More prolific in this operatic alter ego than his day job (where, with Peter Kruder, he’s a celebrated DJ, remixer of Madonna and co, and recording artist in a vein between acid jazz, trip hop and light techno), Richard Dorfmeister reunites with childhood friend Rupert Huber for Tosca’s latest. Richly textured sounds and smooth rhythms are impressively assembled for a sort of coldly funky lounge motorik. A second CD dubs up Huber’s classical piano to no purpose.

After an abortive set of demos recorded with Brian Wilson in the early-’90s, March fell in with French producer Bertrand Burgalat and recorded Chrominance Decoder, one of The New Yorker’s Top 10 albums of 1999. Continuing in the same vein, Triggers revels in ’60s and ’70s French and American pop idioms, brought up to date by eclectic production and Tricatel’s explosive house band A.S Dragon. Sung mostly in French, this is fabulously funky Francophile fun.

For an artist so stigmatised by outsiderdom, Johnston’s influence is immense. Down the years, his unbearably poignant, no-fi scrapings have tended the souls of Nirvana, Beck, Sonic Youth, Pearl Jam, Yo La Tengo, Butthole Surfers and The Pastels, while more recently David Bowie sprung him a Meltdown invitation. And not forgetting a whole bunch of New York anti-folksters, to whom the man is some kind of godfather.

The Californian’s enduring popularity lies in his perilous mental state and creative sensitivity, which manifests itself in primitive musical outpourings of agony and ecstasy. Johnston creates personal, intimate art that is at once liberating and imprisoning. Almost as though he’s missing a skin, a valuable layer of psychic lagging, life has often been too vivid for Johnston, resulting in a string of hospitalisations. Now, though, on medication and in the safe hands of father/manager Bill, the Texas-based 41-year-old is as prolific and happy as he’s ever been.

Fear Yourself is the result of a week spent with producer/arranger/admirer/Sparklehorse lynchpin Mark Linkous, who fleshes out Johnston’s pounding piano sketches with banks of fuzz guitars, crooked walls of strings and spectral synth washes. As with much of his work, Johnston swallows love’s bittersweet pill then fashions a record as redemptive as it is uncompromising. “Syrup Of Tears” somehow transforms despair into a blinding flash of hope over disjointed slaps of piano, while “Mountain Top” (all chugging guitars and saw-toothed fiddle) and “The Power Of Love” curse cupid himself. At its best, Johnston’s flailing rasp is shockingly intimate and immediate, like a download straight from the cortex. A fierce, defiant record.

Ace guitarist Landreth came to our attention two years ago via his superb playing on Shelby Lynne’s Love, Shelby (a great record robbed of credibility by its ludicrous jailbait cover). His own album of southern blues and swamp rock is full of virtuoso playing, and he’s part of a new white blues revival that includes the North Mississippi All-Stars and Doyle Bramhall. But he’s going to need stronger songs to carry it off as a solo artist rather than a talented sideman.

Punk/funk reggae innovator Sherwood squeezed into the loop spinning his take on Tackhead, Bim Sherman and the mighty African Head Charge, so it’s no surprise to hear him retainingy those streamlined influences for his ‘proper’ solo debut on Peter ‘Hippy’ Gabriel’s label. Working in the lineage that gave us Brian Eno, Sly and Robbie and dance floor diwali geezer Lenky, Sherwood constructs a cut-up-and-keep cacophony of what he terms “sci-fi world dancehall”, the latter ingredient ensuring his labours bubble and squeak with conviction. Shmokin.

Scott McCaughey collects illustrious bandmates the way most collect old records. Not content with having Peter Buck and R.E.M. auxiliary member Ken Stringfellow as recruits to the Minus 5 cause, McCaughey expanded the membership at the end of 2001 to include serial collaborators Wilco.

The usual Wilco-related label problems contributed to a delayed release, so that Down With Wilco virtually coincides with the Jeff Tweedy/Jim O’Rourke Loose Fur project. More predictably still, McCaughey is a mellower foil than O’Rourke, so the closest Wilco parallel to this sunshine pop is probably the Summerteeth album, though Tweedy does slip in a few of his newer, tetchy guitar lines beneath the jangle and gurgle, and sings “The Family Gardener”, an obvious highlight.

The Anticon collective, now based in Oakland, have become a ubiquitous presence in underground hip hop circles thanks to their novel fusions of liberal politics, surrealism, navel-gazing and leftfield production. For newcomers, this second album by founder member Sole is a good entry point. Save a neat cameo from a demo-toting God, Selling Live Water avoids the self-conscious whimsy of some Anticon projects, since Sole is vicious more than introspective, referencing Ice-T and Noam Chomsky as well as Watership Down. A worthy. West Coast counterpart to El-P’s superb Fantastic Damage.

