An exclusive preview of next month's album releases

Artist: Ty

Title: Closer

Related articles

• Record Label Profile: Transgressive
• Day In The Life: Serena Benedict, co-founder and head of Just Music
• Michael Nyman: Piano, solo
• British hip-hop: Going overground
• Music sales: Unsigned, sealed and delivered
• Essential gig guide
• Isobel Campbell: Lone star
• Manchester: Northern music stars shine again
• Search the news archive for more stories

Label: Big Dada

Hip-hop's classic demarcation between DJ and MC is fairly strictly adhered to for good reasons, as many self-contained producer/rappers tend to come up short when they get behind the mic. Not so London's Ty, whose relaxed flow over his own beats is equally commanding whether he's batting down rumours ("Apparently, I walk with a thousand grand") or grappling more seriously with the state of the culture, as in "Closer": "Rap is trapped, and that's so scary/Just sex, no message, no text," he frets. It's the kind of message once heard from the likes of De La Soul and Arrested Development's Speech, all of whom take guest raps here, though none outshines Ty's own contributions, which range over such matters as work, war, creativity - and the frayed state of the social fabric generally.

Artist: Luke Haines

Title: Off My Rocker At The Art School Bop

Label: Degenerate Music

There's a basic contradiction at the heart of Luke Haines's Off My Rocker.... He may rail in "Heritage Rock Revolution" against the dad-rock pantheon of "Crosby Stills & Nash/The legacy of The Clash", and in "Here's To Old England" against the stale clichés of Little England; but in both his own music and his lyrics, he's one of the biggest offenders. The arrangements are heavily reliant on an Eighties electropop style now just as antique as the pantheon he scorns. And his obsession with England's shifty Sixties and seedy Seventies borders on the pathological. But mercifully, it's all done in the worst possible taste, particularly in "Bad Reputation", a case of sympathy for the devil's backing band: "Gary Glitter/He's a bad, bad man/Sullying the reputation of The Glitter Band". Incorrigible.

Artist: Babyshambles

Title: Back To The Bus

Label: DMC

Save for a ramshackle version of "What Katy Did Next", this doesn't actually feature Babyshambles themselves, but instead offers a background glimpse of the music the band listens to on the bus. It's a surprisingly diverse selection which takes in old punk warhorses (The Clash, Johnny Thunders) and plenty of spindly indie from support-band chums like Cazals. More revealing, though, are the less predictable choices - Sixties garage-psychedelia from The Creation and melancholy folk in the form of Bert Jansch's "Needle Of Death", surely the most beautiful song about addiction. On the same tack, but different in tone, is Love's "Your Friend And Mine - Neil's Song", a jauntily affectionate tribute to a fallen drug buddy that ought to ring a bell with poor Pete: "You don't do nothing and you land in jail/Farewell, farewell, farewell my friend".

Artist: Aim

Title: Flight 602

Label: ATIC

Andy Turner's third album as Aim exposes some of the shortcomings of the sample-based music aesthetic that developed out of the Nineties DJ/rave scene - specifically, questions as to the music's function when the focus on dancing is abandoned. It's like the old cliché about feeling hungry an hour after eating Chinese food: there are some pleasant moments on Flight 602, but I'm damned if I can remember what they sounded like. Without anything to anchor them in the memory save for the occasional trumpet sample or vocal soundbite, they seem to dissolve away upon their conclusion. At the root of the problem is the easy-listening mode favoured by Aim, in which all the sounds are blended inoffensively. The result is just another albumful of smeared jazz samples lacking excitement, intrigue or surprise.

Artist: Coaxial

Title: Coaxial

Label: Gold Standard Laboratories

Hailing from Long Beach, California, hip-hop duo Coaxial inhabit the more experimental end of rap, the 13 tracks of this debut owing little to the familiar mores and tropes of urban/street culture. The soundscapes created by David K are made up of sinister, glistening ambiences, the perfect haunting, nightmarish accompaniment to the verbal flows of Beegs Alchemy. Beegs's raps have the urgent, tumbling quality of Eminem's, but he lacks their humour and verbal violence, concentrating instead on bizarre, paranoid sci-fi musings such as that of the opening "It's Not My Voice". However, the novelty of hearing what Eminem might have sounded like if he were a Dr Who nerd instead of Detroit trailer-trash soon wears off, and the absence of any more populist connection ultimately proves fatal.

