Seven years ago Moloko asked us Do You Like My Tight Sweater? On Statues, singer Roisin Murphy reprises that raunchy look with a cold water snap and two pints of lager. Hard to categorise as ever, Moloko’s milky club anthems pop along with a zip, oodles of programmed orchestration and enough melody to cross the divide between chart and cool. Murphy and Mark Brydon have expanded their deadly duo ambitions, adding substance to charm on “Cannot Contain This” and the hypnotic moods of the title track. With a Timo Maas remix waiting to ‘do a “Sing It Back” on the single “Familiar Feeling”, this will be one of the spring collection’s favourite outfits.

“With my great big amp I will rule the world,” he croaks, and being Wayne Kramer?the man who put the kick in Kick Out The Jams and the cocaine-dealing martyr canonised in The Clash’s “Jail Guitar Doors”?he means it. Marching to a power-stodge two-step similar to Neil Young’s sublime Mirror Ball, Adult World is as thick on sincere, sharp songwriting as it is on squealing licks. Alongside the politically-charged “Love, Fidel” and “Sundays In Saigon”, Kramer’s beatnik-jazz diversion “Nelson Algren Stopped By” is a riveting surprise.

Loud, it seems, is the new loud. Back in 2001, when Turin Brakes released The Optimist LP and were bracketed with the “New Acoustic Movement”, it would have been inconceivable for them to have been invited onto a show like Born Sloppy, trying to make themselves heard above Sara Cox and her lairy sub-Chris Evans circus. But that’s exactly what they did last month. Ether Song, their new album, was recorded in two weeks in California with Beck/Air/Supergrass producer Tony Hoffer. However, this amounts to more than a commercially expedient attempt to amplify themselves in the musical marketplace. Ether Song merely brings to the surface all the volatility and emotional charge that was inherent in their work.

Exposure to Los Angeles has certainly impacted on their music?there’s a Southern-fried, sun-dried air about Ether Song in the slide guitars of “Self-Help”, which threaten to drift off into “Freebird” mode, or the laid-back, electric keyboard licks of “Full Of Stars”. Yet their music is characterised by a quiet desperation in the face of life’s vicissitudes that is very English. Rain is a recurring motif, with even the occasional hurricane, as (human) nature does its worst.

“Average Man” and “Self-Help” are excellent songs about mid-life crises, though presumably Turin Brakes are too young for such things. The first encapsulates that horrible moment of epiphany when a demon whispers to you that whatever you thought you might make of yourself, it ain’t going to happen now. The narrator of “Self-Help”, meanwhile, is in such a state that he has to talk himself through life one step at a time: “Tell yourself you’re not in it for the money…”. By “Panic Attack”, things have reached crisis point.

The single, “Pain Killer”, is as ecstatic as “Self-Help” is distraught, as bracing as the summer shower that strikes in its chorus. Finally, “Little Brother” and “Rain City” paint more settled and evocative pictures, after the best and worst is over. A tug of war between demons and angels, Ether Song is an album of ups and downs?but its standards remain uniformly high.

Fame didn’t sit easy with the recalcitrant Stephen Jones. These days he writes books, tinkers with electronica and makes music inspired by the Mexican Day Of The Dead and the lure of advertising. The phrase ‘maybe he should get out more’ is met head-on in “Keys To The Brain” and the typically trenchant “Jesus Freaks And Candy Asses”. Meanwhile, on “Radio’s Been Thinking Again”, Jones acts like a sponge, except the quirky musical liquid is never the same on its way out.

A neat adjunct to the Badly Drawn philosophy.

Just about to hit 36, Evan Griffith Dando, the mild Bostonian, is more likely to throw a tea party these days than crack open another bottle of Russia’s finest. In the process of rehabilitation?to life, mostly?the original King Of The Slackers, who rose to prominence thanks to classic hard pop discs like Hate Your Friends (the Lemonheads’ 1987 debut), Lovey (1990) and breakthrough album It’s A Shame About Ray (1992), decided not to “join that stupid club”

By steering clear of his controversial ‘Nazi rock’ period, 1984’s scandalously fab “Lemon Incest” and the epic “Cargo Culte” from 1971’s Histoire De Melody Nelson (arguably his most influential seven minutes on record), this can never deliver its titular promise even if it is the first Serge comp to bear an English sleevenote. Still, Gainsbourg virgins new to his erotic pop art should find “69 Ann

Various Artists

RADIO CRYMI PLAYLIST VOL 1 1988-1998

ANKST

No longer the harsh psychedelic Celtic oddballs they used to be, 20 arrives as an opportune reflection on Gorky’s’ more eccentric origins, rounding up their first six Ankst singles from 1994-96. Check “12 Impressionistic Soundscapes”?like Pink Floyd’s Ummagumma with a slice of acid-infused barra brith on top.

