A synapse-burning marvel of hip hop knowledge and glitch science, Scott Herren’s second LP as Prefuse 73 confirms him as the underground Timbaland. One Word Extinguisher is an endlessly fascinating maze of sound. Frequently, it seems as if Herren has compacted the entire history of hip hop (plus plenty of R&B and jazz) on his hard drive, then cut and pasted them into ultra-dense new forms. As on his debut, he manages to combine the micro-detailing and radical kinetics of the best electronica with the thump and immediacy of classic hip hop. But the rap-mangling that characterised Vocal Studies+ Uprock Narratives has evolved into a sound that seems direct and graceful even as it explodes in a thousand fresh directions. This decade’s Endtroducing…, possibly.

Away from the lusty twang of her country albums, Neko Case leads a double life singing with Vancouver’s The New Pornographers. The contrast could hardly be greater as she abandons Patsy Cline impersonations to sound more like Debbie Harry. The songs of chief Pornographer Carl Newman surge with contagious power pop energy and wit in which obvious reference points are Blondie, Cheap Trick and The Beach Boys at their more surreal (“Testament To Youth In Verse” is more “Vegetables” than “Good Vibrations”). There’s nothing profound about Electric Version. But classic pop has seldom sounded so much fun.

The banner of Cosmic American Music has been co-opted so often in the past few years that it’s become virtually meaningless. It’s strange, though, how few players in the current Americana boom have chosen to graft country songforms onto billowing psychedelia. Especially when Canyon’s UK debut proves how effective it can be.

There are obvious parallels to fellow travellers My Morning Jacket and The Radar Brothers, even Uncle Tupelo, but the way these songs spiral from earthbound laments into grandiose spacerock is original and often remarkable. Looks like the alt.country cabal just found their Pink Floyd.

Hutchings’ standing in Britain’s folk pantheon is indisputable. Co-founder of Fairport Convention, Steeleye Span and The Albion Band, he’s also an arranger, producer and broadcaster whose tireless work ethic has recently involved poetry readings at London’s Globe Theatre, spreading the word to schools and working on BBC4’s tribute to ex-Fairporter Richard Thompson. Human Nature exposes the often tenuous relationship between man, plants and animals via a stellar guest list (Ralph McTell, Rory McLeod, Ken Nicol among others), string quartets and bursts of brass. Partly traditional but often beautifully soulful, it’s the sound of a man still twisting the familiar into brave new forms

Rhodri Marsden’s debut Free French album Running On Batteries lay criminally ignored among the rubble of Britpop, but now the dust has settled he’s back with an all new line-up and another set of smart, catchy, hook-laden songs. Opening track “Scatterbrain” combines the melodic nous of Brian Wilson with the cerebral approach of Scritti Politti, but after that it’s a headlong rush into brighter, more upbeat territory with witty lyrics and intoxicating melodies.

Intellectually cohesive yet enjoyably throwaway.

When Cerys Matthews parted company with Catatonia-largely because she was in danger of becoming a one-woman embodiment of the band name-few people would have guessed that she’d up sticks, move to Texas, dry out, get married and then make a country album.

In fact, she first hooked up with producer Bucky Baxter (better known as Bob Dylan’s long-time pedal-steel guitarist) at his Nashville studios, and while Bucky knew diddley squat about her, he took the gamble. Legend has it that Matthews was accommodated in a log cabin with no running water, bathroom or kitchen, miles from the nearest offy. Lacking distraction, she wrote the songs that form Cockahoop.

So is it any good? It’s certainly accomplished, with new country licks types like Richard Bennett and Jim Hoke lending an almost Ry Cooder flavour to proceedings. Matthews’ obvious love for country?well, she is a Celt-means that she comes across like the Dolly Parton of the Valleys. The opening “Chardonnay” sounds like her autobiography, the missing years part, but this song about a love affair with the bottle was written by Roger Cook, who pens tunes for Crystal Gayle.

