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Formerly part of Mercury Rev, playing keyboards around the Deserter's Song era, Snyder cut loose four years back and now finally emerges with his solo debut, Across The Pond (hti). As you might expect from his past form, although he's not churning out rehashes of  the Rev's soaring majestic pop there's nothing on here likely to scare the horses. Folk pop seems to be the order of the day with Two Moons and Up The River showing off his Neil Young collection and the quirky childhood memoir Mike + Me heading to downtown Jonathan Richman. 
It's all rather lovely, winsome and sometimes melancholic as he rolls out his tales of small town life,  new single Leaves of Grass adding harmonica to go with the skipping splash down the creek melodies while pensive piano hangs sadness over Daddy Song's plaintive tale of a separated father explaining things about his new life to his child. A mountain music slow stomp, Bare Bones continues his domestic themes with a song about how a family's happy without its car, TV and video while the gentle Until It Comes looks beyond current sorrows to brighter horizons. A hushed, intimate and I daresay rather splendid gig looms.

A rare and welcome visit from the outfit formed and fronted  by the former Jayhawks man and wife Victoria Williams, their music inspired by their rustic California life, desert dust and cool creek waters blowing and lapping through downhome folk-country roots songs, watched over by the ghosts of Gram Parsons and the Louvins. 
The visit coincides with the recent release of Creekdippin' For The First Time (Fargo), an anthology of material from their first three hard to find albums  (The Original Harmony Ridge Creekdippers, Pacific Coast Rambler, Zola & The Tulip Tree);  pretty much the best of the bunch with things like the plaintive Neil Young like Flowering Trees, country love song Give My Heart To You, Owens Valley Day, the banjo rippling Be On My Way and Pacific Coast Rambler.  The tempo almost never rises above a lazy, drifting doodle, allowing the Southern spiritual ache to shine through Olson's cracked weary voice and Williams's counterpointed purity, but it's melancholic rather than mournful;  there may be hurt in the songs but they're celebrations of rather than regrets about life.
 Many of these will no doubt figure alongside among material from the more recent December's Child with hopefully something from Williams's solo album of standards and at least a couple of tracks from the upcoming Political Manifest, an album of songs written in response to the Bush presidency, titles such as Portrait of a Sick America pretty much suggesting they'll not be part of the GW campaign soundtrack. 

Well here's a rarity. Neil Innes, John Halsey and Rikki Fataar have got back together for another bout of  Beatles spoofery, though with Eric Idle notably absent who'll be doing the McCartney lines on things like I Must Be In Love remains to be seen (Wreckless Eric and Andy Robinson are guests but it's hard to imagine either of them fitting the bill). Macca questions notwithstanding, this affectionate Spinal Tap on the legend of the Fab Four is really unmissable as they work their parodying way through mop top history with such spot on send-ups as Doubleback Alley, Ouch!, Piggy in the Middle and Major Happy's Up and Coming Once Upon A Good Time Band. 
 
 

Here to promote their third album, Grit (Music For Nations), while you may not have come across the latest Norwegian export  before there's enough going on here to suggest you'll be hearing more of them from now on. With its walking bass line, circling guitar buzz and Sivert Hoyem's brooding vocals the opening Blood Shot Adult Commitment and the punkier strut of Ready bring together thoughts of Iggy, Bauhaus and the Velvets, Lucy One points you towards the Jesus and Mary Chain while Hands Up - I Love You and new single Majesty head into Tindersticks territory and Seven Seconds harks back to the Stranglers before the closing spoken and spare Ready To Carry You catches you offguard with echoes of Robbie Robertson. Goth darkness dominates the mood and the lyrics, but then when you come from the land of night and you take your name from the Spanish for the hour before sunrise, chances are you're not about to turn out a set of bubblegum pop. Worth exploring. 

Having spectacularly imploded just when they were being hailed as hardcore punk metal's next big thing, front man Casey Chaos has regrouped, signed to System of a Down guitarist Daron Malakian's eatUR music label and put together the incoming comeback album Death Before Musick which documents the eighteen months of hell where everything fell apart. 
Having recorded a staggering 73 tracks, the final selection was honed down to 15, among them Please Kill Me, The Summer of Guns, Money Infection and the first single, California Bleeding which borrows from the Temptations' Get Ready and sounds like The Dead Kennedys at their Holiday in Cambodia best. Chaos is glad to be back. On the evidence so far so should you be too. 

