It's a hot, tight and sweaty noise, oozing menace on the opening Run Rabbit Run, checking what they rightly call a cross between Willie Nelson and James Brown on Save Me, getting into the gospel pews with Brown growling on his knees for Talbot's Chance In A Million while piano waltzer Flying Lessons (a tribute to a friend who overcame a bipolar disorder) is steeped in a New Orleans vibe, complete with a clarinet solo by Williams.

Divided In Two underlines the slow soul Stax flavours that provide the band's bedrock while the lurching, brass greasy , bass burping instrumental Freedom March (a Blythe number dating from `84) firmly confirms their scorching musicianship. The past's also revisited with a cassette version of the Williams-penned Keaton's Walk, produced by Bob Lamb and recorded prior to the band's split back in 82.

Brown and Williams share vocal duties on the penultimate track, the old school blues-soul Nothing's Gonna Stand In our Way. After all this time, it would be nice to think they were finally proven right.

Following up downoad single, The Score, Brum quintet THE LIGHTS get physical with The Fairweather Travelling Companion own label EP. With the electric version sounding like Duran, it's interesting to hear an acoustic Stop Stop Carry On here sounding far more in tune with the psychedelic trad folk of The Leaving Song and the building anthemic Maria McKee inclinations of Film Within A Film. Of the other two equally fine tracks here, the Manics flavoured She's The Answer comes from the earlier Eve EP while a falsetto voiced slow tumbling pop Welcome To It All is part of the Blue Whale sessions available for free download on their website www.thelights.co.uk

In the wake of second single, Smilin’ with its Roland Gift rolling gait and psychedelic pop twinge, BRYN CHRISTOPHER now delivers debut album My World (Polydor). Perversely touted as a male Amy Winehouse (the handclapping beat, brass parps and urgent rhythm drive of Seconds Ago has her getting into bed with Prince and Jackson grooves) , he does have similar Motown affinities, Gone Gone Gone suggesting The Temptations doing Northern Soul. But as you can hear from the title track and heartstopping ballad My Kinda Woman his heart’s more in Memphis Stax.

Whether working a Gnarls Barkley dance groove on Stay With Me or sliding Otis soul through The Way You Are, he’s got an amazing voice, certainly strong enough to overcome the album’s occasionally overdone production while an atmospheric The Quest and an orchestrated rework of Portishead’s Sour Times should have them lining up at his door with film soundtrack and theme song offers.

Fronted by the Johnson sisters Hannah on mandolin and Sophia on guitar with dad Stewart on banjo and dobro, Howard Gregory on fiddle and new girl Lauren Rogers playing double bass, THE TOY HEARTS follow up their If The Blues Come Calling debut with When I Cut Loose (Woodville), a set of 11 self-penned songs that again showcase their vocal and instrumental dazzle.

Sounding like they've spent their lives in the Kentucky hills rather than Kings Heath, it opens with Stronger, a title that aptly sums up the added raunch to Hannah's vocals, while The Angels Sing To Me finds them waltzing around the honky tonk floor with beer in one hand and a Bible in the other. Elsewhere Girl In Each State could take Ricky Scaggs in a picking contest, Giving You Back Your Troubles expands their bluegrass into hot club and jazz-blues notes, Montepellier Street swings with a Grapelli groove and Fast Raging River conjures thought of early Johnny Cash recast as a Lucinda Williams.

JAMES SUMMERFIELD returns to the scene with Count To 10 And Start Again (Commercially Inviable), an album spawned by the darkness and self-doubting of divorce and one which seems his step back from his familiar Americana in favour of a more 60s West Coast feel. Given how they deal with feelings of betrayal, regret, self-pity, anger and self-deluding hope, it's a surprise to find how many come with such breezy melodies and lush arrangements as the twangy opening Another Day With You's Like Torture. A folksy Stuck In The Mud, the gently pulse of What's On Your Mind?, A Little Time's sprightly fingerpicking and the spooked blues 9 Lives get the seal of approval, but without question the two standouts have to be a Will Oldham sounding Once where the image of a bedroom full of broken glass cuts across the hope of falling in love again, and the closing Paper Bag where hymnal like keyboard notes, wistful banjo and guitar come together in a gathering peaceful swell before, in a distant voice, he says that "butterflies and angels help me count to ten when I think I want you back again."

ALBUMS

DANIEL POWTER - Under The Radar (Warner Bros)
The return of the man who gives James Blunt a respite from critical slagging. It’s not that he’s actually bad, just that the Canadian singer-songwriter’s earnestly accessible, radio friendly songs all sound like somebody else’s. Take the opening Best Of Me that borrows its cascading falsetto from Sometimes When We Touch and could well have been lifted from some Boyzone album and, while I can’t quite put my finger on it, the chugging melody line of Not Coming Back is totally stolen. Heck, My So Called Life even sounds like a diet Blunt. To compound matters his lyrics and rhymes suggest he bought a job lot at a cliche sales. What makes it all the more annoying is that his dreamily romantic piano balladeering pop, lushed up here by producer Linda Perry, is so pervasively catchy that you find it hard to stop yourself nodding along to things like the tinklingly sunny Next Plane Home, early Elton John-ish Love You Lately and a lighters aloft Negative Fashion, the latter surely destined to be on a Radio 2 loop for months to come. Sneaky!

THE MAYBES - Promise (Xtra Mile)
Hard to believe that the Liverpool five piece have been variously likened to The Beatles, Zutons, Stone Roses, Beach Boys and Oasis with singer Nick Ellis compared to Jagger and Steve Tyler. In fact the main reference point turns out to be The Who, most especially so on Turn Me Over, Boys, and Modern Love while album stand out Summertime which sounds like Townshend and co recasting Joy Division's Transmission. But in the cold critical light of day, there really doesn't seem a lot here to justify the drooling superlatives with which they've been lavished. Catchy retro-minded pop songs like Ronnie Loves Julie and Trick of the Light with its unexpected hint of the Spectorised Willy DeVille are fun in the moment but doesn't entice you back for a prolonged relationship. They parade their ambitions with the final title track, a twelve minute instrumental of spacey, dub rock and swirling psychedelia, but like the rest of the album it just reminds that the bands they look to emulate did it all much better.

DARTZ - The Sad History of the Village of Alnerique (Xtra Mile)
The pop punk alt rock Sunderland trio's debut album was a punching collection of whiny vocals, pounding drums and piston whipping guitars spliced with skewed cut n paste tempos and rhythms that dipped into the art rock dance of bands like Talking Heads and Gang of Four and flirted with traces of ska. For their follow up they maintain the jittery feel but in conjuring up some sort of indie art school Teenage Opera concept album (which you have to check in on their web site to decipher) they've forgotten to include any tunes while the anaemic production means the lacklustre numbers virtually disappear while they're playing. Colourless thin vocals and watery guitars don't help while songs like A New Venture From Mordecai & sons, What happens To Places Where Spaces Should Be and The Arrival, Building of Alnerique are more interesting for the titles than anything they contain.

LITTLE JACKIE - The Stoop (Parlophone)
That's Imani Coppola who's wandered away from the solo path to team with multi-instrumentalist Adam Pallin for an album of New York old school r&b heavily laced with hip hop and pop flavours. The opening title track is an infectious shrug n groove designed to played over ghetto blasters on hot summer Big Apple streets while kids take showers in fire hydrants while kick off single The World Should Revolve Around Me (her ego was never a shrinking violet) and 28 Butts are the sort of off the shoulder soul pop Lily Allen might make is she was Italian and from Manhattan. 60s girl soul-pop and early Motown shades glitter through Guys Like When Girls Kiss, LOL and Liked You Better Before though Coppola's sassy lines are pure streetwise now while the latter's alcoholism reference and the knife crime themed Go Hard Or Go Home show her tuned in to contemporary social issues just as the witty candy topped Black Barbie takes a swipe at celebrity culture and image fascism.

THE VERVE - Forth (Parlophone)
They split in 1995. They got back together without Nick McCabe shortly afterwards. McCabe rejoined in 1997. They split again in 1999. And got back together yet again (after Ashcroft's less than glittering solo career) in 2007. Don't expect them to hang around too long if this is the best they can manage. The single, Love Is Noise, is a high point with its dancey feel and vocal woo hooing while the opening Sit And Wonder weaves a dark, brooding nerve-itching intensity of beats and a mantra like vocal. But come Numbness and Appalachian Springs and were into poor man's Roger Waters territory while Noise Epic makes Led Zep pretensions, and the echoey Valium Skies sounds more like a Verve parody than the band itself. It is, of course, superbly played and produced, but given their history it's woefully undernourished in terms of songs and memorable melodies. I See Houses is a majestic, soulful reminder of what they're capable, but sadly Judas seems more representative of what they've settled for.

