FUZZY WARBLES 2

Following labelmate Jesse Malin’s success, twentysomething Jeff Klein’s take on warped American mores pitches up in a darker backwater. Opener “Everything I Alright” is a suicidal arsonist’s tale built around a grisly-lullaby keyboard loop and guest (and Klein landlady!) Patty Griffin’s back-ups. “If I Get To California” rocks like early Uncle Tupelo, and “Another Breakdown” is a huskier Ryan Adams. Klein’s ace in the hole is his careworn delivery and songwriting suss, and he proves here that 2000’s a claimed You’ll Never Get To Heaven If You Break My Heart was no accident.

Ry Cooder is arguably the great lost rock’n’roll guitarist. Remember the spitting slide on “Memo To Turner”? The growling licks with the Magic Band on Safe As Milk? The brilliant blues-based excursions of Into The Purple Valley and Boomer’s Story? No wonder the Stones considered him as a replacement for Brian Jones after he provided the (uncredited) central riff to “Honky Tonk Women”. But he simply wasn’t interested in being a rock star, and we’ve hardly heard him play electric guitar in a decade.

In recent years he’s found satisfaction first playing acoustic guitar duets with Ali Farka Toure (with the occasional splash of slide) and then sitting in the producer’s chair with Cuba’s venerable Buena Vista Social Club. And we’d pretty much despaired of ever hearing him play rock’n’roll again.

Recorded in Cuba (he had to get special permission from the White House during the last days of the Clinton administration after the State Department had fined him for breaching the anti-Castro embargo over Buena Vista), Mambo Sinuendo is hardly a conventional rock album. But it’s as near as we’re going to get from the great man, and the quality of his playing only adds to our frustration at his reticence.

With ’60s doowop quartet Los Zafiros, Manuel Galban became the toughest, rockingest exponent of the instrument in the country’s musical history. And he and Cooder have here made an album full of big, fat, twanging lead guitar lines that hark back to the days of Duane Eddy and the Perez Prado-style mambo-jazz of the 1950s. Not so much post-rock as pre-rock.

With a rhythm section including Buena Vista bassist Orlando ‘Cachaito’ Lopez and long-time Cooder drummer-of-choice Jim Keltner, the dozen tracks are almost entirely instrumental, but that doesn’t mean it’s background music?any more than was Cooder’s soundtrack to Paris, Texas. Agile, sexy, witty and lyrical, it’s an exquisite album, and even at this early stage, the guitar playing on rocked-up mambo “Monte A Dentro” sounds like one of the musical highlights of the year.

Probably the most wistful music you’ll hear this year is on this debut album by Casino Versus Japan, which takes us back to the good old days when electronica wasn’t afraid to be beautiful. Tracks like “The Possible Light” and “Summer Clip” have the same kind of warped grandiloquence as the Aphex Twin and Global Communications a decade ago: delicate melodic flakes magnified through a cosmic amplifier. On tracks like “Moonlupe”, Vangelis is even brought to mind?and there’s nothing illegal about that. “Em Essey” essays a heart-breaking poignancy worthy of Mu-Ziq at his least ironic. An unexpected beauty.

Inhabiting the same wasteland of sparse sadcore as Low, Karla Schickele can make the plainest of melodies sob with poignancy. “None Of My Business” and the prickly “Keep Your Eyes On The Road” sound almost like practice exercises for the struggling pianist, but given the sincere delivery of her soul-baring laments they become truly mesmeric. The raw timbre of her voice on “Complete” is particularly chilling.

John Darnielle (aka The Mountain Goats) has been serenading us with the fortunes of his fictitious, doomed ‘Alpha couple’ for nigh on a decade. Produced by Tony Doogan (Delgados, Belle & Sebastian), Tallahassee is the sound of their relationship hitting the rocks in 14 spirited, acoustic movements; where love is “like the border between Greece and Albania” (“International Small Arms Traffic Blues”) and the only pillow-talk is “I hope we both die”. Bitterness never sounded so sweet.

Unless Gareth Gates is keeping a very big secret, MOBO-nominated Sizzla is one of the few followers of the Bobo Ashanti rasta faith to have had a single playlisted on Radio 1. His fusion of hardcore dancehall with blissed-out, roots-conscious culture has earned Sizzla respect internationally, and this Fatis Burrell-produced album will finally disprove the theory that reggae’s been dead in the water since the early-’80s.

Not a lost follow-up to teen prodigy Shuggie Otis’ second and final psychedelic soul classic Inspiration Information (1974, reissued last year), not even a Shuggie Otis album at all, this uses the wunderkind’s currently ballooning cult status to sell late-’70s session material by R&B veterans including Richard “Louie Louie” Berry, on which Otis plays guitar and bass. His blues and funk licks are fine and versatile, but they’re not even a footnote to his own work. Treat instead as the sessions were intended: as a primer in easy, dirty R&B.

Brought up on the same south London estate as the rampaging So Solid Crew, you might have expected Baz to have become a soul diva or a rap artist, like her sister Monie Love. Instead, under the direction of uber-producer Guy Sigsworth, she’s chosen an unashamedly pop path. It would be unfair to call her a black Dido, even if several of the melodies would not have sounded out of place on No Angel. But a female version of Seal wouldn’t be far wide of the mark.