Not a reunion of Gary Moore's first band, out of which grew Thin Lizzy, but early ex  Bon Jovi guitarist Snake Sabo and company, now with Johnny Solinger on vocals, over  here for the first time in seven years to plug new album Thickskin, a muscular but fairly routine mix of hard rock, blues metal, 80s hair band swagger and the prerequisite stadium  ballad. Riff addicts won't be disappointed with Thick Is The Skin, Mouth of Voodoo, Hittin A Wall or the grinding Lamb while Born A Beggar, See You Around and Ghost provide plenty of  melodic hooks in that Joviesque sort of way. Solid enough to win over those thought the band couldn't make it without Sebastian Bach, but probably too stuck in their ways to convince many newcomers 

Sporting a healthy love of AC/DC in their strutting no nonsense hard rock, with Chris Hodge's Bon Scott/Robert Plant vocals complemented by the rowdy Jennifer Stephens, this mullet sporting Austin, Texas quartet positively explodes with a sound that turns your bedroom into a barroom. Their debut album, Mouthful of Love(XL) will be out to coincide with the tour but for now they're knocking back some celebration juice after charting with full tilt rock n roll single Tommy Shot and having Motorhead's Lemmy guest on their cover of AC/DC's Get It hot. Pumped up rock  party mayhem beckons. 

Sounding more like they're aspiring to be the new Pretenders rather  than garage indie rock on last year's single Maps (despite an intro that threatens to launch into Pictures of Matchstick Men), the Noo Yawkers head in to town for apparently no particular reason other than to keep their gigging muscles flexed. They'll be digging back in to debut album Fever To Tell and possibly dropping in a sample of what they've been fiddling around with for the next album. Whatever, they're hardly regulars over here so opportunities should not be missed.

Named after a slang term for lesbians,  this New York five piece are currently the latest big thing in hip. Their self-titled debut album is brazenly open about its 70s influences with its camp glam burlesque screaming out Bowie, Billy Joel, Elton and Roxy while their version of  Pink Floyd's Comfortably Numb given a Saturday Night Fever falsetto Bee Gees make-over is insanely inspired. Some of their synth pop (Lovers In The Backseat, Better Luck) rather dodgily invokes Howard Jones and Nik Kershaw, but you can overlook that when they swing into full Elton piano ballad mode for Mary or his more uptempo pounders with Take Your Mama Out and Music Is The Victim, give it serious Thin White Duke with Laura, recall the fab days of Hi-N-RG eurogay disco pop with Filthy/Gorgeous and get down for some party funk with The Skins
It's not all glossy froth, Return To Oz deals with a drugs death while the wonderfully named - and ever more wonderfully sounding - Tits On The Radio is a dig at Mayor Giuliani's lockdown of the NY party scene, but while they'd obviously like you to think if you find the time the main object - sure to even more forthright live - is to get you to move your ass like a disco mutha. It's a snip.

Having reinvented himself as a roots singer-songriter the former Almighty frontman returns with his acoustic guitar to give another plug for his recent debut album Tattoos and Alibis (Sanctuary) which evokes Crowded House on things like Enemies and The Genuine Fool while Crack n Divide could be a Del Amitri outtake and the twangy country shadings of  Mysterioso, It Always Rains On Sunday and Close To Last Call are very much Steve Earle. He even throws in Texas banjo and mandolin bluegrass for  Ending Is Better than Mending and The Church of Paranoia, which  is likely to come as a bit of a shock to old fans expecting variations on Powertrippin' or Devil's Toy, but seems likely to ensure him a healthy future playing the Americana clubs. 

Welsh pranksters from Newport who sound like a piss take fusion of the Super Furrys and Wu Tang Clan, it may have started off as a joke but with self-released albums Adam Hussein: Truth And Slander and The Party Album  taking South Wales by storm, they've now landed a proper label deal for new single Half Man Half Machine, a silly and expletive riddled sliced of silly nonsense that  rather belies their tight hip hop beats. Whether they have the writing muscle to rise beyond the novelty comedy and  not to become a rap answer to Splodgenessabounds remains to be seen, but they have to be worth a look. 
 
 

Once hailed as the female Tom Waits and the new Laura Nyro, after a promising start with the hit Chuck E's In Love and her self-titled and Pirates albums, Jones has been off the musical map for far too long thank to assorted drug and alcohol related problems. For many her last decent album, Traffic From Paradise, was over a decade ego with the trip hop experiment Ghostyhead and a couple of covers collections doing little to restore her lustre. 
But then came last year's The Evening Of My Best Day (V2), a smart return to form with its bluesy soul jazz ambience and songs that reflect her views on the state of the nation under George W, the opening track, Ugly Man, specifically dedicated to the cowboy Potus. Stylistically harking back to the 60s with tracks that embrace gospel favours (Tell Somebody (Repeal The Patriot Act Now)), R&B (Little Mysteries, another Bush dig), swamp blues (Lap Dog, Mink Coat At The Bus Stop), folk (Sailor Song), bossa nova (It Takes You There) and the sort of  jazz funk polish trademarked by Steely Dan (Second Chance), the often helium inflected childlike voice  remains something of an acquired taste, but anyone seduced by those early recordings should find this, and especially the lovely sad piano ballad title track and the wistful love song A Tree in Allenford will want to renew the affair while there's plenty here to attract new young lovers too.