LOVVERS - Think (Wichita)
Clocking in at barely 13 minutes, the Nottingham punk crew are going to have to have a few more things up their sleeve than just the seven numbers on Think (Wichita). Featuring former members of The Murder Of Rosa Luxemburg, it's a breakneck, hurtle through spitting guitars, hammering drums and rushed vocals with barely discernible lyrics straight out of the original New Wave explosion. Slightly more along the lines of second division names like the Adicts, Killjoys and Chelsea than the Damned, Clash, Ramones or Pistols (though No Fun clearly wants to be the Stooges), nonetheless the tear it up energy and bursting blood vessels of Wasted Youth, Human Hair and Teenage Shutdown will keep the most pit happy while No Romantics suggests there may be a pop band lurking behind that noise.

CSN&Y - Deja Vu: Live (Reprise)
No, not a live retread of their early seminal album but the soundtrack of the recent concert movie of their 2006 Freedom Of Speech reunion tour. A response to the Iraq war, seven of the featured songs come from Young’s Living With War (the track itself reprised twice as piano instrumental), including apocalyptic environmental warning After The Garden, Shock & Awe, Families, the melancholic nostalgia of Roger And Out and the cards on the table Let’s Impeach The President. On the film you can see people walking out while it plays and you can hear the boos on the soundtrack. Good to see the old protesting hippies are still getting it right, then. Musically, it’s a little rough and ready and the signature harmonies aren’t always on top form, especially on a somewhat lumbering title track, a dodgy Teach Your Children and a decidedly offkey For What It’s Worth. But a lengthy Wooden Ships work out and a stark Find The Cost Of Freedom alone justify them getting back together and you can’t fault the energy and commitment on display here. A pity though the soundtrack omits the film’s closing farewell, a moving choral version of America The Beautiful for all those patriots who wanted their money back.

KRIS DREVER, JOHN McCUSKER, RODDY WOOMBLE - Before The Ruin (Navigator)
Following solo album My Secret is My Silence, Idlewild frontman Woomble takes the full plunge into folk in company with fellow Scots, rising star Drever and youthful veteran McCusker. While Woomble handles lead vocals in terms of writing duties and overall approach it’s certainly a collaborative album (not to mention featuring such guests as Heidi Talbot, Michael McGoldrick, Norman Blake and Andy Cutting) with Drever and McCusker’s trad influences seeding the likes of All Along The Way, Stuck in Time, the fiddle dominant title track evocative of early Span) and, one of several songs drawing on imagery of water and the ocean’s pull, Rest On The Rock. Inevitably, perhaps, Drever’s only lead vocal contribution, The Poorest Company, is the most trad sounding of them all. More contemporary flavours enfold the harmony rich Silver And Gold and the radio friendly anthemic folk-pop leanings of Into The Blue, but from whichever end of the folk circuit you approach this, the end result surely has to be among your year’s best.

RA RA RIOT - The Rhumb Line (V2)
John Pike, drummer with the Massachusetts sextet, drowned shortly after the release of their EP, but, having co-written most of the material his presence is all over the debut album. He’d doubtless be proud of what the surviving members have made of it, though it does seem ironic that so many of the songs are concerned with death and water. Taking its title from a hometown bar, the music marries new wave pop with orchestral sensibilities (cellist Alexandra Lawn and violinist Rebecca Zeller are pivotal to their sound) with Ghost Under Rocks channelling New Order alongside Arcade Fire, St. Peter's Day Festival nodding to anti-folk influences, Can You Tell clearly enamoured of Morrissey’s 60s obsessions while a cover of Kate Bush’s Suspended In Gaffa surely also suggests a touch of Sparks. Inevitably touched by melancholy and sadness, but, as Dying Is Fine and Winter 05 illustrate, it’s also upbeat and life affirming with Oh, La a band manifesto about holding it together, overcoming adversity and moving on. The second album should prove interesting.

Currently working on a debut album with members of Fairport, RED SHOES have one of their songs featured on the new Showcase Sessions compilation, available for free download until Oct 31, complete with artwork, at
www.fatea-showcase-sessions.co.uk
Written by Carolyn Evans and featuring daughter Megan on piano, the track in question is the stunning My Father's Green Beret, her moving, angry and poignant tribute to her father, a former marine who recently died after contracting MRSA while in hospital. Other acoustic acts featured on the download include Leski, Doghouse Roses, Tinderbox, the Carrivick Sisters and Megson.

ALBUMS

SOUND SANCTUARY - Dust (Lo-Tek)
I was quite taken with the Kent quartet’s Contact EP of three years back, likening them to an electronica Simon & Garfunkel. Now comes the full album, which may take a while to seep inside the head but proves worth the patience to let its charms reveal themselves. A burnished cocktail of folk, trip hop, 60s West Coast pop and blissed out art rock, the S&G comparisons rise again on Crossfire and Carried Away, but references to the Beta Band, Elliott Smith and Gomez apply too. Closing track Bababada slips into a Latin rhythmic groove that might suggest a crossbreeding of Jose Gonzalez with America and Zero 7, but generally things are kept laid back. They magic chilled summer night moods out of Mexico and Kamikaze Dreamer, do the soft funk hump with Got The Feeling, surf the skies on the psychedelic 60s inspired title track, and explore George Michael soul alleyways with Enemy. The lurched narcotic noir of Blonde Prey and the spaced vibes and guitar explorations of Under The Radar also suggest those Folktronica Trip Hop Radiohead labels aren’t wide of the mark. Mike Davies

XX TEENS - Welcome To Goon Island (Mute) Art school angular pop that mashes together the B52’s party vibe, Talking Heads, The Fall, Iggy, some early Stones swagger, a bit of Hawkwind space rock (see For Brian Haw if you don’t believe), Adam and the Ants, and some vintage Pigbag, this marks an impressive if slightly derivative debut album for the London five piece. Rhythm driven with plenty of insistent percussion and stabbing riffs elbowing their way through throbbing basslines, brass, strings and, on Darlin’ even steel drums, the likes of Onkawara, the incredibly poppy Only You, electrorockabilly My Favourite Hat, the fat brass 22nd Century Dexys of Ba (Ba-Ba-Ba) and the pulsing, spoken, riot going on rumble that is B-54 are all this month’s cool elite club fillers. Mike Davies

THE TELEPATHIC BUTTERFLIES - Breakfast in Suburbia (Rainbow Quartz)
Psychedelic 60s beat acid pop from Canada with surf noir guitars and influences that brazenly embrace the Beatles, Hollies, and Buddy Holly but show the duo are also on nodding acquaintance with newer forces like the New Pornographers. Conceived as a quasi concept album with the songs written from the perspective of various suburbanites faced with the alienation and drudgery of modern life, it’s packed with ringing guitars, close harmonies and catchy hook-riddled melodies. Spread across 14 tracks, the song quality occasionally dips and a certain sameness begins to creep in, but with stand-outs that include A Scathing Report, the Move-like flowery pop The Caution Slumber, and the very Hollies-sounding Telescope, they’re worth sharing a croissant with. Mike Davies

MATTHEW SWEET - Sunshine Lies (Shout!Factory)
Over the years I’ve had a long affection for Sweet’s 60s flavoured pop rock with its ringing guitars and soaring harmonies. His last release, Under The Covers Vol 1, saw him collaborating with Susannah Hoffs for a collection of their favourite 60s tunes. Perhaps he should have taken a lesson from that simplicity because, a while in the making, his 10th album is a bit of a mess. The touchstones of psychedelic summer of love pop remain intact, but he’s over-egged the pudding on several tracks, burying the songs in a welter of production that may look to Jeff Lynne but too often just emerge as cluttered noise.
Falling into this category you get the splurging hard rock wig out of Room To Rock, Flying, Let’s Love, Sunrise Eyes and at least parts of Time Machine, Sunshine Lies and Daisychain.
There are songs where he pulls back from the overkill, so that Byrdgirl is a lovely slice of jangling burred (no pun intended) pop, Pleasure Is Mine dreamy surf balladeering, Around You Know a fine evocation of vintage McGuinn and closing track Back Of My Mind a slow ticking, big building power pop ballad. A pity they’re in the minority. Mike Davies

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HOME NEWS by Mike Davies (updated 23/7/2008)

Having spent a couple of years playing support to the likes of The Twang, Little Man Tate, The Infadels, and Battle, the Birmingham four piece 51 BREAKS release their self-titled debut EP (Animal Farm). There's definite hints of early Duran, especially on the synth prominent Embers, and the electro tinged Blueprints surely borrows influences from the defunct Cooper Temple Clause. A strong pop sensibility, plenty of energy and solid tunes suggest they'll be soon in the running for the city's next new big thing

Yet another Birmingham outfit, fronted by keyboardist Lizzy Keys and guitarist Kellio the alt-pop quintet THE LIGHTS like to bandy round comparisons to Idlewild, Teenage Fanclub, Costello, ELO and the Manics and indeed you might hear bits of all of them floating around their tunes. iTunes downoad debut single, The Score is unabashed jingly poprock with, perhaps, a hint of the Go Gos while last year's Stop Stop Carry On is another local nod to the Duran boys. They can be a bit rough at times, but there's no doubting the pop confidence while both Film Within A Film and The Leaving Song indicate a strong sense of psychedelic folk inflected balladry.