Having ditched their sweetness, The Cardigans hit pay dirt but lost their effervescent magic in the process. This, their fifth album, is even more blow-dried than 1998’s Gran Turismo. “Communication” and “Feathers And Down”, for instance, are as anodyne as The Corrs. Nina Persson writes exquisitely lovelorn lyrics, and “You’re The Storm” has a yearning majesty, but this is the sound of dashboard-tapping, local radio MOR. It’ll probably be huge.

Hot on the heels of The Avalanches and The Vines, the latest hot tip from Down Under arrives on a wave of media hype?and for once it’s not undeserved. The Sleepy Jackson is the year’s first great summer pop album. “Good Dancers” and “Sunkids” rival the gorgeous shimmering tunes of The Delgados, and “Caffeine In The Morning Sun” is pure Beatles, a simple but effortlessly cool melody. Only the drone-rock of “Let Your Love Be Love” misfires in this context. It’s as sketchy as mini albums usually are, but the band have undeniable promise.

Their minimalist boy/girl blues-rock makes for an easy comparison with The White Stripes (and, rather conveniently, both bands recorded their new albums at east London’s Toe-Rag studios), but The Kills (singing guitarists Jamie Hince and Alison Mosshart) plough a darker, more corrosive furrow. The London-based duo’s liking for repetitive Royal Trux-style riffage forms the core of their debut but they frequently explore more sparse territories. “Kissy Kissy” assumes an eerie country twang while “Black Rooster” spirals into a bluesey swagger, but it’s Mosshart’s sexily drawled spoken-word segments that keep this brisk debut the right side of bare-boned.

Kristin Hersh

Masquerading as a fiftysomething ex-janitor from Capitol Records cobbling together an album from his prodigious record collection, this is actually E cobbling together a hip hop album of sorts, rife with post-modern flippancy. Hammond organs, stiff rhythms and samples from obscure, cheesy old ’60s phonographs instructing you How To Hypnotise Yourself, you know the sort of thing.

This album has its moments, but frankly, unless you’re a jaded goatee-bearded record store clerk attuned to a particularly American wavelength of irony, you’re unlikely to get much from this.

When the debut album by Philadelphian punk-metal trio Burning Brides was first released on a modest indie (File 13) two years ago, it was proclaimed a lo-fi classic. Co-produced by indie troubadour Brian McTear (of Bitter, Bitter Weeks fame), the album had enough mainstream rock appeal to score them a deal with V2. Now that Fall Of The Plastic Empire has been remastered by Howie Weinberg (Nirvana, Sonic Youth), the metallic leanings of singer/guitarist Dimitri Coats have been fused with the pop-inspired basslines in such a way to ensure Burning Brides become more than just peripheral players in the neo-garage rock scene.

You can never pigeon-hole Ben Harper but Diamonds On The Inside is his most eclectic collection yet. “With My Own Two Hands” is roots reggae. The title track sounds like The Band. There are pop ballads, acoustic blues, New Orleans-flavoured R&B, acoustic folk tunes, Lenny Kravitz-style rockers and, on “Picture Of Jesus” (with Ladysmith Black Mambazo), he’s got that old-time religion. The diversity takes your breath away. But where in the past he has often impressed rather than engaged us, here there’s an emotional warmth that makes it by some distance the best record he’s ever made.

Carter Wood

Someone’s gotta coin a snappy name for the genre represented by So Solid and the hordes of MC crews who came in their wake. UK garage doesn’t cut it any more?it’s misleading. Listen to this debut from Leyton crew More Fire and you’ll hear hardly a trace of house’n’garage. 2-step’s swing and sensuality is banished in favour of hard-bounce riddims and punishing textures. More Fire’s primary producers, the Platinum 45 team, draw on the most anti-pop, street vanguard elements in black music history: electro’s angular coldness, jungle’s bruising bass blows, ragga’s lurch and twitch.

“Oi!”, More Fire’s No 7 smash of 2002, made for the most exhilaratingly extreme Top Of The Pops appearance in living memory. For pop punters who like a nice choon and fans of Artful Dodger-style softcore garage alike, “Oi!” had the shock impact of punk: “Is this even music?!?”

The answer, eventually, is “yes”. But it takes several listens before what initially seems hookless reveals itself as contagious. Platinum 45’s idea of melody seems derived almost entirely from video game musik and mobile ring-tones. Their dry rhythms connect backwards through time to Schoolly D and pioneering dancehall riddim “Sleng Teng”, and sideways across space to current rap like The Clipse’s “Grindin”(a drum machine on auto-pilot). If James Brown was a 19-year-old from an E4 estate who’d misspent his youth in a purple haze of PlayStation and hydroponic, this might be his idea of future funk. Factor in the rapid-fire jabber of Ozzie B, Lethal B and Neeko, with its blend of gruff ragga grain and uncouth cockney, and you’ve got music that instantly creates a massive generation gap.

