If there’s a definable thread to Garcia’s work, it’s a love of guitar. A six-string obsessive since the age of 11, an unorthodox upbringing in both Panama City and Manhattan makes for broadly stylistic riffola, be it power pop (“I Don’t Mind,” “Blue”), Nile Rodgers funk (“Fast”), garage rock or Skynyrd boogie. But this is more than orgiastic plank-spanking. Garcia’s recent relocation to his native UK was sparked by submersion in analogue electronica, injecting the likes of “Life & Death” and “The Feeling” with enough squelching beats to scramble Heavenly Social headz. Jaw-droppingly inspired, Garcia shuffles identities with all the techno-headed aplomb of a latterday Mister Ben.

WICHITA/DARLA

Led by whiskery 24-year-old Jim James, My Morning Jacket, five rock hounds from the farmlands of Kentucky, were formed back in 1998. Early days rehearsing and recording amid the barns and silos of guitarist Johnny Quaid’s grandparents’ farm were pivotal, smearing their countrified slacker rock in a haze of reverb. The effect, now duplicated in the studio, is like buckshot clanging’ round the pillars of an empty cathedral. At its epicentre is James’ remarkable delivery, as oddly beautiful as The Flaming Lips’ Wayne Coyne, but five times as tough.

Debut The Tennessee Fire (1999) finds them manfully struggling to nail the sound. There are mercurial moments, but James is often buried in the mix or seemingly unconvinced of his own strengths. Last year’s At Dawn, however, kicked over a welter of traces in dazzling style. There’s straightforward country-pop (“Lowdown”), shorn, stoned ballads (“If It Smashes Down”), the odd, ill-advised 12-bar blues (“Honest Man”), bell-bottomed Southern boogie (“Just Because I Do”) and even a dabble in dub (“Phone Went West”), but James’ soulful, inflamed howl is enough to crack open a marble moon.

This is simple stuff at heart. The songs cover the time-honoured staples of love, loss and death, but, though hardly happy-clappy, there’s no miserabilist baggage to unload here (they adore Led Zep, despise Will Oldham). And this stunning, sometimes transfiguring music is all the healthier for it.

Take a twist of the Wild Bunch and some ghosts from The Alamo, wash down with tequila, then fall asleep on the back porch. That music you can hear drifting through your dreams is from Calexico, who christened themselves after a town on the border between California and Mexico. Their music is an intoxicatingly vivid evocation of the mythology of the American west and its Hispanic heritage, and Feast Of Wire lays down an optimistically early marker as one of the albums of the year.

From the opening cantina two-step of “Sunken Waltz”, you’re transported to a place where the sun is hot enough to bake bricks and there’s always a couple of mangy dogs in the shade. The nucleus of Calexico is drummer John Convertino and multi-instrumentalist and singer Joey Burns, but the duo act as musical traffic cops, marshalling a small army of sympathetic collaborators.

You’ve been here before, but never quite like this. “Black Heart” lifts off in a Portishead-like shimmer of distortion and woozy violins, before opening out into a sullen epic of space and distance. “Close Behind” thunders across the prairie like a Pony Express rider with a war party on his tail and arrows wedged in his Stetson, strings and mariachi trumpets arching across pedal steel and Convertino’s bustling percussion. “Across The Wire (Widescreen)” finds Burns hijacking Marty Robbins, narrating a classic border ballad bristling with trumpets, accordion and Spanish guitar (“He spotted an eagle in the middle of a lake, resting on cactus and feasting on snakes”).

But there’s more to the Calexicans than leftovers from a campfire. Ennio Morricone’s deadpan surrealism floats over the horizon like a mirage, and many a minimalist composer will be picking apart “The Book And The Canal”. “Dub Latina” fans out across Latin America, and “No Doze” ends the disc in an eerie mist of drones and roaring percussion. “Crumble” fuses Gil Evans-style piercing horn with the feral rumble of Charles Mingus’ Tijuana Moods, embellished by Nick Luca’s jazz guitar. And apart from all that, Calexico’s world is big enough for the classic heartbreaker-pop of “Not Even Stevie Nicks… “, in all its wondrousness. Saddle up, it’s showtime.