Artist: Chuck E. Weiss

Title: 23rd & Stout

Label: Cooking Vinyl

Chuck E Weiss's position as the uncrowned king of bohemian Los Angeles is affirmed with this splendid new album, the best of his career, in which low-life characters with names like Prince Minsky and Piccolo Pete rub shoulders with tributes to bluesman Slim Harpo and Disney voice artist Sterling Holloway. The latter is represented by Weiss's falsetto whisper on "Sho Is Cold", a lovely jazz shuffle, while Harpo's characteristic slouch-twitch rhythm underpins "Fake Dance". There are a couple of splendid weatherbeaten street croons in the style he shares with old chum Tom Waits, "Primrose Lane" and "Another Drunken Sailor Song". "You could call this album 'Alternative Schlock'," observes Weiss's sleevenoten. "I like to call it 'discom-bop-ulated jive'." Whatever you call it, it sounds just fine to me.

Artist: Various Artists

Title: In Prison

Label: Trikont

The German company Trikont has for several years now assumed the mantle of the world's leading archivist label, with excellent compilations on everything from American Immigrant Songs to John Peel's 78 collection. In Prison is no exception, a fascinating survey of black prison music throughout the last century which switches smoothly between old blues, Seventies soul, prison moans and Nineties hip-hop. There's a matter-of-fact outrage behind Brand Nubian's "Claimin' I'm A Criminal" and Curtis Mayfield's "Short Eyes" takes a symphonic-soul perspective on the subject. Most moving of all, though, especially "Living Proof" by Lifers Group, a 1993 rap about living with "a shank knife, a rock in a sock, a razor-blade, a fist-fight". All killer, no filler, quite literally in this case.

Artist: Various Artists

Title: Plague Songs

Label: 4AD

A project commissioned by the Artangel arts organisation, Plague Songs features 10 disparate artists' representations of the 10 plagues supposedly inflicted to aid the Israelites' flight from the Egyptians. A daunting prospect, but realised in such inventive fashion that the results are actually quite thrilling. Many of the performers adopt the point of view of the plague itself: Brian Eno takes Robert Wyatt's buzzy insect impression and uses it as the core of a slowly-expanding chorale for "Flies"; Laurie Anderson evokes the dying livestock of "The Fifth Plague" through a murmurous collusion of voice, strings and electric piano. Meanwhile, Stephin Merritt is thought-provoking, going above and beyond the call of duty in formulating an intriguing new theological heresy for his witty electropop piece "The Meaning Of Lice".

Artist: Solomon Burke

Title: Nashville

Label: Snapper

Capitalising on his success with the Grammy-winning Don't Give Up On Me, the latest stage of Solomon Burke's 21st century comeback campaign is this country album, an unusual undertaking for the "King of Rock and Soul", though certainly not without precedent - one thinks of Ray Charles' groundbreaking Modern Sounds In Country & Western Music. Nashville isn't quite that good, though it's not without its highlights, including Patty Griffin's "Up The Mountain". That's one of several duets here, of varying success: neither Dolly Parton's nor Emmylou Harris's voices quite fit with Burke's on "Tomorrow Is Forever" and "We're Gonna Hold You" respectively; but they're more than compensated for by his collaboration with Gillian Welch on "Valley Of Tears", in which Solomon's soul seems wrenched almost physically out of his body.

Artist: Clinic

Title: Visitations

Label: Domino

There's always been an element of mystery about Clinic, an enigmatic quality that might be characterised as mystic-modernism. So too with Visitations, which seems haunted by a collectivist spirit of ancient seasonal ritual. It's most obvious in the opening "Family", a pounding Velvets-esque riff laced with slide guitar, and "Harvest", where Ade Blackburn reminds the clan to "batten down and button up, 'cos all the family needs you". The farming theme extends through to the juddering psych-rock exercise "Gideon", leading finally to the album's best track, "Animal/Human", a blend of rattling percussion, jangly harp glissandi and flute, which suddenly changes into an equally peculiar blend of Bo Diddley shuffle-beat and klezmer clarinet. Ambitious and intriguing, it's typical of the spirit that drives all the band's work.

Artist: Tasmin Archer

Title: On

Label: Quiverdisc

It's been 14 years since Tasmin Archer was, courtesy of her debut hit "Sleeping Satellites", the Next Big Thing. She didn't hang on to that status very long, but as this latest offering shows, she's managed to retain the songwriting gift and vocal approach that aligns her more with folk/pop artists like Carole King, Carly Simon and Aimee Mann than with the R&B divas with whom she may have been expected to compete. There's a pervasive focus here on insecurity and low self-esteem. "Complaints", for instance, seems to offer clues to her sudden career decline, so soon after furnishing "a new rock anthem circulating in the air"; but with the sinister shimmering funk of "Take Care" and the sparkling African-inspired bustle of "Sedan", she undoubtedly has the armaments necessary to mount a fresh campaign.

