Compared with the abstract, buried rhythms of 2002’s Confield, Autechre’s new album sees Sean Booth and Rob Brown cautiously reconnect with humanity. Their titles (“Tapr”, “P:Ntil”) still seem to stem from a dyslexic pharmacy, but through the scratchy fog of the opening “Xylin Room” a beat is dimly discernible. By the time we reach “Surripere” we could be listening to a toughened-up Aphex Twin, poignant harmonies battling against oblique but splintering beats.

“Theme Of Sudden Roundabout” is even danceable, and “V-Proc” would be ambient in more clueless hands, but here the repose is systematically unseated by increasingly fractious electro-blurts.

Initially it seemed like a fun, if limited, concept:four Californian high school girls, all allegedly called Donna, playing snarky bubblegum rock that resembled Joan Jett fronting The Ramones. Five albums on, The Donnas miraculously remain a great idea, legal drinking ages, a major deal and endless repetition notwithstanding.

Men continue to be objects of scorn, and the prevailing aesthetic is still of a sleepover circa 1979. Inspiration, however, has pleasingly shifted to incorporate Cheap Trick, so that Spend The Night emerges as the sharp-minded, dumb-riffed album Courtney Love tried to make with Celebrity Skin. Oh, and singer Donna A’s real name is Brett Anderson. Neat.

Tegan and Sara Quinn know all the right people. Their debut album is released on Neil Young’s Vapor label and they’ve toured in support of Ryan Adams. In truth, they have little in common musically with either of them, and If It Was You is a collection of energetic girl-pop full of surging melodies, VH1-friendly hooks and a fashionable punkiness (one song is called “Want To Be Bad”) that sounds more like Madonna’s discovery Michelle Branch or a grown-up version of Avril Lavigne. They have a more intimate side, heard on “Don’t Confess”and the banjo-laden “Living Room”, which sounds a little like the Be Good Tanyas gone pop. But mostly it’s unashamedly upbeat. And all the more welcome for that.

Following 2001’s debut Beat Your Crazy Head Against The Sky, the only band with a multi-album deal on Alan McGee’s Poptones return with another record of summer ’60s pop. The Byrds and Beach Boys influences are strong, especially on the lilting “Make My Day”and “Looking For Love”. But there is also a whiff of Drawn From Memory-era Embrace, especially in Sunday Times rock critic-turned-frontman Adam Howorth’s winsome vocals. The highlight is the towering “Last Night”, which recalls Mercury Rev’s “The Dark is Rising”. Captain Soul (itself a Byrds song title) mix up classic and contemporary influences, only they do it well.

Followers of Spunk, the all-female improv quartet of which Maria Ratjke is a founder member, will probably constitute the only audience for this, her first solo album, which, to say the least, is challenging, occasionally verging on the unlistenable. No conventional songs, indeed very few conventional vocalisings, feature on this disc in which Ratjke’s strong, attractive voice is electronically processed into firestorms of cut-up noise. Those in the market for experimentalism may find there is something to take their fancy in this uncompromising release.

KILLING TIME BETWEEN MEALS

Vendetta Red caused something of a minor sensation in 2002, with volatile live shows?singer Zach Davidson once inadvertently chewed someone’s skull while stagediving?that won them an astronomical deal with Epic. Between The Never And The Now showcases why, combining fiery, earnest emo-punk with the stadium dynamics of U2 and The Who. At The Drive-In and Sunny Day Real Estate are other plausible comparisons, but neither had quite such shameless anthemic clout. One worry for their paymasters, though: while Vendetta Red seem like a perfect hybrid to satisfy both hardcore and trad rock fans, there’s a chance they might actually alienate the conservative majorities of both tribes.

The 12 tracks on this stunning LP by Bill Halliday and Gareth Jones, labelmates of Uncut favourites The Russian Futurists, were recorded over two years “in various bedrooms in and around Toronto”. Imagine the askew, deadpan pop of early Eno blended with bucolic ’60s West Coast echoes and punctuated by proto-Neptunes breakbeats?hear how the beats on “Are You Lonesome Tonight” (not a Presley cover) suddenly leap out at you from the speakers. Pleasingly, one never knows what to expect: “This Girl And This Boy” is worthy of Brian Wilson, while “In Bloom” sounds like early Richard Carpenter trying his hand at free improv.

Recently seen supporting Arthur Lee and Love on the Forever Changes tour, the debut album from Scotland’s Draw is all fuzzy guitars and histrionics from singer Brent Proctor recalling Catherine Wheel or, more recently, JJ72. The best tracks, such as “Silver Screen”, rock pleasingly enough. Their dreamier side, displayed on “A Chance To Disappear” and “Courage”, is less convincing, and it’s hard to escape the conclusion that the songs aren’t quite yet good enough to encompass their ambition. One to watch?but some way short of the finished article.

