An exclusive preview of next month's album releases

Artist 1990s

Title Cookies

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Label Rough Trade

Formed from the ashes of the same Yummy Fur that spawned Franz Ferdinand, Glasgow trio 1990s are being hotly touted as the next big thing by sundry Ferdinands, Kaisers, Long Blondes and Gossips, and it's easy to see why from this hugely enjoyable debut album. Produced by Bernard Butler, it features the same crisp, trebly guitars and indie swagger as Franz Ferdinand, with a sideline in raggedy raunch like Primal Scream doing another imaginary outake from Exile On Main Street, and employs the hip conversational vernacular utilised by Jamie T, Just Jack and The Streets, to deal with similar themes of lassitude, dope, parties and shopping precincts. But crucially, it also draws on the immense fund of droll lyrical wit that enables singer/guitarist Jackie McKeown to dash off lines like "Sometimes I wish I was wrong, so I could dream I was right/That would be outtasight!" and "Get out to a bar/Get out like a blonde gets out of a car". Frivolous and funny, they'll be household names in a matter of weeks.

Artist The Hold Steady

Title Separation Sunday

Label Full Time Hobby

Available for the first time in the UK following the success of their acclaimed Boys And Girls In America, this second album from The Hold Steady effectively offers a prequel to that album's tableaux of lovers, losers, wasters and dopers in teenage wasteland America, following the same few characters as they stumble haphazardly between the bible and the bong. Singer Craig Finn's wordy, literate lyrics and offhand, insouciant declamation, combined with his band's powerhouse rock arrangements, bring to mind the young Springsteen on tracks like "Hornets! Hornets!" and the standout "Your Little Hoodrat Friend", an anthemic rocker about a streetwise girl with religious inclinations and self-harming ways. Apart from his obvious lyrical gift - who could resist an opening line like "She drove it like she stole it"? - Finn's great asset is his entirely non-judgmental attitude towards his characters, which prevents them from becoming mere ciphers. Also available is the band's debut, Almost Killed Me.

Artist The Watersons

Title Sound Sound Your Instruments Of Joy

Label Topic

Reissued to coincide with their forthcoming anniversary concert at the Royal Albert Hall, this 1977 album of British and American hymns and carols displays the impeccable a cappella polyphonies that were The Watersons' trademark. Their fulsome, ringing harmonies both enrich such familiar fare as "While Shepherds Watched Their Flocks", and cast a suitably sour, forbidding air around the dark piety of a song like "Windham", with its admonishment that "Broad is the road that leads to death/And thousands walk together there/But wisdom shows a narrow path". Holiness is manifested here in myriad forms, from the contemporary vernacular of "Heavenly Aeroplane", a Thirties holy-roller hymn akin to "Christian Automobile", to the mythopoeic "The Bitter Withy", in which the infant Jesus gets his bottom spanked with a withy switch for mischievously disposing of three aristocratic unbelievers by luring them onto a bridge made of the rays of the sun, plunging them into the chasm below.

Artist Ocean Colour Scene

Title On The Leyline

Label Moseley Shoals

Ocean Colour Scene have changed labels but little else on their new album, which as usual sticks closely to the same old Sixties dad-rock influences. "We invent new words just so that we can use them", they claim in the title-track, though there's no equivalent concern about new sounds: the opener "I Told You So" has the mild, mellifluous manner of harmony popsters like The Searchers, "These Days I'm Tired" sounds like a minor Lennon-McCartney effort not good enough for The Beatles, and a stompy Motown backbeat drives their cover of Weller's dancehall-days lament, "For Dancers Only". But the main fault here is that apart from a dig at the PM-in-waiting ("Mr Brown") and a "Shipbuilding"-style song about Scots youth being offered a military escape route from heroin and unemployment ("Go To Sea Boys"), the album is largely taken up with tedious break-up songs, the cumulative effect of which is to sap one's spirit.

Artist Various Artists

Title Crime Scene USA

Label Giant Steps

What a great idea: Crime Scene USA compiles together over 30 of the title themes from the great films noir of the Forties and Fiftiess, a parade of miniature jazz scores - just long enough for the opening credit sequences - by the likes of Elmer Bernstein, Miklos Rozsa, Max Steiner and Dimitri Tiomkin. Ranging from The Letter (1940) to The Sweet Smell Of Success (1957), and taking in such milestones as Double Indemnity, The Big Sleep, Force Of Evil, Detour, The Killers and The Killing, the tone throughout combines hysterical melodrama with furtive subterfuge, as composers attempt to cram in all the genre's signature elements - danger, mystery, sensuality, treachery and death - into one or two minutes of blaring brass, louche saxophones and fatalistic timpani. It's hard to pick a favourite, but I'm particularly smitten with the theme for Private Hell 36, rendered musically here in a blend of sleazy sax, exotic vibes and mysterious muted trumpets.

