Now that I’ve moved from Mid Levels to Sai Kung, my daily commute is two or three times longer than it used to be. Most people would see that as a bad thing, but for me it means more time every day to listen to music. I’ve got this 8 GB iPod Nano plugged into my car stereo and I had it loaded with my 1,000 favourite songs, but after a while I realized the time would be better spent listening to newer sounds. So I set that playlist aside and re-loaded the Nano with about 50 recent albums. It’s a tricky situation because it’s hard to change albums while driving, so I’ve had this tendency to pick out albums to play from groups I’m already familiar with. The last thing I need is to be on the highway with some death metal-polka hybrid suddenly blasting out of my speakers.

After listening to a lot of these new albums, not many seem worth more than just a few revisits. And I’ve yet to find many tracks that would end up on my 1,000 favourite songs playlist. However, 2008 does seem to be a year in which artists who have wandered off course have returned to the tried and true, albeit with mixed results.

R.E.M.’s latest album, Accelerate, is a good example. After drummer Bill Berry left the group in 1997, they released three increasingly complex and instantly forgettable records. Their live shows were great (as evidenced by a concert here in Hong Kong a few years back) but their albums were so bad they didn’t even go gold (sales of 500,000 units in the US), a disaster considering Warner Bros had re-signed them in 1996 with an advance of US$80 million.

So R.E.M. went back to the drawing board, got back to basics and recorded their latest album in a matter of days instead of months, working with a producer (Jacknife Lee) who’s had notable success with some of the latest British bands. Now, some might say that Michael Stipe’s announcement that he was finally out of the closet was carefully timed to drum up publicity for a group most people have forgotten about, but I’m not that cynical. And if Accelerate doesn’t quite stand up against Reckoning or Automatic For the People, it’s not a total embarrassment either.

The B-52s were never afraid to embarrass themselves in the name of fun, and their first album in 16 years, aptly titled Funplex, picks right up where the best ’80s albums left off. These guys may be getting on in years (Kate Pierson will be 60 by the time this column comes out) and they may have relied a lot on Photoshop for the album cover, but musically this is the kind of high-energy stuff they’re best remembered for, combined with off-kilter titles like Deviant Ingredient and supremely silly lyrics like “candelabras in a wonderbra.” But there is also no obvious successor to Love Shack here.

Going retro like that can work as long as you’re combining it with something vaguely new. The B-52s did it by working with producer Steve Osborne, who has also worked with New Order, KT Tunstall and Happy Mondays. But it’s a lesson that diminutive vegan Moby desperately needs to learn if he wants to keep his career. Following the relative commercial failure of his last album, Hotel, he’s tried to make a return to what he does best on his new one, Last Night. But Last Night sounds like Last Century to my ears. In a recent interview, Moby says he was trying to “take a long eight-hour night out in New York City and condense it into a 65-minute album”. When was this night out, Moby? 1997? There are some lovely melodies here, buried under dated arrangements and accompanied by vapid lyrics. A song titled 257.zero features women chanting those numbers. Philip Glass already used numbers as lyrics in Einstein on the Beach in 1975 – though I suppose you couldn’t dance to it.

The past few years have seen Van Morrison releasing a series of records that were just plain weird – a country album, a skiffle album, an album of duets with Jerry Lee Lewis’s sister. So it’s a relief to find out that musically Keep It Simple does what its title implies, sticking close to the blues and soul that has buoyed Van The Man’s career for roughly 45 years. This is a late-night album, sleepy, laid back, almost lazy. I enjoyed and empathized with Don’t Go to Nightclubs Anymore, a reworking of I Don’t Get Around Much Anymore. But in a song called That’s Entrainment, he repeats the title phrase over and over again. Googling the word ‘entrainment’, I learn that it refers to a physics phenomenon of resonance. I also learn that I don’t like listening to sleepy blues albums with songs about physics phenomena.

Record companies know really well how to copy each other. When one of them gets a fluke hit with someone new, they all jump on that bandwagon. That wagon has gone from Liverpool to San Francisco searching for the next Beatles, next Dylan and now, the next Amy Winehouse – a fashionably retro singer who hopefully won’t attempt to self-destruct her career by stubbing out cigarettes on her own face. This month’s next Amy is Duffy, a young Welsh girl who came in second on a Welsh reality TV show titled (I wish I was making this up) Wawffactor. Her album Rockferry was No 1 in the UK in March and, shock-horror, it doesn’t suck.

Duffy gets compared to Dusty Springfield because she has blonde hair and sings soul. She has an excellent voice, just quirky enough to sound distinctive, but more like Shirley Bassey (or Rachel Sweet) than Dusty. They’ve paired her up with Bernard Butler, who certainly knows his classic soul (check out Yes by McAlmont & Butler if you don’t believe me). Butler has produced Rockferry and co-written four of the songs, and the result may not be the timeless classic they claim to have aspired to but it does hold up to repeated listening.

One album I know I’ll be listening to for years is Third by Portishead. Their first album in 10 years ended up being leaked to the internet far in advance of its scheduled late April release. Portishead was one of the inventors of trip-hop, but their two studio albums (and one live album, recorded with members of the New York Philharmonic) were uncompromising and stood far apart from the millions of ‘me too’ groups that surfaced in their wake.

This is definitely a case of a group coming back because they had something new to say, rather than just reuniting for their kids’ college funds. Third is raw and difficult. Beth Gibbons often sounds like she’s singing something completely different from what the rest of the band is playing. It is not danceable. It is not mainstream. It is not for people who enjoy the soothing strains of Yanni. But in its own way, it is big and bold and beautifully abstract and sounds better every time I play it.

The only thing that could possibly be more eclectic than a Portishead album is the new two-disc compilation Theme Time Radio Hour With Your Host Bob Dylan, which, of course, doesn’t include any songs by Bob Dylan. What it does include are 50 amazing songs played by Dylan on his US satellite radio series of the same name. Soul, blues, gospel, country, bluegrass and a side of garage – George Jones, Memphis Slim, Billie Holiday, Charles Mingus, Bo Diddley, The White Stripes – these people shouldn’t work together on the same playlist and yet this thing flows like the muddy Mississippi – and unlike Hong Kong traffic.