Almost half a century after it headed on the road to corporate domination, rock culture’s unpredictability?in the face of formulae frauds, and trend-setting fatigue?ensures enduring fascination. Two years ago, just before the British media caught the White Stripes bandwagon, who would have thought that Jack and Meg White would be recognised as saviours.

Consider their history. In 1996 Jack Gillis, the owner of a Detroit upholstery store, already a veteran of Motorcity garage rock also-rans Goober And The Peas, The Go and Rocket 88, marries barmaid Meg White. Taking his wife’s surname and passing himself off as her brother, Jack devises a two-piece band based on minimalist but striking red and white presentation and fixated on the base musical elements of blues, punk and country.

The self-titled debut highlights Jack’s incendiary guitar riffs and Meg’s bare-boned drum accents. Alongside the Robert Johnson and Bob Dylan covers, the talent for transmuting folk narratives into rough-diamond pop shines through. A second album, De Stijl, takes its name from the back-to-basics art design school of the early 1900s and emphasises both the Stripes’ primal power and furthers Jack’s funny, thoughtful persona. He’s an out-of-time/out-of-place Southern gentleman laying down a blues code of honour for the post-Generation X kids lost and rootless on the cyber highway.

When the paparazzi on the cover shot of their 2001 major label debut White Blood Cells became reality, heavy rotation on MTV and a Top 30 single, “Hotel Yorba”, followed. The question was: how long could they stand the white heat of the spotlight? The couple had divorced in 2000 and Jack, already making plans to launch an acting career, had made it clear the group had a limited lifespan, and even acolytes thought their career was destined to be played out beneath the mass media radar.

But there was also the hint that they were still keeping some powder dry, adding to their store of mercurial brilliance, ready when the time came to unleash something even more mindblowing than “I Think I Smell A Rat”, funnier than “You’re Pretty Good Looking (For A Girl)”, even more deranged than “The Big Three Killed My Baby”.

Elephant, a raging, cantankerous beast (recorded in London’s Toerag studios), is where those hints blossom into incontrovertible fact. Laced with enough blue-eyed longing (“You’ve Got Her In Your Pocket”) to make the most diehard Gram Parsons fan weep with wonder and the sort of verbal acuity that would give even Dylanologists pause for thought, Elephant is where the tabloid phenomenon of summer 2001 prove they are no flash in the pan by making a truly phenomenal record.

In its promo double vinyl incarnation, Elephant calls to mind pre-digital double albums like Blonde On Blonde, Exile On Main Street or London Calling. Like those landmarks, it features a group at their peak rejoicing in basic forms while bursting beyond their limitations.

The taut opener, “Seven Nation Army”, explodes with Jack verging on the edge of apoplectic fury. Both here and on the blistering “There’s No Home For You Here”?which climaxes in a talking-tongues outburst of contempt and features an astonishing multi-tracked, Vocodered backdrop?media clamour is a springboard for statements of faith and intent.

Elsewhere, the album’s declared theme?”the death of the sweetheart”?is fleshed out by White exploring blues lore at its most outrageously macho on “Ball And Biscuit”. Centred on a pelvis-pulsing riff overlaid with perfectly aimed bursts of Hendrix hysteria, its uproarious swagger feeds off a succession of great lines: “It’s quite possible that I’m your third man girl/But it’s a fact that I’m the seventh son” or “Tell everybody in the place to just get out and we can get clean together/And I’ll find me a soapbox where I can shout about it”.

A wracked cover version of Bacharach and David’s “I Just Don’t Know What To Do With Myself” indicates lofty songwriting intent. The gorgeous “I Want To Be With The Boy” rises to the challenge, the reverberating keyboards and worn vocal recalling the Stones in country-inflected mode. But this is no Primal Scream-style shallow homage, it’s a product of White’s individual and engaging schizophrenia.

When Meg sings the unabashedly sexy “Cold, Cold Night” accompanied by White’s suggestive bass organ pedals, the pleasure this pair take in toying with sexual role-play is palpable. The theme is replayed on the closing “It’s True That We Love One Another”, joined by Billy Childish associate Holly Golightly. The White Stripes devise a singalong love triangle that toys with their own myth. Was the marriage a con or was the divorce a put-on? Or is it simply that their musical relationship really is closer than blood brother and sister?

Such queries are the stuff of website intrigue but ultimately immaterial. The White Stripes’ zeal, the sense of newness they bring to old genres, their incandescent performances and razor-sharp songwriting put forerunners like The Jon Spencer Blues Explosion in the shade.