Well, who's been a busy lad then. Setting out to write a song a day, Kurt Wagner ended up with sufficiently enough passing the quality control test to make a double album. Well, two albums rather than strictly a double, Aw c'mon/No you c'mon (City Slang) each featuring 12 songs. While there's no real stylistic divide between them, Wagner describes the former as a flowing experience while the latter's more stand alone songs. Well, if he says so.
 Back with the full sprawling line up of the halcyon days of  Nixon, strings included, it's a welcome reminder of how lush they can be, even at their most miserable, after the stripped back intimate intensity of  Is A Woman. 
Aw opens on a plush orchestral instrumental, Being Tyler, a nod to the band's principal guitarist, and it's not the only time the vocals take a rest; The Lone Official is a vaguely Occidental n jazz tune while Timothy B Schmidt, named after the Eagles bassist, is a self-effacing little loungey shuffle that may or may not, like the instrumentals elsewhere, be taken from the score he was commissioned to write for a reissue of the 1927 silent Murnau romance, Sunrise.
Schmidt's not the only titular name check either, earlier on Steve McQueen lends his moniker to a dreamy Wagner soulful ballad that curiously calls to mind Dylan's Lay Lady Lay. As you'd imagine, it's business as usual in terms of spooked, whispered tales of losers, wrecked lovers and haunted memories as they rack up the likes of Nothing But A Blur From A Bullet Train, Each Time I Bring It Up It Seems To Bring You Down and, as the blue smoke curls up in wisps,  the ironic piano bar crooner Women Help To Create The Kind of Men They Despise.  The first disc ends on Action Figure, a nice hint of self-mockery finding Wagner saying he's heard a rumour that he's sad before continuing to sound like someone who's never known a moment's joy in his entire life.
Good news then that NoYou opens in perky summery mood with another instrumental, the title tune from Sunrise, but the mood doesn't last long as, come the next track, Low Ambition, he sounds like he's about to burst into tears, a mood continued into There Is Still Time, a come down open space ballad that suggests there's a Jimmy Webb fan somewhere inside Wagner's heart. And then it all goes up in the air as the mockingly titled Nothing Adventurous Please finds the band positively rocking out in a vaguely Krautrockabilly boogie woogie fest. And if that doesn't knock you, back no sooner have you recovered by listening to the lilting lullaby The Problem than Shang A Dang Dang gets up on its feet and dances around the floor in a bubblegum stylee with Wagner simply mumbling the title in a huh huh sort of way. It's jaunty still for About My Lighter, pretty much Lambchop's equivalent of Punky's Dilemma while the Jan 24 instrumental could be a sample of Michael Nyman having a knees up and The Gusher catches you offguard with a friendly samba that harbours lines about scraping the skin with a razor and damp stains on jeans and a lurking guitar threat riff. It also includes arguably the best cut of the 24 in Under A Dream Of A Lie, a smoky soul jazz ballad that once again reminds you where Curtis Mayfield's spirit has chosen to spend its afterlife. 
With plenty on the table to dig into here not to mention satisfying audience demands for the old classics (though they'd have to play all of Nixon to keep everyone happy), this promises to be another of their usual laid back classic shows. C'mon everybody. 

Enjoying an unexpected revival of public interest and critical reappraisal, the band's put itself back together in, if not strictly speaking the original line up, then at least, the one everybody knows with Le Bon, Rhodes and the three Taylors. With the best of collection putting them back into the upper reaches of the album charts just a handful of years after they couldn't even get a UK deal for Medazzaland and the excellent follow up, Poptrash, bombed, they're currently hot news again with a new album waiting in the wings and a major deal with Sony on the cards. 
They'll be testing outa  couple of new numbers on the tour, but mostly this is going to be a retro revisit of the Greatest Hits, so chiffon scarves, glam shirts and New Romantic flounces should be dusted off for a singalongafest to the likes of Girls On Film, Planet Earth, Wild Boys, Is There Something I Should Know, Hungry Like The Wolf and, of course, Rio. Hopefully though they'll restrain themselves form inflicting their version of White Lines on anyone this time around. 
Support comes courtesy of Goldfrapp who'll be taking the chance to remind folk of their excellent Black Cherry  album with its nods to such 80s electro glamsters as the Human League, Gary Numan and the funk-industrial Bowie.