Almost a year and a truckload of corporate negotiation frustrations later, Kings Heath's POPPY & THE JEZEBELS finally get to follow up their Follow Me Down mini album with new single UFO released on their own Gumball Machine label. Available on vinyl and as download, it's a hypnotic slice of spooked cobwebby folk and indie pop cocktail with a persistent walking beat, Mollie's echoey vocals, a whibber of theramin (courtesy Poppy Twist) and a pinch of the same otherwordly magic producer John Rivers brought to Ghost Town.
Hopefully the enforced low profile caused by a combination of school and label ditherings won't have overly harmed interest and awareness because this is really rather good indeed and, along with news that Mike Chapman's done a remix for the forthcoming Mute Irregulars Underage compilation and the fact that they've already recorded follow up single Rhubarb & Custard, should certainly put the buzz back where it belongs.

Fronting GO:AUDIO, short of breath James Matthews looks to be the biggest pop success out of Walsall since Matthew Marsden, though with chances of a much longer musical career. Following on from Busted fizz pop rock single Made Up Stories, they now release the debut album of the same name (Epic) and with much the same sort of catchy bubblegum, jerky and chugging melodies designed to be played loud to get you into an effervescent mood before you head out for a night’s partying. A woeful tale of staying after being dumped, current single She Left Me is another set firmly in the early Busted mode with a dash of chewy US teen pop , as indeed are So Quiet You Were, Brake! Brake! Wood Chuck and Save Me Now while the piano backed Take The Floor, stadium ballad I’m With You and a very Green Day orchestropop Forget About It are there to show their more emotionally moody side. Disposable yes, but not for quite a while yet.

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HOME NEWS by Mike Davies (updated 30/6/2008)

Here's a name from the past. DAVID DITCHFIELD used to be in Birmingham outfit The Mood Elevators and later The Hudson Giants alongside Jenny Jones (brilliant, brilliant, the female Chris Isaak, whatever happened to her). Two years ago he had a near fatal accident when his coat became trapped in a train door at Huntingdon station and he was dragged under the wheels. He survived but was left with damage to his left arm and unable to play his guitar. But his near death experience also changed his artistic life. A graphic artist, he's since painted several canvasses about the experience and his subsequent spiritual journey while, already having worked with Anne Dudley and having his arrangements performed by the London Symphonetta, he's also written his first symphony, The Divine Light. Samples of his work can be heard on www.myspace.com/davidditchfield music

To go by their limited edition self-titled EP, Birmingham quartet BETTY & THE ID are heavily into The Stranglers but also squeeze a few pinches of early space rock of Hawkwind, Floyd and, quite possibly, late 60s underground Britpsych outfits like The Smoke, into Cellophane Man and Neutron World. Both tracks feature on the CD alongside the Peaches-like Chant and the more experimental psychedelia of Last Night Dreaming which pulls together bits of Zappa, America's stoner-desert rock, Soft Machine and Floyd. They don't look the springest of chickens, but they play with solid musicianship and energy and while the music may hark to times gone, it still sounds like today's noise.

GO:AUDIO are a much touted chugging indie pop outfit fronted by out of breath Walsall boy James Matthews though to go by recent single Made Up Stories (Epic) it sounds like they spent too much time cramming on old Busted songs.

It seems ironic that the acrimonious departure of Ali Campbell should coincide with UB40's best album since their early recordings. Having returned to form with the previous Who You Fighting For, now Twentyfourseven (Reflex) finds them back at the top of their game, mixing together reggaed covers with their own biting social and political comment material.

Taking the covers first, the one that's getting the immediate attention has to be I Shot The Sheriff, a song they've performed nightly on the world tour in tribute to Marley and here featuring Maxi Priest. A fine version, though obviously not as good as Bob's. I'll Be Back has Robin Campbell on vocals for the Beatles number off a Hard Day's Night, given a reggae bassline and chugging rhythm line and horns, adding a little slur to the summer undercurrent. The third is the first sample of new member Duncan Campbell who takes lead duties for It's All In The Game, the old Tommy Edwards/Cliff/Four Tops hit, and, with languid sax break, he proves more than up to the job of stepping into his brother's shoes with a similar but sweeter timbre to the voice.

Not strictly a cover, but Dance Until The Morning Light is a rewrite to the tune of Desmond Dekker's The Israelites and featuring Priest and rapper Truth. Not the best choice for the first single perhaps, but a sure and steady dance groove grower.

Had it been inadvisable in terms of band politics given it's sung by Ali with Astro MCing, a better bet might have been Lost And Found, a hypnotic song about self-rediscovery and redemption and one of the two numbers here (the other's the brooding similarly themed Once Around) written for the disastrous UB40 musical Promises & Lies.

There's some upbeat feelgood pop with the embrace life as it comes This Is How It Is, lovers rock I'll Be There, the dub hued Slow Down which features Priest's son Marvin and the step-rhythm Here We Go Again, the latter marred slightly be a weak fade.

But it's the political numbers that give the album a muscular heft that's not been felt quite as strongly since the debut. Fitting then that the lengthy, dub extended Rainbow Nation should be a sequel (complete with original sax riff) to Tyler, the wrongly imprisoned Louisiana black now the longest serving prisoner on Death Row.

Recent global conflicts inform the opening End of War, a plea to stop the endless cycle of violence which takes its title and lyrical quote from President Kennedy's speech to the UN General Assembly on September 25, 1961.

The theme continues with the dark insistence of Securing The Peace and Oh America!, a powerful condemnation of the US foreign policy on Iraq and Afghanistan, performed by Earl Falconer over a 'blue beat' dub backing and featuring a midsection where he's joined by Arrested Development rappers 1 Love and Rasa Don that packs a punch between the eyes.

With Asian singer Hunterz adding classical Indian vocal motifs and tabla percussion, Middle of the Night addresses the climate of fear propagated by homeland security measures, both in the US and back home here. Equally upfront and pointed is The Road which, sung by Norman Hassan and inspired by the campaign for Darfur, takes the pessimistic view that the road to freedom, is paved with too many obstacles to justice for anyone to safely travel. It is, though, counterpointed by one of the album's best tracks, Instant Radical Change of Perception, a lazy summery reggae chug about not being afraid to admit you might be wrong and re-address your views in the face of a changing world.

It's encouraging to feel the heat of the fire back in the band's belly which make sit all the more disappointing that, whether down to the split or the fact that a 10 track version of the album was given away with the Mail On Sunday, it's the band's first album that's failed to make the Top 75. Maybe that's why they're now working on Labour of Love IV.

A new Birmingham old soul boy, BRYN CHRISTOPHER's been deservedly setting superlatives fluttering with debut single, The Quest (Polydor), which ably demonstrates that when he cites Al Green, Sam Cooke, Otis Redding and Nina Simone as influences he's not just looking to boost the bio hype. Warm, muscular, deep with a fiery passion and bolstered by a tight horn section and musicians weaned on Stax milk, we're talking the new Terence Trent D'Arby, Roland Gift, Percy Sledge and Seal rolled into one. Acoustic recordings of I've Been Loving You too Long and Bobby Hebb's Sunny send a shiver down the spine, suggesting that this is a voice for whom the charts are just a stepping stone to knocking them dead in Vegas. Debut album My World is due later this year, you'd be advised to keep a close watch.