Compared to the Stripes, The Strokes barely register, the one-note pleasures of The Hives and The Datsuns mere ripples to their big bang. They are quite simply in a league of their own. Ladies and gentlemen, your Elephant is ready and waiting.

Fatal Recordings?formed as a sub-label of Digital Hardcore, but since divorced from it?is a platform for electronica that strives to break away from the male-dominated music business. Hopefully this will give Elias space to flourish as, behind the riot grrrl posturing and iD-style make-up, this is actually a disappointingly safe album that fails to stray from the path of sleazy electrotrash laid down by the likes of Lydia Lunch et al over the years.

Mapping the evolutionary twists of Cave In is a tricky business. Active since 1995, early records experimented with chaotically corrosive trash metal before making way for the prog bombast of 2000’s Jupiter. By last year’s Tides Of Tomorrow EP, the excess flab had been trimmed, throwing their inherent gift for melody into sharper relief. Antenna compresses the formula further, fetching up crisp, anthemic crunch-rock several notches above the inexplicably popular likes of Bush or Papa Roach and suggesting a classic may soon be within reach.

Initial, eventually-junked work on this album with the British team behind recent banal smashes by Enrique Iglesias, and the title track’s No 1 success on America’s “Adult” chart, show the taste-tightrope Hall & Oates walk right now. Recent compilations revealed how their Philly soul roots mutated into monstrously beat-slamming, melodic synth-soul; supreme ’80s pop craft. Do It For Love instead teeters near the pretty vacancy of today’s blue-eyed chart acts. Only the duo’s ear for a hook, Hall’s still-soaring voice, and Rundgren’s help on an eccentric cover of The New Radicals’ “Someday We’ll Know” keeps them special, just.

Recorded with a nine-piece band before an invited audience, this is an ebullient showcase for the Tom Tom Club’s musical prowess. “Suboceana” showpieces brutal funk-rock guitar and swirling synthesized effects, while the hypnotic groove of “The Man With The 4-Way Hips” reveals enough surprises during its 10-minute-plus duration not to overstay its welcome. With effective reworkings of “96 Tears”, Lee Perry’s “Soul Fire” and Al Green’s “Take Me To The River” (once covered by Talking Heads), this is a home win for the postmodern rhythm freaks.

Comprising at its best music of real depth and spirituality, flautist Malik Mezzadri’s second album is a two-disc collection of which the first is truly impressive. The basis of the music is eclectic, combining many world music flavours. His quintet negotiate these with aplomb and subtle invention, playing together as if for many years. Devoted to collective improvisations within a system devised by Mezzadri, the second disc is less accessible and somewhat less gripping.

Although temporarily abandoned when Cash lost her voice during pregnancy, Rules Of Travel signals a striking reawakening for a too often overlooked talent. Aided by husband John Leventhal’s arrangements, she spurns formula to find unerring fidelity to songs of heartbreak and maturity. Cash puts her experience to use on the slow-burning eroticism of the Earle-assisted “I’ll Change For You”, while the duet with her father and “Closer Than I Appear” match her pop roots with throbbing obsession and vengeance. A deeply felt and accomplished return.

Ian McCulloch and will sergeant are without doubt one of the great partnerships of the post-punk era. And, in theory, Sergeant could drop a sparkling psychedelic lick upon each of Slideling’s 11 tracks and we’d be looking at the follow-up to 2001’s Flowers. But he hasn’t, and we’re not. And yet the absence of Sergeant’s riffing is pretty much all that really distinguishes the sound of the Bunnymen from solo McCulloch.

Either way, and with no disrespect to his sparring partner, Slideling is the best album McCulloch’s had a hand in since 1984’s Ocean Rain. Unlike 1989’s deeply personal Candleland and 1992’s disappointing Mysterio, both recorded in post-split/pre-reformation acrimony, this time he’s just moonlighting from Bunnyland.

All the same, it’s a busman’s holiday. “Stake Your Claim” and the gorgeous “Sliding” are as heart-skippingly splendid as “Bring On The Dancing Horses”, the chorus of “Arthur” as deliciously romantic as “Nothing Lasts Forever” and the dazzling “Kansas” finds Mac up to his shades in heaven, hell and hopes writ large in the stars.

That said, here McCulloch is freer to scratch his Lou Reed itch, obvious from the opening chug of “Love In Veins” through to “High Wires” (with its “some kinda love” chorus) and most blatantly “Baby Hold On”, which unblinkingly robs “Walk On The Wild Side” of its sliding bass sound. He’s also more sentimental on his own, such as on the Beatlesy “Playgrounds And City Parks”, which is too sappy for your average Bunnymen LP perhaps but more than welcome here.

