In and out of bands since 1986, Holler laid down a set of tracks between 1990 and 1992 featuring Tam Johnstone (The General Store) and Rick Corcoran (later to achieve cult status with his neo-psychedelic The Orgone Box). Cast in the melodic, guitar-driven power pop mould of Cheap Trick, Dwight Twilley et al, this album effortlessly hurdles the constrictions of the genre, aspiring to earn a place in the pantheon of great British adult pop alongside Squeeze, Nick Lowe, even The Beatles. Available in shops or direct from Holler himself via www.sugarbush.u-net.com

Occupying the ground somewhere between the Delta blues and the US folk tradition, Chris Whitley has often appeared a journeyman toiling worthily in the songwriting vineyard.

Hotel Vast Horizon isn’t going to change that perception, even though no less an authority than Bruce Springsteen is a fan. It’s a thoroughly decent record that finds Whitley working acoustically with the support only of drummer Matthias Macht and bassist Heiko Schramm. The problem is that someone like Ben Harper does this sort of thing with far more panache.

“Hooligan house” is an inadequate term to describe the scope of this remarkable album from Tom Dinsdale and Simon Franks. This certainly isn’t a raved-up Oasis; rather think of the Stereo MCs cohabiting with a leaner Prodigy?hear Franks’ vocals on the opening “The Snake”?with a tinge of The Streets’ urban angst, though there’s none of Mike Skinner’s black humour here.

“100 Million” is a danceable enough start, but things turn seriously bleak with the pitiless “Way Too Long.” propelled by a brilliant sample of Elvis Costello’s guitar riff from “(I Don’t Want To Go To) Chelsea” constantly stabbing at the song like Stanley knives into the back of the singer’s neck.

Musically, the Bullys come across like the dark side of 1981: “Real Life” could almost be Cabaret Voltaire, while recent hit “We Don’t Care” could be Suggs singing Gary Numan’s “Cars”. Their use of samples is ingenious?hear what they do with Joe Cocker on “Face In A Cloud”?and sometimes poignant (the jaunty ’60s orchestral sample subverting the confusion expressed on “The Things”).

And yet their brutal beats are married to fabulous pop songs. “The Snow” is a dance monster worthy of Basement Jaxx. Primal Scream were once capable of songs like “I Go To Your House”. And the infuriatingly catchy title track, a more realistic “Parklife”, is Madness kidnapped by Fischerspooner. Then hear the dread and uncertainty expressed in the odd untitled extra track, or the sombre drug undertone to the jolly “The Snow”.

Ego War is a grey and foreboding photo of make-do-and-mend Britain in 2003, but it’s a compelling one nonetheless.

It’s been 36 years since the last Yardbirds album, Little Games, and with Keith Relf electrocuted and Jimmy Page a no-show, you’d expect a reformed unit based around guitarist Chris Dreja and drummer Jim McCarty to lack charisma. And they do. Despite guest appearances from Vai, Satriani, Slash and Brian May, they fail utterly to breathe new life into old hits like “Shapes Of Things” and Graham Gouldman’s “For Your Love”. Surprisingly, it’s the new tracks that impress more. A gnarly and bloody-minded Jeff Beck adds fire to the chaotic blues of “My Blind Life”, while the smooth prog of “Dream Within A Dream” and “The Mystery Of Being” point to a new career co-headlining with Wishbone Ash.

Twenty-one-year-old John Wells follows his killer tracks on the respected Musiq Aus Strom imprint with a lush debut that fuses sizzled beats with deep, aquatic melodies and sublime synths. An essential purchase for Autechre and Boards Of Canada fans.

Gerhard (GD Luxxe) Potuznik began making music influenced by all things Mancunian (The Fall, Joy Division, The Smiths) in the early ’80s, and has had an extensive career both as a solo artist and in collaboration with the likes of Chicks On Speed.

Twenty years on and still obsessed with “Everything’s Gone Green”-era New Order, Potuznik has created an album of dark, disjointed, disturbing electronica that still somehow manages to lift the spirit.

A remix package worked on by Adult., DMX Krew, Ectomorph and Patrick Pulsinger is also available.

