That’s DOOM in capitals, by the way, as the necessarily didactic press release is keen to inform us. Before he was DOOM, though, he was merely MF DOOM, or Viktor Vaughn, or Zev Love X or, briefly and memorably, a three-headed alien dinosaur called King Geedorah. Maybe you know all that. Whatever, DOOM is one of the most interesting rappers operating somewhere between the hip-hop underground and the mainstream. It’s not so much that his music is particularly difficult to assimilate – there’s none of the self-consciously quirky stuff you might find on an Anticon release, for a start, and there are plenty of similarities with fellow mythologisers like The Wu-Tang Clan (Raekwon and Ghostface Killah in his Tony Starks guise both guest here). But I guess DOOM’s outlook, if not all his music, is defiantly awkward; a man who never takes off his Supervillain mask and shies away from the spotlight; whose meaty music, often self-produced, operates in a similar world of paranoia, sci-fi re-imaginings of urban realities and verbose mental disintegration as Kool Keith. DOOM also shares elements of gynaecological fervour and homophobia with Kool Keith, but fortunately his records (even the Danger Doom collaboration with the mightily overrated Dangermouse) are far more consistent. “BORN LIKE THIS” (caps obligation again) is his first in a few years, but nothing much has changed. The tunes are clipped, punchily and sometimes abruptly edited, densely packed with imagery, soundtracked by high-tension thriller soundtracks predominantly from the ‘70s, and book-ended by excitable dialogue samples that hammer home the character of DOOM. Ostensibly, that’s a man who sees street crime and performance refracted through the language of old superhero comics. In the same way as the Wu mine old kung fu movies, DOOM treats Marvel Comics as his Apocrypha, as founts of sacred and arcane knowledge. This time, he also draws on Charles Bukowski, whose “Dinosaur, We” is featured here, to emphasise the general post-apocalyptic dystopian vibe of “BORN LIKE THIS”. The whole package might sound hokey on paper, but DOOM is brilliant at sustaining a gripping, neurotic atmosphere – check the way he rides the edgy stabs of ESG’s “UFO” on “Yessir!”, or makes something sinister out of a piece of Raymond Scott kitsch, “Lightworks”. Not everything’s ideal: “Batty Boyz” is an extended riff on the homoerotic subtexts of Batman that isn’t exactly the most enlightened treatment of a familiar subject I’ve ever come across. But when DOOM really lets rip, on “Ballskin”, “Gazillion Ear” (to be remixed by Thom Yorke, curiously) or the fantastic “Angelz”, this sounds like the best hip-hop album I’ve come across in a while. “Angelz” finds him indulging in a knockabout Charlie’s Angels fantasy in the company of Ghostface Killah (DOOM produced some of “Fishscale”, if memory serves) and also serves to remind that the pair promised a joint record a few years back. There’s a Great Lost Album to add to the pantheon, for sure.

A nice surprise, last week, when Julian Cope sent over his new double vinyl album, “Kiss My Sweet Apocalypse”. A surprise, because I thought I might have been blackballed after struggling with some of the attitudes that came to the surface on last year’s musically excellent “Black Sheep”. I don’t want to get into all that again, particularly after the rather edgy thread that followed the blog (hit the “Black Sheep” link above if you want a look). Fortunately, “Kiss My Sweet Apocalypse” – credited, significantly, to a band named Black Sheep - doesn’t have any songs criticising “blowing-themselves-up motherfuckers”. Instead, Black Sheep (who look to have more or less the same personnel as on that last Cope album) have a tune named after a Palestinian freedom fighter, Leila Khaled, and generally seem to be indulging in a sort of rural terrorist chic: milk churns painted as bombs on the cover; a track called “We’re The Baa-aa-aader Meinhof!”; some German found tapes which mention Ulrike Meinhof. Khaled also figures on the gatefold calendar of “Hebbs’ Outsider Icons”, alongside Jung, Yoko Ono, Einstein, Eddie Cochran, Patti Smith, Emily Pankhurst, Jim Morrison, TC Lethbridge, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Vachel Lindsay and, not to my taste, Joe Strummer. Since there’s none of the customary sleevenotes from Cope, it’s hard to make out how this all fits together, short of implying that his attitudes may have softened towards the fetishising of revolutionary cults. But there’s no privileging “indigenous” gods this time. . . Anyway, music. It’s great again: windswept, organic, raggedly militaristic, often hugely daft. The credits announce, “Project directed by Julian Cope” and on Sides Three and Four two of his accomplices, Holy McGrail and Christophe F, take the lead. Generally, though, the music follows the path set out on much of last year’s “Black Sheep”. Cope’s first two