With her second (albeit successful) album proving a little too maverick for mainstream fans, it looked for a second like Macy might be the new Terence Trent D’Arby?godhead one year, forgotten the next. Yet she’s kept her eye on the ball (when not appearing in Spider-Man) over the 18 months spent recording her third. From opening single “When I See You”, which evokes both the Jackson Five and Janet Jackson, the mood is up. Sunny funk (Clintonesque in spurts) pours from most tracks, veiling the odd lyric about single moms, and the slowies are lit by noble torches. If this was Rod nobody would glance twice at it, but it’s Macy, and as such will fly fashionably off the racks. Let’s be fair: she’s one of the few industry-saviours with soul, and is indeed being herself, no trouble.

You take three established songwriters, put Martin acoustic guitars in their hands, get them to sing three-part harmonies on each other’s songs and a folk rock supergroup is born. With every other aspect of ’60s musical history revived, ripped off and revered by a generation not even born circa Woodstock, it’s surprising that the legacy of Crosby, Stills & Nash has never really been disinterred.

Until now. The Thorns are Matthew Sweet, Shawn Mullins and Pete Droge. All three have enjoyed modestly successful solo careers but now pool their talents in a manner that can’t really fail. Standouts include the yearning “I Can’t Remember”, the countryish “Think It Over”, “Dragonfly” (which has a real Stephen Stills feel) and the one cover, an uplifting rendering of the Jayhawks’ “Blue”.

Yet there’s more to them than mere acoustic strumming. “Thorns” and “I Set The World On Fire” rock tastefully. “Now I Know” is augmented by sweet strings, and “Such A Shame” is an appealing mid-tempo ballad, although all are stamped with their immaculate harmonies.

In truth, Sweet, Mullins and Droge are not as individually distinctive songwriters as their role models. They lack Stills’ virtuosity, Crosby’s left-field unpredictability or even Nash’s winning simplicity. This makes them more America than CSN, and the songs are not so much “Suite: Judy Blue Eyes” as “Horse With No Name”. But, hey. It’s a long time since we heard three-part harmonies as good as this from anyone. Perhaps the singer-songwriter supergroup is an idea whose time has come again. Think up your own dream team. Uncut’s would be Ryan Adams, Josh Rouse and Ed Harcourt.

How about it, guys?

Bret Easton Ellis’ second novel was very much of the ’80s, but one of the many clever things Roger Avary’s done with his pulsing movie adaptation is to catch the feel of that decade’s music without slavishly nuzzling obvious nostalgia trends. The underlying score, by indie-flick stalwarts tomandandy (sic), is both inventive and unsettling. Around it are layered songs of a chic, shiny kind of darkness, borrowed from various eras: tone and temperature are more important here than timeliness. Acute hysteria usurps accurate history lessons.

The Cure (are they possibly slithering back into fashion?) rattle through “Six Different Ways”; Blondie (never uncool, despite Debbie Harry’s current tendency to dress in Divine’s cast-offs) coo through the seamless “Sunday Girl”. From the ’60s, Donovan’s “Colours” accompanies the closest the film comes to a normal falling-in-love scene, and there are synthpop burbles from Erasure and Yazoo. The Rapture storm “Out Of The Races And On To The Tracks”, while the sun-baked syrup of “Afternoon Delight” by Starland Vocal Band is heroically reinvented. Yet even that re-coding is as nothing next to what Avary’s done with Nilsson’s “Without You”: here it decorates the most memorable suicide in 21st-century cinema. Somehow, if this isn’t too tasteless an observation, you have to feel Badfinger’s Pete Ham would’ve approved.

We could all live without Milla Jovovich’s attempts at singing; likewise Love And Rockets. But the inclusion of Kip Pardue’s “European Vacation” monologue, in character as Victor Ward, scattered across further tomandandy sketchings, is a manic masterstroke. A mini movie in itself, and a brilliant encapsulation of Ellis’ ghoulish humour and satirical hedonism. Avary’s pulled off the barely possible, and nailed it. The film’s polarised opinion, the soundtrack does it justice and does in your resistance. Not pretty, but hugely attractive. It rules.

Spiritual sons of New York’s Life Of Agony and forgotten emocore heroes Fireside, Sweden’s Katatonia combine Sabbath’s cosmic melancholy, Korn’s festering guitars and Jim Steinman’s flair for the melodramatic to forge an impressively doomy, reproachful metal of their own.

