Remembering one of the great creative geniuses of the twentieth century, who has died aged 69. This performance of ‘Upon The My Oh My’ is from the Old Grey Whistle Test in 1974.

Staying on a folk tip, here’s Richard Thompson at the 2006 Cambridge Folk Festival playing his glorious love-and-death ballad ’1952 Vincent Black Lightning’. Hunter S Thompson said of the Vincent Black Shadow (of which the Lightning was the stripped down racing version):

“If you rode the Black Shadow at top speed for any length of time, you would almost certainly die. That is why there are not many life members of the Vincent Black Shadow Society.”

Incidentally a certain Dick Gaughan recorded a cover of  this on his 1996 album Sail On.

Dick Gaughan once said of ‘Now Westlin’ Winds’: “This is the perfect song. It says everything it is conceivably possible to say about anything.”  I first heard it several years ago on the car radio, when the novelist Kazuo Ishiguro selected it as one of his Desert Island Discs.  The track,  from Gaughan’s classic 1981 album Handful of Earth, takes its beautiful lyrics from the Robert Burns poem ‘Song Composed in August’. This performance is taken from the 1983 BBC documentary Gaughan.

Here is a voice that has had to swim the vast ringing spaces of Simon Cowell’s cynicism in order to reach us.

Perhaps this explains why for much of I Dreamed A Dream Susan Boyle sounds like she is singing in a wind tunnel. This is not helped by the fact that her much-vaunted vocal assets have been heavily treated – pumped up with the studio equivalent of Botox.  It adds to the artificiality of her already mannered vocal technique, which (perhaps at the insistence of her voice coach) consists largely of piling on layer after layer of wobbling vibrato.

Which isn’t to say there isn’t a voice here, of sorts.  On rare moments when Boyle relaxes into her natural midrange, you can hear it – a kind of long-breathed warble, with enough power to worry the edges off the custard creams in the church halls of West Lothian.

Contrived it may be, but Boyle’s Elaine-Paige-on-steroids singing style is at least preferable to the nasal histrionic whinnying that now seems compulsory for new pop acts.  The fact that she offers an antidote to the generic urban/RnB template surely goes a long way to explaining Boyle’s staggering popularity.

And there’s another saving grace: Cowell has been merciful – there is no opera here.  Instead the repertory ranges from predictable anthems like the title track, through contemporary stadium-pop and the odd nod to her church roots with the likes of Amazing Grace and Silent Night.

Boyle’s take on Wild Horses, the Jagger/Richards paen to the heaven-and-hell pull of heroin, is downright eerie. There’s even a stilted, bloodless rendition of The Monkee’s Daydream Believer that hooks the song up to an iron lung and drains every last dreg of Pop life out of it.  At times the track order is bizarrely incongruous – one minute Boyle’s going all breathy and Bette Midler on us for Cry Me A River, and the next, she’s wading into a pious rendition of Great Thou Art.

There’s a sort of implied biographical narrative underpinning these song choices, which seem to soundtrack Boyle’s years of thwarted ambition and strangulated passion as she stayed at home to care for her ailing mother.

It’s ironic, then, that Boyle, despite striving for effect to an almost fatiguing degree, seems incapable of investing any of these songs with a scintilla of authentic feeling. This is un-music, manicured with pitiless efficiency by Cowell’s production team, with any vestiges of what might have made Boyle’s singing distinctive carefully airbrushed out of the aural picture.

What I Dreamed A Dream exhibits most powerfully is an overwhelming self-consciousness, a morbid awareness of itself as product.  Even as it insinuates itself into our lives, soundtracking our weddings and work-do’s, this record is harbouring a sneaky secret: it’s not really on our, or the music’s, side at all.

Bitte Orca is such a record. That it’s also a strange and wayward affair is no surprise coming from a band whose last album, 2007′s Rise Above, was an attempt by frontman Dave Longstreth to remember and reinterpret the entire Black Flag album Damaged after not hearing it for 15 years.  But what makes Bitte Orca special is the way it manages to combine disorientating, mind-flanging weirdness with a joyous, entirely instinctive pop sensibility.