The second JUDAS PRIEST album since Ron Halford returned to the fold, Nostradamus (Epic) is nothing less than a 2CD concept metal epic about the 16th century French prophet who supposedly predicted every major world event for the next 500 odd years. As you might expect from titles like Pestilence and Plague, Death, Persecution, War, and Future of Mankind, it's a riff heavy, old school welter given lashings of orchestral bombast overkill to make the prospect of a teaming between Andrew Lloyd Webber and Iron Maiden seem positively muted by comparison. Naturally, there's the obligatory acoustic tracks like Sands of Time, Calm Before The Storm and Lost Love for a little light and shade, but otherwise it's a relentless metal magnum opus with the lyrics everything you might have hoped or feared. They're certainly pushing the boat out though, the album available as a ltd deluxe edition that comes in a 48 page hard-bound book with illustrations and lyrics. Those interested in the prophecies but will less tolerance for ear-splitting guitars should seek out a copy of Al Stewart's Eyes of Nostradmus instead, which deal with the predictions in far more effective manner.

Following up mini album, Arcs Across The City, hometown trio JOHNNY FOREIGNER deliver their fully-fledged full length debut with Waited Up Til It Was Light (Best Before), another urgently and energetic flurry of scratchy art-pop with angular melodies, chopping riffs, and boy/girl vocal collisions. Polished, they're not and Alexei Berrow's attempt to breathlessly cram more words into a song than its running time has space for can prove and exhausting listen. But the bustle and rush of the punky riffs and driving drums on things like Lea Room, Our Bipolar Friends, Hennings Favourite and Eyes Wide Terrified belie a tight proficiency on the instruments. Want proof, listen to the jerky The End And Everything After or, taken at a slightly slower pace, Absolute Balance and Salt, Pepa And Spinderella.
The acoustic DJs Get Doubts once again shows them to be more than yelping indie rock barrages while their hometown roots and experiences are made amply evident on numbers such as Sometimes, In The Bullring, Cranes And Cranes And Cranes And Cranes and Yes, You Talk To Fast. And, just to underline their love-hate relationship with the city, the song lyrics come on individual insert cards, each sporting photos of Birmingham landmarks. This lot certainly deserve to be added to the Brummie roll of honour.

ALBUMS

MY CHEMICAL ROMANCE - The Black Parade Is Dead (Reprise) Having spent two years on what feels like constant promotion for the Black Parade concept album about death and dying, their biggest success to date, MCR decided to finally put it and their alter-ego to bed with a series of farewell performances playing the album in full. This live CD/DVD album was recorded in Mexico City's Palacio de los Deportes on Oct 7 and at Maxwell's in New Jersey on Oct 24, the former featuring on both the CD and the DVD with the hometown show (which included songs from Three Cheers for Sweet Revenge alongside a selection of BP numbers) on just the DVD. The Mexican crowd goes wild, so much so that their cheers become an almost permanent whooshing noise backdrop to the songs, so much so that on the opening The End/Dead! it almost sounds like a fault in the pressing. Rather inevitably, the live setting strips down much of the albums orchestral depth to rock band basics and at times singer Gerard Way seems to be overcompensating for the lack of depth and arrangement by shouting his vocals, though seeing him command the stage on the DVD offers suitable visual distraction. It's the quality of the songs, of course, that drive the studio album, elevating it beyond the convenient emo pigeonholes to reveal a band who know all the tropes of classic rock, a little bit prog, a little bit pop, a little bit goth. It was no surprise when they mentioned Queen and Pink Floyd among the influences. So it is that, even with the studio polish pared away, the songs rise to the occasion, the full thrust attack to Dead!, a swaggering Teenagers, This Is How I Disappear, Mama and, with the crowd taking over the vocals, Welcome To The Black Parade, all sending a rush of blood to the head as they rip out of the speakers. It'll be interesting to see where they go next and how they follow up what has become their defining moment, but for now The Black Parade Is Dead, Long Live My Chemical Romance. Mike Davies

SIGUR ROS - Med Sud I Eyrum Vid Spilum Endalaust (EMI) Which, for the none Icelandic speakers out there, translates as With a Buzz in Our Ears We Play Endlessly, as the Nordic wags put aside their heavenly ambience and otherwordly ice melting in favour of actual pop songs that you could sing along to if you had any idea of the language. Even if you don’t, chances are you’ll find yourself trying to get the phonetic gist and warbling nonsensically to such infectious summery melodies as Gobbledigook, Inni Mer Syngur Vitleysingur, and the Coldplay-like Vid Spilum Endalaust.
Devotees will be pleased to know they’ve not entirely forsaken their big drama ice sculpture symphonics. For some six minutes Ara Batur is a delicate simple piano ballad, then in come the London Oratory Boys' Choir and London Sinfonietta for a rousing cathedral of majesty. The choirs are there too for Godan Daginn, Med Sud I Eyrum tinkles with waterfall cascades as the drums carry it to another epic climax and Festival moves from almost Gregorian chant to the full orchestral fireworks, while, for tranquil contrast, Illgressi is a simple acoustic guitar folksy number. The closing number, All Alright, a melancholic spare balled with simple piano notes and warm Hovis brass, is their first to be sung in English and, in its fragile hymnal quality, sounds as though it belongs on the soundtrack of Terence Davies’ Distant Voices Still Lives. May their endlessly never cease. Mike Davies

CAMPER VAN BEETHOVEN - Popular Songs of Great Strength and Enduring Beauty (Cooking Vinyl) To mark their 25th anniversary, the reformed Campers have put together this collection of their finest - and at times weirdest - eclectic moments, recorded between 1985 and 1990. One of the first indie bands, they're probably best known for Take The Skinheads Bowling which, you'll recall, figured prominently in Michael Moore's Bowling For Columbine courtesy of Teenage Fanclub, and their 50s pop pastiche The Day Lassie Went to the Moon. They're both here along with 16 other choice cuts that include the self-descriptive genre fusing Border Ska, the Egyptian-ska-mazurka Skinhead Stomp, backporch zydeco Sad Lovers' Waltz, REM meets Jonathan Richman country stomp Ambiguity Song and the psychedelic Dream Syndicate/Wall Of Voodoo splice The History of Utah.
Record label intransigence means they've had to re-record five numbers, among them the desert rock gone spooked Eyes of Fatima Parts 1& 2 and their inspired carbon cover of Quo's Pictures of Matchstick Men, but have hewn as close to the originals as possible that only the most anorak fan will spot the differences. Nice to be reminded, now how about something new? Mike Davies

WEEZER - Weezer (Interscope) Their third eponymously titled album puts to rest talk of the band calling it a day, though for some the pointless version of The Weight and sludgy psych-blues grind cover of Talktalk's Life Is What You Make It might not sound like they made best decision. However, with Rivers Cuomo opening up the writing input to the three other guys, the overall result proves one of their better sets even if it takes some time to warm to its charms.
A punky opening riff chugger Troublemaker gets things off and running in poky form with both it and The Greatest Man That Ever Lived (part quasi rap, part indie guitar rock, built around variations on a Shaker hymn) seeing Cuomo in self-mocking form before heading down into Pork And Beans, the blissed Heart Songs and a funked up stuttery rock raunch Everybody Get Dangerous.
Of the non Cuomo numbers, Brian Bell's Thought I Knew is fairly standard stoner poprock and Pat Wilson's Automatic is pleasantly disposable indie midtempo crunch but Scott Shriner's Cuomo collaboration, Cold Dark World is a snaked leviathan blues rock that shows real muscle. But, as the six minute closer The Angel And The One makes it clear, without Rivers, this would be just so much water under the bridge. Mike Davies

CAPTAIN WILBEFORCE - Everyone Loves A Villain (Electratone) Simon Bristoll frustratingly continues to remain a blind spot for the disc buying public, a fact that's even harder to fathom in the light of this new album If you were to splice the DNA of Squeeze with that of the Guillemots, Burt Bacharach and Lennon and McCartney, this is what you'd likely get, a melody drenched album of superbly arranged intelligent grown up pop, rippling with quality songs that wear their 80s influences without shame but also sound like they were minted tomorrow. There's not a duff track here, but special attention should really be directed at the title track which is both reminiscent of and as good as anything Sgt Pepper, while spaghetti western guitars lay the ground for Confetti, Champagne And Roses which takes the best of early Costello and wraps it in a Difford and Tilbrook parcel, and Born Again Brand New Man swaggers down synthpop street like Badfinger on the arm of Stephen Duffy. And, quite frankly, McCartney should be strapped to a chair and made to listen to both eco-warning The Twilight Kids and the bittersweet The Girl Who Broke Her Own Heart as a reminder of the sort of class he used to write. Mike Davies