Always welcome visitors with their brand of bluesy Mariachi desert rock Americana and border stories, this is a particularly inviting proposition since it finds them arriving on the back of their finest album yet, Feast of Wire (City Slang), with its mix of cinematic epic and atmospheric sparsity. Peppered with instrumental interludes, it scuffs its dust blown heart through such downbeat visions as Sunken Waltz and the plaintively sad Not Even Stevie Nicks -where  Joey Burns shows off his rarely heard falsetto - and the hushed spook of Woven Birds but while Across The Wire may be a typical brass hued Calexico TexMex number they also pull a few rugs from under the feet of expectations with the jazztronics Attack El Robot! Attack!, the parping jazz blast Crumble and the self descriptive Dub Latina. They've just lifted one of the album's stand outs, the string drenched , heavy limbed melancholy of Black Heart, for an EP of  reworks and remixes that include a jazz dub version of that, a 3am smoky cellar sax mourning retool of Robot and the Go Tan Project's  samba lurch of Quattro.
Such experimental notes will likely be kept in check for the show where more traditional Calexico colours will be flying the standard but don't be surprised to find the occasional flamenco tangent and Cuban jazz flurry putting in a strong bid for your feet's attentions. 

Originally a member of The Waterboys way back in 1988, the Clare born accordionist/fiddle player's career has seen collaborations with such diverse musicians as Bono, Nigel Kennedy, Denis Bovell and the Kodo Drummers of Japan as well as a steady stream of well received solo albums, reaching a peak with 2000's The Diamond Mountain Sessions. 
For her latest album, Libertango,  she's brought together a number of  female vocalists to join her road band and such guest musicians as Donal Lunny and Steve Wickham, for an album that combines the traditional flavours of her native Ireland and the kindred musical spirits of Scotland with the warm exotic tones of Latin America, pulling them all together for the opening slow jig lazy fiesta of  The Whitestrand Sling.
First recorded by Grace Jones, the late Kirsty MacColl's version of  Libertango gets a re-arranged treatment to draw out even more of its lazy sultry rhythms while the other well known guest is Sinead O'Connor who joins her for The Seven Rejoices of Mary (an ancient chant learnt from the monks of Glenstal Abbey) and the traditional Anachie Gordon. 
Traditionalist eyeborws may be raised  by What You Make It which reworks the opening track with rap and backing vocals by Marvel and Lady K but they'll be lowered and soothed again by the more familiar Celtic strains of  such instrumentals as Shannon's own Hogs & Heifers,  the waltz and jigs of The Burst Mattress, Tommy Peoples's The Wishing Well and, sounding nothing like the title might suggest, Space Party. And for those who've long wondered what Fleetwood Mac's Albatross might sound like played with accordion, mandolin and fiddle, well look no further.
Perhaps the best album's performance though is by  Co Kerry newcomer Pauline Scanlon who takes vocal duties on John Spillane's All The Ways You Wander and will no doubt by lending her talents to Shannon's acoustic set as well as providing the opening act where she'll be showcasing her own debut, Red Colour Sun (The Daisy Label), an album that juggles the traditional notes of Molly Ban and What Put The Blood? with covers of  songs by Peggy Seeger (The Springhill Mining Disaster), Don McLean (And I Love You So), Willie Nelson (Valentine) and folk legend Cyril Tawney (Sally Free And Easy) as well as her self-penned trad ballad meets Eastern influence inspired Churchyard. 
Slightly fuzzy in the production, even so when Scanlon's let loose on the a capella numbers All The Ways You Wonder and Kerry folk tune The Boys of Barr Na Sraide, there's no mistaking the quality of her voice, something that'll be well in evidence tonight. 

Round these parts not too recently, the Gibraltar boys put in another appearance following the release of their epic emo single The River and the imminent arrival of the Cultura (Albert) album which sets out their stall to good effect as they marry the sort of punishing riffs you'd expect from the likes of Pantera and Alice in Chains with the rhythmic and melodic Moorish and Arabic colours of their heritage. With the album's guitar flurry opener Individio setting the pace and La Ultima Hora laying out the chant undertones, there's some inevitable axe grandstanding that's likely to over extend come the live solos, but even when they're doing the standard gravel gargle vocal routines or letting the air guitars off the hook on things like The Only Ones and World's On Fire, it's clear they're a cut above the norm, with the acoustic ballad Numb suggesting there's a platinum AOR stadium ballad single waiting in their future.

Named for the Archduke whose assassination led to WWI and imbued with an art rock sensibility, the self-proclaimed new Scottish gentry are currently the music press flavour of the month with their eponymous debut album (Domino) already hailed as one of the year's best and the UK's reply to The Strokes. 
Get past the media overkill though and you'll find a basic well shaken cocktail of  influences that embraces The Doors (Darts of Pleasure), a disco Mott the Hoople (Tell Her Tonight ), Blur (Cheating On You) and Bowie (Take Me Out) blended with aspects of Sparks, Pulp and such fellow Scottish underachievers as Josef K and Orange Juice while dropping references to things like chips, BBC2 and Terry Wogan into the lyrics just to underline their parochial cred.
Fronted by the elegantly gangling Alex Kapranos, it's kinetic funk punk pop with brain cells and some well crafted eccentricity, and while at under 40 minutes you may wonder what they've held in reserve this and their ever burgeoning live reputation should safely see them living on their laurels for at least the next 18 months. 