Instantly, listening to opener ‘Cannibal Resource’, it’s as if Dirty Projectors have rearranged rock’s DNA and installed a new songwriting logic. At once strange and familiar, the song offsets its swaggering rock bass and hand-clap percussion with odd time signatures, tangential guitar riffs and vertiginous modulations in pitch. Like the rest of this record, it pulsates with a supreme sense of freedom and confidence.

Things get better still with the gorgeous ‘Temecula Sunrise’, which soars along on the dovetailing Eastern-flavoured harmonies of singers Amber Coffman and Angel Deradoorian, providing the perfect foil to Longstreth’s caustic warble.  Their girl-group vocals see-saw away in the background as dissonant 12-string finger picking meets flurries of fuzzy, amped-up guitar.  This is pop freed of – or rather reconstructing – cliché, throwing us curve balls while simultaneously riffing off classic motifs from rock’s institutional memory.

In fact, tracing the influences in Bitte Orca is like writing tasting notes for a complex wine; every time you delve into it you’ll pick up a hint of something else. ‘The Bride’ has a lilting, water-borne quality that recalls Starsailor-era Tim Buckley. Elsewhere Longstreth, a music composition graduate, drops in jazz, classical, Middle Eastern and African influences, even a touch of 50’s doo-wop.  There are shades of Devendra Banhart, bluesy Led Zep/White Stripes power riffs, the circular grooves of Steely Dan and the voodoo boogie of vintage Captain Beefheart.  But above all this album rings with the influence of Talking Heads, whose David Byrne is a recent Projectors collaborator.

Then, as if to underline their ability to defy categorisation, the Projectors launch into the avant-R’n’B of ‘Stillness Is The Move’, a procession of booty-jiggling pop hooks filtered through something thrillingly alien. With a lyric paraphrasing Peter Handke’s poem from the Wim Wenders film Wings of Desire, Coffman and Deradoorian’s helium-high vocals ride a Middlle Eastern guitar loop over a glitchy staccato rythmn.  Yearning strings enter the mix as the track builds to a plateau of blissed-out, mystic euphoria. It’s the coolest record Destiny’s Child never made.

This is an album about the longing for transcendence, the state of grace music promises but only delivers in rare glimpses. It’s indie music let off the leash, in which bookish white college kids attain heights of rapture of a kind normally reserved for black soul artists.

More ecstatic word painting follows in ‘Two Doves’, which plays on poetic imagery from the Old Testament text Song of Solomon. Its picked guitar and breathy violin stabs pay loving tribute to Nico’s cover of Jackson Browne’s ‘These Days’ from her album Chelsea Girl, even going so far as to lift a line (“Don’t confront me with my failures…”).  Deradoorian’s vibrato-laden vocal is vulnerable and deeply moving, all the more so for being placed in music that seems to have been mysteriously deconstructed and reassembled.

But it’s on the wildly segueing medley ‘Useful Chamber’ that the Projectors’ sheer reckless verve is at its most jaw-dropping.  A backdrop of morphing synths and chiming, spun-glass guitar is sprayed with sporadic blues riffs; this switches abruptly into a spoken passage, then bursts into a romping chorus plastered in blistering fretwork, before leaping into unearthly vocal modulations that sound like something from another culture, if not another planet. It’s like Ligeti crossed with the Beach Boys.

Old punks might dismiss all this as so much suspect prog-rockery.  But this record is on a relentless quest to transcend its own self-conciousness. The formal experimentation never distracts the music from its main purpose – to communicate urgent, spontaneous joy.

Bitte Orca gloriously reaffirms your faith in pop music’s protean and inexhaustible abilty to reinvent itself, be reborn and live again – even if it has to turn itself inside out to do it.

