It’s typical of their cheery nature but Bathtime With Loop Guru is a bit of a debilitatingly flip title. Don’t be put off. This ranks up there with their best work. Beneath their mock-Hare Krishna trappings and big, cyclical rhythms, LG are a scholarly duo whose vast, eclectic musical knowledge, ranging from Gamelan to avant-garde, lends the LP a wealth of nuances and citrus twists.

From the samples of Edgar Varese’s Po

It’s a shame Cinerama are still seen as a Wedding Present afterthought: David Gedge has built them into a much more interesting vehicle for string-soaked, painfully acute romance. They sound like Petula Clark theme tunes with kitchen-sink cinema’s messy details left in, or Jarvis Cocker’s grand ballads circa Different Class, minus the spite. Gedge is simply bemused by the dress-dropping party girls who toy with his attentions. You can see why ageing indie kids still listen. With songs as sadly true as “Get Smart”(asking his girlfriend to be unfaithful discreetly, so he can stay), we all should.

NYC foursome The Mooney Suzuki are the secret architects of the neo-garage rock scene. Released three years ago, their debut album, People Get Ready, caused such a stir that two of The Strokes tried out for a vacancy in the band but didn’t make the grade. Recent history suggests that The Mooney Suzuki’s loss was the modern rock fan’s gain, yet Electric Sweat tells a different story. Produced by Jim Diamond (The White Stripes), it’s a rootsy affair that evokes the spirit of the MC5 before wiping the floor with rival garage rock acts on the sublime, Otis Redding-inspired ballad “The Broken Heart”.

Roberts must wince every time he’s compared with Will Oldham, but the similarity remains on this, his fifth album as either solo artist or pivot of Appendix Out. Besides a similarly faltering vocal style, Roberts presents a myth-ridden, emotionally devious update of British folk music that neatly correlates with Oldham’s makeover of American roots tradition. It’s an effective formula also deployed by James Yorkston, though Roberts steers his gently rippling songs closer to pagan arcana, leaving his “native land clad in birch and rhododendron”, or watching a woman metamorphose into a gosling. Affecting stuff, if not quite a match for the Appendix Out album The Rye Bears A Poison.

This is mostly a live version of the Dawson’s Creek fan’s Nirvana and their largely semi-acoustic breakthrough, The Places You Have Come To Fear The Most. The main addition is a singalong choir of their young, mostly female fans, whose fervour for the neatly handsome Chris Carrabba’s songs of heartbreak is hard to dismiss. But though he’s a fan of Costello, and attempts the fury of love in the cuts and bruises of “Screaming Infidelities”, his well-meaning work is too ordered and bland for even shallow scars, sounding like the self-dramatising agonies of well-off young Americans with few real problems.

And it all seemed so promising. Beachbuggy’s third album (their second for Poptones) features knob-twiddler Steve Albini (Nirvana The Pixies) and, impressively, not one but two drummers. Indeed, first single and opening track “Killer Bee” is insanely catchy garage rock, almost worthy of Pixies, or even the Stooges. The subsequent 11 tracks, however, rehash the same wailing, distorted vocals and guitar sound to the point of irritation.

The appropriately named Greg Trooper is one of the foot soldiers of the Americana army. His rootsy songs have been covered by the likes of Steve Earle and Rosanne Cash in different campaigns, but he’s never going to make it to the rank of general. Yet serving in the ranks is a dignified profession, and Trooper at the very least deserves an honourable mention in dispatches for Floating, an album of fetching melodies and intelligent lyrics. And he should win a Purple Heart for “Muhammad Ali”?Earle claims in his sleevenotes that he’s already planning a cover version of the song.

While The White Stripes remain King and Queen of post-Stooges Detroit punk, the bands playing in their shadows have virtues, too. Though The Go at first seem content to run the gamut of Anglo-American trash-rock influences (Bolan on track 1, The Faces on track 2…), with arresting pastiche lyrics (“What happened in your early life? Got laid when you were too young?”), they eventually pummel through to a place of their own. “He’s Been Lyin'”, especially, with its sexily menacing “Gimme Shelter”intro, jumpy beats, phased, clanging guitars and “Babybabybabybaby”boiling climax, is worth the ticket.

Since their split in May ’94, Uncle Tupelo’s reputation as America’s foremost alt.country pioneers grows ever more unshakeable. Though their tenet was a simple one?that country, punk and rock all tapped into identical emotions; that Buck Owens and The Minutemen weren’t mutually exclusive?it often appeared a solitary light in a landscape prowling with Nirvanas and Pearl Jams. With the late-’90’s Americana boom, however, the band finally began taking belated bows.