Slideling is an intense, uplifting rush of blood to the head (no pun intended?Coldplay’s Chris Martin and Jonny Buckland feature on “Sliding” and “Arthur”).

Smashing stuff, Mac?but for the love of trenchcoats and camo’, don’t go giving up the day job just yet.

More than most bands, Fleetwood Mac evince complex, unresolved feelings. On the one hand they’re the ultimate mainstream soft-rock dinosaur, past masters of glossy emotions and overcooked arrangements. On the other hand…

On the other hand what, exactly? It’s not like Fleetwood Mac are Abba?So Uncool They’re Cool. But nor have Fleetwood Mac ever been So Cool They’re Uncool…if you know what I mean. So what are they, and why does a goodly percentage of their music stand up after decades? I guess because a) witchy woman Stevie Nicks has the voice of a petulant siren; b) studio geek Lindsey Buckingham still wants to be Brian Wilson; and c) Fleetwood Mac were and are truly a band for boys and girls. Good things all.

So here they come again, in a post-post-punk, hip hop-dominated universe, keen to make meaningful music. And there’s a historical parallel here: just as 1979’s ‘brave, off-the-wall’ double album Tusk followed 1977’s stratosphere-busting Rumours, so the almost-double CD Say You Will follows the play-safe ‘live greatest hits’ thing that was 1997’s The Dance.

The funny thing is that Tusk, when you revisit it, doesn’t sound off the wall at all. Which makes Say You Will all the more out-there as mainstream rock product. Next to Tusk, indeed, this 18-track opus is a box of All-Sorts replete with countless different colours and moods.

As one would expect, there’s a slew of those Stevie Nicks songs that are essentially narcissistic hymns to, well, Stevie Nicks. One of them is called “Silver Girl”, no less. Another, “Illume”, is a bongo-driven meditation on life post-9/11 and boasts the priceless line, “I am a cliff dweller from the old school”. Gotta love the woman: on the closing “Goodbye Baby” she sounds like Kate Bush spliced with Victoria Williams.

Then there are Lindsey’s songs, some of which date back to the solo ‘project’ that should have come out after his 1992 opus Out Of The Cradle. What makes Say You Will really great are Lindsey tracks like “Red Rover”, “Come” and “Say Goodbye”. The heady melodicism and hyper-syncopation of “Rover” are intoxicating. The shimmering “Say Goodbye”?all dappled guitars and whispered vocals?suggests Lindsey has been listening to modern-day troubadours like Elliott Smith.

The album peaks somewhere in the middle, with “Rover” followed by the effortlessly shiny Steviepop of the title track and then by first single “Peace Keeper”, a true Bucks/Nicks joint effort. Both pack killer choruses, as insidiously sweet-sad as vintage Mac classics from “Silver Springs” to “Gypsy”. Nicks’ “Running Through The Garden” is early-’80s hippie power pop, with a layered keyboard hook and chugging noo wave guitar.

For obvious reasons the only flavour missing on Say You Will is the departed Christine’s perfect Tango In The Night bop-pop, making the album more Buckingham-Nicks Redux than anything else. (You can hear Chrissie, though, on the moody, thumping “Murrow”.) That’s OK, because there’s so much here to get one’s teeth into.

Tusk this isn’t, but Tusk it doesn’t need to be. In an age of off-the-shelf Linda Perry pop, the Mac keep the mainstream interesting. Say you’ll give it a spin.

Vini Reilly, a true visionary, put this phenomenal album together following the illness and death of his mother. Ironically, he sounds more alive than at any time since his work on Morrissey’s Viva Hate in 1988. In fact, this is probably his finest record since 1981’s L.C. Despite the events which led to these songs, the sense of rejuvenation is strong: hear the breakbeat-powered “Love Is A Friend” and “No More Hurt” with his distinctive voice (surely an influence on Ian Brown) and passionate guitar playing. The two songs which cut the deepest, though, are the ballad “Requiem For My Mother” and “Spanish Lament”, which makes brilliant use of a sample from David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive. This could be Reilly’s masterpiece.

First Jesse Malin’s solo debut, now Concussion?if anything, this is an even finer record than The Fine Art Of Self Destruction. Steve Earle described Ryan as “one of the best songwriters I’ve seen come to Nashville”, and he’s no bullshitter. It’s mostly sparse stuff, just acoustic guitar and maybe a single cello, though “Devastation”, a duet with Lucinda Williams, and a pained cover of The Clash’s “Somebody Got Murdered” do raise the tempo.

Throughout, Ryan croaks these perfect phrases?”Life alone will humble you” (“Rabbit”), “With you by my side I’m nearly satisfied” (“Chickering Angel”)?as he tells his tales of the disenchanted and emotionally disembowelled. Quite brilliant.