The Kendal birthed, Brighton based four piece are an unpredictable bunch who like to make their gigs visually confrontational wearing old Navy uniforms with twigs and whose staring eyed singer, Yan, calls their sound a battle between barking Czech writer Jaroslav Hasek and The Scouts. It doesn’t make much sense but it sounds interesting. Which seems a reasonable description for their magnificent debut album The Decline of British Sea Power (Rough Trade).Owing much to the early days of Joy Division it’s also a cocktail of The Smiths, Teardrop Explodes, Echo and the Bunnymen and Bowie (especially the tumblingly wonderful Something Wicked and Remember Me) while Apologies To Insect Life’s noise riot sounds like a mad Eastern European punked up mazurka and Favours In The Beetroot Field the bastard child of PiL and The Ukrainians. Informed with as much a sense of wonder as it is sadness and loss as it addresses subjects ranging from nationalism to nostalgia, Yan’s melancholic breathy vocals wringing the emotion out of things like The Lonely and the tumultuously spangly pop of upcoming single Carrion with its sea imagery with Lately a fourteen minute epic journey into the heart of the storm. They sail into town this time to run up the rigging for new single A Lovely Day Tomorrow, its very Czech n sound aptly accompanied by two numbers actually in Czech, Zitra Bude Krasny Den (which is actually the title track gone native) and folk ditty Fakir. Get those phrasebooks out and sing along. 
 
 

Though front man Mike Peters is the only member of the original line up in the Welsh guitar rockers’ latest incarnation, there’ no mistaking that storm the barricades rock, punk, folk, pop sound. Well, perhaps there is. They released their recent single, 45rpm, under the name of The Poppfields, and no one twigged. If they had there’s every chance that the ingrained sneery dismissive attitude to the band would have meant it sinking without trace rather than crashing the Top 30. Having thrown off the pseudonym, Peters and his boys now hit the road standing proud under their real moniker to promote new album In The Poppyfields, a distillation of the best of their five internet only releases and packed with a dozen quintessentially like=minded call to arms guitar anthems, The Drunk and The Disorderly sounding not unlike the youthful Who, Close evincing a touch of early U2 (and borrowing the riff from New Order’s Love Vigilantes), Trafficking nodding to Peters’ Bowie and Bolan collection and New Home New Life giving the Manics a run for their money. Well fond of the swelling chorus and big melodic crescendo but equally likely to slip into the acoustic moods of The Rock n Roll, Peters has never been exactly part of the fashionably cool brigade, but from the rousing glory days of 68 Guns, Blaze of Glory and Where Were You Hiding When The Storm Broke though his solo, Coloursound and Dead Men Walking projects, he’s consistently turned out passionate, hook friendly, committed rock n roll and, as anyone who’s ever heard his solo double live album knows, he gives fantastic gig. This will be no exception.

Enjoying an unexpected revival of public interest and critical 
reappraisal, the band's put itself back together in, if not strictly 
speaking the original line up, then at least, the one everybody knows 
with Le Bon, Rhodes and the three Taylors. With the best of collection 
putting them back into the upper reaches of the album charts just a 
handful of years after they couldn't even get a UK deal for Medazzaland 
and the excellent follow up, Poptrash, bombed, they're currently hot 
news again with a new album waiting in the wings and a major deal with 
Sony on the cards.
They'll be testing out a couple of new numbers on the tour, but mostly 
this is going to be a retro revisit of the Greatest Hits, so chiffon 
scarves, glam shirts and New Romantic flounces should be dusted off for 
a singalongafest to the likes of Girls On Film, Planet Earth, Wild 
Boys, Is There Something I Should Know, Hungry Like The Wolf and, of course, Rio. Hopefully though they'll restrain themselves form inflicting their version of White Lines on anyone this time around. Also out to coincide with the tour are two spruced up videos, available 
on DVD for the first time; Arena, an ambitious concert cum fantasy 
that sees the original Duran Duran (Milo O'Shea) from Barbarella try and destroy the band during a stadium gig, now packaged with a Making Of documentary showing exactly where the £1million budget went, and Sing Blue Silver, a document of the 1984 America/Canada tour at a time when they were one of the biggest bands in the world and Andy Taylor was under the impression he was Keith Richards.

Songs about death, misery and mortality, hued with doleful violin or mournful melodica and delivered by Robert Fisher's sorrow hung melancholic resonant throaty rumble of a baritone that can make Nick Cave sound like S Club 8 , well it’s not exactly a recipe for a knees up. But strangely the mood of current album Regard The End is upbeat, even River in The Pines’ trad tale of two young lovers, a drowning and a grave manages to come out the other end celebrating their devotion while the self-penned Beyond The Shore sees passing as the end of life's woes and a passage to Glory. Of course, it's hard to find too much sunshine in murder ballad Ghost Of The Girl In The Well or The Suffering Song’s not entirely optimistic saga of a dysfunctional disintegrating family.It says much of Fisher's work and influences that unless you know it's almost impossible to separate the trad from the self-penned, as easy to mistake Twistification for the latter as it is The Trials of Harrison Hayes for the former. Partly recorded in Slovenia (which may explain the Eastern European folk ambience), it may turn over the rocks to explore the human failings that scurry below but there's redemption and hope here too. On Soft Hand basic human brings a smile and while death peers over the shoulder on Day Is Past And Gone, there's a sense of peace and acceptance rather than anger. Of course with four previous albums of disconsolate melancholy to draw on, you won’t be getting all of this served up tonight, but wherever they choose to dip their glasses you can be sure the brew will be heady and intoxicating.

