The title of the Alabama duo’s debut, The Essential Fucked Up Blues, usefully summarises the contents of this, their second album. It begins with a song called “Robert Johnson”, and the words “Woke up this morning” bawled by singer Chetley “El Cheetah” Weise as if the proverbial hellhounds are ripping him to shreds.

The effect is quite invigorating, like a remedial Pussy Galore, though the Killers come a cropper when their take on the blues becomes less iconoclastic. They’d be good live, one suspects.

Hailing from the arsehole of England (Northampton), Medium 21 do a grand job of masking their glum roots in a sandstorm of transatlantic slacker pop and the salient tones of John Clough (a harmonious croak somewhere between ’77 Bowie and The Blue Nile’s Paul Buchanan). The punchy “Acting Like A Mirror” will guarantee the youth vote, but M21 are at their best on the mature, sanguine haze of “Black And White Summer” and “Poisoned Postcards”.

As leader of Savage Republic and Scenic, Bruce Licher patented a brand of desert rock that influenced Calexico and Godspeed You! Black Emperor. For their first LP since 1996, however, Licher has steered Scenic out of the Mojave and into cosmic territories. The results are depressing: clich

Despite being one of Japan’s biggest dance DJs and having released several tech house records such as 1995’s Metronome Melody, Yokota is best known in Europe for the soulful floating ambience of recent albums such as 2000’s spellbinding Sakura. Overhead neatly bridges these two seemingly contradictory bodies of work, a downtempo set of deep house tracks that draws heavily on Middle Eastern (“Wheel Tower”), African (“Aerial Chamber”) and flamenco (“Bridgehead”) rhythms.

Now wealthy enough to not fall foul of record company lawyers (unpaid for Nana Mouskouri samples resulted in tracks being pulled from their 2000 debut Programmed To Love), The Everlasting Blink features a series of inspired if somewhat bizarre guest stars. Nuzzling alongside expected collaborators such as The Beloved’s Jon Marsh and superproducer Stephen Hague, there are vocals from David Essex (“Stay The Same”) and country legend Billie Jo Spears (“So Long Without You”), as well as an inspired uptempo number featuring ’70s soft rock icons Captain & Tennille (“Magic Love”). Mainstream success hasn’t diminished the band’s loveable lo-fi DIY ethic, however?this is quintessential English daft-tronica.

After much cheerleading from Jack White, The Detroit Cobras are the latest talented itinerants to be plucked from the Motor City’s second-hand record shops and dive bars. Like most of their compatriots, ex-exotic dancer and butcher Rachel Nagy and her bandmates make uncomplicated party music, overhauling ’60s R&B sides in a gnarled garage style close to fellow travellers The Dirtbombs. Little originality here, of course, but it’s hard not to fall for such affectionate and confident revivalism.

It’s easy to see why the American music business has become mildly orgasmic about Hot Hot Heat in the past few months. These four Canadians embrace the skinny ties and stuttering pop of The Strokes with the angular bile of early Elvis Costello and the fractionally more outr

In common with the excellent Icelandic group M

SECRETLY CANADIAN

As restless spirits go, Jason Molina takes some topping. Having grown up on the shores of Lake Erie and earned his chops in local HM outfits, Songs: Ohia was conceived as cover for a solo career whose early mandate fed into the Wills Oldham and Callahan well of black meditation. Since his self-titled 1997 debut, Molina has subtly reinvented himself at every turn, high watermarks being 2000’s crushing, compelling Ghost Tropic and last year’s Muscle Shoals-influenced Didn’t It Rain, using a full band for the first time. For his seventh full-lengther, he’s kept the back-up, the live-in-the-studio ethic and enlisted Steve Albini (in whose Chicago studio Magnolia was recorded). The results are stunning. There’s an immediacy of sound, the guitars like glass crushed underfoot, with Molina, backed by Jennie (Pinetops) Benford, compulsively electric. Neil Young is an obvious touchstone. If Ghost Tropic was Molina’s Tonight’s The Night, this is his On The Beach.

Whereas Didn’t It Rain was a veiled yearning for the past, Magnolia… struggles with emotional dislocation and epiphany via classic US metaphor: lost highways, moon-flooded crossroads and lonesome station whistle whine. Opener “Farewell Transmission” unravels with enough stoned menace to suggest the imminent cracking of a furious sky, while “John Henry Split My Heart” employs the same bruised template of gnashing guitars, suspended piano notes and Molina’s vocal double-whammy?at times vibrantly pure, at others retreating over the horizon. The sound of major talent gone major league.