Natalie and Nicole Appleton’s ‘solo’ debut sees them trying out many styles. Not all of it works (the listless rock of “Fantasy”, the bland ballad “Don’t Worry”), but tracks like “5 am” and “All Grown Up” are imaginatively produced and exude autumnal poignancy. The epic “Ring-A-Ding-Ding”, with its Eastern string flourishes, could pass as a pop flipside to the desperation of Massive Attack’s “Antistar”. And on the brilliant “Hallelujah” (Sakamoto does Chic’s “At Last I Am Free”) and the Beverley Sisters-on-acid wig-out of “MWA”, the Appletons brush their palms with genius. Keep an eye on them?they could be more than 3am Girls fodder.

Air’s soundtrack to Sofia Coppola’s The Virgin Suicides may have missed the movie’s humour in favour of the obvious melancholia, but the resulting score provided added resonance to even the most lightweight scene. Here, Air attempt to do the same for leading Italian author Alessandro Baricco, by soundtracking a reading of his western novels. The result is exactly what it says on the label. An Italian bloke talking over Air’s trademark Beck meets Bowie prog-lite. Roughly translated, that means three stories, divided into 19 tracks which are, at best, beautifully hypnotic, or, at worst, dull.

At times, this sounds like an experiment promulgated by Parlophone’s A&R department. Here, variously, is the Mockney joviality of Blur when they at least appeared happy, the production fizz of the Beta Band, and the well-adjusted emoting of Coldplay, plus some faux-West Coast gloss. It’s a cunning blend, impressive on last year’s sunny hit, “You Got The Style”. After a while, though, Athlete’s very amiability begins to grate, as does the fact that, for all their diverse influences, Vehicles And Animals is a wearyingly one-dimensional 45 minutes.

Jazz-electronica quartet Supersilent distinguish themselves from other groups in the Norwegian scene by not using sequenced set-ups as the basis for their music. Nor do they rehearse or discuss their music in advance, instead collectively improvising it in the moment. The general approach on this, their sixth album, is darkly moody, slow and hypnotic. It’s difficult to measure the success of such music, which depends on the listener’s receptivity. Those of avant-garde taste may be persuaded.

As they’ve been gigging with The Hives, D4 and The Datsuns, you may have expected The Divine Brown to be receiving awards and chart attention. However, their loud guitars and angry rhythms aren’t as easily packaged. Larry Loud’s singing may be more Sham 69 than Stooges but the band know how to write a three-minute punk anthem. Neither subtle nor original, but on songs like “Superlive 45” TDB sound like a cool, vibrant band.

Imagine you’re combing the racks of your favourite cool record store, one of those sub-High Fidelity dives with a coupla snooty geeks behind the counter and some Sun Ra covers on the wall. You’re flipping through the ’80s Hardcore section, looking for an ancient Millions Of Dead Cops LP, swimming in Raymond Pettibon graphics, when all of a sudden… What’s this? The Finger’s We Are Fuck You/Punk’s Dead Let’s Fuck? Who? What? Musta come from some boondock town in one of the “vowel states”?Ohio or Iowa. The singer’s name is Jim Beahm?a distant cousin, perchance, of Jan Paul Beahm, aka Darby Crash.

Enough already. Suffice to say this was the fantasy scenario in the minds of Jesse Malin and Ryan Adams as they killed time after working on Malin’s justly-praised The Fine Art Of Self Destruction last summer. Or so rumour has it, since both Malin and Adams legally have nowt to do with The Finger.

Presented and packaged anonymously, complete with SST-style design, We Are Fuck You/Punk’s Dead Let’s Fuck is an amusing homage to suburban US hardcore circa 1982, sounding like a hybrid of a hundred bands of the time but nothing like as pulverising as Black Flag in their prime. Most of it’s generic’core. Some of it sounds like late Ramones and some of it sounds like bad Bl

Less self-conscious and more organic than 2001 debut Indian Ink, My Elixir (recorded in a summer barn while MBICR were homeless) eschews the artsy, antsy blasts of sudden guitar squall for a more measured?though no less disturbing?trawl through gothic psychosis. Despite the sex, blades and blood-clotted imagery, the quietly propulsive banks of piano, keyboards and horns are both morbidly beautiful and utterly engrossing, fetching up somewhere between This Mortal Coil, Godspeed You! Black Emperor and Movietone, while singer Emily Gray exudes all the clipped English bile of Black Box Recorder’s Sarah Nixey.

