With All About Eve clambering cannily back towards the profile they enjoyed in the ’80s, this seven-track snowstorm is a stopgap, a “Christmas special”, before their return proper. Its wintry themes include three bizarre cover versions?Wham’s “Last Christmas”, Aled Jones’ “Walking In The Air” and Queen’s “A Winter’s Tale”?which, if nothing else, prove they have funny bones. Elsewhere, old hit “December” is radically revamped and “Cold” is an effective instrumental. Julianne Regan’s voice is frustratingly under-used, but it’s a joy to hear them tumbling down our chimneys again.

Similar in feel to The Faust Tapes, the legendary Krautrockers’ biggest-selling 1974 album on account of being sold for 50p by Virgin, Patchwork is a collage of studio outtakes spanning their entire career. There are familiar moments, such as a fragment of “It’s A Rainy Day, Sunshine Girl”, but mostly the sounds here run the entire Faust gamut from tentative, acoustic half-ideas to minimal, Triassic riffery to primal electronica from one of rock’s forgotten futures. A good taster for those unfamiliar with the band.

A stridently combative duo formerly known as Dead Prez, M-1 and stic.man apply gangsta-style aggression to an anti-capitalist agenda that circumnavigates Chuck D and heads straight back to the Black Panthers and Mao. No liberal platitudes on Turn Off The Radio?DPZ preach a rifle, library book and health food-powered insurrection over prickly, minimalist electro-soul. Vilifying the fool Bush as a bigger enemy than Osama is one of their milder edicts. But the best moment comes with a rare glimmer of wit when Aaliyah’s “We Need A Resolution” is hijacked and restyled as?what else??”We Need A Revolution”.

Away from the jazz faction, post-rock’s stately drift towards classical music continues apace with the release of the Threnody Ensemble’s debut album. Like Rachel’s, their most obvious contemporaries, the San Diego collective make the ideal soundtrack to those poignant moments in the conservatoire. Actually, Timbre Hollow is less precious than that. A lot of artful acoustic guitar, cello and clarinet, for sure. But there’s unexpected wit and catholicism, notably when a salsa groove gatecrashes the tranquillity of “Tha Roman (Formerly Valerie White) Part 2”. Engaging.

Emily Sparks composes delicate, ephemeral, intimate pop songs that flit between delicate yet upbeat pop and the darker stylings of fellow Americana songstresses Nina Nastasia and Neko Case. Using spartan orchestration with drums and keyboards, Sparks’ acoustic slide guitar work and vulnerable, untrained voice deliver an unpretentious set of deeply felt songs. Recorded with a little help from Drew O’Doherty, who is also contributing to the new Willard Grant Conspiracy album.

Advance copies of the new album from Vince Clarke and Andy Bell were sent out with a special security number and a pompous letter warning the disc should not be “left with a third party” and demanding that “we must globally recognise the risk of illegal copying of music”. Why anyone should want to is another matter. Ten years ago, Erasure released a witty, chart-topping Abba pastiche. Here they try it again with daft versions of songs by the likes of Buggles, Cockney Rebel, Peter Gabriel, the Three Degrees and the Righteous Brothers. The results are risible but the joke is no longer funny. It’s this sort of copying that should be made illegal.

Since the success of O Brother, Where Art Thou?’s multi-platinum soundtrack and Down From The Mountain, bluegrass has snagged an audience far beyond its Foggy Mountain origins. Alison Krauss and Union Station have been deemed the pearl around which the revivalist grit has gathered, though, in truth, the band has been busy smudging the edges of Appalachia, country and pop for over 15 years now.

As phenomenal as the genre’s second coming is Krauss herself: classical violinist aged five; award-winning fiddler aged 12; first album at 14; youngest Grand Ole Opry inductee, eulogised by the legendary Bill Monroe. Since joining Union Station in 1987, the Illinois prodigy has done more to clear bluegrass of its hick antiquity than anyone, reshaping non-traditional material into progressive new forms. And she’s still barely out of her 20s.

If 2001’s New Favourite was a high watermark, Live is its perfect complement. As a touring ensemble of impeccable musicianship, Union Station are almost as astonishing as, say, Dylan’s Never Ending Tour troupe. Guitarist/mandolinist Dan Tyminski, Ron Block (banjo), Jerry Douglas (dobro) and Barry Bales (bass)?all singular talents in their own field?prove a blinding flash of perfection when locked into the same orbit.

Highlights? Too many to mention, but witness how Douglas’ virtuoso piece “Monkey Let The Hogs Out” gives way to, first, yminski’s lead on “The Man Who Wouldn’t Hoe Corn” and then Krauss’ glassy warble on “Take Me For Longing”, and you have the full breadth of her talent laid bare. The only beef is the over-ecstatic, whoopin’ an’ a-hollerin’ crowd noise, showing there’s much to be said for the Live At Leeds school of punter smothering. Then again, maybe they’re excused this one time.

Nashville-based Miller’s stock has never been higher: Emmylou Harris’ musical director for the past five years; superb 2001 collaboration with wife Julie narrowly edged out by Dylan’s Love & Theft at the Grammys. Four albums in, this is his finest solo foray yet, remarkable for Miller’s skilfully-woven fretwork and plaintive moonlit moan. A couple of throwaway rockers aside, its ambitious scope reins in cajun, dirty blues and old-time country. Emmylou duet “A Showman’s Life”, Southern soul corker “When It Comes To You” and slowie “Please Send Me Someone To Love” are guaranteed to elicit envious glances from Miller’s peers.

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.