This full length debut of music box chimes (“Both Mirror And Armour”), sampled Japanese folk songs (“Sakura”, “Takeda”) and proggy Vangelis-inspired electronics (everything else) has a neo-pastoral charm which, at face value, would align it closely with the output of labels like Memphis Industries and Tummy Touch. The reality is more complex?though Folly may lack the painstakingly assembled layers of sound favoured by Boards Of Canada and Four Tet, FortDax’s classical and folk stylings similarly gesture towards an Arcadian, pre-electronic, even pre-electric age, untethering the music from the technology used to create it and confusing the notions of futurism usually associated with electronic composition. Quietly, cleverly beautiful.

Frequently, Jaga Jazzist sound like Tortoise cubed. The Stix, their second album, is a hyperkinetic extrapolation of the Chicago sound; that slippery and inspiring hybrid of post-rock, jazz and electronica. Jaga Jazzist’s spin, though, is to remove much of the post-rock?and with it much of the ponderousness inherent in some Tortoise disciples. Instead, the likes of “I Could Have Killed Him In The Sauna” focus on the innovative arrangements and sophistication of Charles Mingus and Gil Evans’ big bands, but update them with a digital fusillade that’s always integrated, never tokenistic.

Distant musical cousins to Stereolab, Broadcast here offer a taster of their next album proper, haha sound. The superb cover artwork from Julian House, a rarity in the CD era, is an indication of the unbridled sense of experimentalism contained herein, a sort of Sixties-tinged, retro-avant-garde jouissance.

Combining fragile indie-pop with multiple and fractured effects, from distressed keyboards to free jazz rhythms, Pendulum culminates with the extraordinary “Minus Two”, in which samples of their music are put through a musique concr

Numbers’ debut album Life drew its inspiration from the angular irregularities of Devo, Gang Of Four and The Contortions, taking on the mores of late capitalism to the delight of shark-finned fashion monkeys everywhere.

This remix album allows the usual suspects (Gold Chains, Kid606, Kit Clayton et al) to remodel tracks from Life in their own image, and very enjoyable it is, too. Gold Chain’s punkish overhaul of “Prison Life” chugs along amusingly while Kid606 transforms “We Like Having These Things” into something like a glitch dancefloor anthem. Electronicat’s take on “Driving Song” ends up sounding like a faint echo of industrial titans Ministry, and Kit Clayton cleverly fits “Information” with a distorted “bashment” undertow.

This may be the sound of overprivileged white America dribbling stylishly on its bib, but thankfully it also sounds like a hell of a lot of fun. Choose Death.

For 15 years, the socio-political message of Michael Franti has always been equally as important as his musical medium. Now he seems to be steering his once righteous and rootsy Spearhead toward MOR territory with this dilute mixture of dancehall reggae, calypso and bossa nova, underpinned by ’80s funk-rock dynamics.

Sly & Robbie throw their agreeably groovy weight behind “Bomb The World (Armageddon Version)”, but “Never Too Late” sounds like an unhappy mix of Randy Newman and Arrested Development, and sometimes Franti sounds like a clap-happy Seal.

Revolutionaries and relaxation are ill-suited, it seems.

Glass opens with “To The Author”, which is immediately followed by an alternate version of the same song. A mixture of hard disk-tweaked jazz and krautrock separates these from the second part of the album, remixes of tracks from 2002’s One Bedroom. “Interiors” is retooled by Broadcast, while “Hotel Tell” gets two remixes?one from Detroit techno legend Carl Craig, the other from Stereolab (reciprocating drummer John McEntire’s production work for them) confusingly retitled “Tea And Cake”. The disc is rounded off with an animated video to accompany the band’s cover of Bowie’s “Sound And Vision”, which also featured on One Bedroom.

Prog, at its best, is English music’s epigonic and projected marriage of postmodernism and magic realism. Steve Hackett has spent a quartercentury out of Genesis painstakingly divining how to perfect it.

This is his umpteenth glorious failure. Hackett’s blizzard of textural ideas lacks discipline, the melodic ear remains tinny, but as ever there’s enough contrary cheekiness and blas

Having washed up in the wake of Oasis’success, stadium-filling Welsh pub rockers Stereophonics are clearly only too aware of the shifting temper of the times, hence their reinvention here as keepers of the soul-funk flame. Their fourth album sees them attempt the same move The Charlatans made with their last LP, but less successfully. Kelly Jones’ laryngitic bellow?which makes Rod Stewart sound like a castrato?is applied to Stones-y epics and sub-Weller workouts, both of which strive for rock’n’roll authenticity but ultimately just prove how lacking in soul the trio really are.

