly addictive hip hop. “New New York” is notable for being a post-9/11 address that avoids mawkishness, while “Fooltime” tackles the more mundane subject of shitty day jobs (“Fooltime, but I can’t break free/Time spent racing rats running laps of luxury”). Tes drops in his samples with a spare, dub-like delicacy, leaving wide open spaces through which to access his lyrical meditations on the urban treadmill.

If you’ve ever, via hallucinogens, expanded your mind to Dark Side Of The Moon, all you need to do is change your drug of choice and Dub Side… might easily sound like the best thing you’ve heard, if you inhale deeply enough. Even without a spliff, it still sounds pretty fine as a bunch of rastas take a voluptuous dubbed-up trip around the Floyd’s psychedelic masterpiece. Highlights include Ranking Joe’s toast on “Money” and Kirsty Rock’s bonged-out yodelling on “The Great Gig In The Sky”. It fits so perfectly you wonder why it took 30 years for someone to think of it.

Shaun Ryder’s weird artistic odyssey now appears to be forming some kind of pattern. Each new venture hits the ground running and burning with revolutionary intent, delivering words and music of mangled-up, category-defying magnificence (Happy Mondays’ Bummed and Pills’n’Thrills And Bellyaches, Black Grape’s It’s Great When You’re Straight… Yeah). Then the class-As begin to take their toll and words/music get sloppily, grossly self-indulgent and pitifully self-parodic (the Mondays’ Yes Please, the Grape’s Stupid Stupid Stupid). After which, Ryder downs tools and pretty much disappears from public gaze to concentrate on adding yet more lurid chapters to the ongoing soap opera that is his life.

Imagine Corrie directed by Quentin Tarantino and Vincent Gallo, with hair-raising plot twists involving drugs, guns, divorce, overdoses, rehab, car crashes, meetings with aliens, bankruptcy, psychic breakdowns, more drugs… That’s Ryder’s life. Then, just when his bonkers lifestyle threatens to eclipse all memories of his deranged musical legacy, back he bounces and, once more, all bets are on.

So it goes with his latest project, which sees him holed up for two years in Australia, fomenting mischief in a shed belonging to Perth-based producer Pete Carroll. Ryder and Carroll are joined by a trio of musicians (as well as, on several tracks, Stephen Mallinder of Cabaret Voltaire) including the excellently-named Lucky Oceans, whom older readers will recall from ’70s country boys Asleep At The Wheel.

If there’s any 10-gallon influence on these eight tracks, Ryder’s band are keeping it well camouflaged. As you might expect, though, just about every other genre and sub-genre is included in the general mash-up. At a time when much scholarly ink is being spilled over the brainwave of “soundclash”, in where two songs from different musical genres are spliced together to make a single atom, it’s worth remembering that Happy Mondays used to sound like six different bands playing six different songs at once.

It might have been put together in a shed, but so dark and seedy and drug-addled does it sound that Amateur Night In The Big Top might as well have been cooked up in a Moss Side crack den. Reports of Ryder adopting a pipe-and-slippers lifestyle in Oz have been exaggerated, at least on the evidence of this latest stream of derailed consciousness.

Opener “The Story” has Ryder gibbering about a Persian-necking weekend to the accompaniment of a pounding rhythm that drills into your skull like a dose of ketamine. At which point you might as well fasten those seat-belts for this trip to the hinterland beyond the reaches of sanity. Which is what this is right up to the finishing line, although closer “In 1987” finds Ryder in rare reflective mood, longing for the lost pre-Madchester Eden when “the MDMA was pure”. Between these startling bookends, he sounds like a man living beyond the edge of himself, trapped but strangely liberated by the realisation there is nothing left for him to lose.

Ryder’s barking raps tell of futures narrowing, of inner cities overrun by headless zombies, of short-cut escapes (drugs, cheap sex, fast entertainment) leading to dark cul-de-sacs rank with the stench of death and decay. As on the nightmarish, spaced-out dub of “Monster”, or the funked-off paranoia of “Long Legs (Parts 1,2,3)” where Ryder sounds like a man grabbing onto the jump-leads of anxiety because there’s nothing left to hold. It’s terrifying, exhilarating stuff. “Where do you think you’re going with that big red fucking nose,” he wonders on “Clowns”, a rare moment of levity. And this in a song all about the pathological fear of being beaten to death by circus turns.

