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

Brian (Future Sound Of London) Dougans first achieved UK and European notoriety with his 1988 “Stakker Humanoid” single. Eurotechno was created with video art st Mark McClean, who used a then-state-of-the-art Fairlight graphics box to create an ecstatic 25-minute abstract acid house video. Remastered from the original tapes and available for the first time on CD and vinyl, this soundtrack is soon to be followed by a second CD of outtakes from the project. Historic stuff.

A bold yet composed marriage of primitive guitar-folk and gently progressive electronica, Sun + Sea = finds multi-instrumentalist Sangster’s smoky voice spiralling high above her flute-laced, suppertime laments.

While “Seein’ Things” provides a rare moment of Gorky’s-style exuberance, elsewhere the mood is as hushed and contemplative as a candle-lit service. Churls may bemoan the lack of variety in these barren grooves, but for those who prefer their folk chilled by icy modernism, this is an intrepid, boundlessly rewarding delight.

The sweet song from the Volkswagen ad?”Strange And Beautiful”?cast a spell over thousands of confused Radiohead fans who wondered why they didn’t know it. That’d be because it emanated not from the head of the radio but the lung of the aqua?one Matt Hales, a grafting London singer/songwriter. Still, Yorkees won’t be let down by his debut opus, 11 elegiac hymns to regret and frustration.

A plaintive piano man whose sincerity almost makes you forgive him taking the name of a Jethro Tull album.

One hesitates to push the parallel too far. But there are clear similarities between the solo career trajectories of Ryan Adams and Thea Gilmore. Adams makes Heartbreaker, an acoustic troubadour record. Gilmore makes Rules For Jokers, a predominantly acoustic album in classic singer-songwriter mode. Adams follows with Gold, a full band album of rock’n’roll. Gilmore, too, goes into the studio with a band and, on Songs From The Gutter, rocks out like we’ve seldom heard her before.

Adams is so prolific that within a year of Gold, he’s released Demolition, an LP culled from the dozens of songs he couldn’t fit on regular albums. Gilmore adds a second, Internet-only bonus CD to Songs From The Gutter, comprising 11 songs that couldn’t be accommodated elsewhere. And both already have further albums in the pipeline. Two songwriting machines abseiling across almost every conceivable style of popular music. But the quality control is still spectacularly high.

There’s one even more important similarity. Both Adams and Gilmore eschew the formulaic, following their impulses. Under conventional record company wisdom, Demolition and Songs From The Gutter would have been quashed by product managers complaining of market saturation. And we would be so much the poorer.

Recorded mostly live, the main body of Songs… comprises nine new compositions, plus Gilmore’s translucent version of “I Dreamed I Saw St Augustine”, first available with Uncut’s Dylan issue in June (Take 61). You can argue she wears her influences too obviously. But they said that about Gold, too. Rather, both she and Adams have the ability to assimilate an astonishing amount of music and somehow make it all their own.

“When Did You Get So Safe?” rocks like Neil Young circa Time Fades Away. “Lip Reading” leaves Alanis and all her angsty clones trailing in its angry wake. The bonus CD has more great songs, including the poptastic “Brittle Dreams”, written when she was just 16. The best British female singer-songwriter of the last 10 years? And then some.

BAD MAN

The ’70s was the high-water mark of rock’n’roll excess, the decade in which pop musicians, swollen with wealth and steeled by ruthless managers, realised the power they wielded, and flaunted it shamelessly. As cocaine inflated the self-esteem of semi-literate stars, the most ridiculous and half-baked of notions were indulged in sprawling, quasi-philosophical concept albums clad in ghastly gatefold sleeves, and the ham-fisted, overblown caterwaulings of redneck boogie-bands lovingly documented in live double albums of mind-numbing banality.

Backstage, the morality envelope was stretched to breaking point by the hedonistic exploits of touring musicians while, out stagefront, increasingly extravagant and costly spectacles separated these self-proclaimed rock gods ever further from the fans with whom they had once shared some tenuous fellowship. A few years before, you could have watched Eric or Elton or Duane or Jimmy from a few yards away in the fevered atmosphere of a small club; by 1975, you were lucky if you could see them at all from Row ZZ, Block 126, let alone admire their dazzling fretwork. This was the dark period between the advent of stadium rock and the development of adequate big-screen technology, so if you weren’t sufficiently distracted by the giant flying pig or the hovering UFO or the scale model of Stonehenge, you were doomed to suffer, if not in silence, then at least in something approaching blindness. Bob Dylan was no less immodestly ambitious than other rock stars?indeed, his 1974 American tour with The Band had done much to establish the legitimacy of stadium rock?but his ambitions ran in different directions to most musicians.

By 1975, his re-immersion in the bohemian Greenwhich Village folkie milieu (from which he had exiled himself during the late ’60s) inspired him to embark upon the Rolling Thunder Revue, a low-key, high-concept tour, part hootenanny, part travelling minstrel show, with a posse of his old chums, including Joan Baez, Bobby Neuwirth, Roger McGuinn and Ramblin’ Jack Elliott, and a backing band combining youthful verve (notably teenage multi-instrumental virtuoso David Mansfield) with seasoned experience (former Bowie sidekick Mick Ronson).

The vibe would be spontaneous, collaborative and poetic?Ginsberg was along for the ride, too?and the whole thing would be filmed. To make the film more than just another tour documentary, though, dramatic tableaux would be improvised from town to town, with playwright Sam Shepard on hand to try and shoehorn the resulting scenes into some semblance of coherence.

The Rolling Thunder Revue itself may have been a deliberately low-level, freewheelin’ undertaking, but at nearly four hours long, the resulting movie, Renaldo & Clara, would ultimately rank as one of the decade’s greatest rock-star indulgences, Dylan’s own giant flying pig. “It’s about the essence of man being alienated from himself and how, in order to free himself, to be reborn, he has to go outside himself,” he tried to explain, but few were persuaded: mauled by critics for its am-dram theatrics and self-regarding inscrutability, the film was soon pulled from cinemas, and rarely screened again after its initial run. The music has likewise languished in bootleg limbo for the best part of three decades before finally appearing overground. For all its legendary status, it’s a bit of a curate’s egg, with a few transcendent moments?mostly Bob’s solo versions of “Mr Tambourine Man”, “It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue”, “Tangled Up In Blue” and particularly “Simple Twist Of Fate”, all of which profit from the air of impassioned intimacy which infuses his delivery?and rather too many tracks spoilt either by oddly graceless and brusque vocal harmonies from Joan Baez, or by Scarlet Rivera’s incessant gypsy fiddling, of which a little goes a long way, and a lot goes way too far.

Sequenced to approximate the set?or at least, Dylan’s parts thereof?the album opens with a “Tonight I’ll Be Staying Here With You” which has undergone extensive but immaterial lyric changes (“throw my ticket in the well, throw my mattress out there too”, etc), and which he sings in a hoarse, almost angry voice somewhat at odds with the song’s compliant mood.

“It Ain’t Me Babe” and “The Lonesome Death Of Hattie Carroll” are among several numbers done in a twitchy, flamenco/country crossover style, which suits the latter song’s declamatory tone up to a point, but ultimately sabotages its impact by denying the dramatic shift required at its d