Artist The Cinematic Orchestra

Title Ma Fleur

Label Ninja Tune

This eagerly-awaited follow-up to 2002's surprisingly successful Everyday finds Cinematic Orchestra leader Jason Swinscoe attempting an ambitious musical portrait of the passage of life, with vocalists Patrick Watson, Lou Rhodes and Fontella Bass playing youth, adulthood and old age, respectively. As before, Swinscoe's musical grammar is largely jazz-derived, albeit from a European, ECM-style chamber-jazz. Accordingly, pieces tend to begin quietly and develop slowly, usually with simple introductory piano figures gradually acquiring depth and heft before being augmented by washes of strings, organ, guitar or, on the title-track, saxophone. Though intended as one of those putative "soundtracks for an imaginary movie", the results do rather lack the decisive narrative drive a movie requires, but there's much to enjoy nevertheless, particularly the appealing overall mood of cool, elegant melancholy, and Fontella Bass's moving performance on "Breathe".

Artist Wiley

Title Playtime Is Over

Label Big Dada

With Roll Deep having been dropped by Relentless, production svengali Wiley picks up the solo career he last addressed seriously with 2004's Treddin On Thin Ice. Making the best of his situation, he boasts about his new record deal in "50/50", before settling in for another round of parochial turf-marking, streetlife tales, dissing-down of rivals and bigging-up of himself and his spartan grime grooves. "Who's got lyrics, who's got bars, who can stay up in the sky like stars?" he asks (answer: Wiley, of course!), and while that's a matter of opinion, he doth protest too much, methinks, about the wonders of "Bow E3". Elsewhere, he reminisces fondly over a wistful woodwind figure about old times and rivalries in "Letter To Dizzee", offers a cautionary tale about the lure of gangster glamour in "Johnny Was A Bad Boy", and proclaims his individuality in "Nothing About Me" and "Getalong Gang" ("I walk alone, not in a getalong gang").

Artist Von Südenfed

Title Tromatic Reflexxions

Label Domino

Von Südenfed is a trio comprising Mark E. Smith on vocals and Mouse On Mars duo Andi Toma and Jan St. Werner on synths, their efforts coalescing in a series of semi-improvised techno-prose pieces. This is no jazz'n'poetry-style exercise, though; rather, in its garage-techno crunch, punk spirit and berserker vocalese, Tromatic Reflexxions bears closer comparison with the enigmatic electro-hop of Spank Rock, albeit less funny and more baffling. It's entertaining and irritating in roughly equal amounts, with Smith declaiming "We live in strange and mysterious times" over a brittle bricolage of electronic bleeps, burps and beats on "Serious Brainstorm", discussing boiled chicken over extemporised blues guitar on "Chicken Yiamas", chanting in German occasionally, and admonishing a noisy, lawn-mowing neighbour on "Jbak Lois Lane": "I've known bigger fuckin' fellas than you," etc. Number one in a field of one, one suspects. But none the worse for that.

Artist Travis

Title The Boy With No Name

Label Independiente

Although reunited with producer Nigel Godrich, The Boy With No Name is no more polished or persuasive than the lacklustre 12 Memories, which failed to win hearts in the manner of their previous albums. Perhaps there's a limit to how much pity we're prepared to expend, which, once reached, throws some circuit-breaker in our empathy centre? Because for all his success, Fran Healy is still operating primarily in poor-pitiful-me mode on most of these 12 tracks - none of which, crucially, possesses the memorable singalong quality of a "Driftwood" or "Why Does It Always Rain On Me". In the absence of anything like a compelling melody, the wan falsetto into which Healy too readily slips becomes more irritating each time it appears. Ultimately, he just sounds like a drama queen, desperately trying to make mountains out of insignificant emotional molehills. And we all have enough of those already, thanks.