For a man so steeped in the honeyed hickory grit of Gram Parsons, newcomers to Bruntnell could be forgiven for mistaking his English ‘burb origins for Bakersfield, Ca. New Zealand-born, Surrey-raised and westward soul-bound, he finally drew acclaim with 2000’s superb third LP, Normal For Bridgwater. Its follow-up is equally fine, studded with guitars (courtesy of 21-year-old James Walbourne and Son Volt’s Eric Heywood), faint washes of piano, peals of steel and a forlorn, imagistic delivery and way around a melody reminiscent of Joe Pernice. He can spit bile, too (“Tabloid Reporter”), while “Rio Tinto” would be a monster hit in a just world. A Nudie Suit short of perfection.

Damien Jurado threw a curveball on his last release, I Break Chairs, by strapping on an electric guitar and giving us a Springsteen-like album of blue-collar rock. Most Jurado fans will be delighted to know that on his fifth album (his first since leaving Sub Pop) he has returned to the naked-and-acoustic style of earlier albums like Rehearsals For Departure to give us another LP of “lo-fi dirges about caskets, mental instability and miscellaneous misery”, as his songs were once memorably described.

Where Shall You Take Me? is minimalist in every sense, clocking in at under 32 minutes. Yet despite its brevity, Jurado takes us on a journey and leaves us emotionally sated by its intensity. To look at the clock at the end of the cathartic final track and see that the hands have advanced but half an hour is to be convinced that time really has stood still.

“I’m not an evil man,” he whispers on the mesmerising opener, “Amateur Night”, “I just have a habit I can’t kick”. It’s as ominously debauched as anything on the first Velvets album. Like a collection of Appalachian murder ballads, the gentle, finger-picking acoustics lull you into a false sense of security. Then the terror of his menacing tales strikes. “Abilene” is a story of elopement or abduction?or worse. “Window”, on which Rosie Thomas harmonises, stares into the darkness and has a strong affinity with the work of Will Oldham/Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy. “I Can’t Get Over You” is a tale of such unfathomable sorrow that you fear for his sanity. “Tether”, another deceptively lovely melody, finds him at the end of it, disarmingly rational despite unimagined wounds. The closer, “Bad Dreams”, asks for salvation. But he’s “done so many bad things”, he knows none will be forthcoming.

Not for the faint-hearted, Damien Jurado is a habit which won’t necessarily bring joy to the listener. But once acquired, you will find it hard to kick.

With Skyscraper National Park, the quiet ebb and flow of Paul Hayden Desser’s cracked, sad-slow lullabies proved one of last year’s more insidious treats. On record often hushed to the brink of fade, the Canadian’s downbeat allure is set surprisingly aglow, however, before a pocket of punters. Recorded in his Toronto home town during 2002’s North American tour, this two-CD set amply demonstrates the man’s craft, the inherent strength of apparently fragile blooms added extra ballast by painterly shades of guitar, piano and strings and a deadpan humour playfully poking at the likes of Billy Joel. Includes three newly-minted ditties: “Holster”, “I Don’t Think We Should Ever Meet” and “Woody”.

If there’s a house style at Memphis Industries, it’s a sampling of the sexiest instrumental genres (’60s action TV shows, spy movies, BBC Radiophonic Workshop, soul-funk Hammond breaks, psych-acid middle-eights) remodelled with a patina of hip hop rhythms and cutting-edge technology.

Blue States are pack leaders after their 28 Days Later soundtrack work, but even artists who grate over an arch album’s length (for example, Squire Of Somerton) are sultrily effective in this varied home, which for once reconnects experimental and pop music.

Does the world need an R&B Andrew WK? The queenly Kelly Osbourne and various indie dignitaries evidently think so, given their patronage of Sean Tillman’s farcically hypersexualised alter ego. Actual R&B fans may think otherwise, even if Har Mar Superstar’s drooling electro-funk parodies do betray a latent affection for fellow Minneapolis self-mythologiser, Prince. The thought occurs, though: why waste time on incompetent satire when the best R&B celebrates its own absurdity so effectively?

The Oasis supremo was so impressed by The ‘Burn that he signed them up as a support band before they had released as much as a seven-inch single. Sally O’Mattress is a highly accomplished rock album with some unerring Oasis similarities (just listen to “Steel Kneel”back to back with “Fade In/Out”). However, “Calling All” and “Both Faces”are wonderfully vibrant and first single “Drunken Fool”is the sort of jangly folk-rock that Starsailor would die for. It’s nothing that you haven’t heard before, but no less enjoyable for it.