Riffs like those of “A Premonition” and “Wealth” don’t so much attack as shift and slide like molten lava over the surefooted rhythm section of Mattias Norrman (bass) and Daniel Liljekvist (drums). The earnestly gloomy lyrics occasionally raise a wry smile, but the tuneful delivery of vocalist/guitarist Jonas Renske is convincingly forlorn, rather like that of a small child trapped inside a pharaoh’s tomb.

Jason Merritt’s quavery, tragic voice and his band’s parched, downbeat tone make Will Oldham the obvious reference point. But a wider palette of rustic despair is eventually painted in by these unlikely country converts from New York.

Like fellow NYC yokels The Boggs, they’ve obviously heard The Band, and the arcane Americana they in turn drew on, So while Merritt’s desolate lyrics never quite double as deadpan hilarity

Even with all the ingredients of a miserably intense rock band?lead singer and brainy lyricist Damian Kulash has a semiotics degree and spent years touring with the likes of Elliott Smith?Ok Go sound… well, happy. This is an album packed with glam rock drumming, Mick Ronson-circa-Ziggy Stardust riffs, Teenage Fanclub harmonies, and even the occasional nod to The Cars (“You’re So Damn Hot”). Even the lovelorn sentiments (“Hello, My Treacherous Friends” and “Bye Bye Baby”) sound melodious and summery. Sheer unironic rock pleasure.

No self-disrespecting finger-snapping swinger should be without the music to Clooney’s clever directorial debut. Suave as the fella himself, it kicks off with a song written by the movie’s hero, Chuck Barris?or at least he claims he wrote it. Of course, he claims a lot of things. His shining pop moment, “Palisades Park” by Freddie “Boom Boom” Cannon, is as kitsch as the night is long. Elsewhere the retro-cool is greasier than a conman’s elbow, though Vicki Carr belts out “The Silencers” with such gusto we’re hushed, and George’s aunt Rosemary brings the roof off with “There’s No Business Like Show Business”. Game on.

Bernard Herrmann. To any soundtrack devotee the name’s sacred. From Psycho to Taxi Driver, his music made good movies great and great movies greater. Here he even caused a rubbish film to linger in the collective memory. Flying saucers and robots were ’50s cinema staples, spawned by a real public fear of science (in the aftermath of the atomic bomb). Robert Wise’s 1951 sci-fi message movie (war is bad) would today look more hilarious than it does were it not for Herrmann’s tonal and symmetrical score. Conducted by Joel McNeely, here it’s been recorded in digital sound for the first time. Your Earth will move.

Yann Tiersen rose to the front rank of film composers with the irresistible Amelie, but he’s keen to stress that he’d recorded for years prior to that. He’s collaborated with The Divine Comedy’s Neil Hannon, among others, and sells out the Royal Festival Hall in his own right. Goodbye Lenin!, directed by Wolfgang Becker, won awards at Berlin this spring, and Tiersen’s score is a chest-swelling thing of beauty and a million violins. Actually, 17 violins?I’ve just checked. Yann himself plays piano, melodica and violin?so that makes 18. Claire Pichet is guest vocalist. This man will be the Gabriel Yared of the decade if he plays his cards (and violins) right.

Dave Gahan

Part of a package of albums previously issued only in Japan on the Eighty-Eights label, Mad 6 finds John Coltrane’s son Ravi in relaxed and ebullient mood on a two-day session recorded last May in New York. Coltrane’s sextet work through a varied programme which includes four originals as well as Coltrane senior’s “26-2” and “Fifth House”, Monk’s “‘Round Midnight” and “Ask Me Now”, Jimmy Heath’s “Ginger Bread Boy”, and Mingus’ “Self Portrait In Three Colors”.

Lively and accomplished, this LP is a good place to make Ravi Coltrane’s acquaintance.

Seven years after declaring “The Banshees 1976-96 RIP”, Siouxsie and her sidekicks, painfully aware of the potential pitfalls, decided a reunion tour would be okay after all.

Impressively, though, they avoided any greatest hits party, choosing to play their most abrasive, claws-out material. Their aim?a cross between krautrock and Bolan?is mostly realised on this shrill, nerve-shredding document of the Shepherd’s Bush shows of last July, Former Psychedelic Fur Knox Chandler takes guitar duties, Budgie’s a one-man barrage and Sioux wails with wired angst. The likes of “Metal Postcard”, “Night Shift” and “Voodoo Dolly” will remind you there were scary style queens before Karen O was born.

