Having met while performing in St Etienne's touring band, Debsy Wykes (from all-girl post-punk popettes Dolly Mixture) and Paul Kelly (ex-East Village) front the elegant chamber pop quartet Birdie. Comprising unreleased tracks, alternate versions and new cover versions, their third album is all poignant melodies with strong, mellotron-driven hooklines and wan female vocals.

Given their history (support on two Antipodean tours and collaboration on forthcoming Gene Clark tribute LP), it's hardly surprising to discover Sydney's Golden Rough in thrall to all things Joe Pernice. Singer/songwriter David Orwell's hushed, breathy delivery-particularly on "99%" and "Summer Feeling"?is eerily Pernice-ish, though the beautifully understated melodies savour The Scud Mountain Boys' quiet desperation over The Pernice Brothers' fuller-bodied pop. Lyrically, though, it's an astute vision of Orwellian dystopia.

Hailing from California, Mad At Gravity were recently the focus of a furious bidding war. Bearing in mind they'd only played 10 gigs, you'd expect their debut to be mind-boggling. Instead, you get plodding rhythms, Slash-influenced guitars, a lot of chest-beating and the kind of cloying vocals that make Nickelback so irritating.

With the universal acclaim accorded 2000's eponymous debut, Suffolk-born McRae hoisted himself firmly into the vanguard of the new acoustic wagon train. Since then, of course, the field has become saturated with sensitive singer/songwriter types whose frailty is matched by earnestness. Thankfully, McRae remains ahead of the pack. Produced by Ben (Blur/Elbow) Hillier, Just Like Blood occupies the same territory as Tom McRae, though at least a couple of hues darker, haunted at the edges, by turns stony and impassioned. Loosely themed around the idea of travel?be it arrivals, departures, or just wishing you were somewhere else?there's palpable menace beneath the softly-softly facade. McRae's songs are emotionally and politically inseparable, so seemingly simple love songs are really choking messages to the human race. At times, his swooping voice is so hushed you strain to hear it, wrapped in acoustic guitars and strings, lulling you into a false sense of serenity. It's like lounging on a summer beach, then having sand ground into your eyes. "Stronger Than Dirt" is typical: a mesh of spindly guitars, a slap of drums and McRae's buttery timbre declaring the importance of standing for what you believe in ("I'll still be here when the dust has cleared/Will you?"). "Walking2Hawaii", too, summons its power not from sonic bravura?though, despite the sparse arrangements, there's a richness of tone, a fullness of expression here?but from the quiet smoulder, its bleak intensity unpicking the common illusions of everyday experience: "Falling feels like flying/Until you hit the ground/Everything is beautiful/Until you look around". Occasionally he broadens the palette for added oomph ("Mermaid Blues" has distorted synths like a squadron of harriers on afterburn while a raft of xylophones surf through "A Day Like Today"), but this is largely subversion through stealth. Even the poppiest cut, "Karaoke Soul", is a broadside at our Will'n'Gareth culture. Closing track "Human Remains", however, is darkness incarnate, bemoaning the universal inability to address the present ("Looking away, too scared to see human remains/Soon enough, soon enough, this will all be a memory") and proving that McRae's venom is ultimately borne of concern, not contempt. This is beautiful, chilling stuff.

Todd Haynes is a film-maker you're never quite sure whether to champion. In the past, when he's won accolades, it's been for something boring and indulgent, like Safe, which moved as quickly as Laurent Blanc in diver's boots in Montreal snow. When he took a hammering, it was for the vivacious, accurate glam rock Citizen Kane that was Velvet Goldmine. Which, relevantly, was gorged with fantastic music. Now he's everybody's darling again, tipped to enjoy Oscar orgies with his deeply stylised Douglas Sirk homage, Far From Heaven. Under a veneer of pristine '50s repression, it focuses on racism, homosexuality and Julianne Moore giving a performance which will be praised as "impeccably restrained", although one wonders if, as with Safe, she was half-asleep. It's a visually ravishing film, if not quite the earth-shaker US critics are claiming. What's really odd is the use of the more-than-legendary Elmer Bernstein's old-school score. Bernstein is now 80, and without wishing to be ageist, there's a chance that Haynes-an avowed fan of Bowie, Grant-Lee Phillips and Shudder To Think?is deploying him with steaming cartloads of skittish irony. And that old Elmer doesn't know it. Although he made his name with the radical jazz of The Man With The Golden Arm in 1955, and remained a young buck through such gems as The Sweet Smell Of Success, he's been a venerable institution from The Magnificent Seven onwards, and done plenty of rubbish since his 1967 Oscar for Thoroughly Modern Millie. With Scorsese's Cape Fear there were hints of rehabilitation: it never truly transpired. The lush, sumptuous orchestration here may be Haynes' way of satirising the period charm; for Bernstein it was surely just another day at the office. He's so good at the genre?he IS the genre?that you go with it. Heaven, subverted from afar.

