The persistent pursuit of an explosive climax and the dancefloor epiphany can be exhausting. But beneath their knowing camp and tongue-in-cheek theatrics, Junior Senior have a wealth of references to pull it off. With the surf guitar riffs of “C’mon” through B52’s-style freak-outs, Kid Creole And The Coconuts craziness, Stones raunch, Sweet-ish bubblegum and as many elements of garage punk as garage house, their hedonistic sex-dance anthems go down a treat. Fancy “a good time, all the time”? You could do a lot worse.

New York’s premier abstract hip hop label goes west to enlist Murs of California’s Living Legends crew, whose angsty lyrics and pained delivery makes for a taxing hour’s listening. Some moments of sheer brilliance (“Gods Work”) help lighten the gloom.

The skimpy biog for New York-based McCombs reveals diverse allegiances with Will Oldham, the Anti-Folk movement led by The Moldy Peaches, and art-metallers Oxes. Of these, the Oldham connection is most revealing, if only because both have clearly studied the odd Dylan record. McCombs isn’t quite that predictable, though, since his singer-songwriter routine often fuses with pleasingly lethargic psychedelia, especially on “Opium Flower”. He also has a nice trick of being at once plaintive and undemonstrative, so that this debut mini album resembles Galaxie 500 as much as all the usual alt.folk touchstones.

This is a very odd album. Lyrics chronicling masturbation and murder with music that is a freaky hybrid of The Cure’s goth whimsy and Fugazi’s serrated aggression. While slightly bombastic and overwrought, Tim Kasher’s tremulous narratives steer this largely compelling album into the territory of fellow-Nebraskan Conor Oberst aka Bright Eyes. Incredibly, prog-rock scales are united with fairground organs (“Butcher Song”), but Grette Cohn’s scraping cello is revelatory and their kinetic force sees them through.

Wrongly lumped in with the electroclash brigade last year, Fat Truckers utilise quasi-Glitter Band beats with whirring synths and snarling Mark E Smith-style vocal barks. Old singles “Teenage Daughter” and the astonishing krautrock meets rockabilly surge of “Superbike” retain their blazing intensity. And “Roxy’s”, presumably named after the Sheffield night-spot owned by the infamous Barry Noble, is a marvel of tumbling arcade game analogues and pristine Kraftwerk syncopation. Unfortunately, the ideas do eventually run dry. “Anorexic Robot” and the A&R-baiting “I Love You Son” are slovenly punk-synth dirges. Still, with Add N To [X]’s future in doubt, they could fill a micro-gap in the market.

Dunger, a Swedish ex-footballer, crept onto the radar a couple of years ago when he toured with an admiring Mercury Rev and released the heady Soul Rush, an unusually fruitful grapple with the legacies of Van Morrison and Tim Buckley. Those influences are still apparent in Dunger’s throaty and supple vocals. On his excellent third album, however, the music is stripped back to a kind of easy-going, rumbustious folk blues, fitting given the notable participation of Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy. Maybe this time Sweden’s current rock’n’roll cachet will bring Dunger (whose debut featured Soundtrack Of Our Lives) closer to the acclaim he deserves.

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.