Gorky’s inevitably appear again on Ankst’s own Radio Crymi retrospective, a handsome two-CD set also boasting collectable Welsh rarebits from Super Furry Animals, Catatonia and Peel darlings Datblygu.

Championed in Smiths-era indiedom by the very paper she wrote for, former NME hack Cath Carroll’s Miaow built their cult upon just three EPs before disbanding. Though nothing eclipses this anthology’s title track?1987’s jangle-tastic Factory single with its blissful Tyrolean yodel and glam hand claps?its supplementary Peel sessions, demos and Carroll’s Steve Albini-assisted homage to Elvis’ “King Creole” are enough to validate much of that distant, nepotistic praise.

With NYC’s bright new hopes (Liars, Yeah Yeah Yeahs) openly worshipping at the altar of scratchy early-’80s UK punk-funk (PiL, Gang Of Four), it now seems doubly outrageous that Department S were denied the release of this like-minded debut at the time?”Whatever Happened To The Blues” alone is 20 years ahead of Radio 4. An even greater shame that singer Vaughan Toulouse (who died of AIDS in 1991) isn’t around to savour the overdue recognition this should grant him.

It should be ridiculous, and sure, many of the titles on this compendium of Brit-prog between 1968 and 1975 are hysterical (“McGuillicudie The Pusillanimous”?please!). But cut through the suffocating incense clouds and the pug-ugliness of the assembled rogue’s gallery and there’s some astonishing fare here. Disc 2 is especially great, featuring as it does the sub-Zeppelin delights of Clark-Hutchinson and Black Cat Bones, Room’s ambitious bong-symphony “Cemetery Junction” and Human Beast’s lovelorn hippie heartbreaker “Maybe Someday”. Thank God for punk and all that, but did we really swap all this for Chelsea and Eater?

For those still thinking Electric Six are hardcore, direct yourself immediately to this reissue of the two studio albums of NYC punk/funk saxophonist/singer James Chance, one of the most confrontational figures in the No Wave movement. Buy is the more ‘purist’ record: askew Beefheartian rhythms meet Ornette harmolodics topped with Chance’s frustrated crooning.

Off White was the more ‘commercial’ album. “Contort Yourself” from the first album is reworked and discofied by August Darnell (aka Kid Creole) to stunning effect. Hear in particular how, on the telephone sex duet with Lydia Lunch, “Stained Sheets”, Chance’s unstable masculinity surrenders blissfully to Lunch’s feminisation of his noise.

Like the audio equivalent of the dreaded Christmas pullover, tribute records torment our fashion sensibilities with the nagging conundrum that, however bad a garment, it’s the thought that counts. But there comes a time, especially when faced with Bono fumbling with The Ramones’ not-to-be-fumbled-with “Beat On The Brat”, when one is forced to drop to one’s knees and scream, “WHY?”

Okay, a partial profit donation to New York’s Lymphoma Research Foundation (the cancer that claimed Joey Ramone in 2001) is a fair excuse, but it’s by no means an explanation for the off-target desecration on show here. With the exception of Tom Waits, who reinvents 1976’s “Judy Is A Punk” as his own wino-blues howl “The Return Of Jackie & Judy” (returning the favour for their late cover of his “I Don’t Wanna Grow Up”), and Marilyn Manson, who at least tries by stripping “The KKK Took My Baby Away” of its original upbeat melody (creating a dingy murder ballad in the process), this is a pointless exercise.

Rancid and Green Day’s contributions are as gormless as one might imagine but nor do U2, Metallica, Eddie Vedder or the Red Hot Chili Peppers ever deliver anything beyond egotistical karaoke. With the best of intentions, nothing here says anything profound or poetic about The Ramones. To be brutal, this album’s charity beneficiaries can be contacted via www.leukemia-lymphoma.org. Send them your cash but, for the love of Joey and Dee Dee, leave this on the shelf.

HEAD OVER HEELS

TREASURE

VICTORIALAND

ALL 4AD

The cocteau twins were the most incandescent yet impenetrable of the post-punk bands. The contrast between Robin Guthrie in particular and the music he made, with its gossamer showers of guitar, was always marked. No effete dandy, his truculent refusal/inability to shed light on the Cocteaus’ creative process was always coupled with jeering derision at critics’ attempts to fill the void with their own, adjective-laden praise (“‘Gossamer showers’? You wanker!”). Liz Fraser, meanwhile, always seemed strangely disconnected from her own wordless, ethereal offerings, as baffled as the rest of us. For those who demand a strict, nutritional quota of ‘content’, the Cocteaus were always problematic, and there were some who condemned them as an airy confection. Yet while it’s hard to grasp what their music signifies, and despite its whimsical titles (“Fluffy Tufts”, “When Mama Was Moth”), it’s still rapturous and manages to pull you in deep.