And there you have it. Another wildly implausible Shaun Ryder comeback. Just when we needed one. All things considered, you wouldn’t want to be inside his head. But there’s times when you need him inside yours.

Fear for his sanity and his general wellbeing, by all means. But embrace his demented soul vision. Because it speaks some uncomfortable truth which, in its own fucked-up way, reasons the way ahead.

See Shaun Ryder Q&A, page 74

Previously, Dillon was a gravel-throated angst-rocker midway between PJ Harvey and a female Tom Waits. The tragic death of Dillon’s husband and musical partner Steve Bywater, however, has changed that. Collaborating with Kinobe’s Julius, and featuring guest appearances from Heather Nova, Nobody’s Sweetheart mixes Hammond organ with brisk, syncopated electronics. Kinobe’s downtempo brand is palpable on “It Must Be Love”, wherein Love’s “Red Telephone” makes a swooping cameo. Equally impressive is the cyber ballad “Shoreline”. But while chill-out suits Dillon, this is just too prosaic for an already saturated arena.

Gillian Welch, with her hard ‘g’, is indisputably a Good Thing. Tall and gawky, decidedly non-photogenic, Gillian gives hope to all of us who contend that talent should triumph over Nu-Nashville cuteness. No less than the revered Ralph Stanley, Gillian?along with paramour/accomplice David Rawlings?deserved the newgrass shots-in-the-arm that were O Brother, Where Art Thou? and Down From The Mountain.

I saw Gill’n’Dave just when they were setting off on their scholarly alt.bluegrass path in early 1997. They were a match made in heaven, Dave’s soft tenor exquisitely shadowing Gillian’s stark, vibrato-less alto as their guitars?a 1935 Epiphone for him, a big, reddish-brown Guild for her?intertwined. Backstage they struck me as two of the most decent, honourable?and super-talented?musicians I’ve ever encountered. More power to their ascetic Appalachian schtick, said I.

Of course, back then there were mutterings about the provenance of these blue-ridge ballads of orphans and Walker Evans hillbillies. Wasn’t Gillian Johnny Carson’s daughter or something? Authenticist baloney. If music had to be sociologically correct we’d never have had Tom Waits, Steely Dan, Prince and innumerable others. Rock’s biggest pitfall is the delusion it should be a transparent medium for a singer’s ‘identity’ (whatever that is). Which is why musicians conflate their fame with their self-intoxication and fuck up so badly.

Gillian Welch doesn’t pretend she’s some Alabama miner’s daughter. She just loves this music, studies and inhabits it, revives it in the most caring and compelling way. How great those first two Almo records were: is there a better alt. country song than “One More Dollar” (from Revival)? Did AP Carter ever write a more moving ballad than “One Morning” (Hell Among The Yearlings)?

Which was why I felt the teensiest bit let down by Gillian’s post-Almo Time (The Revelator). To me it felt like Gill’n’Dave were striving to move beyond their old-timey scholarship?commendable in itself?and not quite making it. Gill’s front-parlour DIY banjo playing was nice but the songs simply weren’t special enough. Not as special, at any rate, as “Orphan Girl”, “Pass You By”, “My Morphine”.

Which is why it gives me so much pleasure to report that Soul Journey is a highly satisfying bridge between the log-cabin museum pieces of Revival and Hell Among The Yearlings and a more rockin’, Basement Tapes-ish Americana. Of the 10 tracks, at least two (“No One Knows My Name”, “I Had A Real Good Mother And Father”) are dependably stoical acoustic statements of sorrow and orphanhood. “No One Knows” is Welch directly addressing the small matter of her own adoption. Along with “One Little Song” and “Make Me A Pallet On Your Floor”, “I Had A Real Good Mother And Father” also gives us the previously unheard sound of Welch performing without Rawlings or anyone else?just the gal and her guitar, recorded at home in Nashville.

The flipside of Soul Journey is a clutch of songs (“Lowlands”, “Wrecking Ball”) that feature a soup of scrunched electric guitars, loping Richard Manuel drums, scraping Scarlet Rivera fiddle and muted Garth Hudson/Al Kooper clapboard-Baptist organ. The drumming on the album is by Welch and Rawlings themselves, and very Manuel-esque it is, too. Among the other players helping out: Son Volt bassist Jim Boquist, dobro wizard Greg Leisz, fiddler Ketch Secor and guitarist Mark Ambrose.