The disc picks up a more folky patina with a fine cover of The Handsome Family’s “Weightless Again”. Keeping her roots showing, Cerys also includes old Welsh hymn “Arglwydd Dyma Fi”. Her original fans will be drawn to the more Catatonic, soul-bearing tunes, such as “Only A Fool”. This album, though, should find Matthews a new audience to add to her pop heroine one. The Nashville skyline just got itself a new resident.

A Teutonic quartet whose work surfs the boundaries between electronica, live instruments and lo-fi chamber music, Bergheim 34 are so named because they once shared a house at 34 Bergheimer Strasse in Heidelberg.

The four members have now all scattered to different German cities and make their music remotely via file-sharing-a detached form of collaboration which may sound like a gimmick but is increasingly common and has little obvious effect on the sounds within.

With distant echoes of Stereolab and a lightly experimental edge, the band’s second full-length album is a work of quiet beauty and artfully mashed-up electro-folk.

Inessential, perhaps, but unassuming in its charms.

Portland’s poutiest love to send out conflicting signals. That crossover phone-ad hit (“Bohemian Like You”) disguised the fact that they’re a filthily wondrous live band who could eat The Strokes for breakfast. Now their fourth album, named after a Kurt Vonnegut book, arrives with production from ex-Durannie Nick Rhodes and backing vocals from Simon Le Bon. Which leaves them sounding more electro than grunge. Then Tony Visconti helms a couple of tracks, Nile Rodgers guests and Evan Dando co-writes a song. It could get confusing:you have to stay with Courtney Taylor-Taylor’s dry-as-sand voice as it leads you through the modernist maze. “Hit Rock Bottom” is pure T. Rex. They could’ve been new rock messiahs, but chose to be pop-art prophets. It’s arrogantly risky. That’s their best feature. Still cool.

Part of the Montreal-based musical coalition that includes Godspeed You! Black Emperor (several members are included here), Set Fire To Flames wander familiarly disquieting terrain as titles like “Buzz Of Barn Flies Like Faulty Electronics” suggest. This was recorded in an abandoned farm in Ontario, with natural sounds incorporated into the recordings. Here, drones, strings and trance rhythms hang together by a beautiful thread, evoking authentic and imaginary landscapes.

Scandinavia, implausibly, continues its ascendancy as a source of fine music, with Sweden’s Logh (pronounced: Log) falling off themselves-a beautiful mesh of ennui and understated angst. The very antithesis of The Hives, they’ll appeal to lovers of Low, Wheat and early Floyd. Every note sounds like it was wrenched painfully from their innermost emotional core, but for all the sobriety and greyness, it’s ultimately uplifting, warm and watery. It’s the second track, “Yellow Lights Mean Slow Down, Not Speed Up”, which flags up their knack for patience, tease, and the telling breakout guitar fling.

Like finding a suicide note after its author has decided not to commit suicide.

In recent years, electronica’s innovative momentum has stalled. The clicks’n’cuts/glitch texturing of Pole and To Rococo Rot has ended up a creative cul-de-sac with bored bedroom geeks. Thank your hard drive, then, for 25-year-old London boy Kieran Hebden, who is Four Tet. As with To Rococo Rot and Iceland’s M

Getting out of the big corporate rat race, and taking a lengthy sabbatical, seems to have sharpened Maria McKee’s view of her craft. Always blessed with a vivid, exciting vocal power, she’s starting to mature into a kind of modern Jackie DeShannon, since High Dive is packed with big, epic pop, produced for full-on effect by husband and collaborator Jim Akin.

Standouts include a new take on “Life Is Sweet” and some audacious and complex ideas explored in “Non Religious Building” and the emotional range of “Love Doesn’t Love”.

She may look like a Carson McCullers character but McKee’s Southern gothic is still polished by the LA dream.

It’s fair to say that Mia Doi Todd has garnered good notices for this, her first album, and that there’s an opinion abroad that she’s something special. It’s difficult to see quite why she should have been seized on in this way for her simple, repetitious music is predominantly listless and washed out, typically swinging back and forth between two chords.

