Danny Boyle’s arty horror flick started brilliantly, ended badly, and was scored by a fast-rising Brit, John Murphy. But the musical highlight is Blue States’ “Season Song”, which is both chilling and reassuring. Brian Eno’s “An Ending (Ascent)” is also ambivalently touching, while Grandaddy are, as ever, incapable of dullness. Not sure why Godspeed You! Black Emperor’s efforts for the film don’t feature, but Perri Alleyne’s “Ave Maria” should cheer up disappointed crazed extremists. In the name of research I recently asked Boyle for his favourite music of all time?he went for Led Zeppelin, The Clash, Ziggy Stardust and Underworld. I’m pretty sure you could locate the spirit of most of those here, given a capacity for lateral imagining.

Another day, another Bond movie. Forgive me if I can’t get worked up about the McConcept, although David Arnold is, by any standards, a slick operator who does as much as anyone could to keep the formula fresh. Paul Oakenfold has a stab at remixing the James Bond theme, and, of course, Madonna and Mirwais concoct that title song. Here Madge contrives to sound like a tracheotomy victim rattling through an outtake from the Music album. “Sigmund Freud,” she croaks. We wonder why. Then we realise she’s simply trying to tell us she read a book once. Something she’s been trying to tell us for years and years. We’re not having it. You don’t marry Rodney Trotter if you’ve read a book. Uh-uh.

It’s the 20th anniversary?already?of the groundbreaking TV pop show where enigmatic New Order vocalist Barney once furrowed his brow, stared at Paula Yates’ arse and said to me: “Cor, I wouldn’t half mind shagging that.” Ah, melancholy ’80s indieland, where the boys were poets and the girls were, if they had any gumption at all, somewhere else having a life. A splendid 37-track compilation this, as much for Wham! and Frankie as for Echo And The Bunnymen, Iggy Pop, U2, The Human League and The Jam. You’ll be succumbing to the beat surrender, sparing us the cutter and hungry like the wolf. Whether you’ll be investigating “The Politics Of Dancing” with Re-Flex is less certain.

Marking public enemy’s 15-year journey from the pinnacle of the rap game to a less populist but still vital position as fractious elder statesmen and industry-baiting online evangelists, Revolverlution is part-skewed retrospective and part-flawed experiment.

The smattering of muddy live tracks, sampled phone calls and earnest messages about staying in school are low points for these hip hop pioneers who once constructed albums with surgical precision. Musically, new cuts such as “Put It Up” and the title track itself draw on the same simmering cauldron of ’70s funk, bass-heavy grooves, declamatory rhetoric and impolite guitars which have dominated PE’s work since the mid-’90s. The grinding “Son Of A Bush” takes a none-too-subtle sledgehammer to Dubya (“Son of a bitch! Son of a bad man!”) while Flavor Flav does his obligatory bendy-legged Jim Carrey routine on “Can A Woman Make A Man Lose His Mind?” and Professor Griff auditions for Rage Against The Machine with “What Good Is A Bomb?”.

A more revolutionary aspect of the album is its remixes of classic PE cuts, downloaded from the band’s website and overhauled by novice studio contenders across the globe. Thus Scattershot’s “B Side Wins Again” emerges as a splice’n’dice noise salad, Vienna’s Functionist sculpts “Shut ‘Em Down” into a trip hop juggernaut, Argentina’s Jeronimo Punx slather “Public Enemy No 1” in ragged lo-fi Beastie beats, and so on. Energy levels are high, and the egalitarian concept borders on radical.

Chuck D’s righteous rapier rage and piledriver propulsion may have slackened, but in terms of challenging lazy music business norms with brutally eloquent, anti-authority cyber-funk, PE are still fighting the powers that be.

Veteran French bassist Henri Texier here leads his Azur Quintet through a two-CD set of elegant and atmospheric compositions, aided by a string orchestra arranged by Claude Barthelemy. With especially attractive soloing by Sebastien Texier on soprano sax and clarinet, these pieces are evocative, intriguing, and always immaculately realised. Add the harmonically exploratory contributions of Bosnian pianist Bojan Zulfikarpasic and you have one of the best European jazz albums of the year. Another winner from the dependable Label Bleu.

