“I asked the lighting guy to blind me so that I couldn’t see who was walking out,” he says.Drawing largely upon songs from his latest album The Invisible Man, self-loathing seeps from nearly every song. “Without You”, “Anything” and “Shine” are unassailably bleak, each brimming with introspection and isolation. The mood is lightened by some bizarrely entertaining anecdotes in between songs, too rambling to repeat here. The same skewed humour leaks into “Johnny Mathis’ Feet” and the excellent “Christian Science Reading Room”, a mischievous number about Eitzel and his cat getting stoned and becoming Christian Scientists. It’s nights like this that show Eitzel to be one of the most talented and articulate songwriters of his time If only he knew it.. Over the course of their previous albums Reverence and Sunday 8pm, Faithless assiduously toured the globe in pursuit of the kind of “stadium-house” status accorded the likes of Underworld and the Chemical Brothers.

The gruelling schedule just exacerbated the tensions between a small group of people, resulting in the departure of the songwriter Jamie Catto and the guitarist Dave Randall. Though Outrospective bears only the most superficial scars of these fractures in its familiar blend of swirling percussive techno, spacious ambient-house washes and cool, understated raps, there are significantly fewer stand-out tracks than before, and no suggestion that the remaining faithful have a definite sense of the band’s future direction. Instead, they dart about restlessly, trying to cover as many bases as possible, from the reggae-beat of “Not Enuff Love”, and the Philly-Soul string glissandi draped around the rapper Maxi Jazz’s tribute to “Muhammad Ali”, to the Latin-tinged house groove of “Tarantula”. The best track is probably “Giving Myself Away”, on which Maxi brings his customary Zen placidity to an account of a disintegrating relationship (perhaps that of the band itself?).

Elsewhere, there’s an awful lot of repetitive pounding, while the contributions of Catto’s replacement Zoe Johnston are rather cast in the shade by Dido’s appearance on “One Step Too Far”. It’s not a bad album as such, but it packs little of its predecessors’ emotional punch.. Despite barely raising itself to more than a trudge, this third album from the Virginia alt.country mystic Mark Linkous’s Sparklehorse positively seethes with energy. Not the wired, urban energy one usually associates with rock music, but a more elemental, rural energy, born of awe at nature’s sheer fecundity.

When Linkous sings, in his usual hoarse whisper, of dogs, frogs, horses, snakes, yellow birds and little fat babies, it’s as if he’s embarrassed to compare his own measly creations with the overwhelming vastness of Mother Nature’s creative efforts: for him, life in all its forms is, truly, a wonderful thing. Like its predecessors Vivadixiesubmarinetransmissionplot and Good Morning Spider, this album relies on simple, unhurried melodies ­ sometimes just a two-note guitar figure, or one telling chord-change ­ to carry Linkous’s enigmatic images, the songs deriving further depth and resonance from the folds of antique keyboard devices draped around them, and from the soothing patina of scuffs and scratches that partially obscures them. Friends/fans such as Polly Harvey, Tom Waits and Nina Persson lend their own distinctive voices to some songs, without trampling on the distinctive Sparklehorse character. But Linkous’s most important associate here is surely Mercury Rev’s Dave Fridmann, in whom he’s found his perfect production partner. A beautiful, gentle record, impossible to recommend too highly..

For his second Bran Van 3000 album, James Di Salvio has ditched most of the friends and acquaintances who helped out on 1998′s Glee in favour of more famous collaborators such as Curtis Mayfield, Youssou N’Dour, Big Daddy Kane, Momus and Eek-A-Mouse, with the former Cars frontman Ric Ocasek drafted in as co-producer. The intention was probably to create a freewheeling, eclectic patchwork along the lines of the late, lamented Was (Not Was), but as the convoluted credits suggest, the result is more a lawyers’ picnic than a feast of music. The opening song “Astounded”, with its Curtis Mayfield a capella vocal laid over a sleek techno-soul backing track, is fine enough, but Di Salvio quickly loses focus thereafter, cramming in too many conflicting elements into a single track. “Montr?”, for instance, starts as a laidback white rap over an acoustic guitar funk groove, slips into a Spanish scat refrain, and closes with Youssou N’Dour in his native tongue. “Discosis” likewise opens with Big Daddy Kane rapping about himself, then mutates into a bustling Latin-house groove before returning, via a snarl of heavy metal guitar, to Kane.