THE CORRECTIONS - Repeat After Me (EMI) Touted as bearing comparison to early Radiohead while also occasionally suggesting the Manics and Coldplay (which adds a certain irony to opening track This Voice Is Not my Voice), it's easier to get more excited about this lot on paper than in practice. They play well enough and both the stately slow building Full Stop and a tingling The Wind Is Wild have repeat performance quality, but there's nothing to really distinguish the rockier tracks from each other, and the whole thing just fades away into the sort of earnest young man indie rock that sounds ok as background radio but would never prompt anyone to make a note of the name to buy later. Mike Davies

PHANTOM PLANET - Raise The Dead (Fueled By Ramen) Now minus both Jason Schwartzman, who quit midway through recording the last album, and guitarist Jacques Brautbar who went off to be a photographer following its release, the question is can Alex Greenwald and co sustain the momentum of a four year old record. Well, possibly so, despite them citing the music of Charles Manson and David Koresh as influences. With songs dealing as they do with cults, disease, severed heads and mucho angst, it's a far from sunny set of subject matter. The music though is another matter, taking the surf moods of the last album and adding liberal doses of glam and power pop as well as, on Geronimo, dollops of blues metal noise. So Do The Panic is an early Bowie-strut with a dash of the Kinks and Mott the Hoople, Raise The Dead a handclappy chant that juggles the Polyphonic Spree and Plastic Ono Band, Dropped is a hard Bolan boogie, Leave Yourself For Somebody Else sounds oddly like a more acidic Monkees and Leader comes complete with tropical flavours and a kiddie choir. It doesn't all come off, Too Much Too Often is just a noisy mess, but for the most this could well live up to its title. Mike Davies

GAVIN ROSSDALE - Wanderlust (Interscope) He used to be in Bush who were vaguely big in America and peaked here with their first single and album. He's married to Gwen Stefani. This is his debut solo album. It's full of middling but overblown and over produced radio friendly stadium power ballads that sound like Chris Cornell with laryngitis fronting Bon Jovi and featuring dreadful lyrics like 'Hamburgers so that we stay alive, but happy meals mean something died'. As anodyne and average as it is instantly forgettable, it doesn't even inspire you to remember any of the song titles since, ultimately, they're all much the same song. As anyone who saw Constantine will know, he's a pretty decent actor. Maybe he should look at a few more scripts and leave the albums to the missus. Mike Davies

INFADELS - Universe In Reverse (Wall of Sound) Looking to rekindle the stalled promise of their debut album, the London quintet have poured everything into the follow-up, and called in Youth to mould it into shape. To which end they've taken their original dance intentions and expanded horizons to embrace a robust pop sensibility that makes itself amply evident from the opening chantingly dark Circus of the Mad and then leaps confidently into Make Mistakes where echoes of The Clash reverberate around a skirl of the sort of Celt-Country chorus friendly rock once pumped out by the Skids. That same guitar driven determined urgency is there too on credit crunch themed Free Things For Poor People which comes with one of the year's best choruses, designed to be belted out as you jog back from the pub or line up arm in swaying arm on the stadium terraces. Is its marching beat a bit early Big Country? Well yes, but then no one's going to say Fields Of Fire wasn't a classic of its time.
They're in different musical mood for Code 1 which more readily brings to mind a Depeche Mode electro-pop version of Stevie Wonder's Higher Ground while Chemical Girlfriend suggests what might happen if you crossed Snow Patrol with Bryan Adams. Play Blind, the horn slapped jerking swagger title track and the Ultravoxy slow burn Don't Look Behind You don't quite pull off their ambitions and the album needed a stronger closing track than the scratchy, slightly aimless How To Disappear which never makes the most of a chorus that's looking to burst free, but otherwise this has the markings of one of the summer's most played. Mike Davies

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ALBUM REVIEWS by Mike Davies (updated 12/5/2008)

SPARKS - Exotic Creatures Of The Deep (Lil'Beethoven)
After a return to form with Hello Young Lovers, Ron and Russell are rather over-egging the pudding with the follow-up, due to be premiered at the last of their 21 album a concert London shows on June 13.
Inevitably pushing the quirky controls to the max, adopting their favoured operetta arrangements and jittery melodies, Russell's falsetto looking for the canine audience, songs like the urgent jabbing baroque (She Got Me) Pregnant, a chugging Lighten Up Morrissey (woman refuses to have sex with boyfriend because he doesn't measure up to Moz), and the terrible Photoshop ("photoshop me out of your life") which sounds like a bad Sondheim parody, tend to overdose on lyrical whimsy and puns.
There are some inspired moments. Despite the self-mocking lyrics, the electro Glitter Band glam and operatic piano trills of I Can't Believe That You Would Fall For All The Crap In This Song, has a droll appeal, as does the pop-opera romping Good Morning with its ancient lothario thanking god for a one night stand tale and the jabbering neurotic mood of Strange Animals.
But, lashed with ADD violins and keyboard, a twitching-eye Let The Monkey Drive quickly irritates with its repetitiveness and while the Mozart camping This Is The Renaissance is amusing, it seems irony has deserted them when they follow a song that makes a witty play about different pronunciation with The Director Never Yelled 'Cut' (another musical wannabe) where they pronounce Yelled as Yaled.
It's good to hear them still sounding fresh again after the stale wilderness years and always ready to turn musical tricks, but it might be an idea to take the foot off the pedal now and again rather than sustain a pace and style that eventually just becomes wearing.

CAJUN DANCE PARTY - The Colourful Life (XL) Between prepping their A-levels these London sixth formers seem to have found time to knock up an album's worth of catchy summery pop and recruited Bernard Butler to give it a production sheen. It's only just over half an hour long, but it's packed with breezy melodies designed to have you skipping down the street and joining in with Danny Blumberg's short of breath vocals. You're not looking at anything profound among the usual songs about love, desire and living it large, but when faced with the 80s flavoured title track tumble, surf twangy jabbing rock pop The Race, a Kooks meets Sparks The Next Untouchable, the spoken yearning and romantic angst of No Joanna with its gypsy fiddle and lava bubbling guitar, drunken swayer Buttercups and the 60s soul, pop, psychedelia, folk mash up that is The Hill, The View & The Lights, then who needs deep.

THE VINES - The Best Of (Heavenly) Variously called Australia's answer to The Strokes and Nirvana, and fronted by the volatile Craig Nicholls whose voice has clearly been rubbed with sandpaper and marinaded in gasoline since he was born, they were on course for world domination with debut album Highly Evolved. Then the follow up, Winning Days, hit the backlash, Nicholls was diagnosed with Aspergers, the band quit touring and their bassist quit. Reformed as a trio they came back in 2006, but, in sales terms at least, the moment had passed. Now resigned to cult status with a fourth studio album in the wings, this is a chance to look back on their mosaic of West Coast, Stooges punk, Nirvana grunge, The Kinks mod metal and Beatles pop.
On the debut album picks they gargle with nails, they spit out power pop wrapped in barbed wire, they take their riffs and shake them about until they beg for mercy. And then, just when the fingers have been ripped raw on Outtathaway or Get Free, they go all balladry with something like Autumn Shade and whip out their Brian Wislon Fan Club cards with Homesick.
As if they feel there’s a point to prove there’s a surprising six from that difficult second album, though really only the juddery riffs of Ride, psychedelic spacey ballad Autumn Shade II and the muted title track warrant revisiting. The remaining four cuts are lifted from the power chord and more poppy driven Vision Valley, namely the progfolk Spaceship, the anthemic title track ballad, brief Stooges swagger Anysound and the Ramonesy pop Don’t Listen To The Radio. And as a bonus, they throw in their slowed down cover of 4 Ever (here retitled 4Eva) by Australian sisters The Veronicas from the No Man’s Woman compilation tribute to female musicians.

