An exclusive preview of next month's album releases

Artist El-P

Title I'll Sleep When You're Dead

Label Definitive Jux

Look a little deeper then the posturing of 50 Cent and you'll find a whole subculture trying to reclaim hip-hop. As a producer, El-P is the only true heir of Public Enemy's Bomb Squad, creating jagged backing tracks whose samples and breakbeats collide with a weird, chaotic logic vividly evocative of the fragmented quality of New York streetsound. As he observes on " Tasmanian Pain Coaster", "this is the sound of what you don't know". He's equally uncompromising and confrontational as a rapper, taking mighty swipes at everything from NYC traffic, the music industry and old girlfriends to God, dangerous kids, and scientists who can't be trusted. Not what you might expect from a hip-hop album, but then, this is no ordinary hip-hop album.

Artist Money Mark

Title Brand New By Tomorrow

Label Brushfire

His first album for Jack Johnson's Brushfire label finds the former Beasties keyboard wizard in the doldrums, his emotional fragility apparent from the opening "Color Of Your Blues". "Since you've been gone, I've lost my cleverness", he sighs over a backdrop of guitar, chirping cicadas and fizzing effects, "and since you walked away, I can't deal with my loneliness and emptiness". The musical mood improves with the chugging funk-rock of "Pick Up The Pieces", but the lyrical tone is still glum. The best track, though, is probably "Radiate Nothing", a blend of twangsome guitar and drum-machine, on which Mark starts to claw back a little self-respect: "One of these days I'm gonna find me someone to shine with, because you radiate nothing".

Artist Duke Garwood

Title Emerald Palace

Label Butterfly

Reared on a sonic diet of blues and classical, Garwood doubles as occasional clarinettist with the Archie Bronson Outfit, but in his own right makes wracked country-blues albums like Emerald Palace. Recorded two years ago in a Surrey log cabin with percussionist Paul May and former Verve guitarist Simon Tong, these 18 tracks showcase Garwood's spindly, jagged picking and understated vocals. It's a sound which prizes mood, depth and authenticity over sophisticated surfaces, with the erratic, apparently off-tune guitar, splashy, shuffling drums and sundry squawking horns of a track such as " Beast Of Wood" recalling Tom Waits, while the bricolage of metallic percussion and avant-twang guitar flourishes of a more astringent piece like "Shimmering Visage" owes a clear debt to Captain Beefheart.

Artist Pentangle

Title The Time Has Come

Label Sanctuary

As prog-rock inflated musicians' egos to the size of small planets in the late Sixties, it became fashionable for denim- and velvet-clad fools to form supergroups. Though undoubtedly the quietest, by far the most artistically successful were Pentangle, whose folk-jazz line-up - traditional singer Jacqui McShee, jazz drummer and bassist Terry Cox and Danny Thompson, and folk guitarists Bert Jansch and John Renbourn - achieved the rare feat of balancing virtuoso musicianship, intriguing eclecticism and surprisingly broad appeal. The most commercially potent realisation of their style was single "Light Flight", which proved highly effective as the theme for a TV travel programme. It's accompanied on this four-disc set by the full range of their imaginative explorations. Mandatory listening for all nu-folkies.

Artist Mando Diao

Title Ode To Ochrasy

Label Nettwerk

Swedish rockers Mando Diao are so big in mainland Europe that, as recently as last year, Razorlight supported them on tour, rather than the other way round. Ode To Ochrasy has already vaulted high up the charts in Germany, Switzerland, Austria and Sweden. Their songs tend to focus on oddball icons and outlaws, from the Unabomber in "Killer Kaczynski", to the Canadian ice-hockey star used as a talisman of the singer's unhappy childhood in "Welcome Home, Luc Robitaille", and the Swedish DJ celebrated in the ska-punk of "Tony Zoulias (Lustful Life)", a song whose initial charm is squandered, ending up resembling an Oasis album-filler. Their chances rest squarely on single "Long Before Rock'n'Roll", whose brittle barrage of guitars might snag profitably on current indie-pop fashions.

Artist RTX

Title Western Xterminator

Label Drag City

RTX, the group formed by Jennifer Herrema from the ashes of Royal Trux, are another case of great potential marred by misplaced avant-punk posturing. As on 2004's Transmaniacon, they go to great lengths to render everything as indecipherable as possible, especially Herrema's vocals. Things improve if one tries to ignore her voice and focus on the guitars, particularly on "Balls To Pass", a great raunch-riff exercise in the early-Seventies style of the Stones, and "Black Bananas"; but even then, the latter's swagger and searing guitar licks are no real compensation for the memorable melody they've neglected to write. The band's shortcomings are neatly crystallised on "Money Will Roll Right In", in which any half-decent musical ideas are swamped by gallons of excess attitude.