Darian Sahanaja and Nick Walusko of Wondermints (who performed admirably as Brian Wilson's backing band on his recent Pet Sounds tour) met in the early '80s, and before striking out in their own right they jobbed as arrangers/performers for other artists. In the late '80s they teamed up with power pop diva Lisa Mychols on Lost Winter's Dream, a suite of songs updating 1963's A Christmas Gift For You From Phil Spector. Receiving only a very limited cassette release in 1990, this is the project's first appearance on CD, and sounds like a blueprint for the style that would later make the band a huge critical, if not commercial, success.

Is this the first book soundtrack? Stephen "(The Real) Tuesday Weld" Coates' sophomore album investigates what it is to be human. Lucifer is given a chance to redeem himself on contemporary Earth, finding himself reincarnated as a depressed writer interrupted in mid-suicide. Coates' dream-like, softly crooned vocals hover between optimism and melancholy, backed by an inspired sampling of ghostly jazz 78s in collision with breakbeats. Meticulously arranged, touching, intimate, and with mesmerising melodies, this is superbly atmospheric.

Remember back in 1995 when Eric Matthews' mix of contemporary rock sonorities and Brian Wilson production values (It's Heavy in Here) was supposed to be the cat's pyjamas? Well, singer-songwriter Tony Romanello from Oklahoma has finally delivered on that promise. Post-Sergeant Pepper glockenspiel and horn section lead into Jeff Buckleyesque wailing. String quartets give way to distortion-laden guitars. The presence of Flaming Lips skin-pounder and multi-tasking whiz Steve Drozd is a further clue that Counting Stars is psych-pop successfully made modern.

The poignancy of this concert lies in the fact that bassist Bernard Edwards died later that same night. Otherwise, it's a dismal spectacle. Ironically, Edwards and guitarist Nile Rodgers play superbly throughout, but one listen to guest guitarist Slash ruining "Le Freak" will make you weep. For a group so dependent on elegance and delicacy, it is somewhat humiliating to experience a past-it Sister Sledge warble "We Are Family" for 10 minutes, to witness them plodding with Steve Winwood through Hendrix's "Stone Free", and to hear them reduced to segueing "Good Times" into "Rappers' Delight". They deserve a better memorial.

And so, thankfully, once again, here are Black Box Recorder to dispatch a cold bucket of sarcasm over the chronically lukewarm indie/pop scene. Passionoia, superficially, doesn't seem quite so bleak and mordant as Luke Haines & co's previous work. The spindly, sophisticated, John Barry-esque strings and electronica of "The Facts Of Life" have been eschewed in favour of a shiny, bouncy sound. Certainly there isn't quite the sense of serial killers lurking in the rose garden?but don't be deceived. "School Song", the opener, returns to the theme of "England Made Me", with prim vocalist Sarah Nixey playing the role of the sort of bitterly authoritarian schoolmaster responsible for emotionally crippling the nation's youth. ("You lot need a bit of toughening up... you're weak and spoilt.") There's something almost kinky (a good BBR word) about Haines and John Moore employing Nixey as a mouthpiece for this nightmarish recollection of schoolboy misery but all involved seem to enjoy the perversity. There's playfulness, also, in the numerous instances of pop pastiche. "GSOH QED" alludes to Tupperware Bacharach/David pop classic "I'll Never Fall In Love Again". Only for Nixey, the price of passion is death threats and intimate pictures on the Internet from two-faced impotent spineless reptiles". Then there's "Andrew Ridgeley", with its impudent steal from The Human League's "Love Action". "This is Sarah Nixey talking..."?ah, the triple-axled irony. "Andrew Ridgeley" is a defiant cri-de-coeur on the part of a generation weaned on the most shinily insipid aspects of the 80s. Still more intriguingly worrying is "The New Diana", in which Nixey yearns to be just that, "lying on a yacht reading photo magazines". A fairy tale wish or a death wish? As ever, BBR's absinthe-flavoured acid drops give you a great deal more to suck on than the rest of pop's confectionery selection. Savour their sourness.