Artist Various Artists

Title Songs Of Defiance

Label Topic

Chechnya and the surrounding North Caucasus region usually only appears on our cultural radar in connection with its ongoing campaign for independence from Russia, so this collection of traditional and contemporary songs offers a unique insight into the Chechen mindset. Recorded despite great personal danger by musicologist and Independent writer Michael Church, who was at one point jailed for his efforts, it includes songs of national pride, homesickness, unrequited love, a griot-style praise song for a legendary tribal leader, several energetic dances played on balalaika, accordion and rattle, and even a few comic folk songs like Lydia Bachaeva's "Djuldouz", in which a girl turns her lover into water and drinks him. The harmonies employ similarly astringent intervals to Bulgarian choral music and frequently incorporate hummed drones, not least in the remarkable "Gezdenti Efsimerte Zareg" by the Batu Dzugaev People's Choir, a heart-wrenching tale about seven Ossetian brothers who died fighting the Nazis.

Artist Battles

Title Mirrored

Label Warp

The EPs collected together for last year's EPC/BEP offered a rather more varied impression of New York art-rockers Battles than is conveyed on this debut album proper. The opener "Race : In" is typical, the frantic introductory drum tattoo acquiring keyboard lines of almost Zappa-esque inscrutability and an undulating, wordless vocal part. It's a prog-tastic approach subsequently emulated on "Atlas", where chipmunk vocals ride a galumphing drum boogie off into a cartoon sunset, and "Rainbow", whose stop/start fusillades of drums and keyboards have the smug muso air of early King Crimson. "Tonto" holds out the promise of variety with some Japanese koto-style guitar figures, but these soon acquire a more brutal, propulsive undercarriage and yet more prog-rock keyboards. Battles may share a certain hyperactive, artful energy with UK punk-jazzers Acoustic Ladyland, but there's far less fun in this music, which sounds like it was as hard to make as it is to listen to.

Artist James Yorkston

Title Roaring The Gospel

Label Domino

An anthology culled from various singles, B-sides, EPs and out-takes, Roaring The Gospel doesn't really show Fife folkie James Yorkston off to best advantage, though it does include some high-points of his recorded output, notably the nine-minute "The Lang Toun", the oddly dispassionate, though engaging, piece on the theme of domestic abuse which became his first single for Domino. The Spanish-only release "Seven Streams" is another highlight, its plunking banjo and breaths of woodwind winding listlessly around each other as Yorkston reflects, "I hope she doesn't consider me a curse, though I hear since then she's had far worse than me". Less successful are a truly awful, ham-fisted version of Tim Buckley's "Song To The Siren", and "Sleep Is The jewel", a bizarre mismatch of Yorkston's mild, folksy manner with pounding Neu!-beat drumming, an aberration on an album otherwise picked out in gentle waves of droning accordion, harmonium, clarinet and acoustic guitar.

Artist Nina Nastasia & Jim White

Title You Follow Me

Label Fat Cat

Asked about this collaboration with the Dirty Three drummer, Nina Nastasia replied simply, "It was Jim's idea" - which in the circumstances is rather like Spinal Tap deflecting the blame for "Jazz Odyssey" onto the hapless Derek Smalls. Because whatever the virtues and talents of the two musicians as individuals, together they've made a dog's breakfast of an album, one so half-arsed it can't help but fall between whatever stools it tries to occupy. As a songwriter, Nastasia can be introspective to the point of opacity, delivering lines like "I don't believe in the wisdom of stones" as if they were provocative notions, rather than arrant nonsense; but when allied to White's pointlessly florid jaaazz drumming, her songs take on a whole extra dimension of risibility. There's nothing wrong in principle with the blending of folk and jazz, as the likes of Buckley, Drake and Martyn have demonstrated, but this is a battle rather than an alliance.

Artist The Young Gods

Title Super Ready/ Fragmenté

Label Play It Again Sam

Their first album in seven years finds the Swiss industrial avant-rock pioneers in almost subdued mood, if that's not too ridiculous a notion to employ about a trio whose jackhammer beats and sampled guitar riffs inspired such American sonic outlaws as Nine Inch Nails and Marilyn Manson. Franz Treichler may growl "I'm one, two, three, four tons of TNT", but for all the bullishness of tracks like "I'm The Drug" and "Freeze", their Bonham-esque drum barrages and looped buzzsaw guitars somehow seem to lack the wildness and sheer extremity of earlier Young Gods albums like TV Sky and Second Nature. Variety is provided by the Arabic-toned keybopard of "El Magnifico" and the wisps of sitar floating over the lava-flow synth-noise bed of "Stay With Us", but too often the ideas run out before the track ends, leaving surging space-rock grooves like "Color Code" and the title-track going nowhere.