Grant Lee Phillips’ long career to date has been bookended by brilliance. Fuzzy, his debut album with Grant Lee Buffalo, was one of the rock landmarks of the early 90s. Fourteen years and a string of solo records later, his sublime 2006 cover album Nineteeneighties paid tribute to classic acts from New Order to Pixies, proving Phillips was an artist with a musical voice so singular he could take on almost anything and make it his own.

Yet Phillips’ emotive, widescreen songwriting has always walked a thin line, at times becoming overblown and occasionally lapsing into stodgy blue collar rock. Sadly, while Little Moon offers glimpses of GLP at his best, more often than not it gives this side free reign.

Upbeat stomper “Good Morning Happiness” starts the show with a banality and leadenness that will likely leave you cold. The air-punching MOR of “Strangest Thing” could be late Springsteen, with some of the soft-focus upholstery of a David Gray track. Its reliance on clichéd lines like ‘You gotta believe in something’ certainly do it no favours.

The title track is much more likeable, as Phillips returns to the multi-layered, filigree realm he’s made his own. There’s a swooning, salon-like air to the song, with its languid piano, brushed percussion, intricate picking and lilting strings. While not exactly a work of searing originality, it’s beautifully performed and produced.

“It Ain’t the Same Old Cold War, Harry” is even better: a smartly-penned appeal to an anachronistic cold warrior – Truman? – to adapt to an ambivalent new world. With its marching-band swagger and trumping brass, it’s full of jazzy showtune insouciance.

“Seal With A Kiss” is a rushing, loved-up rocker cushioned on layers of springy organ. It’s middle brow, pool-hall rock, and it smells of flannel shirts and workman’s benches. Ryan Adams does this sort of thing far better. Trying a little too hard to be luscious, “Nightbirds” struggles under the weight of its own contrivances. “Violet” is better – a sweet, delicate ballad built on deft little guitar touches and snowdrop piano, as Phillips’ burnished voice curls like smoke between the notes.

As ever, it’s the textures of Grant Lee Phillips’ music that ultimately seduce. His sensibility is essentially baroque, his sound world full of tenebrous, labyrinthine emotional states. Even when the songwriting is less than brilliant, listening to a GLP song is like sinking into soft crimson fabric. A good example of this is “Buried Treasure”, which is no great shakes as a song but manages to win you over with its moody, intoxicating instrumentation. And if all else fails there’s always that languorous, lagoon-deep voice, so rich it could lend a modicum of grace and majesty to the recital of a shopping list.

But even all of this can’t save the cloying “Blind Tom”, a stab at Randy Newman-style musical storytelling that’s sticky with faux-emotionalism. Meanwhile “One Morning” is stuffed full of hokum about sunrises, rolling trucks and crying roosters. Musically and lyrically, it dusts off every country-folk cliché in the book.

Things get no better with “Older Now”, a maudlin affair drenched in soporific strings. You want to go with Grant on this one, but he insists on underlining everything in such heavy pencil you have to stifle a groan. When an artist starts croaking on about ‘angels in white’, it’s time to book that refresher course at the Gram Parsons School of Wasted Beauty.

Then he pulls a gem out of the bag. Closer “The Sun Shines on Jupiter” is a piece of archly playful dixie jazz that swings by in a ticker tape parade of deliciously droll lyrcis: ‘I dare say it’s sweater weather every single day,’ croons Phillips, suddenly transformed into a kind of butch Rufus Wainwright.

Little Moon sees a lack of imagination and an over-reliance on hackneyed musical and lyrical phrases threatening to eclipse Grant Lee Phillips’ indubitable talent. It also reminds us that on form, few can touch him. But throughout this album words like “worthy’, ‘crafted’ and ‘earnest’ spring to mind – and in pop music they never should.