Garlands, their 1982 debut, sees the Cocteaus in the thrall of post-punk’s first wave, the Banshees and Public Image Ltd. There’s also a black streak, a disturbing undertow running through their work, in songs like “Blood Bitch” and “Blind, Dumb, Deaf” which were in accordance with those more abrasive musical times. But there’s an ambience to their music which set them apart.

1983’s Head Over Heels was an affirmation of Guthrie and Fraser’s romantic bliss, to which titles such as “My Love Paramour” and “Sugar Hiccup” attest. It’s an ecstatic affair, guitars blazing like Van Gogh sunshine, with all the toxins of the debut album banished. A snowblind-white counterpoint to Siouxsie’s dark, gothic hauteur.

Treasure (1984) saw Simon Raymonde fully on board, and was a thing of pre-Raphaelite splendour. Made in a year when post-punk had all but withered away to be supplanted by the peroxide mediocrity of mid-’80s new pop, its remote, crystalline beauty was all the more conspicuous.

If this was the Cocteaus in full flow, 1986’s Victorialand saw them ebb a little?it’s subdued, more like buoys bobbing out at sea than crashing waves of guitar.

Whether you regard The Cocteau Twins as analgesic or stimulant, they are the still-vital link between the post-punk of their own era and the post-rock which they anticipated.

FREAKY STYLEY

THE UPLIFT MOFO PARTY PLAN

MOTHER’S MILK

CAPITOL

It’s a curious quirk of fate that the Red Hot Chili Peppers are at their most musically potent when they’re least innovative. Last year’s career-topping By The Way succeeded with a fairly traditional brand of Californian rock. But back in the ’80s, they invented the kind of smutty, jittery rap-rock that’s still so lucrative?and unappealing?today.

A good time for this extensive reissue programme, then, if only to confirm our old prejudices about the band. The eponymous 1984 debut is a tinny opener, dominated by Flea’s savagely irritating bass style. The following year’s Freaky Styley is an improvement, with the funk quotient upped by producer George Clinton and a surprisingly tolerable cover of Sly’s “If You Want Me To Stay”.

The more metallic Uplift Mofo from 1987 finds their trademark style fully formed: extreme masochists are directed to the desecration of “Subterranean Homesick Blues”. By 1989’s Mother’s Milk, MTV-boosted mega-fame and attendant drug disasters (including one dead guitarist) had arrived. Some live Hendrix covers tacked on the end provide scant reward for the diligent.

On the point of celebrating their 10th anniversary, Mouse On Mars remind us of their legacy of quiet brilliance, which began with the subtly wrought polyrhythms and distressed tones of 1994’s “Frosch” EP. What’s strange about the pristine and media-neglected likes of, say, 1997’s “Schnick-Schnack” is not that it hasn’t dated but that it still bubbles like it’s fresh and steaming in the soundlab, future sounds still awaiting wider development and distribution. As relentlessly inventive as Autechre, yet less daunting.

APOCALYPSE DUDES

BURNING HEART

A bunch of carefully unappealing Norwegians styled as gay bikers, Turbonegro achieved a certain notoriety in the mid-’90s thanks more to song titles like “Rendezvous With Anus” and “I Got Erection” than their fairly grim musical hybrids of Judas Priest and The Ramones.

In the wake of numbskull contemporaries The Hellacopters finding international success and guyish tributes from Queens Of The Stone Age and The Hives, the inevitable reformation and reissue programme is well underway.

Forced to choose, Apocalypse Dudes is infinitesimally more varied and accomplished than Ass Cobra. But after a while, it’s hard to decide what’s more boring: the hairy-palmed musical slogging, or the risible attempts at outrage.

This Jimmy Page-era gem captures The Yardbirds in their hard psych-blues pomp, mixing bought-in British hit factory items like the Fabulous Flakes’ “No Excess Baggage” with pre-Zep blueprints like the trance-rock “Glimpses” and “Only The Black Rose”. Fans will gravitate quickly towards the sessions, which include bizarre covers of Nilsson’s “Ten Little Indians” and Manfred Mann’s “Ha Ha Said The Clown”. The Beeb cuts are equally intriguing as the band tackle Maurice Chevalier chanson, Bobby Dylan and the riffy blitz of “Dazed And Confused”. Listen up, all you White Stripers.

Hank Williams recorded around 170 songs between 1946 and his untimely death at the age of 30 in 1953. Subtitled “An Introduction To Hank Williams”, this album isn’t a greatest hits, omitting, as it does, many of his most successful releases. Instead, it concentrates on the poetic and reflective side of his output, ultimately the touchstone for his reputation as “the hillbilly Shakespeare”. As such, it succeeds in conveying the essence of a unique talent and a classic of country music.