It’s odd to think of Placebo as being no longer relevant, as singer Brian Molko’s early after-the-horse-has-bolted bleatings on the subject of androgyny and bisexuality surely saw them start out as the most irrelevant band on the planet. But now there’s doubt in the Placebo camp itself, what with Muse and JJ72 upping the stakes in guitar-based melodrama. Their solution is to recruit electro-guru Jim Abbiss but, though he adds some delicious keyboard snatches and has “Something Rotten” sounding like Portishead produced by Liam Howlett, he can’t salvage much from the band’s often tedious three-chord bustlings or Molko’s lamely repetitious lyrics. Must try harder.

It starts with a shivery vibrato guitar, straight off one of those ’60s New York soul ballads?Betty Harris’ “Cry To Me”, perhaps, or Garnett Mimms & The Enchanters’ “I’ll Take Good Care Of You”. A little while later it peels away into a bruising Neil and Crazy Horse blowout called “Real Live Bleeding Fingers And Broken Guitar Strings”. Then it shrinks back into “Over Time”, a slow-shuffle four-in-the-morning ballad that could be second cousin to Sweet Old World’s “Little Angel, Little Brother”. (Why, incidentally, wasn’t that heartbreaker on the soundtrack to Ken Lonergan’s sublime movie You Can Count On Me?)

Where else does World Without Tears go? Easier to ask where it doesn’t. Cut more or less live in a ’20s mansion in downtown Los Angeles, it’s the most extraordinary smorgasbord of styles, moods, modes, a far more daring, jolting record than 2001’s Essence. Just when you’re ready to sink into the murky recess of the Lucinda Williams corner booth and drown in a flat beer she pulls another surprise out of the hat and you’re back on your feet hollering again.

Even more jolting than “Bleeding Fingers” is “Atonement”, an industrial blues monster that lurches and grinds like Tom Waits’ “Heartattack And Vine” or (more specifically) Captain Beefheart’s Blue Collar cameo “Hard Workin’ Man”. Ironically Bible-belting it may be, “Get Right With God” it ain’t. It must be the most brutal thing Williams has ever recorded.

“I’m really excited about this record because it’s different from anything I’ve done before,” Lu says in her Lost Highway press release. “Each song has a different flavour and reflects some of my influences. I think it shows a natural progression. Plus, it has some up-tempo stuff on it and I think it was time for me to do that.”

Let’s not overstate this: within the 13 tracks there’s still a generous dollop of diamond-cut country-soul moping. Lovers of Lucinda at her most chiselled and desolate are hardly going to be let down by the wintry Marianne Faithfull lament of “Minneapolis” or the baleful ache of “Ventura” and “Words Fell”. And let’s not forget, either, that Williams has on occasions rocked out with the best of ’em. Part Tammy Wynette, part Chrissie Hynde, part rock-chick Eudora Welty, Lady Lu is the closest thang we have to a distaff Steve Earle?or should that be the other way round?

But World Without Tears nonetheless emerges some way from the backwater bayou that birthed Car Wheels On A Gravel Road and Essence. There’s less small-town blues here, more grappling with the bigger picture of America today. A part of that is down to the inclusion towards the end of the album of a song called, unpromisingly, “American Dream”. Wearily rapped in the persona of a dispossessed Navajo Indian, over a glassy electric-piano-and-rimshot arrangement that’s equal parts Gil Scott-Heron and “Riders On The Storm”, it’s a withering deconstruction of Dubya Nation, a country in which “everything is wrong”, at least for the growing majority of have-nots.

No doubt “American Dream” will cause Williams to be pilloried as anti-patriotic by her warmongering compatriots and Universal will order the track to be dropped. Less a world without tears, methinks, than a country without dissident voices.

There’s rapping, too, on what for me is easily World Without Tears’ most moving track, “Sweet Side”. The song is just two strummed acoustic chords and a smear of Delta slide, but Lucinda’s heartrending address to a damaged lover, seeing the beaten boy in the emotionally crippled man, moved me to tears. “You had the blues ever since you were six/Your tennis shoes and your pick-up sticks…” If Eminem could get vulnerable enough to write one song as powerful as this I might forgive all the megalomaniacal belly-aching about the pressures of his own notoriety.