BOMBADIL - A Buzz, A Buzz (Ramseur) Taking their name from the Lord of the Ring character, these North Carolinians apparently met by chance in Bolivia and decided to become a band. Whether they worked up to this or emerged fully formed, their sound is a ramshackle cocktail of indie rock, Bolivian waltzes, trad English folk, shanty, hick jug band country and lollopping campfire with comparisons that range from the Incredible String Band, Dr Strangely Strange and Jonathan Richman to The Pogues, Spoon and even Woody Guthrie.
With instrumentation that includes horns, pan pipes, harmonica, glockenspiel, and xylophone, they’re melancholy and boisterous in equal measure, And with songs like the rollickingly clanky Julian of Norwich, the playful Three Saddest Words, nursery rhyme folk jogger Cavaliers Har Hum, the over-excitable wobbly Johnny and the five minute Southern folk gospel oddity title track, they make curiously beguiling listening for any hobbit.

JORDAN ZEVON - Insides Out (NewWest) He may have provided a heartfelt cover of Studebaker on the tribute album (now reprised here), but while that clearly echoed his father's pipes don't expect to find a clone of Warren on this debut album. Rather it's a set of sunny FM radio power pop that sounds like Fountains of Wayne on the guitar bouncy The Joke's On Me and This Girl and leans towards Ben Folds or even early Billy Joel with Home and Camilla Rhodes.
There's no denying he can write catchy - if ultimately unmemorable - hook laden tunes, but where his father could be politically biting, sharply insightful and slyly witty, Jordan is none of the above, his lyrics bordering on the banal (listen to Home), creaking with in jokes and, as on American Standard's swipe at privileged college kids, clumsy social commentary. And when he does manage to latch on to more emotional spiritual questioning depth with Too Late to Be Saved. he renders the song an ordeal by pitching his voice to the higher register of its nasal tones.

THE MOUNTAIN MOVERS - We've Walked Into Hell And There Is Life After Death (Fortuna Pop) Written and sung by Daniel Greene from The Butterflies Of Love, this is melancholic and often mournful indie pop built around an afterlife theme and lots of songs about God and the Devil. Noodling piano, flourishes of brass, wheezing gospel-folk melodies and Greene's alt-country pop drawl occasionally strike attention rousing notes, as with the Velvetish What The Devil Wants The Devil Takes, the bare boned 60s poppy soul This Last Hope, piano driven funeral march folk This Man Is Not Dead and a jaunty country and r&b Bomb Shelter. But at the end of the day, when it wraps up on the boozed up pedal steel country The Devil Always Wins, there's not really anything that's made sufficient of a lasting impression to move you want to play again..

THE LACKLOVES - Cathedral Square Park (Rainbow Quartz) I don't know how many Beatles soundalikes there are in Milwaukee, but chances are Mike Jarvis's trio are up there with the best of them. And it's not just the Fab Four that rings their bells. All ringing guitars and harmonies, this is pure 60s pop that takes the British beat invasion also repped by bands like The Hollies and Kinks and laces it with the jangly folk-rock of the Byrds and (especially on Space Age Romeo) a liberal dose of West Coast psychedelia. Then there's Marlena which is Buddy Holly reincarnated while Belong To Sunday could have come from a lost Monkees episode. With On My Way, Hallmark Stars, and surfpop Another Kind of Girl adding to the urge to rush out, buy a sherbet dab and have a mop top haircut, this is disposable but thoroughly enjoyable retro fun.

THE DRAYTONES - Up In My Head (1965) And would you believe, here's another band in love with the Swinging Sixties and all things Rubber Soul era Beatles. It’s uncomplicated stuff, some harmonica here, primitive electric guitar riffs there, throaty vocals, some basic drumming and r&b derivative melodies. However, if Turn It Down, As High As I Can Get, After All and I Have To Go are blueprint Fab Four, they do have other colours, albeit from the same vintage. Heart Shaped Line is Standells style swampy garage rock with a blistering guitar solo, On The Way a folksy pop song that might have been lifted from some hayride if it weren’t for those psychedelic wibbly bits, Summer’s Summer's Arrived a little Dave Clark Five and Mindbenders and Throwing Stones a lot like The Move. And, then just to confuse it, last track Flowers On The Bridge is a gentle strummed acoustic ballad with echoey distant vocals that seems more in love with Elliott Smith. Not essential, but an enjoyable enough time trip.

THE LOOSE SALUTE - Tuned to Love (Heavenly) And if you’d prefer Beach Boys to Lennon and McCartney, then here’s a lovely set of summertime pop courtesy of Mojave 3 drummer Ian McCutcheon’s side project. That intro to opening track Death Club is pure Brian Wilson’s Good Vibrations and from then on you also get shades of the Mamas & Papas, The Byrds, Neil Young, 60s Laurel Canyon folk rock and some keening country. They even take the band name from the title of a Mike Nesmith album.
McCutcheon’s vocals are augmented by those from big voiced Lisa Billson and, on backups, melodica player Charlotte King to produce a set of lilting melodies that swing from the S&G ballad folksiness of Ballad of the Dumb Angel (you’ll swear the intro’s lifted from America) and the sad steel of break-up song Why’d We Fight to the surfing Bangles pop of From Head To Sandy Toes and Through the Stratosphere To The Bars which evokes not just the country side of Fleetwood Mac but Yellow River British outfit Christie.
A solid writer (Photographs and Tickets could find itself on many a Nashville set list) and a fine band who obviously had as much fun making this and you will have listening. Grab a backporch and, as the song says, Turn The Radio Up.

MATTHEW RYAN - vs The Silver State (One Little Indian) If Springsteen fronted The Replacements or John Mellencamp headed up the Waterboys, this might be a likely product of their unions. Ryan’s got a dust coated throat that sits well with these sparsely arranged rootsy rock numbers that address downbeat themes of regret (They Were Wrong), disillusionment with the American Dream (American Dirt), suicide (Drunk And Disappointed), urban decay (Meet Me By The River) and, on the rock out guitar slinging Hold On Firefly, domestic violence.
It’s not all such a downer, Ryan finding shards of hope flickering in It Could’ve Been Worse, Meet Me By The River, the spare acoustic Jane, I Still Feel the Same, Dulce Et Decorum Est’s folky mandolin rocker, a plaintive I Only Want To Be The Man You Want and a heartbreaking slow building Closing In. Or if not hope then at least a determination not to be sucked under by the weight of the past, disappointment and a pitiless world. And that’s more than enough to deserve your attention and respect.

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HOME NEWS (updated 13/4/2008)

LOCAL

This is officially the last mention of ENVY AND OTHER SINS as winners of that T Mobile competition. From now on, following debut album We Leave At Dawn (A&M), they will be referred to only in the context of the music they make. It seems fitting that they should be signed to A&M since in world where there’s numerous pretenders to the Squeeze crown, the Birmingham boys have a better claim than most. Listen to the opening Morning Sickness and you’ll hear the sound of classic Difford & Tilbrook, likewise on the witty pop of Almost Certainly Elsewhere, and Man Bites Dog. Elsewhere they take on the Cure at their own Lovecats game with the overlooked single Highness while the burlesque flavours of Talk To Strangers calls to mind Madness with a hint of Joboxers and It Gets Harder To Be A) Martyr is a Britpop Joe Jackson crossbred with the Kooks and Billy Joel.
And between their inventive arrangements (check out The Company We Keep), infectious melodies, appealing soft burr vocals and the seven minute slow building to tumultuous climax Radiohead-like closer Shipwrecked, they are clearly destined for a place in the current pantheon of Brum music gods alongside Editors, The Guillemots and Misty’s Big Adventure. Someone should just tell the label to get their fingers out and give them the promotion they deserve.