This reissue of their 1993 swan song still sounds spectacular. If cracks were starting to form, there’s little sign here. After the spare beauty of the Peter Buck-produced March 16-20 1992, Anodyne stuck to its live-in-the-studio formula to fashion a near-perfect mash of scything rock and bruise-black honky-tonk. Farrar’s lugubrious lead-off (“Slate”) remains its crowning glory, but this record is studded with rare booty. Tweedy’s wildly fiddlin'”Acuff-Rose”is both a celebration of tradition and a reminder of old-guard ubiquity, while “New Madrid” is a clear marker for all roads Wilco. And while the sleep-blurred title track and pounding “Chickamauga”offer up both sides of the Farrar coin, two key Tupelo influences are present in Texan legend Doug Sahm’s “Give Me Back The Key To My Heart”(Sahm himself on guitar/vocals) and Waylon Jennings'”Are You Sure Hank Done It This Way?”(Joe Ely sharing vocals). The latter, its baton clearly awaiting its next palm, seems entirely appropriate.

Following the attention heaped upon 2002’s lovely I’m Coming Home, Norway’s most famous ex-postman Thomas Hansen began to wilt, preferring to “hide behind the beer”. Straightened out and under the wing of producer Mark Nevers (Lambchop), Hey Harmony is the product of a frantic’s week recording in Nashville, spotlighting the 26-year-old’s Anglophilia and US country-folk leanings. Sort of Neil Young and Donovan tripping at The Wicker Man’s solstice fest. “45 Seconds”could be Robert Wyatt playing with greasy guitars; “New Apartment”is a new take on flying the nest (“So I made a dinner for myself/And put on a record with The Hives”), and closer “Institution”is the most moving thing I’ve heard all year.

Having met at Leicester Music College in 1998 and formed early last year, The Havenots are Sophia Marshall and Liam Dullingham, two young pups (20 and 22) whose smoke-weary delivery belies their tender years. Informed by Gram/Emmylou, Gillian Welch/David Rawlings and Uncle Tupelo, this is gentle smoulder for the most part, all languid, punt-down-the-river melodies and mountain-air acoustic guitars (courtesy of Samuel Harvey). The tunes may need work to snag in the memory, but the voices are spectacular: Dullingham’s lazy drawl already likened to “Ryan Adams on smack”; Marshall’s classically-trained larynx somewhere between Emmylou and Hope Sandoval. Heartening stuff.

Modesto is a town in Northern California where, Grandaddy would have us believe, very little happens. It is here that the five members of this exceptional band have lived all their lives, here that they party, fight, skate, and make records at the house of songwriter Jason Lytle. Like many small-town boys, they’re ambivalent about their home: bored and irritated by it, yet somehow unable to break free.

It’s a common enough story, rendered weird when one considers Grandaddy are an internationally acclaimed rock band, kindred spirits of The Flaming Lips, whose music respects and transcends American traditions. Most would assume their second album, 2000’s The Sophtware Slump?a marvellous concept project that used decaying technology as a metaphor for a ruined relationship?had provided the band with a means of escape.

Nothing, it seems, could be further from the truth. Much of Sumday presents Lytle as a man in stasis, the guy “who lost the go in the go-for-it”. “We’re all collapsed and futureless,”he sings in “El Caminos In The West”. “I’m On Standby”, he pithily names another song. A bit young for a mid-life crisis, but the band carry it well. Perversely, Sumday is compact where Sophtware Slump sprawled. No nine-minute epics?the 12 songs are compressed and insidious, often oddly reminiscent of Tom Petty or ELO had they grown up with a penchant for Giant Sand records and junkshop synths.

It’s a compelling psychological study set to lovely tunes, a document of a man torn between torpor and achievement. And a man whose paralysis and uncertainty can be traced back to that critical failed relationship, if the tremulous cosmic yawn of “Yeah Is What We Had” is anything to go by. Somewhere in the anonymous suburbs of Modesto, an uncommonly potent muse must be hiding out, waiting for the band’s inevitable return home.

Eddi Reader got “spooked” by Robert Burns one January night singing “My Love’s Like A Red Red Rose” to a bunch of drunks in a Glasgow bar. The experience sent her off in search of Scotland’s national bard, and the result is an album of 11 enticing arrangements of his 200-year-old lyrics, among which “Red Red Rose” and “Auld Lang Syne” will be familiar, but most will not. The accompaniment by leading Scottish folk musicians and the Royal National Scottish Orchestra is sympathetic, and Reader’s lovely vocals render Burns’ words far more comprehensible than on the page.