Adrenalin rushes like The Ramones are virulently addictive. No surprise, then, that guitarist Dee Dee and drummer Marky couldn’t let it lie. Back in June 1999 at the Continental, and accompanied by Dee Dee’s wife Barbara Zampini, they raced once more through that ageless back catalogue. They’d lost a yard or two of pace?a mere 21 tracks in 40 minutes?and Dee Dee and Barbara’s vocals lacked Joey’s heart-warming dumbness, but their enthusiasm was touching nonetheless. For completists only.

Curious times, these, when the latest advance in dance music is a subtly tweaked revamp of deep house. This is the basis of Digital Disco, where clean lines and theoretically soulful vocals are enhanced by the latest laptop dub techniques and four-to-the-floor beats are gently mutated by the pops and clicks of micro-electronica. Occasionally, cheese triumphs over invention. But the highlights are lovely, especially contributions by tricksy Montreal wonderkid Akufen and the peerless Vladislav Delay (using his Luomo pseudonym), who adds real depth and guile to music habitually dismissed as glossy and vacuous.

The Sea And Cake are the sort of band who tend to slip under the media’s radar. They regularly issue quality-assured albums with the quiet fastidiousness of cabinet makers. The sort of band people fail to take into account when complaining that nothing’s ‘happening’. One Bedroom, featuring Stereolab producer and Tortoise man John McEntire, isn’t ‘happening’. But it’s very fine, glowing with an oblique, poppy sensibility that’s theirs alone. If there had never been bossa nova, this is what it might sound like if someone tried to invent it in 21st-century urban America.

Unlikely as he is?a white, upper-class rapper who positively revels in his Ivy Leaguery?Paul Barman offers a surprisingly fresh take on hip hop clich

Translating as “100th risk”, international club-pop label Bungalow’s latest offering celebrates its 100th release. This double pack features a 16-track CD of brand new unreleased songs by Bungalow artists (including Stereo Total, Le Hammond Inferno, Yoshinori Sunahara and Maxwell Explosion), and a DVD featuring all 28 Bungalow videos. Snazzily packaged with a 40-page booklet detailing Bungalow’s history, this is one of the most desirable items in record stores right now.

Hot on the heels of the hype surrounding The Hives come The Venue, a Scandinavian quartet who sound like they just walked out of 1965. Rough, tinny production backs up songs that walk an aural tightrope between Herman’s Hermits and The Seeds. As an exercise in ’60s-style garage rock it’s all perfectly respectable, but the nagging question here is why bother with The Venue when you can hear the real thing?

Thirty-two years and 32 albums into their existence, The Residents’ gradual move away from frenzied experimentalism has taken them into a parallel universe of avant garde muzak and theatrical lyrics.

As with Bruce Springsteen’s The Rising, there are no explicit references to the World Trade Center attack itself, but this is an album full of despair, isolation, loss, pain and?hopefully?redemption. Its folksy, disembodied keyboard washes and softly intoned lyrics convey a sense of confusion without attempting to supply any simple answers. Disturbingly packaged, as always, by The Residents’ own design company, PoreKnow Graphics.

Remember an era, not so long before the stylised ’70s rehash of The Strokes or the morose, risk-averse, trad-indie of Stereophonics et al, when there was such a thing as experimental guitar music? An era when it was still thought that Hendrix hadn’t drained every last liquid drop of sonic possibility from the fretboard? When the likes of Bark Psychosis, Sonic Youth, AR Kane and MBV immersed and irradiated themselves in the very grain of the instrument’s shriek, its drones, its reverbs, its feedback, and imagined the possibility of an entire new virgin world of sound?

Of course, the arrival of electronica meant that such new sound worlds could be more conveniently, albeit less thrillingly, arrived at by twiddling a few knobs or pushing blocks around on a PC screen. Thus the guitar was busted down to its present retrograde status, the trad museum piece for tonal, crowd-pleasing conservatives.