Everything Prince Paul (Paul Huston) touches turns to gold. He proved himself as the man behind Stetsasonic, De La Soul and Handsome Boy Modeling School. This good-natured jab at the music industry, which failed to understand his (brilliant) 1999 concept album A Prince Among Thieves, calls on the likes of De La Soul’s Trugoy, DJ Jazzy Jeff, Guru and The Beatnuts. And, of course, it all works. Kokane’s attack on gangsta braggadocio, “So What?”, is excellent. The unknown collaborators are great (particularly W Ellington Felton on the beat-driven blues of “Beautifully Absurd”). Chuck D and Ice T duet on the title track. Even the skits are funny (Chris Rock helps out). All that is good in hip hop is here.

Londoner Helene is as interested in the textures of her songs as their words, making this closer to the haunted soundscapes of The Walkabouts’work with Phill Brown [Talk Talk] than the acoustic singer-songwriting ghetto. Collaborating with Owen Turner of guitar mavericks Magoo, Helene’s breathy voice sits on arrangements including violins, guitars and glockenspiels, at their best conjuring sinuous fairy tale enchantments. Her lyrics, meanwhile, are daydreams of death, disenchantment and vengeance. If “Murder Can be Necessary”is more petulant sneer than felt, fatal impulse, this is still impressive night music.

Faced with pyrotechnics-by-numbers outfits like Mono, no wonder Mogwai left the guitar-pummelling field. But Mono’s bone-crunching post-rock is too derivative to be convincing. The frequent squall-and-calm tricks are predictable, while their bludgeoning attacks are lumpen and drab. It’s often forgotten that white noise aggro needs tension to instill terror, and Mono neither frighten nor create foreboding. Meanwhile, attempts at Slint-style math-rock on “Sabbath”are woefully inadequate. Finally, oddly, apocalyptic hardcore sounds dated.

As vocalist for rap-metal rockers Skunk Anansie, the towering, black, bald and sexually ambiguous Skin became an iconic focus for UK rock during the late ’90s. Her shouty, polemical style was frequently countered by softer, more personally expressive moments, and both sides of her vocal character are exercised on her solo debut. A host of interesting guests appear?David Kosten of Faultline (as producer), Ben Christophers (piano) and film director Mike Figgis (trumpet on “You’ve Made Your Bed”)?but Skin somehow sounds too big for her new role, and a strained adventurousness results.

Obscenely underrated, Sheffield’s Spearmint continue to plough their lonely furrow through crafted, crystalline songs which marry the bile of Buzzcocks and the beauty of Bacharach. Wit and wordplay abound, but all sentiments are genuine as (male) singer Shirley Lee analyses post-relationship survivor guilt, the true value of worldly goods, how books match up to people and why no one likes to buy roses from those in-your-face hawkers at restaurants. Impressive in detail, this white-soul smartness climaxes in riotous applause. Rightly.

The monumental sense of expectation which hangs over any new Radiohead album must be as daunting for the band as it is for fans and critics. As the world’s most creatively ambitious mainstream rock stars, they have set their standards so high that some kind of mythic fall seems inevitable. By aligning themselves defiantly against the anti-intellectual parochialism of Britpop and retro-garage rock, the Oxford quintet have risked alienating friends and foes alike. Perversity, virtuosity and emotional clout have carried them through two desiccated post-rock albums, but the critical consensus seems to be one of patient expectation for a return to the left-field guitar heroics of 1997’s OK Computer.

Deep, broad and sprawling, Hail To The Thief is not that album. But for all its muddied textures and sideways lurches, it is a magnificently engaging and expansive work. Neither a classic-rock climbdown nor a completion of the experimental cycle which began with Kid A but an entirely logical and mostly successful fusion of both styles, throwing out some new hybrids in the process. Such as the weary, washed-out plod of “We Suck Young Blood”, which sounds like some bombed-out gospel choir with history’s worst hangover. Or “Myxomatosis”, which vaults into the space-jazz stratosphere on a spiralling cyclotron of treated speedfuzz guitar. Or the electro-whirr of “The Gloaming”, a hissing sci-fi slither fissured with snaps, crackles and pops.