Manorexia releases eschew the meticulous approach of Thirlwell’s Foetus and Steroid Maximus aliases, allowing a freer-flowing approach to composition. Water imagery is very much in evidence here?the previous Manorexia album, Volvox Turbo, was named after pond-dwelling organisms, while The Radiolarian Ooze refers to slime secreted by plankton on the ocean’s floors (a similar sub-aquatic leitmotif dominated Thirlwell’s recent live laptop performances as Baby Zizane). Cinematic in scope, the album explores a sinister psychological inner space before blossoming into a suite of uplifting compositions that express awe at the vastness of nature.

On 2001’s promising Sweet Heart Fever, Nottingham’s Scout Niblett presented herself as a combination of Cat Power and P J Harvey. For this follow-up, however, one suspects she’s tried too hard to cultivate her own idiosyncrasies. A couple of tracks are in Japanese, while others feature Niblett accompanied only by her Animal-ish drumming. A bolshy experiment. Presumably she’s saved the tunes for her Steve Albini-produced full-length album, due in spring

“Hyperdub” isn’t an ideal name for this music, but better than ghastly alternatives like “intelligent 2-step.” Horsepower apply architecture to their post-drum’n’bass adventures, and while tracks like “Fist Of Fury” drift too far into Gilles Peterson-land, interest is ensured by the slaloms of punchy rhythm which ski round your head (“Pimp Flavors”), the dancehall interjections (“Gorgon Sound”), the immense vistas of space that owe more to Juan Atkins than Lee Perry (“The Swindle”), and even, in “To The Beat Y’All”, what sounds like Todd Terry meets Boards Of Canada.

Matchbox Twenty and Grammy-winning frontman Rob Thomas are adored in the US but their angst-ridden melodic rock has failed to ignite the UK. Their second LP, 2000’s Mad Season, was an eclectic record full of catchy hooks and lyrics. More Than You Think You Are is flat by comparison. Thomas’ lyrics are too frequently overwrought, with “Unwell” and the ghostly ballad “Hand Me Down” the only standouts.

Red in tooth and claw, Grand Mal’s third album is a raucous, righteous paean to the mythological decadence of their hometown. There are, however, enough kinks in their bourbon-soaked blueprint to deflect charges of artlessness, with the ingeniously ersatz gospel of the title track, for example, recalling Odelay-era Beck. But it’s their dirty, lowdown rock pastiches that truly score, with “First Time Knockout” and “Duty Free” beaming with the glam-kissed exuberance of the New York Dolls. A bona fide blast of ageless, pretension-free rock’n’roll, Bad Timing is the nazz.

Electric Music AKA doesn’t quite mirror their moniker. Anth Brown and Tom Doyle’s songcraft resounds with smooth ’70s MOR?Steely Dan and The Beach Boys navigated via chiming nu-folk glockenspiels, harps and trebly guitar twangs. Yet they do possess an adventurous streak. Organic glitch textures and stop-start judders house the traditional and the modern. As such, their yearning adult pop is magnified, refracted and brought whizzing to life. An album that gets lovelier with every listen.

Any fan of American Music Club and Red House Painters knows that the only kindred spirits in the UK are Dakota Suite, the Leeds-based trio with a handful of achingly beautiful albums under their belt. Their latest logically teams the band with ex-AMC members Bruce Kaphan and Tim Mooney, who give the arrangements a majestic sound. Horns, acoustic guitars, piano, Chris Hooson’s shattered voice: from start to finish, this is a gem.

Formed in 1980 and led by Amsterdam-based English ex-pat Edward Ka-Spel, The Legendary Pink Dots have never quite fallen into fashion in their 20 years but have been steadily prolific all the same. Their music, an easy mix of mock-whimsical psychedelia and avant-garde techno, is redolent of the nightmarish, fractured fairytales’n’toyboxes imagination of Syd Barrett. All The King’s Horses’ Humpty Dumpty allusion is deliberate?this is their oblique take on September 11. However, the ultimate message of these songs is that the world, like the Pink Dots themselves, is fragile but strangely resilient.

There’s no doubting Pilot To Gunner’s conviction. From opening track “Every Minute Is A Movie” on, this careers forth on densely knotted anthemics that are passionate and exhilarating. Guitarist Pat Hegarty displays a staggering sonic range, while Scott Padden’s breathless articulacy compounds the urgency. But for all their complexities, Pilot To Gunner repeat their explosive shifts too often. At a concise 32 minutes, though, such limitations are a minor aggravation.