Monotonous, her voice fails to sell her rather earnest lyrics. Perhaps Todd is an acquired taste. Certainly ask to hear some of this before buying.

Jewish-Canadian electro-rapper ‘Chilly’ Gonzales has carved a short but cultish career out of sporting a velour tracksuit and injecting his idiosyncratic hip hop with a humour both sharply self-effacing and thoroughly silly.

This is a compilation with a difference, since every track has been not only re-recorded but reworked from scratch. Gonzales’ ribald rhymes are thus disguised or obliterated by surprisingly sensitive, often sumptuous musical arrangements that run the gamut from klezmer to Studio 54 funk.

Z is a revelatory experience for fans and a treat for neophytes.

With Squarepusher as a brother, Aphex Twin as patron and Ed DMX as label boss, Andy Jenkinson’s debut album was hardly likely to be alt.country. Sure enough, Ceephax Acid Crew fits comfortably into the Aphex-patented Braindance genre:lush melodic constructions whose intricacies don’t obscure their debt to rave.

Graceful stuff, thrown into relief by a second CD that compiles some of Jenkinson’s infrequent EPs, mentions “Acid” in eight out of 14 titles, and brings his squelchier, brutalist predilections to the fore.

Beserkley boys The Rubinoos scrambled up the food chain at about the same time Jonathan Richman and Greg Kihn did their solo road running. Having gone the way of most flesh, the Roobs might have slipped into the Where Are They Now file until power pop’s renaissance jerked their chain.

Following an International Pop Overthrow date in 1999, the band decided to visit the 21st century with this sterling set of covers.

Anything from “Heroes And Villains” to the Sweet’s “Little Willie” passes muster, and the cheeky inclusion of Utopia’s “There Goes My Inspiration” next to Elliot Lurie’s divine “Brandy” shows they’ve got class-A tastes.

As Fog, Andrew Broder constructs fragile soundscapes using everything from his beloved turntables to bird whistles and music box tunes. There’s something Heath Robinson-like about his twittering creations, which use hip hop as their base but defy all attempts at categorisation and recall artists as diverse as Keith Jarrett, DoseOne and Smog. Broder has described his second LP as “an urban vaudevillian symphony”, but although a barbershop quartet looms briefly in “I Call This Song Old Tyme Dudes”, Ether Teeth is a thoroughly (post-) modern affair.

It’s reasonable to assume that anyone who’s named an album/Poo Poo On Your Juju might not play it entirely straight. Now, after dealing variously in dub, drum’n’bass, ambient, prototrance and electronica, Matt Elliott has invented something perhaps best described as gypsy glitch. Combining elements of the French chansonnier and folk traditions with experimental post-techno, the former Third Eye Foundation man has produced an LP of spooked delicacy and wheezy, wayward charm which recalls both Coil and Yann Tiersen. Odd, but oddly affecting.

Recently heard opening for Bob Dylan, Ani DiFranco says Evolve is her last album with the jazz-lite backing band that has accompanied her in recent years before she returns to “solo folk guitar”. If so, make the most of these subtly funked-up arrangements with their horns and clarinets and bebop percussion. Then turn to the lyrically dazzling 10-minute “Serpentine”, which snakes its way into the maggot-ridden apple that is contemporary America (“Uncle Sam is rigging cockfights in the promised land”). Solo and acoustic but still full of fireworks, if it points to what she intends next, a treat is in store.

The press release describes Markel’s “smooth voice”, but in fact it is rough and ragged, which presents a major obstacle to appreciating this album. Somewhere between an untrained Jeff Buckley and a reluctant Greg Dulli, this record similarly inhabits an unsatisfactory limbo between Grace and Black Love. The more obviously soul-oriented songs such as “Finer Side” and “Relics Of Reaction” are undermined by Markel’s creaking tenor, while the intimacy of “Hello Hello” is like being seduced by sandpaper. The strongest of these 11 songs is the falsetto paradise of “Pallisades Promenade”, a bit like the Association singing The Flaming Lips. Which makes it The Polyphonic Spree, I guess.