Having lost much of the MOR audience who gave him such hit as Stainsby Girls, The Road To Hell and Let’s Dance when he released his post cancer treatment Delta Blues double album Dancing Down The Stony Road, Rea’s remained true to his rediscovered roots, releasing the jazzy Blue Street last year and now continuing the mood with The Blue Jukebox (Navybeck), letting his slide guitar and gravelly voice loose over another world weary jazzy blues collection of self-penned numbers. Occasionally reminiscent of Tom Waits and Mark Knopfler, this is what he should have been doing all along instead of wasting his time recording things like Driving Home For Christmas, throwing away his money producing and starring in vanity project movies and making an arse of himself for the camera with Michael Winner. If you’re still locked into the image of Rea performing On The Beach, then lend an ear to the jazz soaked duskiness of Steel River Blues, the barrelhousing sax wailing blues boogie The Beat Goes On, the early hours whisky soaked Paint My Jukebox Blue and throbbing shuffle of Speed and grab an earful of revelation.

Finnish emo anyone? Germany, France, Poland, Switzerland, they’ve all been going gaga over the In The Shadows single for yonks and now the UK defence has crumbled too. But even a casual listen to the accompanying Dead Letters (Island) album with the overblown, overarranged 80s rock sound and the big guitar solos and pumping riffs of things like In My Life, Back In The Picture, First Day of My Life and the yearningly morose Funeral Song, and the nightmarish vision of Europe and The Final Countdown all come rushing back. No, no, a thousand times no.

Recovered from a fist to face interface with Jack White, head Bondie Jason leads the pack into town for a headline visit on the back of the critically acclaimed, best selling Pawn Shoppe Heart. Given the album bursts out of the case with No Regrets and Broken Man tearing apart the speaker fuses, you can pretty much guarantee that, even with the Hawaiian bluesy slow moan of Mairead, there’ll be little pause for dreamy smooches and chill outs as they crank up the loose-limbed guitars and primal rhythms section for a head on assault on garage retro rock blues. Although C’mon C’mon is a rubble raising stomp and Poison Ivy pummels the skull, they don’t always attack with a battering ram, Been Swank ( a swipe at fellow Detroit scene figure Ben Swank) a throbbing voodoobilly lumber through siren riffs, Right Of Way prompting thoughts of early Jagger r&b and and Crawl Through The Darkness tipping the hat to stroppy CBGB punk. They even sink their bloody blues teeth into Otis’s Try A Little Tenderness. With amps turned up past bleeding point, riffs crushed in their fists and attitudes razored, they’re here for the kill not the hunt. MaybeStollsteimershould get slapped about more often.
Support’s provided by oddball plastic punk outfit Ima Robot, an LA quintet who include Beck’s former rhythm section and whose eponymous debut album (Virgin) suggests a combined record collection consisting almost entirely of Devo, Roxy Music, Sparks, Wire, B52s and, buried somewhere at the back Sweet and A Flock of Seagulls albums.

 Exuberant synthy art pop with a garage revival coating, twisted, frantic, concise, snappy and laced with irony as they sing about love (Dynomite, Philosophofee), maths (12=3), apocalyptic death (A is for Action), existential angst (What Are We Made From) and buying their album before we all go up in flames (Here Comes the Bombs). Too quirky to be more than a passing novelty, but colourfully fun enough to catch before the batteries run down.

Listen carefully, that sound you hear is time being called on the Irish boy band following the departure of Bryan McFadden. To all intents and purposes, he’s given it up to spend more time with the missus, Atomic Kitten (no more) Kerry and the kids, but no one’s going to be surprised if he decides to follow in the path of band mentor Ronan Keating and strike out solo. Meanwhile the remaining four have been left to get on with this greatest hits tour, belting out their enviable string of number ones (though unless you’re a real fan you’d be hard pushed to name one) in the full awareness that they’ve probably got little more than a couple of singles life-span left.