Artist: Colleen Et Les Boîtes À Musique

Title: Colleen Et Les Boîtes À Musique

Label: Leaf

Colleen is avant-garde composer Cécile Schott, whose work with music-boxes prompted French radio's Atelier De Création Radiophonique to commission her to devise a suite of pieces played on these tiny automata. The results are surprisingly broad-ranging but uniformly engrossing, from the delicate toytown gamelan of "What Is A Componium? Pt 1" to the faltering passage of "Hush A Bye Baby" gleaned from a greetings-card insert. The longest and most satisfying piece is the concluding "I'll Read You A Story", for which acoustic guitar is added to the twinkling swirl of music-box lines and reversed notes to produce an enchanted, pied-piper air strongly redolent of a pixie's ice-cream van. Quite delightful.

Artist: Bonobo

Title: Days To Come

Label: Ninja Tune

On the face of it, Simon "Bonobo" Green's Days To Come could be another colourless sample-groove exercise like the Aim album reviewed earlier: it features the same basic elements of jazz loops, R&B-flavoured female vocals and supercool attitude. But it's clear things are different here. On "Between The Lines", singer Bajka displays an engaging creamy-smoky vocal character, while Green demonstrates his exemplary taste and technique in jazz looping with a striding Sun Ra-style groove of deep, burring horns. The single "Nightlite" is another highlight, with Bajka's vocal riding a delightful glockenspiel and thumb-piano riff. Green's his ear for tones, textures and timbres is inspired throughout and heard to best effect on the samples of harp and what sounds like African kora that carry "Ketto" and "Days To Come".

Artist: Martin Carthy & Dave Swarbrick

Title: Straws In the Wind

Label: Topic

With Dave Swarbrick now pretty much recovered from the life-threatening bout with emphysema, he and Martin Carthy have been able to renew their four-decade occasional partnership with this, their first album in 14 years. And what a welcome reunion it is, the old chums reigniting the musical intimacy that only comes from such a long association. It's there right from the opening "Death Of Queen Jane", in which Swarb's violin plays darting flourishes around Carthy's more formal guitar picking; and especially in "Ship In Distress", where his astringent drones tug woozily against the rolling gait of Carthy's guitar. There is more pleasure to be had from Carthy's annotations, particularly that for "Lord Thomas And Fair Eleanor", where milord Thomas is described, not unfairly, as "a twerp".

Artist: Magnolia Electric Co.

Title: Fading Trails

Label: Secretly Canadian

Recorded in a variety of locations including the legendary Sun Studio, and with a variety of producers including Steve Albini, Fading Trails is a patchwork of an album which still manages to hang together as a coherent whole, largely thanks to the central directing presence of Jason Molina, who, to all intents and purposes, is Magnolia Electric Co. Molina's muse is a melancholy one, wherever and with whomever he's working, and the album is consequently a prime party-killer, shot through with glum portents and pessimistic observations such as "Everything in its place/ The world does have to end in pain". The better moments are actually those in which these downcast sentiments are rendered most nakedly, as in "Old Horizon", a mournful piece built on a minimalist piano figure.

Artist: Robyn Hitchcock & The Venus 3

Title: Olé! Tarantula

Label: Proper

Robyn Hitchcock sounds more than ever like his hero Syd Barrett on this latest album, recorded in Seattle with his chums Peter Buck and the R.E.M. auxiliary of bassist Scott McCaughey and drummer Bill Rieflin. Indeed, the opening psych-rock wig-out "Adventure Rocket Ship" sounds like the Floyd might have if Syd had written the space-rock songs rather than Roger Waters. The rising melodic hook of "Red Locust Frenzy" recalls Tim Buckley; and the warm horns on "Museum Of Sex" have an engaging Memphis soul character - all of which illustrates the problem Hitchcock has in transcending his influences. But there is recompense here in the poppy, epiphanic "'Cause It's Love (Saint Parallelogram)", which may yet furnish him with the hit he deserves.

Artist: Squarepusher

Title: Hello Everything

Label: Warp

Tom "Squarepusher" Jenkinson's previous albums have pushed further and further out to the rarefied fringes where drum'n'bass meets avant-jazz, in the process accruing the admiration of artists such as The Neptunes, Thom Yorke and Andre 3000. But apart from the concluding "Orient Orange", an 11-minute-long cavernous soundscape, this is a much less adventurous exercise than 2004's out-there Ultravisitor. Some passages here are little more than standard jazz-funk workouts; others are effectively incidental music largely devoid of incidents; and the more synth-based tracks such as "Welcome To Europe" are just footnotes to Kraftwerk, until sundered by the surly intrusion of a drum'n'bass beat. It's all impressively effected, but there's scant consideration for the listener's needs, and consequently little one can really love.