“Wrecking Ball”, which closes the album and has nowt to do with the Emmylou Harris song of the same name, is just terrific: a very Dylan-ish piece of reminiscence looking back on life as “a little Deadhead”, no less. Did Gillian “play bass under a pseudonym”? Did she meet a “lovesick daughter in the San Joaquin”? The song is possibly more autobiographical than “Miner’s Refrain” or “Caleb Meyer”, for what that is worth. Almost as good is the spare, thuddy “Lowlands”, which is more Neil than Bob, Harvest to “Wrecking Ball”‘s Basement Tapes/Rolling Thunder hybrid.

If Gill isn’t delving into her own past or channelling Depression-era orphans, you can usually find her running around with good-time boys and gals. The sauntering, dobro-licked “Look At Miss Ohio” and the blithe fatigue of “Make Me A Pallet On Your Floor”?the album’s opening tracks?set this tone for Soul Journey.

Similarly occupying the middle ground between the family-bible bereavement of “I Had A Real Good Mother And Father” and the electric tie-dye sweep of “Wrecking Ball” are the can’t-go-home-again lament that is “Wayside/Back In Time” and the morose “One Monkey”?the latter the darkest patch on what Welch herself rightly regards as a fairly sunny soundscape. “I wish I were in Frisco with a brand new pair of shoes,” she sings wonderfully on “Wayside”, “[but] I’m sitting here in Nashville with Norman’s Nashville blues.” Whoever Norman is…

Soul Journey’s one unarguable masterpiece is the penultimate track “I Made A Lover’s Prayer”, possibly the most perfect thing that Gill’n’Dave have ever created. It’s so simple, so unadorned, so dreamily lovely that I can barely find the words to describe it. Some braided guitar lines, some words about a beloved boy, a puff or two on a harmonica?all combining to make a mood that’s almost divine. Otis Redding eat your heart out: Soul Journey would be worth buying for “I Made A Lover’s Prayer” alone.

Loose and laid-back, Soul Journey is a porchlight songbook of a record, a close-to-perfect soundtrack for a country summer. Get on board without further ado.

OMD were always the most reasonable of electropoppers, and much of their eponymous 1980 debut album resembles a sixth-form music project with songs ranging from the endearingly daft (“Red Frame/White Light”) to the accidentally profound (“Messages”). Organisation, released six months later, is what they turned into after they had listened to Joy Division; few hit singles have been as darkly ironic as “Enola Gay”. But 1981’s Architecture And Morality was a commercial and artistic peak, a luxuriously bleak collage of avant-garde lullabies (“Souvenir”) and proto-ambient soundscapes (“Sealand”) culminating in the end of the world (“Georgia”). How the hell did singer Andy McCluskey end up inventing Atomic Kitten?

Them were a band whose membership had been in a state of flux since their formation in 1963, so it came as no surprise that, even after Van Morrison’s exit in ’66, the band soldiered on. Working with producer Roy Ruff in California augmented their raucous R’n’B sound with garage psychedelia and chart-oriented pop. A mixture of self-penned material and covers (including two Goffin and King songs, “You’re Just What I Was Looking For Today” and “I Happen To Love You”), this album sits nicely between the extended guitar fantasies of the Grateful Dead and the expansive jangle pop of The Byrds.

With their mellow backbeats, groove-based orchestration and vocalist Skye’s creamily soulful tones, Morcheeba described themselves perfectly in the title of their second album, Big Calm. Their sound?one step removed from trip hop?is coolly understated but ultimately unaffecting, as this compilation proves. There’s some magic in hits like “Trigger Hippie”, while Kurt Wagner’s hoarse-voiced charm is a perfect foil for Skye on “What New York Couples Fight About”, and new track “What’s Your Name?” (featuring Big Daddy Kane) borrows from UK garage, but overall it’s too soporific. Calming as the sound of waves washing on a deserted shore is, you soon long for a big, bad-assed storm to shake things up.

Christa “Nico” Paffgen’s career after The Velvet Underground revealed a bleak, mandrax-and heroin-addicted proto-gothic personality that resonated with the post-punk audience. Disc one Drama Of Exile…Plus features the decidedly rockist 1981 album with eight additional tracks. Drawing on David Bowie’s Scary Monsters guitar sound, the album features covers of his “Heroes” and the Velvets’ “I’m Waiting For The Man”. Disc two?the 14-track Live At Chelsea Town Hall 9.8.85?captures Nico’s doom-laden vocals overlaying her trademark harmonium, and includes an extended version of her former lover Jim Morrison’s “The End”.

