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.

After his disappointing mid-’90s Sweet 75 project, Krist Novoselic’s future in rock’n’roll looked decidedly grim. Seven years on, flanked by The Meat Puppets’ Curt Kirkwood and drummer Bud Gaugh, he’s back?and you’ll be pleasantly surprised. Eyes Adrift is a stunning debut. It is anchored in Ragged Glory-era Neil Young (for example, the epic closing 15-minute Weld-a-thon, “Pasted”), there are rockabilly flirtations (“Dottie Dawn & Julie Jewel”), some Tex-Mex (“Sleight Of Hand”), and it’s largely grunge-free. Never mind the Foo Fighters?it seems that the phoenix from Nirvana’s ashes has finally arisen here.

Of the 10 laptop-driven acts who appear on this album, Cex are perhaps the best known, and their “Wrist Elbow 2” is the standout track here?intelligently paced and stimulating hip hop. Of the others, the most arresting tracks come from Original Hamster, whose “Notorious DSP” is a bit like Stephen Hawking impersonating Jay-Z, and Knifehandchop, who essays a stab at an intriguing new genre of gabba ragga. Where the artists move further away from populism, the results are less impressive: Stars As Eyes’ post-rock by numbers, the Numbers’ starry-eyed post-punk. But Nathan Michel’s C&W cut-ups on “Magellan” are intriguingly askew.

Tokyo guitarist Yoshihisa Shimizu began Kenso in 1976, and 26 years on his successful dental practice doesn’t prevent him leading possibly the world’s finest prog band. There’s twiddliness and cinematic ambition in abundance, but you also get punk energy, cut-throat riffs and co-opting of grunge (“Fist Of Fury”), gamelan (“Muhon”) and live drum’n’bass (“Taro-To-lu-lkikata”). This is what prog was always meant to be.

Since 1994, Lenola have existed as a cut-price Mercury Rev without transcending their influences. This double CD gingerly attempts to do so. Lenola still sound like forgotten shoegazers Drop Nineteens apeing the aforementioned giants, but now blend R.E.M.’s psych-country into the equation. They come into their own with skewed but joyous bubblegum pop blasts.

Stunningly varied, vibrant and well-crafted, this sonic eulogy to the firefighter nephew that Murphy lost in the 9/11 tragedy has roots in everything from Hoagy Carmichael to Brian Wilson, and is the true heir to the mercurial genius of Pet Sounds (Van Dyke Parks himself lends a hand). Murphy’s deep, sad voice moves through a harmonically sophisticated landscape, like Mark Eitzel crooning the Rufus Wainwright songbook. With a sense of humour, yet! Murphy is a skewed pop visionary to be reckoned with.

Even if you’re sick of the current wave of neo-garage rock currently flowing like dirty water out of Sweden, give the INC a try. Driven by iconoclastic political ideals, they have more on their lyrical agenda than their party-minded brethren. They don’t stop the clock with the release of Raw Power, either, incorporating the influence of quirky late-’70s UK art-punks like Wire and the Swell Maps into their rave-ups, consequently arriving at both a broader sonic landscape and more satisfying mindset.

This LA duo, aka Ross Harris and Craig Borrell, are multidirectional electronicists, offering a dizzying array of sounds. Less obviously ‘loop and samples’oriented than their previous work (debut album Simplemachinerock was pulled from distribution for containing uncleared Sesame Street samples), Can You See The Music? neatly navigates an electronic/organic interface, as do the Dayglo psychedelic film collages that accompany the tracks on the DVD included free with this album.

Alt.country traditionalists dismayed by the avant-garde inclinations Jeff Tweedy showed on Wilco’s Yankee Hotel Foxtrot will be demoralised further by the appearance of Loose Fur. A third collaboration between Tweedy, Jim O’Rourke and drummer Glenn Kotche, it takes the fluid, impressionistic style of Yankee Hotel Foxtrot and O’Rourke’s Insignificance to a brittle new level.

Actually, Loose Fur was their first work together, recorded some three years ago, long referred to as the “Nuts” project and delayed until the protracted YHF campaign was over. The three songs sung by Tweedy and two by O’Rourke, plus one deft instrumental, have a surprising unity: a rolling, hazy style which circumnavigates usual verse/chorus/verse dynamics. Instead, typical Loose Fur pieces begin as sketchy songs before undergoing a kind of gracious metamorphosis into long, semi-improvised passages.

Only “You Were Wrong” is spared an elaborate coda, a perfectly-realised fragment of Tweedy melancholia that, distant dysfunctional clang notwithstanding, should sit easily with Wilco’s more conservative heartland?though the superb opener, “Laminated Cat”, found its way into a few Wilco sets last year. But to imagine Tweedy as some sort of humble, straightforward balladeer being led astray by the arthouse trickery of O’Rourke is to miss the point of Loose Fur. The group allows O’Rourke to indulge his songwriter instincts and Tweedy to exert an often-suppressed experimental imperative.

So when O’Rourke essays the frail “So Long”, his acoustic reverie is interrupted by an electric guitar line from Tweedy, whose pointillist soloing recalls no one so much as improv hero Derek Bailey. Kotche, too, is complicit in the plot, sounding as if he’s more interested in throwing his drums down a staircase than playing them. It takes some six minutes before the trio glide into unison behind O’Rourke’s breathy harmonising.

The effect is brilliant. You can look at it two ways: as a document of shifting tensions between songform and skronk, a big virtuoso tease that may well aggravate as much as illuminate Tweedy and O’Rourke’s contrasting fans. Or as the discovery of the common ground between songwriters and experimentalists.

Little has gone right in Osborne’s career since her 1995 hit “One Of Us”, which found her bracketed with Alanis and Sheryl as part of a new and assertive breed of American female singer-songwriters.

After being dropped by two major labels, on How Sweet It Is she’s gone back to her blues and R&B roots and made a defiantly non-rock album of songs originally done by the likes of Marvin Gaye, Edwin Starr, Aretha Franklin, Stevie Wonder, Hendrix and Sly Stone. You could be forgiven for not expecting much. In fact, she’s a brilliant reinterpreter and sounds far happier in Raitt territory than she ever did as a Morissette clone.

In the late-’90s, moody alt.country songpoet Buckner went all post-rock for two major-label albums. This is the official release of a homemade acoustic demo CD he later peddled at shows, containing bare-bones versions of songs from those records. Stripped of adornment, these elliptical songs make a much more direct emotional impact and provide easier points of entry. Imagine Townes Van Zandt with some DIY mud on his shoes and you’re in the ballpark.

They may be punks, but this five-piece purvey a sound redolent of a time before the punk aesthetic was codified and encompassed everything from Generation X to the Rich Kids.

While there’s no letup of energy here, Bombshell Rocks display a surfeit of songcraft and production smarts without ever getting near the Green Day-soundalike mill that dominates the contemporary punk-pop scene.

Watch your backs, Bad Religion! The Great Swedish Takeover of rock continues unabated.

An authentic children’s band from Lewes, East Sussex, Hunkydory signed to that safe haven for eccentrics,