Artist Mick Harvey

Title Two Of Diamonds

Label Mute

Unlike his 2005 album One Man's Treasure, on which he painstakingly overdubbed all the parts himself, for Two Of Diamonds Mick Harvey recorded most of the tracks live in the studio with a band incorporating fellow Bad Seeds James Johnston on organ and Thomas Wydler on drums. Harvey's an accomplished arranger - he makes good use, for instance, of the haunted tone of the organ and bowed string bass on "Here I Am" - but as a frontman he's hampered by his narrow range and characterless voice, which holds back tracks like the sermonising "Walk On The Wild Side" (not the Lou Reed song) and a cover of Bill Withers' "I Don't Want You On My Mind". And he's clearly so deeply steeped in musical history that he can't stop it seeping into the songs, most notably the Buckley/Hardin flavour of "Blue Arrows", and less agreeably the way that "Sad Dark Eyes" sounds like the product of some unholy union between "Sad Eyed Lady Of The Lowlands" and "For Your Love".

Artist Death Vessel

Title Stay Close

Label ATP

Death Vessel songwriter Joel Thibodeau arrived in New York via Maine, Massachusetts and Rhode Island, and his strange songs are redolent of the kind of tragic legends that afflict eastern seaboard communities. Sung here mainly by Espers' vocal sisters Laura and Meg Baird, who struggle to follow the odd melodies, in the manner of someone chasing a pea around their plate, they're full of impermeably poeticised locutions like "Oh the load is to the long, exploding up fit to be tied to a stranglehold" (from the trucker ballad "Mean Streak") and "If the weather is right, we'll be harpooning our wishes on the iron coast and Indian bile" (from "Later In Life Lift"). Sometimes, even the titles seem couched in some private language, as with "Mandan Dink" and "Deep In The Horchata"; but there's a curious allure about these neo-bluegrass pieces, some unspoken connection with an older, mysterious tradition, in the manner of The Handsome Family, that holds one's ear throughout.

Artist Boom Bip

Title Sacchrilege

Label Lex

Bryan "Boom Bip" Hollon's 2002 debut Seed To Sun and his work with the likes of Doseone marked him out as a techno-hip-hop producer of considerable wit and inventiveness. A further brief solo outing presaging his forthcoming Neon Neon collaboration with Gruff Rhys, this mini-album finds him flexing his techno muscles impressively on tracks such as "Snook Adis", a slice of sleek, synthesised motorik with a pleasant retro-futurist feel, like Kraftwerk and Giorgio Moroder sharing a space-shuttle. "Rat Tail" uses a choppier riff, with brutally distorted bassline and percussion that sounds like a bag of coins being beaten with a leg of lamb, while "The Pinks" and "One Of Eleven" employ the kind of logical, interlaced synth lines and funky beats of classic Detroit techno. The record's only vocal is by Ali Lee, who sounds like a cross between Lily Allen and that woman out of The Flying Lizards, all rhyme and attitude over the staccato pulse and waspish melody line of "Coogi Sweater".

Artist Ian Hunter

Title Shrunken Heads

Label Jerkin' Crocus

Old rockers don't get even, they just get grumpy. Former Mott The Hoople frontman Ian Hunter displays a similarly dyspeptic attitude on Shrunken Heads to that wielded by Ray Davies on his recent solo album, and it's likewise entertaining enough in small doses: although "Fuss About Nothin'" and "When The World Was Round" just seem like middle-aged moans, an added element of self-awareness redeems "I Am What I Hated When I Was Young", a ramshackle country-rocker incorporating a sly reference to his old Mott anthem "The Original Mixed-Up Kid". Elsewhere, bilious attacks on American neo-imperialism like "Soul Of America" and the title-track are delivered with suitably Springsteen-esque fervour, though the album's outstanding track is the opener "Words (Big Mouth)", a morning-after apology for a bout of spleen-venting - "it's just words, cruel little clusters" - prompted by his depression, a "black dog lurking in the alleyway".