Sieger began as an acoustic troubadour but on her second, self-released album she’s dramatically raised the bar.

Assisted by various members of the Transglobal Underground/Temple Of Sound axis, Heart In The Sky is an adventurous mixture of chilled beats and floatingly diaphanous soundscapes, plus her own crystalline vocals and haunting compositions. Think of Beth Orton’s collaborations with the Chemicals, but with dashes of Rickie Lee Jones and Jhelisa Anderson.

Self-produced and self-released like last year’s Screwing Lies, Passion Play breaks from that record’s Kate Bush-influenced alt.folk for piano- and brass-based, atmospheric funk grooves. The songs are less brazenly sexual than before, like Ed Harcourt in the way they veil any confessions in metaphor and flights of fancy. It means Carr’s heart isn’t quite on display yet, except for her love of show and disguise. And despite her evident talent for production, the next record may be time for the challenge of a record company budget?so long as the wayward, unique instincts that fire this one stay.

Following the split with ex-Folk Implosion colleague John Davis, there now appears to be no distinction between this ‘band’ and Sebadoh. Certainly this is emotionally a world away from the sublime good humour of the Folk Implosion’s previous album. The opening bucolic acoustics of “Fuse” and “Pearl” soon give way to the rockier “Releast” and “Coral”. A bitterness pervades the record (references to “self-destruction” in “Releast”, the repeated “miles away” in “Creature Of Salt”), with Barlow’s voice sounding like Eric Matthews, before reaching an uneasy acoustic compromise on the closing “Easy”. For Barlow stalwarts only.

Clearlake are crucially compassionate. Jason Pegg’s voice betrays his own uncertainty but also the need to reach out to the listener. The opening “Almost The Same” rocks, but in a post-Neu! way. The lightness of touch balances out the often sinister lyrics (“I’d Like To Hurt You”). The heartbreaking “Keep Smiling” utilises Beatles harmonies as it decries conformity and compromise. The pinnacle is the extraordinary closing sequence of “It’s All Too Much” (excoriating self-hatred), “Treat Yourself With Kindness” (a hand offers to rock the unstable cradle) and “Trees In The City” (a final gesture towards hope). A beautiful record.

Sounding like a cross between Mazzy Star, Portishead and Throwing Muses, Devics have been playing their doom-laden, cinematic songs to audiences in LA for a decade now. Led by Sara Lov’s plaintive vocals and Dustin O’Halloran’s guitar-scapes, they sound like the kind of band who would receive a personal invitation to play at David Lynch’s funeral. Ten torch songs for a rainy night in.

Dan Bern’s New American Language scored highly in Uncut’s 2002 critics’ poll and established him as the leading pretender to wear the mantle of Bob. The Swastika EP is arguably even better?five topical songs issued not as a piece of product but because they demand to be heard, just like they used to publish them in Broadside and Sing Out back in the Greenwich Village days. “Talking Al Kida Blues” is the bravest, truest post-September 11 song yet written (if it’s the worst disaster on US soil ever, what about the Indians and slavery?). Suffice to say that, had the Twin Towers existed and been destroyed in 1963, you’d like to imagine this is the song Dylan would have written. World Cup contains five acoustic songs in a lighter vein, written during a trip through Europe last summer. The best of them is “My Love Is Not For Sale”, a kind of equivalent of Bob’s “Boots Of Spanish Leather”. Neither EP has anything to do with commerce, marketing or industry. These 10 songs exist simply because they have something to say that we need to hear. What a subversive idea.

There exist groups who, regardless of how interesting their music might be, are rendered unlistenable by their singer. Pram’s Rosie Cuckston deploys the same couldn’t-care-less stylings as Stereolab’s Laetitia Sadier in a way that goes beyond atonality. Dark Island’s more approachable than 2000’s Museum Of Imaginary Animals, but despite attempts at poignancy such as “Goodbye”, that voice is a barrier, and the sub-Morricone mood pieces (“Peepshow”) and ’60s French un-pop (“Penny Arcade”) would have sounded dated even in 1994.