Is it possible for the astounding to become a routine? Elliott’s fourth album of a miraculously productive career trounces all other hip hop and R&B releases in 2002 with unnerving nonchalance. Her preoccupations this time are sex (as usual), old-school hip hop and the deaths of Aaliyah and TLC’s Lisa “Left-Eye” Lopes, while Timbaland mixes up Afrobeat, acid, playground voices and vintage rap samples to typically breathtaking effect. Yet there’s a suspicion these pioneers are taking it rather easier than on last year’s Miss E: the albums follow uncannily similar patterns, with Method Man and Ludacris guesting on tracks two and three for the second record running. When she’s raised the stakes so high, anything less than the reinvention of music comes as a disappointment.

The numerical milestone has inspired LL’s best album since 1987’s Bigger And Deffer. Predominant are five tracks produced by the Neptunes, who again demonstrate their genius. The woozy post-psychedelic backing they provide on “Luv U Better” is worthy of My Bloody Valentine. Their example seems to have raised LL’s game: the album varies from blissful pop (“Paradise”) to warped fantasies (“Lollipop”) which at times outweird even the Neptunes. He sounds like an older, equally powerful brother to Jay-Z: hear his roars against the choral sample on “10 Million Stars” contrasted with the claustrophobic whispers on “Mirror Mirror”.

Dubbed the ‘Japanese Bj

There’s a physicality to her descriptions of deep desire and romance?licking faces, looking at hair, feeling bones through skin?that sets McGee apart from more feyly folky singer-songwriters. A strong, unfussy voice, confident, careful arrangements and an earthy affinity for barroom abandon and bad-to-know boys also keep her just the right side of sappiness, and make her one to watch.

Best known as the gentle guitar foil to Warren Ellis’ flamboyantly melancholy violin in The Dirty Three, Mick Turner hardly allows himself to cut loose on this, his third solo album. Instead, Moth consists of 19 untitled guitar meditations, reminiscent of Papa M, only far more weathered and haphazard. Turner’s tunes have a pensive, wandering style, but that’s part of their charm. Plus points, too, for the excited dog on “Part One” and the sleeve being designed by a company/individual called “Giant Beer”.

In the mainstream, drum’n’bass died some time during the late ’90s, finished off by jazz-fusion concept albums and the emergence of its plucky young cousin, UK garage. Imagine our surprise, then, when scene veterans Shy FX and T-Power gatecrashed the Top 10 in the summer with the magnificent “Shake Ur Body”, a shiny, Latino soul update of the old formula. Nothing else on this album quite matches it, and there’s some slushy filler on display. But collaborations with Kele Le Roc, ragga king Elephant Man and underrated UK rapper Fallacy are lively and gutsy enough to sustain the revival for a few more months.

Diversion Tactics

PUBS, DRUNKS AND HIP HOP

The Texas rebel singer-songwriter who helped kickstart the ’70s Outlaw Country movement still packs a punch 20 years later. On Freedom’s Child, his first recording since the death of his guitar-hero son Eddie on New Year’s Eve 2000, Billy Joe Shaver mixes up gritty, almost Stones-like house-rockers with honky-tonk drinking songs, raw rockabilly romps and loss-tinged acoustic ballads.

Shaver’s leathery voice and unpretentious but poetic word-slinging suggest what Guy Clark might sound like if he moved from the coffeehouse to the roadhouse.

Glowering from the CD cover like murderous East End repo men, The Solarflares?comprising two members of unsung garage delinquents The Prisoners (bassist Allan Crockford and singer/guitarist Graham Day), Buff Medways drummer Wolf and Dutronc organist Parsley?serve up the kind of maximum GBH usually reserved for much newer kids on the block. Astonishingly, Day’s Steve Winwoodesque, white-soul-boy tonsils, ravaged guitar lines and knack for a winning tune have remained fiercely intact.

At times reminiscent of classic Who (“State Of Mind”), Hendrix (“Hold On”) and The Pretty Things, this is a perfect assimilation of ’60s R&B and punk clatter for those in thrall to The Hives, Von Bondies and their ilk.

Gigolo Aunts

Satellite is Jonny Green, a one-time painter with echoes of Ed Harcourt as well as McAloon in these songs of harmless, surreal insanity set to cheap, bleeping sequencer symphonies. It bounces along in open-hearted style, with love only ever an unlikely lyric away: “I don’t know why a psychopath like you went for me/I’m only glad that I got the chance to see what we could be…”

Arising from the ashes of unloved indie-rockers Hofman comes a bird of far more promising musical plumage. When songwriter Steven Adams took himself off to Austin, Texas, he came back a changed man, and with a 10-gallon-hat full of wonderful, fractured, off-kilter alt.country compositions that sounded like Will Oldham might if he’d been born in Brixton. A full Broken Family Band album will follow in 2003, and on this showing it should be a stunner.

One suspects that notorious avantist Masami “Merzbow” Akita and Aphex ally Russell Haswell believe that Lou Reed’s Metal Machine Music is for lightweights. Their first album together, Satanstornade features some very fancy knives on the sleeve and applies the aesthetics of death metal to improvised electronic noise. The desire to be extreme can be a little wearying, but mostly this is gripping stuff: as meticulous as it is brutal; a chal enge for headbangers; and useful mood music for those romantic nights in the abattoir.

The producers of 8 Mile expect it to do for hip hop what The Blackboard Jungle did for rock’n’roll and Saturday Night Fever did for disco. As Eminem is already far and away the biggest-selling recording star in America, you kind of wonder where there is left for him to cross over to. Nevertheless, word is the movie’s a highly successful Rocky-type dream-fulfilment tale of poor-kid-becomes-rap-star. The soundtrack, however, isn’t some nightmare hybrid of “Eye Of The Tiger” and “Stayin’ Alive”. It’s a nightmare hybrid of angry Eminem and funny Eminem, and?this from an avowed sceptic?it’s absolutely fucking wicked, from the first “sometimes I just hate life” to the last “you think all I do is stand here and feel my nuts??”

A frighteningly powerful record, it’ll bring out your inner adolescent. And then beat the crap out of him. It’ll make thousands of disgruntled teenagers run away from home, and make their parents jealous. It’s breathless, furious, and all the things pop too often isn’t. The point of Eminem becomes blindingly clear.

He snarls through “Lose Yourself”, the best ‘you can do anything you set your mind to’ song since heyday Dexys, and “8 Mile”, where his “insides crawl” across six minutes of painfully intense tripped-up trip hop. On “Rabbit Run” he leaves you no space to think: this is hardcore, but he can toss in jokes without destroying the momentum. Nas, Rakim, Jay-Z and Macy Gray are among the supporting cast. “Love Me”, Eminem’s collaboration with Obie Trice and 50 Cent, is inflammatory, swiping at R Kelly, Li’I Kim, Lauryn Hill and others, and proving romance isn’t dead with a vitriolic “shut your muthafuckin’ mouth and show me love, bitch”. It’s too late to lock up your children: Eminem statistically rules the hearts and minds of a generation. You can run, hide, or decide this has energy and irony, together in perfect disharmony. It’s time to cave. He’s got it.

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.