The enigmatic Guitar, a project on the Berlin-based label run by Thomas Morr, doesn’t actually add to the lexicon of possibilities created by the avant garde school of 1988-93, but it’s a wonderfully nostalgic reminder of a short-lived post-rock subculture of anti-nostalgism. The opening title track, in particular, with its see-sawing guitar frottage, makes the cerebral nerves stand on end, reawakening afresh the memory of hearing MBV’s “To Here Knows When” for the first time. Sunkissed is a brainbath the likes of which you won’t have experienced in years.

The line between inspiration and madness was never finer than in the improvised portions of post-bop jazz, where a player can temporarily take leave of his senses in pursuit of some abstract ideal. This occasionally happens on the present disc when pianist Danilo Perez gets his stormy ‘Late Romantic’ thing going and starts messing with cluster-chords.

At times it’s as if leader Wayne Shorter were playing against, rather than with, Perez. When it works, the excitement is considerable, climaxing spectacularly courtesy of Shorter’s superb rhythm team of John Patitucci (bass) and Brian Blade (drums). Between the lapses, there is some formidably searching music on this album, especially on tracks like “Masquelero” and “Aung San Suu Kyi”. Try it.

The Daily Star branded him an “evil bastard”, but Snoop Dogg has long been the acceptable face of gangsta rap, an artist who, behind the ballin’ and bangin’ veneer, ultimately just wants to be loved.

Well rid of the dangerous Death Row and wretched No Limit record companies, he treads a line between loving monogamy and club bangers (the Neptunes on form again), emphasising accessibility throughout.

Real venom, though, is reserved for Death Row’s Suge Knight on “Pimp Slapped”, which should raise both Snoop’s sales and his life insurance premium.

With its earliest example a duet between Peter Tosh and Mick Jagger from 1978, this two-hour, 24-track compilation pitches a wide variety of collaborations between world music artists and colleagues from Britain and America. On the one hand, we find the likes of Youssou N’Dour, Femi Kuti, King Sunny Ade, Angelique Kidjo, Baaba Maal and Tito Puente; on the other, Gorillaz, Wyclef Jean, Ry Cooder, Eric B & Rakim, Nitin Sawhney and John McLaughlin. An adeptly managed project which works surprisingly well.

A decade ago, Julia Fordham’s mix of sophistication and polite angst made her the Dido of her times. Then she moved to America and became something of a forgotten woman. Back with a new album, she’s still pitching at the same mature thirtysomething audience.

The title track is tastefully soulful with assistance from India Arie and wouldn’t sound out of place on a Sade album. “Missing Man” finds her more in Laura Nyro territory. The songs drip with class but the relentlessly grown-up arrangements might have benefited from a little more risk-taking.

Timberlake goes solo, asks us to accept his adulthood but remains a blank space for producers Timbaland and the Neptunes to inscribe their innovative visions. The single “Like I Love You” unfurls beautifully as Justin pleads for you to reciprocate. Indeed much of the album is like 1980 revisited and updated; “Rock Your Body” is the greatest record Chic never made, “Nothin’ Else” ditto Stevie Wonder; “Cry Me A River” (not the Julie London one) employs a secular choir to magnify Justin’s laments. On “Let’s Take A Ride” he offers to deliver you from your humdrum existence.

Go with him.

While it’s nice to see an all-time great still doing his stuff, joy turns to mortification when the star has apparently been kidnapped by aliens. Nine of the 12 songs on Thanks… have been written by a certain Billy Osborne, and are distinguished only by their plasticky jazz-funk arrangements and their staggering unsuitability for the artist. It’s horrifying to hear him groaning his way through a brain-dead shag-fest like “How Did You Feel The Morning After”, while the concluding piece, “Mother”, finds Ray drowning in the most jaw-droppingly mawkish dollop of slime since “Lady In Red”.

Deeply regrettable.

The Brazilian label Ziriguiboom has had a high ratio of success in its small number of releases, including albums by Bebel Gilberto, Zuco 103, and Suba. This compilation blends remixes and reissues into a sampler for Ziriguiboom’s output. As well as the previously named artists, there are tracks by Bossacucanova, Cibelle, Celso Fonseca, Erlon Chaves and Trio Mocot