ALBUMS

THE RACONTEURS - Consolers of the Lonely (XL)
Unlike their Broken Boy Soldiers debut, the second collaboration between Jack White and Brendan Benson wasn’t slung together, raw and bloody, on the hoof but more carefully polished in the studio. But they still make it sound like it exploded spontaneously from the speakers.
There’s a little less of Benson’s melodies and rather more of the blues riff barrages White cranks out with White Stripes, which means whole chunks sound like they’re remaking Led Zeppelin. Case in point the opening title track (with a touch of Free thrown in), Salute Your Solution, a cover of Terry Reid’s Rich Kid Blues and Five On The Five. Top Yourself may have a slide guitar and banjo, but it still has a ticket to the Misty Mountain Hop.
Of course, with 14 tracks (many focusing on themes of freedom and confinement) , there’s still plenty that doesn’t channel Plant, Page and co. Benson takes charge for You Don't Understand Me where Elton seems to be playing piano for The Beatles while Many Shades Of Black is a pure Queen swayalong and the back porch Carolina Drama (a bizarre murder ballad that might have been penned by Tarantino) and a mutant mariachi The Switch And The Spur spread out their shared love of country. Indeed, Pull The Blanket Off sounds like The Eagles rewritten by Jagger and Richards.
Talking of whom it’s surely the late 60s Stones of Their Satanic Majesties ( who occupy their thoughts on the psychedelic baroque folk of These Stones Will Shout rather than Plant’s imaginings of himself down the local Jug Of Punch. Of course, since they wear their influences openly, there’s splash of Who in there too, as there is on the fiddle underpinned Old Enough.
Meant to be played really loud, preferably in a sweaty club with beer-smelling sweat, its cheap thrills may not be ones you return to after half a dozen fixes, but while the high lasts they’re headily intoxicating. Mike Davies

PANIC AT THE DISCO - Pretty Odd (Fueled By Ramen)
‘We’re so sorry we’ve been gone, we were busy writing songs for you. You don’t have to worry, because we’re the same band." they sing on opening track We’re So Starving. Well, not really. They’ve shed the !, changed bassists and kicked their electro-cabaret emo dance rock and reinvented themselves as the new Sgt Pepper. Or at least ELO. Just to put a seal on it, the orchestrations were recorded at Abbey Road and they even slip in snatches of Lucy In The Sky, Penny Lane and Strawberry Fields Forever.
Kicking off proper with lavish Mr Blue Sky sounding single Nine In The Afternoon, it’s all resolutely sunny, spangly upbeat stuff. Whether poppy uptempo or more folksy balladeering. The Fab Four and their subsequent emulators are splashed all over That Green Gentleman, Northern Downpour (one of the few slow songs), When The Day Met The Night (with some Harrisonesque Eastern touches) and The Piano Knows Something I Don’t Know (that’s the Strawberry Fields bit you can recognise). The groaningly titled Folkin’ Around (cue fiddles) even sounds like a barn dance hybrid of Falling and I’ve Just Seen A Face.
Appropriately enough you might also find yourself thinking Beach Boys on the lazy dappled Behind The Sea while the acoustic based McCartneyish swayalong Do You Know What I’m Seeing? has a sunny theatrical predisposition of Magical Mystery Tour proportions and, I Have Friends In Holy Places even welcomes ukulele and carnival brass to their vaudeville sideshow.
By the time it gets to the galloping mariachi pop of Pas De Cheval, you’ll be wishing they’d just ease up a moment on the relentless bouncealong, So praise be to the merry go round minuet She Had The World (that’s a clavinet, right?) and, introed with string and woodwinds, the plinketty music hall of From A Mountain In The Middle of the Cabins before skipping off over the horizon with the gloriously sun-kissed surf pop and Savoy Truffles horns silliness Mad As Rabbits. Forget Flaming Lips, PATD are this year’s retro 60s psychedelia pop champion weirdos. Mike Davies

CLIVE GREGSON & CHRISTINE COLLISTER - Mischief (Gott)
The reissue programme continues with the duo’s 1987 sophomore release, the studio follow up their Home & Away live debut. A solid mix of Gregson’s writing and Thompsonesque vocals, Collister’s bluesy soulfulness and songs that slide between folk, blues and country inflected pop, it opens with a sterling cover of Bobby Bland’s I Wouldn’t Treat A Dog, a track that would be later released as a 12" single. It’s the B-sides (which also turned up on the US version of the album) that provide the bonus material here with the twangy country Everybody Cheats On You, the brushed pop I Wonder What Went Wrong with its 12 string guitar, and the slide guitar blues-country This Tender Trap, a Gregson showcase that he redid on Welcome To The Workhouse and still tends to crop up in his live sets.
However, while these are treats for longtime fans, there’s still plenty of incentives among the original album material to entice newcomers, most especially Collister’s tour de force I Specialise, the anti-Thatcher shanty Lost At Sea (apparently written for the Oyster Band who passed on it) and a song that would become a Gregson classic and which he’s, frustratingly, never recorded as a solo version. Mike Davies

JAMES - Hey Ma (Fontana/Mercury)
Resurrected and reunited with former frontman Tim Booth last year, the comeback tour now follows up with the comeback album, their first together in seven years. And it’s like they never went away. So, lashings of anthemic songs with soaring choruses and Booth’s tremulous warble, kicking off with Bubbles where he declares ‘I’m alive’ (as indeed they most certainly are), proceeding to the raggy waltz title track where they deliver a stinging riposte to the Bush administration’s response to 9/11 with a catchy chorus of ‘Hey Ma, the boys in body bags, coming home in pieces’ It might not replace ‘hey sit down’ as the stadium crowd rouser, but it certainly gives it a try.
Then it’s Waterfall, a brass punching, tumbling Lou Reed infused nugget that, again hooked on an irresistible chorus, sounds like classic James as Booth talks about watching too much TV and having too much baggage in his life.
And on through the 60s Merseybeat flavoured ballad Upside, a song about immigrant labour thinking of home that might have been sung by Gerry and the Pacemakers had they been in to that sort of commentary, the jangling White Boy (‘my mum says I look like Yul Brynner, too old for Hamlet, too young for Lear) where Pete Townshend hangs out with Dexy’s brass section, the crushing melancholy of semi-spoken shanty piano ballad Of Monsters and Heroes And Men and, again echoing Reed with its melody line, the closing singalong chorus despair of I Wanna Go Home.
There’s some patchier tracks (Boom Boom, 72 and the James by numbers Oh My Heart come to mind), but for the most, this is a jubilant second coming. Mike Davies

EMILY SMITH - Too Long Away (Spit & Polish)
Winner of BBC Young Traditional Musician of the Year back in 2002 , the Dumfriesshire folkie’s since gathered several north of the border award nominations, gained an Honours degree in Scottish Music at the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama and became Scotland’s first ever winner in the USA Songwriting Competition with Edward of Morton. Two albums under her belt, she now returns with her third, a mix of the trad and her own numbers, delivered in that heather and honey sweet cure voice.
On the trad front, there’s the much visited Caledonia, Smith pumping away on squeezebox, a setting of Robbie Burns’ As I Was Wand’ring, a chunky folk rock primed May Colven that recalls the early days of Steeleye Span, and The Bleacher Lassie o’Kelvinhaugh that offers a chance to show off her unaccompanied vocals before the banjo, double bass and mandolin step in.
Her own relationship themed material doesn’t stray far from the trad pathways, either in her melodies or imagery, most notably on her revision of The Mermaid of Galloway from a poem by a neighbour of Burns and the co-penned Come Home Pretty Bird’s song for those away from home. She draws deeply from the natural world around her. The opening Sunset Hymn was written while soaking in her garden’s sights and sounds one summer evening while the pastoral hymn of the closing Winter Song stems from awaking one March to find several feet of snow. She’s clearly drawn to lives past and the wisdom they hold too. Audience Of Souls was inspired by the graveyard in an old church while the stand out Old Mortality with its wheezing accordion tells of Robert Patterson, a Dumfriesshire stonemason from the 1700s who spent most of his life looking after the gravestones of the Covenanter martyrs of 1638 and inspired the title of Walter Scott’s novel. Guess they’d better start polishing up another set of wards with her name on. Mike Davies

PARKA - Attack Of The Hundred Yard Hard Man (Jeepster)
Take a pinch of Frankie Goes To Hollywood, some early Stones and a lot of Franz Ferdinand, and you’ve got another bunch of Scottish indie funk n punk rockers who play full tilt with the rhythm section on speed and guitars cranked to overdrive.
Certainly if you’re looking to throw yourself around the room, then Bosses And Bastards, Disco Dancer, DJ In The Corner (a bit of Blockheads here), and the swaggering crunch of There’s A Riot Going On then this will do the trick. The bouncing Scotpop Wake Up Call, I Don’t Want To Fight You Tonight (a bit Big Country/Skids this one), a Men Without Hats like If You Wanna? and Hoxton Hair lay out the punky pop inclinations to equally catchy effect. You’re No Geezer (But You Try) suggests they should scrap further thoughts of a slow ballads future, but they’ve certainly got the modern highland fling thing sorted. Mike Davies