A Montreal quartet who trade in lovelorn indie guitar pop filtered through such influences as The Smiths, Interpol, Ride, New Order and Psychedelic Furs, The Stills have been making sizeable ripples with their debut album, Logic Will Break Your Heart (Vice) and Still In Love Song and Lola Stars & Stripes in particular. However, stretched over the length of 12 tracks, their gloomy, sulky and, it must be said, rather one note sound of morose wandering guitars does begin to pall and even though the last track, Yesterday Never Tomorrows, wakes up to deliver a Velvets walking bassline and some sonic variation, it’s all a bit too late. Too much shade and not enough light suggests a rather depressing live experience. 
Fortunately things brighten up with the appearance of New YorkersThe Walkmen who, forged from the entrails of JonathonFire*Eater, have been turning out solid garage rock for the past four years and now hit these shores to promote sophomore album Bows + Arrows (Recordcollection). 

A considerably more diverse sounding affair than the headliners, they ease out of the dreamy church organ spaced narcoticism of What’s In It For Me into the venomous surging The Rat, where they give notice to The Strokes to pack it all in and retire while the going’s good, and then back to the U2 sounding Little House of Savages, a positively weary Dylanish 138th Street and a piano tinkling hushed n drunk Hang On, Siobhan before exploding again in the spraying fury that is Thinking of a Dream I Had. Now that’s worth elbowing your way down the front for.
 
 

Liverpool’s being particularly prolific at the moment, churning out all manner of retro rock contenders. Snappily casual, these boys (and female sax player Abi Harding) cast a rather wider net than most for their trawl through the influences. Debut album Who Killed...The Zutons (Deltasonic) variously hints at David Byrne (Nightmare Part II), Zappa (Zuton Fever) and on Pressure Point and You Will Won’t You the psychedelic era of The Temptations while also throwing country (Confusion, Railroad), vaudeville (Remember Me), bluegrass (Moons and Horror Shows), and voodoo rockabilly (Havana Gang Brawl) into the mix for good measure. It’s still early days yet, but on the evidence of this impressive first offering and a gathering live reputation, reports of their death are likely to be exaggerated for some time to come.

Back for their own small scale headlining dates, Long Island duo Tabitha and Vinny may seem to be all sunkissed seduction but behind this their American Whip (13 Amp) album is an altogether darker and more menacing place. Drawing on My Bloody Valentine influences, it slouches along on waves of fuzzy psychedelia, strings and sweet harmonies, kissing the sun on 33x, sounding like Ray Davies jamming with The Who and Brian Wilson with Out Of The Sun and lazily rolling in the lushness of In The Never Ending Search For A Suitable Enemy. But there’s suicide and senility lurking in the bushes of Dosed And Became Invisible and Alzheimers where they sample sound bites from victims of the disease. Stop and listen while you’re grooving, and you may find that the sway in your feet might turn to a knot in the stomach. 

It’s some three years now since everything seemed to be coming up roses for Turner, her Burn The Black Suit album being picked up for UK release through EastWest, in search of another Irish star to add to their Corrs and David Gray collection. Overnight success didn’t come quick enough for the label however and despite glowing reviews Turner’s low gigging profile didn’t shift the necessary units. And so, having parted company, she’s back on her own Hear This label for her third outing, Season of the Hurricane. Already a hit in Ireland where she was recently named Best Contemporary Artist, with Wogan having picked up on first single, Everything is Beautiful (which finds her a sort of cross between Norah Jones, The Corrs, Dido and Natalie Merchant), she may yet find her star rising on these shores. While keeping the last album’s edgy jazzy folk feel honed, it’s a poppier, more playful affair with songs about sexual attraction (the sultry, reggae underpinned The Greatest Show On Earth), sexual urges (the smoky One Night) and sexual vampirism (See Another Side melding melodic vulnerability with predatory intent) mingled with more wistful memories of fumbled childhood romance (anuptempo, almost rocking 1987), steadfast love (Business As Usual sounding very Eddi Reader) and aching betrayals and regrets (the 5am cityscape mood of Vampire, the melancholic, spare No Good In This Goodybe). Social and spiritual issues are addressed too in the driftingly dreamy but downbeat title track, a quietly angry Suzanne Vega-ish The Signal and the Noise and the enigmatic, faith-themed slow waltzingly acoustic Elvis Is In The Building. Wrapped up with a cover of Nancy Sinatra hit Sugartown, it’s a consummately crafted affair that never loses its passion and soul beneath the musical polish, and if this time round she puts in the necessary footwork promoting it over here, then it shouldn’t be too long before she’s breezing back to play rather more sizeable venues.

