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.

Miracle Mile is essentially Trevor Jones, who makes albums of gentle enchantment such as 2000’s acclaimed Slow Fade. The follow-up is just as beguiling, and as a songwriter he recalls David Gates of Bread, particularly on “Wilful”, which has one of the loveliest melodies you’ve heard since “Baby I’m-A Want You”. Fans of Stephen Duffy’s Lilac Time might also care to investigate. The pedal steel, by BJ Cole and Melvin Duffy, nudges proceedings in an alt.country direction, but these remain essentially pop songs in the most honourable sense of the term.

Blair Jollands (El Hula), a white-suited New Zealander, has conjured up an epic and elegant debut, surprisingly produced by Strokes man Gordon Raphael. Jollands’ voice jets through shades of Scott Walker and Ziggy, and he only lets himself down with lapses into Cave-ian grunge. Most of this, like the arch-Associates swoon of “Bitter Girl”, is exceptional, big soul stuff. This year’s Rufus Wainwright, at least.

It’s four years since we had a new album from one of Britain’s greatest living songwriters?Thompson’s longest period of silence in a prolific career that began with Fairport Convention in the late ’60s. The Old Kit Bag is his first album since he turned 50, so he’s probably entitled to a rest, although the delay probably has more to do with looking for a new home after the expiry of his contract with Capitol.

Thompson remains the most British of songwriters. His last album was called Mock Tudor and the one before that was a song-cycle about the Industrial Revolution. The Old Kit Bag’s subject matter is more universal, but the imagery?both musical and lyrical?is still uniquely Albion across a dozen exquisite songs, supported by a rhythm section he refers to as “the chaps” (Danny Thompson on double bass and drummer Michael Jerome), with occasional backing vocals from Judith Owen.

From the get-go on the hypnotic “Gethsemane”, we are reminded that Thompson is one of our most distinctive guitarists. When it’s followed by the bluesy “Jealous Words” and the ’60s-tinged “I’ll Tag Along”, it’s apparent this is basically a rock album. Even “A Love You Can’t Survive”, which starts as a dark acoustic ballad, ends with one of his most powerful solos.

“One Door Opens” is a mandolin stomp, and “Destiny” is probably the nearest he’s ever going to get to a conventional pop song. “Got No Right” at first sounds an oddity, a jazzy, late-night tale of broken love, but develops into one of the album’s key songs. “Pearly Jim” is another tough rocker before we hit the home straight with the over-dramatic “Sight Unseen”, the sombre “Outside On The Inside” and the accordion-drenched “Happy Days And Auld Lang Syne”, which manages to sound about two centuries old but isn’t.

The Old Kit Bag doesn’t quite make it into the Thompson solo Top 10 alongside I Want To See The Bright Lights Tonight and Shoot Out The Lights. But it’s good to have him back.

With Mushroom having left the band and Daddy G taking a sabbatical from the studio to concentrate on family life, it falls to Robert Del Naja (3D) to carry forward Massive Attack into the beyond, in collaboration with Neil Davidge, the producer of their third album Mezzanine (1998).

Without Mezzanine’s layers of guitar, which left some Massive Attack lovers narrowing their eyes doubtfully, 100 Windows seems at first subdued. Much as shapes only gradually reveal themselves in an initially pitch black room, so it is with this album, which takes a few listens to become accustomed to. The devil is in the detail, nestled deep in the layered backdrop.

“Future Proof”, the opener, seems like generic Massive Attack, with its pulsing, see-saw riff and velveteen ambience, before abstract muezzin shapes hove into your face like bats. “Everywhen” features regular MA vocalist Horace Andy, but there’s something disquietingly irregular about the orbit he’s in here.

There were always ominous overtones to Massive Attack, but 100 Windows is especially stark, inculcating the sort of trepidation that comes with staring at the night sky for too long, or staying up too late discussing Noam Chomsky.

There’s a radioactive air about the album which, coupled with the use of Eastern, Arabic strings, brings to musical life a palpable sense of post-September 11 tension. 3D himself admits that “the state of the world has rubbed off on the record”.

Sin

As a Mercury Music Prize judge, this writer has been dismayed by how dull most of the British jazz entries in recent years have been. Now, shining like a beacon comes the visionary debut from the British bassist/composer Anthony Tidd and his group, Quite Sane. Long delayed while he’s been busy producing Roots and Jazzyfatnastees, given his own head he’s come up with an effortless, groundbreaking fusion of modern jazz, streetwise beats and hip hop. The dynamic tunes, thought-provoking lyrics, imaginative arrangements and general air of utter contemporaneity make it the most accessible, exciting modern British jazz album in years.

Almost uniquely among the anti-folk crowd, New York resident Mason isn’t preoccupied with lo-fi aesthetics. His well-observed ditties may be furnished with little more than acoustic guitar, but a nasal whine and knack for turning out fully-constructed songs give him a robustness lacking in many of his contemporaries. As with fellow tunesmith Jeff Lewis, Daniel Johnston’s influence looms large, as do Dylan and Sonic Youth, but Mason has a wry way with words. His take on love? “My mitten became a glove/My chicken became a dove”. Charming.