Artist Guru

Title Jazzmatazz Vol. 4

Label 7 Grand

This Guru fellow must be some kind of inverse genius. To take jazz and hip-hop, two of the most cutting-edge, inventive strains of popular music, and combine them to create music as mind-numbingly dull as this, surely involves a special kind of talent. To then cajole a battalion of guest collaborators - among them Common, Omar, David Sanborn, Bob James and Blackalicious - along to share the blame is little short of Machiavellian. The dullness is partly due to the insipidity of producer Solar's grooves, among which the chaotic, vertiginous thrill of even the simplest rap sample-collage is nowhere to be found; but mainly it's the fault of Guru's rap style, which is both smugly presumptuous and crashingly monotonous, as if anything more accented than mere talking might constitute a betrayal of verbal sincerity. In the event, it's almost a relief that my copy was rendered unlistenable by the lengthy copyright warning repeated every 30 seconds or so.

Artist Colleen

Title Les Ondes Silencieuses

Label Leaf

On last year's enchanting Colleen Et Les Boîtes À Musique, avant-garde composer Cécile Schott, aka Colleen, used music-boxes to create a sort of toytown gamelan. Its Lilliputian charm is sadly not repeated on this series of sombre but relaxing pieces designed to capitalise on the distinctive individual characters of clarinet, classical guitar, crystal-glass bowls, and such early-music oddities as the harpsichord-like spinet and the viola da gamba, a sort of seven-stringed cello with metal frets. On the speculative spinet piece "Le Labyrinthe", the results are closer to Bach than blues or Beatles, while the viola da gamba displays a thoroughly gloomy countenance on the title-track and "This Place In Time". The resonant, bell-like tones of glass on "Echoes And Coral" are pleasantly soothing, but the noodling clarinets of "Sun Against My Eyes" sound like middle-brow mood muzak, lacking the discipline of classical music and the exploratory ambition of jazz. File alongside Ludovico Einaudi.

Artist Githead

Title Art Pop

Label Swim~

On the engrossing Art Pop, Githead - the band formed by members of Wire, Minimal Compact and Scanner - steps up a level beyond 2005's Profile, with a set of compelling pieces that seem to track the significant developments of the past three decades of indie music, from the PiL-style loping avant-dub of "Drop", through the spiky angularity of the Pixies-esque "Drive By", to the baggy dance-rock of "Rotterdam" and the electro-psychedelia of "Space Life", which could be a refugee from a Primal Scream album. The avant-garde strategies one expects from the likes of Colin Newman and Robin Rimbaud help keep the creative edge sharp on tracks like "Jet Ear Game" (perky guitars circle while a treated voice reads foreign reviews, imperfectly translated by computer software), but the significant factor here is that Newman seems to have relocated the combination of sardonic intellectual wit and winning pop songcraft that made Wire such an engaging (and influential) post-punk prospect.

Artist Matthew Herbert

Title Score

Label !K7/Accidental

Like David Holmes, Matthew Herbert leads a double life, DJing, remixing and releasing electronic/dance pieces under a variety of pseudonyms like Transformer, Radio Boy and Doctor Rockit, and composing complex, jazz-based scores for films - albeit small European art-house films, rather than the Hollywood blockbusters on which Holmes works. This anthology of selected film pieces ranges from the delicate, enigmatic blends of woodwind, vibes and strings created for Vida y Color, to the louche jazz-noir compositions used in Le Défi - including an updated, big-band samba version of "Singing In The Rain", and an understated tango of accordion and piano, "Cafe De Flore" - and the elegant, classical guitar tunes written for, but not used in, Manolete. In each case, Herbert's self-imposed restrictions eschewing the use of drum machines and preset keyboard sounds ensures that the arrangements stay as faithful as possible to the film's style and story.

Artist Basia Bulat

Title Oh, My Darling

Label Rough Trade

Canadian maiden Basia Bulat is a winsome and engaging addition to the growing ranks of the nu-folk scene, her tremulous voice on this debut album recalling warblers such as Tracy Chapman, Antony Hegarty and especially Jolie Holland, whose languid, homespun charm is echoed in songs like "Why Can't It Be Mine" and "December". The arrangements blend acoustic guitar, piano, percussion, flute, dulcimer and strings into elegant, but not too polished, strains of chamber-folk, mostly in 4/4 or waltz-time, though with the occasional foray into striding polka or shuffling samba. Most of her songs deal with the vagaries of young love, from the recollections in "I Was A Daughter" of youthful days when "we gave away our hearts before we even knew what they were", to the specific romantic reverie, in "La-Da-Da", of a time when "you found me, my books all around me", and the more recent urge, in "Snakes And Ladders", to bring some stability to her rocky love-life. An enchanting debut.

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