If her last album, Troubled By Fire, used, er, fire and heat, as a metaphor the Seattle based singer-songwriter's follow up, Carbon Glacier (Bella Union), takes an elementally different approach and adopts cold and ice as images for her meditations on mortality. Named from the black and white geographical formation on the northern slopes of Mount Rainier, the album took shape in the winter of 2003, drawing on Veirs' obsessions with Moby Dick and the sea for its often impressionistic tales of pirate ladies, shipwrecks, storms and the human condition's oscillation between estrangement and connection. There's a crisp frosty iciness to the work, but the effect is one of detachment rather than distancing, a feeling enhanced by the fact that, not least with her librarian look, she sometimes calls to mind the work of kindred spirits Jane Sibery and, albeit with a higher temperature, Laurie Anderson. It's folk music still, plinky guitars and scraping strings much in evidence as she and her Tortured Souls backing band ease the melodies between lullabies from the ether and more earthily bluesy moods. The pretty tinkling standout Rapture, a hymn cum lament about nature and the price of artistic creation on which she namechecks Monet, Cobain and Woolf gives way to the softly tumbling guitar and piano dusk country strains of Lonely Angel Dust evokes thoughts of The Handsome Family before The Cloud Room introduces scuffed percussive beats and unexpected associations of Bjork while immediately in its heels Wind Is Blowing Stars sees her retreating to that spare cabin in the Appalachian hills in the spiritual company of Victoria Williams. Rime crusts around Shadow Blues and you pull the blankets closer as the wind blows through its chords, a toy piano ragtime instrumental, Anne Bonny Rag, rears its head before the bluesy moods of Snow Camping recalls the transcendental joy of a night of feeling sheltered rather than threatened by a thousand snowflakes and night under hoary stars. If that has inner warmth, by contrast Chimney Sweeping Man is a song of wasted promise, loneliness spent writing letters to pass the time. Feedback and distorted guitar and violin noise crack the ice floes of a threatening Salvage A Smile, the sea continuing to exercise its foreboding compulsion on the instrumental Blackened, surely part inspired by whale song, before the album ebbs away on Riptide's pulsing folk with cello shanty, a boat bobbing on the ocean, a map of her world awaiting the choice of compass point. A frozen wilderness, but never a frozen waste, a cool reception is the last thing she’s going to get tonight. 

Fronted by the tremulous girlie voiced Greg Gilbert, the newly emergent Southampton outfit are steeped in a starry eyed and laughing 60s nostalgia for jangling three minute pop songs that soar heavenwards on chorus wings and the sort of cascading melodies that make The Las seem like industrial white noise merchants. Bursting into the public consciousness like the first swallow of summer with debut album Faded Seaside Glamour (Rough Trade), a ltd edition of which comes with bonus DVD of promo vids and live performances, they swell with falsetto hope on Wanderlust as Gilbert assumes the mantle of Liz Fraser before he switches vocal affection to sound uncannily like Stevie Nicks on Bedroom Scene before getting his gonads temporarily into Spiritualized gear for You Wear The Sun and then doing a pretty fair impression of Roger McGuinn before his voice broke on Hey Girl. They don’t quite manage to sustain that first glorious rush throughout the album, Stay Where You Are is a particularly turgid sub Happy Mondays groove, There’s Water Here a noodling acoustic number that never quite sounds finished and Satellites Lost could have done with the direction counter being reset, but by the time they get to the chiming One Night Away and the Stone Roses-ish mantra sway of On all is forgiven. Listen carefully and you’ll find that with tales of lost innocence, death and wasted promise, the lyrics aren’t quite as joyful as the melodies might suggest but when you’re being swept away into angelic singalong bliss for Nearer Than Heaven I daresay you’ll be too euphoric to notice.

He’s gone back to his roots has our Eric, rediscovering his love for Robert Johnson, the bluesman who inspired him to start fiddling with a guitar in the first place. Thus his current album, Me and Mr Johnson, on which he duly works his way through 14 of the man’s tunes, among them such blues standards as They’re Red Hot, If I Had Possession Over Judgement Day, Love In Vain and Hell Hound On My Trail (though curiously not a revisit or Crossroads Blues which he’d tackled back in Cream days). It’s likely too that these will form the backbone of his first UK tour in over three years. A pity then that where Johnson always sounded like he was being chased by the devil, Clapton just sounds like the bank manager’s leaning over his shoulder. He livens up here and there, 32-20 Blues and Last Fair Deal Gone Down particularly high kicking and stomping, but this is the sound of expensive seats and wine bars rather than the Mississippi gin joints, a perfectly played and polished but also lifeless night with an elder statesman and his accountants audience.

Three years on, McLusky Do Dallas, the splenetic angular Welsh punk trio return with new drummer Jack Eggleston in hand to prepare the ground for its follow up, The Difference Between Me And You Is That I'm Not On Fire (Too Pure), once again with Steve Albini in the producer’s seat. Advance word suggests they’ve wisely refrained from repeating themselves and gone for a darker, more raw sound with rumbling bass assaults and spiked guitar storms. With titles that include Slay!, You Should Be Ashamed, Seamus, She Will Only Bring You Happiness, Your Children Are Waiting For You To Die and Without MSG I Am Nothing, the first salvo is the single That Man Will Not Hang, a pummelling riff machine of chainsawing guitar that sounds like what PiL might have been had they come from a folk rather than punk background, an unlikely proposition given more credence by The All Encompassing Positive which is nothing less than a funeral march sea shanty.