Originally intended as a bonus-tracked compilation, this collection grew to epic proportions following a trawl through the Abbey Road vaults. Generation X’s main claim to fame rests with a series of incendiary singles released during 1977 when the band filled the gig-circuit void left by the nationwide banning of The Sex Pistols and the rapid escalation of The Clash to much larger venues.

Unlike their higher-profile big brothers, Idol and pals had no inhibitions about flaunting their love of ’60s iconography, as evinced on their call-to-arms single “Ready Steady Go” and debut “Your Generation”, a not-too-subtle response to Pete Townshend’s similarly titled anthem of a decade earlier.

Hardcore fans will be delighted with a tidied-up version of the unreleased but much bootlegged 1979 Sweet Revenge album, and a superior full-length 1978 live recording from Osaka.

Various Artists

NEW YORK NOISE: DANCE MUSIC FROM THE NEW YORK UNDERGROUND

SOUL JAZZ

Various Artists

ROUGH TRADE SHOPS: POST PUNK 01

MUTE

Ah, Manhattan, so much to answer for?and so in vogue as a rock metropolis after decades as a hip hop Mecca. Yes New York is the perfect title for an anthology of contemporary Gotham noise, a timely riposte to Brian Eno’s notorious No New York compilation of post-punk “No Wave” acts released back in 1979.

It’s the new bands on Yes New York, starting with The Strokes and taking in Radio 4 and The Rapture, that have returned NYC to pole position in today’s neo-post-punk world. But it’s the bands on ultra-hip Soul Jazz’s New York Noise (ESG, DNA, Liquid Liquid, James White & The Blacks, etc) that exert such an influence on those acts.

If you’d told me, as I watched the sulky Bush Tetras play some forgotten East Village dive back in ’81, that 22 years later the Yeah Yeah Yeahs would be playing essentially the same music, I’d have laughed. But one listen to the Tetras’ “Can’t Be Funky” on New York Noise, or to their bilious “Too Many Creeps” on Rough Trade Shops: Post Punk 01, should make it clear you’re listening to Karen O’s spiritual aunties.

How much of this music?and of the UK post-punk on the Rough Trade shops album?have I actually come back to in the intervening decades? Precious little, to be honest. The vast majority of it still sounds like what it was: cerebral, bloodless ‘dance’ music for junkies, the kind of posturing Gotham tripe we used to describe as “atonal” and “angular”. The Dance, The Bloods, even ESG and James White: you can keep it, frankly.

But you can also keep a lot of the UK piffle on Post Punk 01, too?even if the great Simon Reynolds is writing a book about it. Pigbag, the Pop Group, Gang Of Four?white and scratchy and just as devoid o’funk as their Rotten Apple equivalents. Hearing 23 Skidoo’s “Last Words” or Scritti Politti’s “Skank Bloc Bologna” again is like burying your snout in a mildewed copy of NME or New York Rocker circa 1980.

How affirmative can one be about Yes New York? The Strokes are what they are?1969 Velvets/Stooges via Blondie and Richard Hell; I dig ’em despite the record-collection references. But aside from the fabulously intense, lan Curtis-via-Blue Nile Interpol, the Yes groups (The Fever, The Walkmen, The Natural History) sound just as narrow and constricted as their scuzzy East Village forebears. All attitude and no trousers, today’s New York Rockers?like so many of yesterday’s?prompt in me the single word ‘NO’.

Alongside Black Sabbath, Cream and The Groundhogs, Californian power trio Blue Cheer are justly revered for their part in inventing the genre currently known as stoner rock. The influence of their thick, viscous riffing and bastardised blues wailing on Kyuss, Mudhoney and Fu Manchu is undeniable, and this reissue of the first two Cheer albums comes as a timely reminder of their proto-metal pioneer status. Opening with a feedback-ridden cover of Eddie Cochran’s “Summertime Blues”, Vincebus Eruptum is apocalyptic amp-damage all the way, rumbling, overdriven blues for the end of the world. Outside In is more refined, but every bit as brain-blisteringly heavy, adding psychedelic hi-jinks to the band’s monolithic density. At their best, Blue Cheer thundered like an overweight Stooges. Monumental.