It’s seven years since the last installment of the Cornershop saga arrived in the form of the brilliantly-named Handcream For A Generation.  Almost a generation on, Tjinder Singh and co may be rearing children but they’re still bedroom-mirror romantics with one foot stuck firmly in the days of the Ford Cortina. If anything, the nostalgia dial has been turned up: Judy Sucks A Lemon For Breakfast is an album that often seems to be playing on a dansette in a glitterball-lit corner of Hanif Kureishi’s frontal lobe.

Opener “Who Fingered Rock and Roll” is a melange of vintage Stones riffs and spangly Bolan boogie that tethers its ‘yeah yeah yeahs’ to a punky message about the besmirching of our collective pop innocence. It’s followed by “Soul School”, a melodic, sitar-drenched tribute to 1970s adolescence, evoking long summer Saturday afternoons listening to seven-inch singles round your mate’s house.

The retro theme continues on the title track. It starts by walking an irresistible blues-boogie bassline, adds swinging harmonies, bursts of machine gun fire and – wonderfully – a bassoon, and culminates in a soaring climax of righteous soul vocals. Tjinder still has a knack of slinging around cool-sounding nonsense phrases (‘Up-blues rock is the outta town rock’, etc) pitched somewhere between nursery rhyme and revolutionary slogan.

“‘Free Love” is a sublime, strings-laden trip into traditional Punjabi folk filtered backwards through The Beatles’ “Tomorrow Never Knows”, while the single “The Roll-Off Characteristics (Of History in the Making)” breezes by on a magic carpet ride of honky tonk piano, crisp guitar licks and delicious chunks of burnished trombone. As he assures us that, ‘War ain’t nothing but bad technical plip-plop,’ Tjinder sounds more than ever like he’s singing the theme to a particularly hip children’s TV program.

“Operation Push”, a paean to the delights of dub and the era that produced it, piles on layers of echo chamber and jets of juddering sub-bass to celebrate ‘The last song that the world ever sung’.  After a straightforward cover of Dylan’s “The Mighty Quinn” (the Manfred Mann version was apparently the first single the young Tjinder ever bought), “The Constant Springs” meanders along passably, while instrumental “Chamchu” is an agreeable dub-bhangra soundclash.

By the time we roll around to “The Turned On Truth” – 17 epic minutes of blissed-out, redemptive gospel wrapped around a riff resurrected from “Brimful of Asha” – it feels like a cheeky, self-referential triumph, albeit far too bloody long.

Cornershop are still holding a candle for an idealised pop moment fixed in time and space; a semi-mythical golden age when melting-pot Britain was the musical crossroads of the world. This place has precise co-ordinates and Cornershop always know their way back there. They’re still writing love letters to their record collections, and there are times when Judy feels a little too much like a commemorative musical photo album.

But when the irrepressible Cornershop charm kicks in, such thoughts seem churlish. Judy is as wide-eyed and upbeat as indie pop will get this year, and when it sounds this fresh, Cornershop’s revolutionary retro is well worth a reprise.

No one approaches a Pere Ubu record expecting an easy ride. But David Thomas’s musical adaptation of Alfred Jarry’s notorious proto-absurdist play Ubu Roi – from which the band took their name when they formed in 1975 – makes for perverse listening even by their own standards.

This is probably as it should be. After all, the original provoked a riot in the theatre when it premiered in Paris in 1896. Ubu is Jarry’s bourgeois everyman – a grotesque, Punch-like figure, gluttonous, infantile, cruel and cowardly. Egged on by his equally unpleasant wife Mere Ubu, he spearheads a plot to murder the King of Poland, accedes to the crown, and sets about becoming the worst kind of despot.

What follows is a vicious political satire that parodies a number of Shakespearean plotlines including Macbeth and Hamlet. For a flavour of its surreal, farcical energy one need only consider the cast of characters, which includes the Polish princes Boleslas, Boggerlas, and Ladislas, The Whole Russian Army, The Whole Polish Army, assorted Lackeys of Phynance, something called The Disembraining Machine, and A Bear.