Artist Brett Anderson

Title Brett Anderson

Label Drowned In Sound

Compared with the concealing use of character and vignette he's employed on previous projects, claims Brett Anderson, his writing on this solo debut is much more revealing of his own emotional landscape. "Essentially, I have taken a knife to myself and am showing the world my insides," he explains, a rather grisly prospect which nonetheless involves some familiar imagery on tracks such as "Dust And Rain": "I am the needle and you are the vein... using sex like an antidote to the pain". Predominantly bleak and crepuscular in tone, the album is bookended by its two most effective tracks, Anderson's essentially downbeat personality being most accurately reflected in the opening paean to loneliness "Love Is Dead" and the ponderous tribute "Song For My Father".

Artist Screamin' Jay Hawkins

Title I Shake My Stick At You

Label SPV Blue

Screamin' Jay Hawkins was the original ghoul-rocker, his outlandish onstage antics - complete with ciggy-smoking skull "Henry" - exerting a huge influence on such performers as Arthur Brown, Alice Cooper and Screamin' Lord Sutch. His Fifties recordings - most notably "I Put A Spell On You" - still sound vibrant and thrilling, even on this reissue from the autumn of his career in Australia in 1993. Uptempo ravers like the opening "Live, Love Or Die", whose claim that "If it wasn't for women, my pecker would die" indicates Jay's predominant interest, which reaches its apogee later in thinly-disguised cunnilingual tributes such as "Bushman Tucker" and the eight-minute-long "Furburger". Tasty, or tasteless? Let's ask Spinal Tap.

Artist CSS

Title Cansei De Ser Sexy

Label Sub Pop

Originally released last July, this reissued debut from Sao Paulo sextet Cansei De Ser Sexy won fans across the globe with its playful mix of indie-rock and electropop, and the scatological interest in pop culture underlying such songs as "Meeting Paris Hilton" ("Do you like the bitch?"). The band's five girls, one boy line-up brings a distinctive slant, with the blend of throbbing electropop synths and shopgirl vocals on "Alala" resembling a Brazilian Human League. Elsewhere, a variant of the classic Bo Diddley guitar riff drives the sardonic "Art Bitch", which swings between self-deprecating charm and outright rudeness, while a more basic indie style is favoured for " Patins" and the dance anthem "Off The Hook". They may not always play with great technique, but they do everything with great style.

Artist Dean & Britta

Title Back Numbers

Label Zoë

The blend of Dean Wareham's slightly sinister awkwardness and Britta Phillips' gamine elegance recalls the combination of innocence and experience in such quirky pairings as Nancy Sinatra & Lee Hazlewood. The duo even cover a Hazlewood song, "You Turned My Head Around" alongside their own material. The musical tone is of sun-kissed psychedelic pop, a languid, mid-tempo affair on which the duo are joined by Pete (Sonic Boom) Kember on electronics and Matt Johnson on drums. Studio magician Tony Visconti, meanwhile, has been retained to sprinkle his own brand of fairy dust over the songs, devising ingenious combinations of glittering guitars, droning keyboards, mellotron, vibes, and the tenderest of string arrangements to frame the duo's warm, intimate vocals.

Artist Half Cousin

Title Iodine

Label Grönland

Being brought up in the Orkneys must have a corresponding effect on one's music, encouraging a lean towards the musical fringes. Such appears to be the case with Orcadian duo Half Cousin, whose music seems built on extreme contrasts. Take the opening "Big Chief (The B&B Frequenter)", with its curious blend of weedy accordion and galumphing stutter-beat allied to oddly mild vocals; or "Jim's Crash Memory", where the multi-layered high-register harmonies are borne on a bed of angular piano figures, springy guitar and stump-footed beat. At their simplest, the Scots lilt and acoustic guitar of "Abide" offers a depiction of Orcadian characters, both eccentric and everyday, which recalls King Creosote. The results, like the music, are a wildly contrasting mixture of the entrancing and the irritating.