However authentic their fervour, 16 Horsepower often appear cripplingly in thrall to Nick Cave’s old Southern gothic routine. David Eugene Edwards’ second solo album is most effective when he stretches out a little, expanding his malign little songs into ghostly, creaking atmospheric pieces. The results are thematically consistent, if undeniably effective. “Animalitos”, a vast meditation on Bill Withers’ “Ain’t No Sunshine” that features a murder of crows on backing vocals, is the highlight, though “White Bird” (Roxy Music crossed with The Screaming Trees, weirdly) definitely runs it close. The chill-out album as rethought by Flannery O’Connor, perhaps.

Clem Snide grow ever more hushed and pastoral with each album. Songwriter Eef Barzelay recently became a father, and all traces of his Big Apple cynicism have given way to gurgling smiles and lullabies. “There’s nothing to be scared of,” he murmurs as he hits the soft spot on “Strong Enough”. Vulnerability and innocence reign, and the lamb will soon lie down on Broadway. All that’s missing from this mush is a cover of “Puff The Magic Dragon”. Deeply disappointing after the triumphs of Your Favorite Music and The Ghost Of Fashion.

This is probably the most accessible of Lightning Bolt’s three albums, though in relative terms it makes The White Stripes seem like Westlife. Brian Gibson’s bass manages to cover all the necessary functions of free-rock-metal guitar?imagine a cross between the Boredoms and Slayer?while Brian Chippendale’s drums are restless but always manage to nail the rhythm when required. Vocals are indistinct (“All the world’s in flames”) but the music is purposeful and powerful, never more so than on the terrible grandeur of the climactic “30,000 Monkies” with its endless crescendi, and the floundering “Duel In The Deep”.

Over the years, Steely Dan’s melodic profile has grown lower, more bluesy and plangent, less endowed with hook potential, more elusive and understated. The multi-Grammy-winning Two Against Nature (2000) was rich in this parsimony and surely one of the obliquest statements ever to be named an Album Of The Year. Everything Must Go, its successor, is even more Desert Chic in its blending-into-the-background refusal to grab the melodic higher ground, to give us something to sing along with.

Everything’s in the attitude, and we soon find that this is somewhat rarefied: “We could rent a paranymphic glider/My hypothetical friend/And we could sail/’Til the bending end.”

Although there are tracks which impress at first listen?the mordant “Things I Miss The Most”, the enigmatically swinging “Green Book”, the mischievous “Lunch With Gina”, and the fatalistic title (and closing) track?there is nothing here which knocks you for six like “Gaslighting Abbie” or “Jack Of Speed”.

In its melodic sparseness and proclivity for the blues, Everything Must Go most resembles Donald Fagen’s 1993 solo album Kamakiriad; indeed, “Blues Beach” and the chorus line “Drop me off in Groovetime” from “Slang Of Ages” both sound like outtakes from that least compelling of all Steely Dan products. There’s a slight tiredness about the new album. It’s too laid back to grab the attention, which must scan closer for clues.

One of the standard fixtures of the Steely Dan method since 1974’s Pretzel Logic has been the use of endless line-ups of auxiliary musicians in search of the perfect realisation of every separate song. This has always worked beautifully, and it’s surprising to find that Everything Must Go uses the same basic pool of musicians for all nine tracks. Possibly this retreat from the benefits of internal rivalry has produced a comparative slackening in creative tension. Certainly the overall mood of the album is relaxed beyond the usual. An edge of fiery emphasis is missing.

That said, the prevailing standards of composition and performance remain high, while Fagen (left, above) and Walter Becker (right) convincingly handle most of the solos themselves. Perhaps one expects too much. Perhaps this one’s a slow burner. Perhaps, on the other hand, Everything Must Go lacks the last ounce of ambition. Comfortable business as usual on the Dan trail, the album feels like a stepping stone between more major statements. Compared to Two Against Nature, it lacks both variety and intensity of focus on the unusual. The downbeat ending comes effectively, but nothing spectacular enough has happened before it for the dying fall to register to the full.

“Is it over already?” is the somewhat disappointed response.

Steely Dan are too acute to make even a slightly duff album, so don’t run away with the idea that this one’s no good. Just prepare not to be totally floored this time round.