The songs on Long Live Pere Ubu! form part of a six act radio play adapted from Jarry’s text by David Thomas, joined here by ex-Communards vocalist Sarah Jane Morris as Mere Ubu. Needless to say, a seminal avant-garde work does not good music guarantee (apparently Paul McCartney read Jarry’s play while writing the lyrics for “Maxwell’s Silver Hammer”).  But once you tune into its crazed frequency, Ubu! is an absolute scream.

Warm-up track “Ubu Overture” sounds like the reverberations of Satan’s tuning fork punctuated by filthy belching noises: “Merde…erer!” Thomas growls in a voice pitch with wickedness. “Song Of the Grocery Police” finds Mere Ubu in Lady Macbeth mode, exhorting her whimpering husband to regicide: ‘Kill them all / Have a ball,’ she urges, as he hankers pathetically after a ‘big sombrero’.  The darkly hilarious “March of Greed” is an inane stomp featuring a call-and-response routine between Ubu and his court of arse-licking sycophants. ‘I agree to everything,’ he shrugs happily as they cheer him along the fast-track to tyranny.

There’s no mistaking we’re back in the Ubu sound world – but along with the signature electronic dissonance and stabbing, post-punk guitar, there’s a touch of the gallows theatricality of The Birthday Party and the dustbowl holler of Tom Waits at his scratchiest. Most of all though, Ubu! resounds with the influence of Captain Beefheart circa Doc at the Radar Station or Ice Cream for Crow.

“Big Sombrero (Love Theme)” sees Ubu opening a ministerial meeting with the command: ‘Bring me the shitter hook / Bring me the finance book!’  Beneath Thomas’s coruscating, gravel-throated vocal there’s a cacophony of pig squeals and shrieks, hydraulic whirring noises, the sound of cold machinery in terminal dysfunction. ‘Now bring all of the judges in,’ he barks, announcing plans to tax the dead and declaring that dissenters will be tossed ‘into the pig-pincher.’

By “Bring Me The Head”, Ubu’s power is total – as his wife reports: ‘No more finance, justice or law / Into his belly he’s gobbled them all.’  For “Road to Reason”, a funky thrash of wire-wool guitar and frantic theremin, Thomas reverts to his trademark bubblegum baby voice to observe with satisfaction: ‘Everywhere you look you can see burned down houses and people bent double under the weight of Finance.’

The heart-knocking “Watching the Pigeons” describes Ubu’s defeat at the hands of the Russians, while “Snowy Livonia” underlines the pathos of the dethroned Ubu’s escape to France with a sad little refrain on electric piano. Perhaps the most deliciously twisted episode of all is “The Story so far”, eight minutes of sweating dream delirium that takes us on a trip into Ubu’s subconscious.  It ends with Ubu threatening his wife with an elaborate torture ritual whose delights include ‘penetration of the little wooden stick…extraction of the brain through the fingernails…not to mention the opening of the bladderine…’

On its own terms, as a bold experiment in fusing spoken word with post-rock, post-punk and ambient electronica, Long Live Pere Ubu! is an unqualified success.  Thomas’s adaptation of the play’s skewed, dark poetry is brilliant. But does it work as a pop record?  Intermittently, yes. Parts of it would clearly be more effective as theatre, and its weakest moments take it perilously close to Frank Zappa’s tiresome burlesques. At it’s best though, it’s trippy, twisted genius. Hardcore Ubu fans will love it.

Sarah Jane Morris’s self-consciously theatrical vocals do the album no favours. Her singing is mannered, thick with flabby jazz singer cliches. By contrast, the way David Thomas brings Ubu to life with his choked, sad, infantile little gurgle makes the character human, and therefore all the more disturbing.

As in all the best epics, at the end of the chapter there’s a new horizon. For the album’s closer, “Elsinor and Beyond”, we join Ubu as he sets sail on his escape boat. Perking up, the banished tyrant turns to his wife and says:  ‘I sense that many fine adventures lie ahead of us.’  Full speed ahead, Mr Thomas.