Can this sound, brutally shorn of pop appeal, sustain a whole album? If you make it past the dreary “Intro”you’ll find an album that’s highly listenable. Alongside Platinum 45 standouts “Smokin'” and “Politics”, two killer tracks are guest-produced by members of Roll Deep, hot crew of the moment. Wiley’s “Lock Down”pivots around a bubble-and-squeak bass line similar to Roll Deep’s insidious “Creeper”, while Dizzee Rascal (the MC/producer to watch in 2003) contributes the asymmetrical anti-groove of “Still The Same”, over which he spits rhymes in trademark edge-of-hysteria style.

Lyrically, no ground is broken. Haters are castigated, ho’s get humiliated, weed (strictly high-grade) is hymned, and “soldiers, fallen”are mourned as mawkishly as Bone Thugs or P Diddy. But the art of MC-ing doesn’t really involve opening up new areas of content. It’s about finding fresh twists on the same restricted set of themes. What we’re witnessing with this genre-without-a-satisfactory-name that More Fire Crew exemplify and excel at is the final arrival?after many false dawns?of an authentically British rap. No longer a pale copy of the US original, different but equally potent, it’s something to celebrate.

Following a short-lived dalliance with Virgin (left in the cold when new A&R moguls kicked in) and now back on their own label, Goldrush continue to make great music, this seven-track EP more a halfway house between live edge and meticulous studio output. Though Robin Bennett’s tremulous delivery remains a crowning glory, the guitars have a ferocity previously only hinted at (see Flaming Lips producer Dave Fridmann’s remix of “Let You Down” and tour favourite “Counting Song”), with the searing “Intro” suggesting an imminent romp through “I’m Waiting For The Man”.

Alongside membership of Wisdom Of Harry and Ellis Island Sound, multi-instrumentalist David Sheppard’s tenure with State River Widening?with Keiron Phelan and Jon Steele?allows free rein to pursue his languorous blurring of acoustic and analogue, the post-rock sound uncoiling gently, the improv feel gleaned from John Fahey.

Broadening the palette from 2000’s eponymous DIY debut, Early Music’s lush pastoralism and warm tones immediately set them apart from the likes of Pullman and chillier Chicago-ites, steering a course somewhere between Gastr del Sol and The Sea And Cake’s new opulence.

The distinct whiff of an indie phenomenon here, as The Hidden Cameras combine the delicacy of Belle & Sebastian with the massed salutations of The Polyphonic Spree. Essentially the domain of singer/guitarist Joel Gibb, the Cameras number somewhere around a dozen, and sound like it. Typical songs swell from winsome strums to cathedral-sized love-ins whose jauntiness some may find cloying. Fortunately, Gibb’s mixture of gay and Christian imagery is potent, and his vision of music as a grand communal experience is backed up by some memorable tunes.

Mull historical society’s debut loss landed in late 2001 with a bracing freshness British pop had almost forgotten. Mull native Colin MacIntyre, the Society in all but name, sang brightly of islands, severing links, losers, and the recent loss of his father, and gathered tens of thousands to his odd, isolated cause in 2002.

Us initially seems more of the same?as with all strong sensations, the first time’s impact can’t be repeated. But closer inspection reveals clear, happy developments, both musical and emotional. Self-produced again, psychedelic codas and the like soon slot into a unique sonic world with ’70s glam and singer-songwriters buried in its foundations, but with enough eccentrically stroked harps, synthesized organs and ringing chimes to still sound like nothing but MHS themselves.

What really matters, though, after Loss’ celebration of strength in exile and isolation, is MacIntyre’s vulnerable, desperate search for connection this time. “I don’t know how to belong/I don’t know where to begin”, he sings on deceptively triumphal opener “The Final Arrears”, while “Am I Wrong?” and “5 More Minutes” are about regaining lost love, saying he can change, that he saved her life once, that he’ll find the right words in a minute.

Us’ home stretch is an almost unbroken description of a quest for salvation in someone’s arms, and the pain that failure brings, impotently demanding that “somebody else must be with me” while claiming “Asylum”.

“Us” closes the journey equivocally (“I was us when you were you”). But the sense of being closer to others by still risking reaching for them at all is the small, hard triumph MacIntyre ends the Society’s minutes with this time. Poppily uplifting, Us is an album with drowning depths.