Another way of pointing up the difference between Essence and World… is to note that there’s less of the easy, greasy sensuality we heard on the earlier album: ain’t no “Are You Down” or “Steal Your Love” here, bub. Williams sounds alternately loveless or pushing her energies outwards: only second track “Righteously” consorts with the carnal, and even that comes with a lip-curl of reproach. (As another mark of the album’s sonic flavour, Doug Pettibone’s guitar breaks here are less ’70s country-rockin’ and more ’80s blues-metal?think Billy Gibbons circa Eliminator, or even, weirdly in places, the Sterling Morrison of Live 1969.)

There’s further reproach on “Those Three Days” (as in, “Did you only need me for…?”)?when Lu wails “And I feel so fucking alone”, it fucking stings. The album’s title (and penultimate) track is like one of those mid-’70s country-soul morality tales so beloved of Ry Cooder, complete with a gospelly, Bobby King/Terry Evans-style chorus. “People Talkin'”, a swipe at gossiping slanderers, kicks off like The Band’s “The Weight” but is the only really so-so offering on the record.

The really good news is that World Without Tears comes just two years after Essence, which in turn followed just three years after the Grammy-grabbing Car Wheels On A Gravel Road. The agonisingly protracted six-year birth of Car Wheels… would seem to be a thing of the past, meaning that we can expect at least a couple more masterpieces before the decade’s end.

There are still things that irritate about Lucinda Williams?the mannered slurring of some of her singing; the cold precision of certain songs; the preciousness about her Southernness, and about her own poetic origins. But World Without Tears indicates that this fiftysomething gal is brave enough to ruffle feathers and rock boats?to get off the Lost Highway and depart the sometimes overly-cosy country of Alt. As such, it’s worth every one o’ them broken strings and bleeding fingers.

Together with brother Charlie in the late ’30s, Monroe’s cross-pollination of traditional Celtic reels and southern American gospel assured him immortality as the founding father of bluegrass. With frenzied tempos, vaulting vocals and classic mandolin-guitar-fiddle-bass-banjo recipe, the Bluegrass Boys were pivotal in dragging hillbilly music into the US mainstream. His three-decade Decca career includes “I’m Blue I’m Lonesome”, “Raw Hide” and moving ode to his mentor “Uncle Pen”, while “Blue Moon Of Kentucky” was the one that prompted young Elvis to jump truck and head for Sun Studios.

Harvey has long merited a proper compilation. The first disc is devoted to his pre-Sensational Alex Harvey Band days in the ’60s and finds him experimenting with everything from blue-eyed soul (a blistering version of “Shout” which knocks Lulu’s for six) and the musical Hair to psychedelia and free jazz. But his art clearly found its ideal home in SAHB, which is the sole focus of the second disc. The brutal theatrical rock of “The Faith Healer” and avant-glam of “Swampsnake” sound amazingly contemporary, and his simultaneously hammy and frightening renditions of Brel’s “Next” and Tom Jones’ “Delilah” can still induce awe.

Time’s passage only adds to the mysterious, awkward, gone beauty of the Associates, one of Britain’s greatest, most frustrating and fragile bands. These session snapshots show that Billy Mackenzie, though their most enduring talent, was dependent on multi-instrumentalist partner Alan Rankine for many early effects.

In 1982, just prior to their split, Mackenzie’s yelping, ululating voice is sliced to slivers over pensive synths on “Australia”, and swirls under the compressed disco thunder of a rethought “Love Hangover”. His first post-Rankine instinct is a voice-indulging Billie Holiday cover, before restoring more regular electronic rhythms. It’s nearly all unearthly, personal and perversely ambitious.

A WORLD BEWITCHED

ARTFUL

“Hey hey hey hey…” And so The Fall suddenly find themselves in the curious position of ad-land giants, thanks to the Vauxhall Corsa ‘Hide and Seek’ jingle featuring the, er, rocking “Touch Sensitive”. A fitting enough motor, of course, since Mark E Smith’s droll visions have always deflated the highfalutin; so we can’t blame him for nicking a few quid where he can. A Past Gone Mad mines a ’90s hinterland, from Extricate via Middle Class Revolt to Smudger’s solo The Post Nearly Man, but the single will sell it.

A World Bewitched is a quick re-release that should open the eyes of those who find The Fall to be an acquired taste, as it offers a jamboree bag of easily accessible collaborations with the Badly Drawn fella, Edwyn Collins and acolytes Elastica. At this rate, Smith might end up a multi-millionaire.