Artist Idlewild

Title Make Another World

Label Sequel

Sometimes an act needs a dip in form or a change of direction in order to gain a fresh vantage. That may have been the case with Idlewild: compared to 2005's Warnings/Promises, on which their earlier energies seemed dissipated through a new flaccid, folk-rock style, Make Another World sounds like a vibrant return to form. Certainly, the single "No Emotion" is by some distance the best thing they've done in ages, its two guitar riffs intertwining in pleasing skeins as Roddy Woomble considers the chilly state of public interaction. The Edge-y arpeggios and vaunting tone of "Make Another World" itself, meanwhile, brings to mind U2; while "In Competition For The Worst Time" recalls Lifes Rich Pageant -era REM - neither comparison exactly boding ill for their renewed prospects, especially in America.

Artist Deerhoof

Title Friend Opportunity

Label ATP/R

Deerhoof are the class clowns of indie-rock, over-educated geeks employing humour to ward off the cool kids' scorn. Their lyrical non-sequiturs with overcooked arrangements has beguiled as many as it has baffled. Indeed, the way the bustling polyrhythms and riffing organ and guitar of tracks like "The Perfect Me" and "Cast Off Crown" are played with such disregard for listening pleasure marks the band out as unrehabilitated prog-rockers using quirk and novelty to slip their stodgy eclecticism in under one's radar. The only time that they sustain one vision is on " Look Away", which takes things to the other extreme, with 12 minutes of astringent guitar that resembles Beefheart's Magic Band, minus the driving rhythmic undercarriage. Exquisite to some, exasperating to me.

Artist Butcher Boy

Title Profit In Your Poetry

Label How Does It Feel To Be Loved?

Pop used to be a strictly demarcated business: performers were not allowed to write their own material, and writers were kept away from studios. That sort of discipline might profitably have been employed by John Blain Hunt, singer-songwriter with Butcher Boy, who struggles to come up with a single memorable tune. Sadly, his dismal vocals reveal a painful lack of aptitude in that direction too, draining away whetever character, narrative or emotional momentum his material might possess. As the cover suggests, the band's main touchstone is The Smiths, and while the performances succeed in plunging this listener at least into abject gloom, I can't help feeling there should be more to it than merely that. Things like wit, style and melodic grace.

Artist Klashnekoff

Title Lionheart: Tussle With The Beast

Label Riddim Killa

A collaboration with producer Joe Buhdha, this is the first full-length album from Klashnekoff, the gifted British rapper. He brings a considerable intelligence and moral conscience to his work, lamenting in "Revolution" how "We used to be proud to be black and positive/But now we scream loud about crack and hollow-tips", and advising wannabe rap stars in " Question" that "Your plan best be bigger than bling, bitches and hos". But like so many of his colleagues, the narrow strain of homicidal metaphors (one hopes) undoes his positive work. Just because they're metaphors doesn't mean they don't contribute to a general climate of violence - and anyway, shouldn't a real poet have more in his lyrical locker than the same tired old clichés?

Artist Grinderman

Title Grinderman

Label Mute

"I've gotta get up to get down and start all over again," announces Nick Cave at the start of "Get It On", the opening track to his new band Grinderman's debut. It's a dramatic, visceral affair, with distorted guitar raging away behind his rant, more reminiscent of The Birthday Party than The Bad Seeds - a surprise, given that his fellow Grindermen are Warren Ellis, Martyn Casey and Jim Sclavunos, all Seeds of long standing. It's an emotionally bruising collection whose musical approach, blending Cave's surging organ and serrated guitar riffs with Ellis's guitar and violin, comes from the point at which the blues of Lightnin' Hopkins and John Lee Hooker meets the garage-punk simplicity of "Louie Louie" and the avant-rock atonality of the Velvet Underground - an explosive mixture.

Artist Devon Sproule

Title Keep Your Silver Shined

Label Tin Angel

"If you dress sharp, play well, be modest and keep good what you have/When you're warmed up in a wood room/What could be better?" asks Devon Sproule on one track, and put on the spot like that, it's hard to dispute. This fourth album from the 24-year-old Canadian presents her as a latterday old-timey gal in the manner of Jolie Holland, with feet in the bluegrass/country and swing/jazz camps. Her vocal inflection has something of Maria Muldaur's blend of innocence and experience, while the clarinet, accordion and loping double bass on tracks such as "Does The Day Feel Long?" and "Let's Go Out" recalls Leon Redbone and Dan Hicks. Elsewhere, "Old Virginia Block" offers a poetic tribute to her adoptive home state, animated by the bluegrass fiddle dancing its serpentine way through the song.