Having taken their name from the Lone Star outpost nestled between Laredo and Corpus Christi (“a mysterious place haunted by a sombre and bloody past,” figured singer-songwriter Alice Schneider), the band’s earliest incarnation featured ex-Go-Between Robert Vickers and the Bad Seeds’ Jim Sclavunos. Since 2001’s Gold, both have moved on, but the scaffolding remains fixed on an unforgiving landscape haunted by dust devils and black vultures. Schneider’s delivery and attitude is part-PJ Harvey, part-Patti Smith with hayseeds, while the music is all slide guitar, reverbed Gretsch and moody strings. When she’s not straining too hard?as on the Townes Van Zandt-like title track?the voice is at its most affecting.

It’s easy to see Monster as an extended teaser for the forthcoming OutKast extravaganza: Andre 3000 and Big Boi are all over this, Killer Mike’s solo album, and he featured prominently on their last single, “The Whole World”. Indeed, “Akshon” relocates that song’s beat in a tougher environment, a good indication of the prevailing vibe. Monster comes from a gnarlier, less outlandish part of Stankonia, though Mike still reveals a playful pop sensibility on the bouncing “A.D.I.D.A.S.” and “All 4U”, a virtual Jay-Z homage. He has his own voice, mind: on the superb “Rap Is Dead”, he identifies hip hop and rock’s excessive deference to dead heroes as a hindrance to originality. An impressive debut.

For a supposed enigmatic, eccentric recluse, Germano’s been busily sociable lately, working with Eels and Ed Harcourt, acclaimed by Bowie, Gabriel, you name it. There’s a healthy guest roster on her fifth solo opus?Neil Finn, Johnny Marr, co-production by R.E.M.’s Joey Waronker. Not that all this interaction with other human beings has made her music any less spectral, frail and delicately bewildering. As the title suggests, it’s a kind of eerie concept album, loaded with the self-loathing imagery that Tori Amos gave up years ago. She still refuses to knock up any memorable tunes, but arthouse divas thus obsessed with ghosts and personal (if ill-described) demons are always fascinating.

Sincere, if vague.

Within the retro-rockin’ confines of The Black Crowes, Chris Robinson’s bluesy Rod Stewart-isms made perfect sense. On his own, however, he sounds like a man lost amid his own vast record collection. Rather than break free from group restraints and explore virgin musical territory, the solo Robinson merely waters down the Crowes formula to an irredeemably backward-looking soft country rock. New Earth Mud is a muddled debut, suggesting that the singer has yet to find comfort in his own artistic skin.

The psychedelic soul of “Fables” and “Sunday Sound” indicate fruitful new directions, but even the best tunes here cry out to be fucked with in the style of Big Star’s Third Album. Failing that, perhaps someone should slip him Jim O’ Rourke’s digits for the follow-up…

After a brief entanglement with the cruel world of the major labels, Jo and Danny retreated to their Welsh farmhouse and decided to do it themselves. Their third album, which takes its title from a Leonard Cohen line (“We are ugly but we have the music”), proves the wisdom of their decision by sounding like 2003’s equivalent of Fairport’s What We Did On Our Summer Holidays or The Waterboys’ Fisherman’s Blues. Folk flavours, Celtic fringes, subtle touches of electronica, lovely vocals and wonderfully simple but beguiling tunes?you can almost hear them smiling.

File under contemporary pastoral.

Chapel Hill, North Carolina is a vibrant, student-dominated place which tends to throw up a superior type of bar band. The Mayflies USA are symptomatic of the approach whereby poured-out emotion is lashed to the template of raucous guitars. Recalling some of that Southern gothic, R.E.M. style, with producer Keith Cleversley (Flaming Lips, Mercury Rev, Spiritualized) at the helm, Matt McMichaels’ boys live up to their album title on “Malaysia” and the hook-heavy “Written On Every Hour”. Fundamental rock music with no unnecessary frills.

The Bad Plus are a piano trio playing a powerful breed of contemporary jazz using both originals and pop covers such as Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit” and Blondie’s “Heart Of Glass”. Comprising Ethan Iverson on piano, Reid Anderson on bass and David King on drums, the band achieve an impressive impact with a wide dynamic range. These Are The Vistas, their first major label release, showcases their dramatic, occasionally quasi-classical approach with a programme which rises to heights of ferocious intensity and is never less than attention-grabbing.

As Alpha, Bristolians Andy Jenks and Corine Dingley are both tarred with the Portishead brush and unwittingly charged with taking trip hop into new territory. This is a tall order in 2003, but their combination of languid beats, lush orchestration and sophisto-stoner (male and female) vocals still works a certain powerfully seductive magic. UK dance mavericks will hardly be quaking in their boots on its release, but fans of cinematic soundscaping will be euphoric, albeit in a somewhat sedated and somnambulant fashion.