He helped Audrey Tautou steal your heart in Am

Years before the misery of Limp Bizkit, Rage Against The Machine proved rap-metal could harbour both political and musical radicalism within its toned and tattooed frame. Nowadays singer Zack De La Rocha spends his time with the Zapatistas and DJ Shadow, leaving his bandmates to recruit ex-Soundgarden singer Chris Cornell for a predictably conservative affair. With sleeve art by Pink Floyd designer Storm Thorgerson and an admittedly superb opening update of Led Zeppelin (“Cochise”), Audioslave are clearly angling for stadium rock idolatry. Sadly, they don’t quite merit it yet. The band remain prodigiously well-sprung, and Tom Morello has enough guitar effects to reanimate the hoariest old metal dynamic. But Audioslave is weighed down by Cornell’s po-faced bellow, and it goes on 20 minutes too long.

Ever wondered what was Sarah’s take on the break-up when ol’ Bob laid it bare on Blood On The Tracks? Perhaps you can glean an idea from this re-rendering of the entire album by Mary Lee’s Corvette.

The sequence and musical contours of Dylan’s original 1975 masterpiece are followed so exactly that any fresh insight lies almost entirely in the transposition to the voice of a woman. The main difference is that his sneers are given a more tender female makeover. But then, didn’t we always know Bob was from Mars and Sarah from Venus?

Boxstep record with Shellac’s live soundman, Bill Shibbe. As such, he’s helped furnish brooding gothic ballads with enormous mettle. Rolling grand pianos, menacing violins and shards of guitar make this sound like a cross between The Bad Seeds and Godspeed You! Black Emperor’s gale force ebb and flow.

It’s an imposing, imperious album, but Boxstep’s cerebral approach means impassioned crescendos rarely teeter over into melodrama. Thankfully, any quiet-to-loud dynamics are shelved in favour of clarity and coherence.

LOVE, LAUGHTER AND TRUTH

Since coming in from the cold, Richard Hawley has enjoyed the kind of critical, if not commercial, success previously denied him as guitarist with ill-starred indie favourites The Longpigs. After the band’s label went belly up and old mucker Jarvis Cocker had thrown a lifeline (hiring him for Pulp’s This Is Hardcore tour), he struck out alone, releasing 2001’s eponymous mini LP and equally lovely follow-up, Late Night Final. Now he’s delivered the assured collection he’s always promised.

Almost uniquely among sidemen/guitarist solo albums, Hawley resists the urge to riff, eschewing amp-cranking bravura for more meditative horizons. His brooding, velvety croon might have something to do with it, too. This is good, old-fashioned balladeering but with enough street savvy to scupper suggestions of pastiche. Imagine Frankie Laine meets Lambchop.

Meanwhile, the arrangements are sublime, bringing to mind the doomed romantic allure of Jack Nitzsche’s 1963 surf-pop classic The Lonely Surfer or Billy Strange’s work on Hawley hero Lee Hazlewood’s MGM sides (it’s no coincidence that, with other kids embroiled in punk anarchy or disco fever, young Hawley and his old man were trawling through vinyl fairs in search of elusive Hazlewood prot

This features nine bands showcasing two tracks apiece produced by Gordon Raphael. New York’s The Astro Jet and Soundtrak pursue hectic, angular new wave with conviction if not originality. But it’s Berlin’s Van Der Meer who greatly impress with “Now I’ve Found You”, a ravishing dream-pop blast akin to My Bloody Valentine colluding with Juliana Hatfield. Elsewhere, the yearning, lyrical introspection of The Satellites shows that Raphael’s A&R ear matches his studio skills.

“No more hate in my heart, baby!” are Dr Bob’s first solo words, and his early singles and outtakes are surprisingly buoyant, full-bodied stabs at white soul exuberance, impossibly busy, evoking jazz-funk and Orange Juice. Anti-Gulf War One epic “Walt Whitman” and the cathedral-big production of B-side “Realms Of Gold” show the man’s often overlooked ambition, but when he’s reduced to singer-songwriter simplicity as the ’90s wear on, the too-literal limitations of a good-hearted talent are exposed.

Every bit as sleek and shiny as their name suggests, Frank and John Navin delight in upending the conventions of Bacharachian perfect-pop with mischievous wit and panache. “We’re not reinventing the wheel, we’re redesigning the hubcap!” they once proclaimed. Guest design team members this time round include Rob Mazurek (Chicago Underground Duo), John McEntire and Doug McCombs (both from post-rock progenitors Tortoise). Exquisite.

Five years ago every new female singer was trying to be the ‘new Alanis’. Now they all seem to want to tread in Dido’s shoes. At least Virginia MacNaughton breaks the mould, and on such sultry songs as “Essential Prey” and “Shadow Me” she seems more interested in being Britain’s answer to kd lang. She’s a powerful narrative writer, and you can imagine what a major record label could do if they threw a million bucks at the album and sent the songs off to be remixed by top LA producer Tommy Leatherpants. They’d ruin her. But they’d surely sell a lot of records.