tracks, “Ernesto” (Guevera?) and “Leila Khaled”, are epic (18 and 15 minutes respectively) instrumental soundscapes of brooding strummed acoustics, Mellotron creaks and thunderstorm effects. The band sound endearingly battered and windswept, as if heard way in the distance, like some kind of outsider marching band, stoically out on manoeuvres across the blasted heath. By the beautiful last track, “Heathen Frontiers In Sound” (a Cope/Christophe F co-write), they’ve come into focus somewhat: a soothing, melodic resolution to it all that features Cope gently chanting the title. Earlier chants, though, are less calming. “War! Peace!” is ten minutes of gruff men bawling the title over staticky buzz , a needly guitar line and the odd explosion. The rickety jangle of “We’re The Baa-aa-aader Meinhof” features someone (Christophe F maybe? Not Cope, though) singing unsteadily, “We’re The Baa-aa-aader Meinhof and we’ve come to blow your balls off” (I think). “Kiss My Sweet Apocalypse” (the Holy McGrail lead), meanwhile, begins with the title repeated in a roistering yeoman chant before dissolving into a bleak ambient piece. It recalls some of the Queen Elizabeth stuff Cope used to do with Thighpaulsandra, on the outer limits of Krautrock, with an added morris dancing jig towards the death. How you can deal with that stuff will affect how long you last of its 24 and a half minutes. Fine by me these days, though. As is the whole of the album, more or less (the stridency of “War! Peace!” grates a bit after five minutes or so). There’s a comradely, jovial air to these hums and strummed meditations, these rain-spattered imprecations of doom. It asserts, perhaps, something we always knew about Julian Cope: that no matter how isolated he becomes, regardless of how far beyond the non-heathen frontiers of sound that he strays, he remains as indestructible as a cockroach. Now, what’s all this about terrorism?

When I went off on my annual start-of-year rant about hotly-tipped new bands in January (and Lord, I’ve been forced to rethink my opinions about Florence And The Machine after seeing her shocking performance with Glasvegas at the NME Awards), I mentioned that, in the midst of so much electropop, “Maybe even Peaches might get a bit more love as the result of all this, which would be great.” Well, now’s her chance. The new Peaches album, “I Feel Cream” is, in many ways, as dirty, hard and uncompromising as ever. For starters, it’s doubtful that someone like La Roux, to pick a victim at random, would ever come up with a harsh throbber like “More”; a song which possibly has more in common with the stern, rubber-shorted repetitions of European Body Music than ’80s New Pop. Not my thing, normally, but Peaches always gets away with this stuff because of the wit and spirit she brings to it; she understands, unlike most of the inadvertently comic po-faces who usually make this kind of music, that it’s possible to subvert and deconstruct ideas of female sexuality while at the same time celebrating them. On “I Feel Cream”, though, Peaches also has a crack at a poppier sound, which works out enormously well. The title track finds her singing in an uncannily high and innocent voice over jagged rave arpeggios. She’s virtually cooing here, until the requisite saucy rap arrives, and while the backing track is pretty brutal, the vocal melody is quite lovely. “Lose You”, meanwhile, is even sweeter and lusher electro – and, again, far preferable round these parts to any of the younger and presumably less shit-stirring competition. This is, after all, a woman who’s seen it all before quite a few times. The opening track, “Serpentine”, begins with one of her trademark hyper-gabbled raps in which she seems to me saying, more or less, that she’s outlasted the backlash of electroclash – several backlashes, maybe: it’s a sobering thought that it’s nearly a decade since Fischerspooner first released “Emerge”. There’s a chance this time, though, that Peaches might muscle her way a bit closer towards the mainstream, her age (articulated provocatively on “Mommy Complex”) notwithstanding. It won’t be with things like “Show Stoppers”, which is more or less an electronic reconfiguration of The Stooges, “Billionaire” (featuring Shunda K of Yo Majesty – a potty-mouthed, topless lesbian rapper that Peaches would’ve invented if she didn’t already exist), or even “Trick Or Treat”, which reminds me a bit – doubtless because of the title – of Gruff Rhys’ Neon Neon record. Nope, it’ll be the first single that might just get Peaches in the face of a wider world. “Talk To Me”, produced by Soulwax apparently, is a strident and ferociously catchy, full-bodied pop song that, if it’s not a hit, should probably be covered by Pink or someone. It’s brilliant, if not the sort of music I normally write about here, so have a go at Peaches’ Myspace. The classic “Fuck The Pain Away” is still playing there, too, if you’re feeling adventurous.