Artist The Primary 5

Title Go

Label Re-Action

Singer-songwriter Paul Quinn is best known as part of the Scottish C86 indie scene, having drummed with the The Soup Dragons and Teenage Fanclub; in The Primary 5 he's joined by multi-instrumentalist Ryan Currie, with old chums such as Norman Blake and Raymond McGinley chipping in the occasional guitar or backing vocal. The wannabe-Californian tone of that Bellshill scene still dominates, judging by the big Byrdsy jangle of guitars and sweet, soaring harmonies on "Off Course" and the plangent pop stylings of " 2AM" and "Sunsets". But it's the glum tone of Go that ultimately torpedoes its appeal, with "Window Shopping" and " Stars & Stripes" both bemoaning a society of reduced expectations, and "Out In The Cold" and "Reach For The Light" wallowing dully in lovelorn self-pity.

Artist J Dilla

Title Ruff Draft

Label Stones Throw

Following the widespread acclaim for Donuts, last year's suite of 31 instrumental sketches, Stones Throw have opted to celebrate the late DJ/producer's work with the reissue of his rare 2003 album Ruff Draft. After years producing mellow, minimal tracks for daisy-agers, R&B smoothies and conscious rappers, the album revealed a new side to his hip-hop style, boasting grooves built from electropop synths, guitar loops, breakbeats and backward samples. It's a varied and scattershot collection taking in the Raymond Scott-style popcorn-synth of "Interlude", the horror-movie organ of "Reckless Driving", the Afrobeat percussion of " Shouts" and the doubled guitar/glockenspiel line of "Make 'Em NV". Not sure about the child singing "Cum On Feel The Noize" in " Wild", mind.

Artist Various Artists

Title UB40: Under The Influence

Label DMC

UB40's mix-tape compilation of their influences and inspirations vividly evokes the mid-Seventies when more efficient UK distribution was unleashing a flood of great Jamaican music, most notably through Island's string of landmark Lee Perry productions, of which Black Uhuru's anti-gun commentary "Youth Of Eglington" is one of the most infectious, joined here by Zap Pow's "This Is Reggae Music", Burning Spear's "Marcus Garvey" and Peter Tosh's ganja anthem "Legalise It". This was also the time when the first King Tubby dubs were revolutionising ideas about sound production, and toasters like U Roy and Big Youth were inventing rap: all three are featured here, along with contemporary funk and soul classics.

Artist Dr John

Title Trader John's Crawfish Soiree

Label SPV Blue

This two-CD compilation comes from the mid-Sixties, when Dr John was in transition from being session pianist Mac Rebennack. On tracks like " Woman Is The Root Of All Evil" and the R&B rave-up "You're Just Too Square", the Doctor's boho-hipster delivery is already in place, about as black a sound as white folks get to make, while "Zu Zu Man" features the earliest incarnation of his voodoo medicine-man. But for the most part, this collection comprises swampy New Orleans R&B, with piano exercises like "Baldhead" and "Tipitina" adorned with street-band horns, and tracks such as "Helping Hand" essaying the karmic "what goes around comes around" theme to which he would often return. It's not exactly Gris Gris, but it's still great stuff.

Artist Low

Title Drums And Guns

Label Sub Pop

"All the soldiers are gonna die/All the little babies are gonna die," runs the opening gambit of "Pretty People", the lead-off track to Low's eighth album. From the streams running "bright rosy red" in "Always Fade" to the terrorist seeking divine justification in " Murderer", Drums And Guns is stained with guilty contempt for mankind's violent urges. Even a proposed rapprochement is couched in volatile terms in "Hatchet"; "You be my Marianne, and I'll be your Yoko - let's bury the hatchet like The Beatles and the Stones". Low have never been the most propulsive of rock bands, and despite the more keyboard-oriented arrangements preferred here, their facility with funereal tempos and sepulchral timbres is used to good advantage, allowing the songs to build gradually to a pitch of pious horror.

Artist Ibrahim Ferrer

Title Mi Sueño

Label World Circuit

Until the Buena Vista Social Club revived his fortunes, Ibrahim Ferrer was almost exclusively regarded as a practitioner of the Afro-Cuban son form. However, that album's "Dos Gardenias" revealed that he could also handle the more romantic boleros. Following his comeback, Ferrer could finally realise a long-held ambition and record an album devoted to the bolero; completed posthumously following his death in 2005, Mi Sueño features the singer backed by a band featuring Buena Vista stalwarts, guitarist Manuel Galban and bassist Cachaito Lopez, on sessions led by young, talented pianist Roberto Fonseca. The tone is languidly intimate, with Ferrer's subtle vibrato adding an extra flutter of emotion to the performances, and sensuous, swooning strings caressing his voice on a few tracks.

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