Artist: Bright Eyes

Title: Noise Floor (Rarities 1998-2005)

Label: Saddle Creek

Being prolific is not a sin, but there comes a point when even the most avid fan can reach saturation point, and Noise Floor may be that point for Bright Eyes. Conor Oberst is clearly one of the more talented and industrious figures on the American alt.rock scene, but after last year's glut of two studio albums and a live album, this collection of B-sides, tribute-album contributions and sundry other rarities seems, well, excessively generous. Still, the two unreleased tracks recorded with M Ward are sweet enough. Best of all, though, is "Blue Angels Air Show", where Oberst evokes the awed spirit of the show's audience, before climaxing with distorted chorus shouts of "Rhubarb! Rhubarb!". But that's enough Bright Eyes for the moment, thanks very much.

Artist: The Radio Dept.

Title: Pet Grief

Label: Track and Field

Despite the critical acclaim for their debut album Lesser Matters, Swedish trio The Radio Dept were dropped by their UK label XL. Retiring to lick their wounds, the band have reinvented themselves, supposedly in less electronic form, with Pet Grief. To be honest, it's hard to spot the difference: from the opener "It's Personal" on, the album traffics in an Air-y, Royksopp-y kind of candyfloss-light, lounge-muzak electronica which, at its best, ticks along pleasantly but meekly, like a Scandinavian Pet Shop Boys without the aloof, ironic charm. The main lyrical slant of Pet Grief is uncertainty: uncertainty about emotional commitment. But the uncertainty spills over into their own performances, which are too diffident and ineffectual to make any impression; and thus, though pleasant, frankly pointless.

Artist: T-Bone Walker

Title: The Hustle Is On

Label: SPV Blue Label

T-Bone Walker played the blues in the darkest of hues, and not all of them were blue. The inventor of the electric blues guitar possessed a jazz-influenced guitar style, and a voice that still irresistibly summons up images of late nights in smoky clubs and sharp-dressed cats. Drawn largely from the Forties sessions for Black And White upon which his reputation rests, these tracks have a relaxed, classy appeal that remains powerfully evocative more than six decades later. Sometimes, as on "Mean Old World", T-Bone's blues were so achingly slow they were almost in reverse; at other times, he could ply the jump and swing styles popularised by Louis Jordan with an ease that bordered on the jubilant ("The Hustle Is On" and "Alimony Blues"). At all times, though, he exhibited a grasp of mood and texture without equal in the genre. Sublime.

Artist: Charles Campbell-Jones

Title: Wasting The Duke

Label: Bronzerat

Expatriate Australian songwriter Charles Campbell-Jones must have struggled to fit in anywhere in his native country's music scene, so peculiar and individual are his tastes and approach on this debut album. Inspired by Beefheart and Roxy Music, he's produced the kind of grand prog-rock folly that will either be hailed as a masterpiece or dismissed out of hand. The truth is somewhere in between, Wasting The Duke being a one-off curiosity on which Campbell-Jones's overweening ambition often torpedoes his best ideas. When it works well, as in the cello and vibes instrumental miniature "Tuesdays Off", the results can be charming. But all too often, things are over-egged, so that the initially promising likes of "Winter Palace", are soon burdened with superfluous additions.

Artist: Andy Partridge

Title: The Fuzzy Warbles Collectors Album

Label: Ape House

Never one for half measures, Andy Partridge here collects together all the Fuzzy Warbles compilations of XTC out-takes, demos and sundry oddments - a massive 9CD box set containing 161 tracks, many laid down in the seven-year recording hiatus when the band were in dispute with Virgin. It's ridiculously diverse, incorporating jingles, answerphone messages, noodles, doodles, ambient exercises, jazz keyboards and early versions of XTC and Dukes Of Stratosphear songs. Lyrically, the collection runs the gamut from comical and joyous, to abject melancholy, the latter tone notably evident in songs like "Everything" ("Everything you say you felt for me, is it all dust and denial, as lifeless as some lunar sea?"). All told, more music than one life deserves to be blessed with.

Artist: The Dirty Dozen Brass Band

Title: What's Going On

Label: Shout Factory/Evangeline

As New Orleans' premier brass band, The Dirty Dozen clearly felt a responsibility to comment on the post-Katrina scandal afflicting their city. Hence What's Going On, a stunning track-by-track re-creation of Marvin Gaye's socially conscious masterpiece. The virtue of their approach is best shown on "Flyin' High (In The Friendly Sky)", which opens in languid, reflective fashion, before changing tone in the fashion of New Orleans funeral processions, the initial lament replaced by a celebration. Vocal contributors include Chuck D on the title track, railing against the shameful failure of "radio stations, TV news, and all them one-sided views". Overall, it's a powerful statement not just of reproach, but one which actively illustrates the vibrant culture at risk.

To order any CD previewed here, call the Independent Music Service on 01634 832 789.