There is no immediately obvious emotional or lyrical focus to Hail To The Thief. Besides that Bush-bashing title, even the opaquely political lyrics of recent albums have been replaced by bilious inner monologues?a cop-out, perhaps, but Thom Yorke is no Noam Chomsky, and his anti-capitalist musings have mostly existed outside music. Emerging from years of processed vocal abstraction and fragmentary slogans, Yorke’s personal demons loom very large here in a symphony of psychic disgust and parental anxiety, nocturnal gloom and claws-out nature imagery. Couched in a ripe vocabulary of slavering wolves and child-eating vampires, Hail To The Thief feels like some grandly gothic horror film set to music. With his operatic range and fathomless reserves of self-pity, Yorke’s raging persecution mania has finally found its perfect vehicle. Here be monsters.

Any initial disappointment in Hail To The Thief soon fades. Like all great albums, it sounds daunting at first but repays multiple hearings. And for all its baroque sonic trickery, it also contains simply sublime piano-guitar lullabies, from the spectral blue-note sobs of “Sail To The Moon”to the soul-soothing Smithsian folk-pop surges of “Scatterbrain”. There are also enough anthems to appease Radiohead’s more conservative fans. Indeed, the clanging guitars and piercing falsetto sighs of lead-off single “There There” evoke primetime Neil Young, while the honky-tonk piano clonk of “Drunken Punch-Up At A Wedding”is the great vengeful tirade that Supertramp should have written.

Heroically adrift from the zeitgeist, Hail To The Thief raises a gigantic finger to the low ambitions and cramped emotions of the fashion-victim pop minnows all around. The good ship Radiohead sails on into the night with its strange, sad, psychically damaged cargo intact.

Brassy’s debut was a spirited hybrid: the staccato New York punk you might expect from Muffin Spencer (sister of Jon), with hip hop scratches courtesy of Manchester’s DJ Swett. Now they’ve moved to almost pure hip hop, played on by a funk-happy band. In the new (pace Debbie Harry) movement of punky white women rapping, Spencer is more convincing than Northern Exposure but less interesting than Le Tigre. Her drawled venom over the skeletal, bass-driven title track shows Brassy at their best, though elsewhere some bratty energy is lost.

With the praise afforded 2000’s Everything’s Fine, WGC seemed to have reached a critical plateau. After the quasi-psychedelic debut album 3am Sunday@ Fortune Otto’s in 1996, the collective built around founder members Robert Fisher (vocals) and Paul Austin (guitar) began purveying a doom-laden strain of alt.country on 1998’s Flying Low and the following year’s Mojave. Central to WGC’s campfire folk sorrow was the exorcising of demons, particularly the self-loathing and emotional dislocation that had driven Fisher to pills and booze at a tender age. By (the only semi-ironically titled) Everything’s Fine, the singer appeared to have swapped the sauce for the healing waters of music. That record, compared in Uncut to Lambchop’s Nixon, seemed unassailable. Until now.

What strikes you first about Regard The End is the sheer bloodied power of Fisher’s voice, around which everything else spins. It is a voice that defines a mood and ushers in depths of feeling that renders much of their back catalogue redundant overnight. On Flying Low, for instance, he was forever vying for space with tough acoustic guitars, drums and studio trickery, so that for every unadorned “Evening Mass”there was the distorted vocal mix of “August List”. Even Everything’s Fine now sounds as though Fisher was holding back, its more conventional band format denying the space around the vocal which puts Regard The End in such dramatic relief. Compared to Fisher’s deep-swamp baritone here, only the former’s “Wicked”and “Ballad Of John Parker”tap into the same wellspring.

The second point of major departure is the way Fisher now delves into traditional folk forms, informed as much by Celtic/European styles as the turn-of-the-century rusticity of Greil Marcus’ “old, weird America”. Recorded in Slovenia (where Fisher hooked up with ally Chris Eckman of The Walkabouts), Boston and London, Regard The End stitches four traditional songs into seven originals without exposing the seams.

This time, Paul Austin uses occasional members, making way for multi-instrumentalist Simon Alpin (most recently seen pumping keyboards on the Teenage Fanclub tour), who also co-produces. With Fisher leading from the front (