Claudia Barton and Ian Williams inhabit a familiar London dream-world of charity shop glamour, bedsit bohemia and adored icons including Gallic chanteuses, Weimar ice divas, noir film scores and femme fatales, soiled with Soho seediness. Williams' melodramatic, semi-classical, piano-led arrangements frame Barton's breathily versatile voice in these arch tales of romantic doom: The Tindersticks, Jack, even Saint Etienne have been here before, but Gamine's eccentric, underground self-belief leaves them sounding like no one else.

In a few years, Julian Cope will write essays celebrating the brilliance of this debut full-length album. Formerly a confrontational noise band from Rhode Island, Black Dice now live in Brooklyn, record for the radically hip DFA label, and have organised their art-skronk into pulsating pieces in an avant-shamanic tradition that includes late Boredoms, early Popol Vuh and Coil. The dominant tone is violent ambience so that, remarkably, the noise eruptions seem no more malign than the superficially quiet passages that precede them. It all adds up to a genuinely psychedelic record.

"Special Day" is just one of the tracks where New Jersey's Jaheim perfects an audacious match of R&B ancient and modern: his high, grainy voice slides from church supplication to soul abandon, bathed in strings, harmonies and brass, the singing, playing and arranging as lush and heartfelt as any jukebox favourite, even as they bounce in a subtly digital mix. Dedicated to his dead mother, Still Ghetto reflects on relationships with women with a warmth rap refuses, but the downbeat title track dives into Jaheim's home streets with dark sympathy worthy of Curtis Mayfield circa Back To The World.

Ten years ago, Dirty Three established a uniquely formidable sound. Brooding, emotionally wrought instrumentals that drew on Celtic folk and gothic gloom via feedback-drenched menace. They haven't deviated much since, but this album shows their idiosyncrasies are still intact. Mood-wise it's their bleakest yet, with their turbulent ebb and flow unleashing both joy and sorrow. Even when apparently serene, that wound-coil tension is palpable. This makes Godspeed You! Black Emperor sound about as intense as Gomez.

Little Feat aficionados are the sort to have scoured the globe for bootlegs, so will enjoy these collections of rare '70s material. Raw Tomatos is the pick of the vine since it includes original Lowell George items like "Crack In Your Door", a superbly sparse "Fat Man In The Bathtub" and a funked-up "Strawberry Flats". The live Ripe brace may be more familiar, although it's worth picking up on for terrific versions of old Feat classics like "Teenage Nervous Breakdown", "Dixie Chicken" and the timeless "Apolitical Blues". The quality control includes decent liners and updated Neon Park artwork for good measure.

Ital house has a cheesy, chequered past. But with Spiller, Jolly Music and now Stylophonic, it's finally getting good again. Here Parisian filter funk and NY hip hop are twisted into loop-da-loop thrills that combine messy hedonism with pristine precision. There are occasional flirtations with acid jazz, but more plentiful are the familiar '80s synth sounds, creating a sense of fresh urgency. Fontana has an assured touch. All he lacks are the gargantuan confidence and guile of Daft Punk.

Like Fennesz and Four Tet, Julien Locquet (aka Dorine_Muraille) takes folk-inflected acoustic melodies and scrambles them through his laptop to create digital pastorales. Unlike them, however, Locquet seems to have a conflicted attitude towards the prettiness of his sources. On Mani, his British debut, he stretches chansons with impressive rigour. Guitar and piano passages are deconstructed in a way that evokes millions of ants shredding a carcass very quickly. The results are messy, then, but also technically dazzling and often beautiful in spite of Locquet's frenetic micro-edits. He'd benefit from calming down a little, nevertheless.

Average song length: two minutes, but the staccato post-punk of Spoon's own work is retuned by Crewe into clipped, neurotic sexual and verbal aggression more akin to new wavers like Joe Jackson, and even new wave of new wavers like Sleeper (who are lyrically quoted). Sneeringly in control when not running into trouble or falling apart, Crewe's persona is inspiring and insulting. Fresh, frisky pop for mature, modern girls and boys.

In a classic global-village journey, young Chilean dance student Alejandra Iglesias fell in love with vintage electro sounds and eventually wound up as a DJ in New York City, spinning under the name Dinky. Already a couple of years into a fully-fledged recording career, she turns out a seamless blend of techno, contemporary electroclash, and Kraftwerk-loving retro. Spare, sparkling and danceable, Black Cabaret is the soundtrack to the minds of the electro-minions that scour eBay for the keywords "minimalist synth".