REM - Accelerate (Warner)
Following the less than rapturous reception accorded Around The Sun four years back, when Messrs Stipe, Mills and Buck reconvened for the follow up, they roped in producer Jacknife Lee who told them they should get back to the sound of their early albums. You know, straight forward crunching chords, ringing guitars, hooks, circling melodies, warbling vocals and college radio friendly songs.
Well, as the opening tumble of Living Well Is The Best Revenge shows, they clearly listened to what he had to say. They’ve not sounded that energised in ages. With a running time of 35 minutes, there’s no fat here, no noodling experimentation, just a heads down reminder of who REM were and are. What you don’t get, however, are the instantly memorable classics that positively leaped from those early albums. Certainly the muscle flexing Man-Sized Wreath works hard to establish its Green credentials, with its slashing riffs Supernatural Superserious tries to persuade you it could have come from Reckoning and the Stonesy folk-pop lurking underneath Mr Richards from Document. But they still feel like REM working at sounding like REM. Indeed, the thrashy I’m Gonna DJ surely wants to hold hands with It’s The End of the World As We Know It for that big live show crowd stomp and singalong.
Only three tracks really emerge with the sense of unforced inspiration that warrant reservations on future best ofs. The darkling 60s psychedelic folk of Until The Day is Done, Hollow Man’s emotionally anthemic surging verse/chorus self-criticism and Houston’s biting commentary on the administration’s response to Hurricane Katrina, with its organ drone behind the brooding guitars, a namecheck to Glen Campbell’s Galveston and the final throaty feedback.
So, no Green 2 then, but there’s enough fire and sense of reawakened passion here to certainly declare it the best REM album since Automatic For The People. Mike Davies

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HOME NEWS (updated 27/3/2008)

A handy chance to refurb your Two-Tone collection, Coventry pioneers THE SPECIALS are compiled on EMI’s The Best of the Specials, gathering together 28 audio cuts from Gangsters to the album version of Nelson Mandela by way such skanking hits as A Message To You Rudy, Nite Klub, Too Much too Young, Racist Friend, Rat Race and, of course the seminal Ghost Town. On top of which it comes packaged with a DVD that includes live and promo videos and film of 15 numbers, including a moody War Crimes, the witty promo for What I Like Most About You is Your Girlfriend, a rowdy live club performance of Enjoy Yourself and the black and white promo of Gangsters.

Former Kings Heath resident now living in rural Wales, breathily reedy voiced thumb piano playing KATE DOUBLEDAY finally releases her long awaited second album, Belonging (Copper) with a further mix of jazz, folk and African, Irish and Balkan influences evoking comparisons with Sally Oldfield, Joni Mitchell, Anne Briggs, and the spidery aspects of Kate Bush.

Trevor Lines reprises his bass duties from the debut album while this time the line up welcomes percussionist Tom Chapman, guitarist and leading UK kora player Daniel Wilkins, producer Joe Broughton on violin and Pamela Pinnock and Tina Barnes providing backing vocals.

Together they create an intoxicating brew, rich in layered and sinuously subtle arrangements hewn equally from the musical traditions of West Africa, Irish backwaters, the Mississippi and the hayricks of England.

Adorned with images from flora and fauna, her songs treat on love (Do You Not Know, Sweet Dandelion), political hypocrisy (the chant structured Follow Through), nature (Wild Poppies), grief and forgiveness (Watch The Flowers), her daughter (the tinkling trad folk In Full View) and the ephemeral nature of life (a tranquil watery Silver Blue). Songs like the sensual Eucalyptus (where she invokes Aboriginal vocalese) and the choral African hymnal title track, curling through the blood, it's an album that seeps inside you, taking root in the soul.

Based around Solihull, GIOVANNA & THE SANDS draws its six piece line up from California and Poland as well as closer to home. Fronted by Mexican-Italian one time Marilyn Monroe impersonator Giovanna Olvara they blend together blues, funk, ska and West Coast soul, all to be found percolating through their three track EP with the itchy jazz lounge sultry swing of Feel It, Walk On By’s infectious meeting between Nelly Furtado and Fiona Apple and the bubbling hot butter sinuous coffeehouse r&b of Little Games.

ALBUMS

THE BLACK CROWES - Warpaint (Silver Arrow)
In the seven years since Chris Robinson and co last gathered in a recording studio, there’s been many an outfit looking to ride their coattails, but if you’re going to have a band that refuses to admit music has moved on since Sticky Fingers, then you may as well have the best. So, here we are back with another dose of Stones, Allman,Creedence, and Faces influences and riffs, fleshed out a little more muscularly with the addition of Adam MacDougall on keyboards and guitarist Luther Dickinson replacing Marc Ford.

Those who like what they know will be happy to hear that Goodbye Daughters of the Revolution, a swaggery Movin’On Down The Line, Wounded Bird and the Spirit in The Sky clappy cover of Rev. Charlie Jackson's God’s Got It are all solid good time Crowes numbers. Those who reckon seven years should have wrung at least a few changes will be pleased to learn that Evergreen suggests they’ve borrowed a couple of Cream albums and that Walk, Believer, Walk is a sludgy Zep blues. And those who reckon they were always at their best with Southern countrified ballads will be pointing the program butter in the direction of the slide guitar and piano taste of the Band-like Oh Josephine, the mandolin tinged Fogarty-ish Locust Street and the noodling acoustic country blues There's Gold In Them Hills. Ignore the truly crappy cover that looks like something from a bad 70s blues-metal outfit, inside you’ll find the Crowes have got their feathers back and are flying high again. Mike Davies

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HOME NEWS (updated 29/2/2008)

Their first release since winning the Mobile Act best new band competition, Highness marks the debut A&M single for ENVY & OTHER SINS. A live favourite with its skittering beat and mix of Lovecats Cure with a smidgen of Dexys, it’s paired with Orient Express which, as the title hints, comes with a camel jockeying rhythmic sway underpinning the Madness echoes many will hear.

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CAPTAIN WILBERFORCE seem to remain a closely guarded secret, but with upcoming new album Everyone Loves A Villain (Blue Tuxedo), it’s hard to see how they can be ignored any longer. The album’s not out until June, but members of the Leeds Music Forum (leedsmusicforum.co.uk) can download it for free for two weeks in March. There’ll be more details nearer release, but suffice to say it sounds like one of the best albums Squeeze never made with No Strings Or Ties, Confetti, Champagne & Roses (love that guitar intro), Born Again Brand New Man, and the acoustic The Twilight Kids just a sample of the diamonds awaiting your ears.

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Formerly trading under the names of Buick 6 and The Toques during which time they were frequently their own worst enemies with their apathetic approach to self-promotion, Anna Russell, Campbell Docherty and Craig Hamilton are now known as FRIENDS OF THE STARS and have found someone who understands that the best way to get people to write about the trio is to let them hear them.

Recorded late 2005/early 2006 and released on their own Commercially Inviable label with Phil Robinson behind the drums, Mexicolas man Del Carter plaing bass and a guest appearance from Toys Hearts’ Sophia Johnson on dobro, Lighting & Electrical continues their love affair with Americana.

Opening with Russell taking lead on the slow waltzing Old Souls, it sets it stall proudly among those of Gram Parsons, Emmylou, the Dillards and Jayhawks. So step up and sample such fine goods as the 60s sunny summer of love Dragonfly, the old fashioned country harmony lilting Feelin’ Blue with its sly musical quotes, melancholic barroom swayer Nobody Out There and the backporch Handsome Family flavours of Sharpening A Blade’s keen murder-minded break-up song.

They’re not exclusively dedicated to music from across the water, though. Behind its banjo dappled colours, oddly titled acoustic closing track, Why Are The Movies of Jane Seymour? harks to leafy English folk with Russell conjuring the taste of wheatfields and haystacks amid hints of Cara Dillon. Then there’s Monday Morning which, borrowing a melodic refrain from Softly And Tenderly Jesus Is Calling, sounds like it could as easily be a hymn from the Welsh valleys as an Appalachian lament.

There’s a few rough edges around the production, but otherwise this is a rather splendid reminder that some of the best alt-country bands around are actually homegrown. These Friends are well worth making your musical buddies.

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The much anticipated sophomore follow up to Through The Window Pane, Red (Polydor) sees THE GUILLEMOTS reaching even more ambitious and musically diverse heights. Opening track Kriss Kross is a massive melody drenched orchestral pop song that makes Jeff Lynne sound lo fi, then the album’s electronic bias kicks in with Big Dog, a slice of sleazy Prince funk with an Eastern riff and a huge chart friendly clattering chorus grab.

Take it down then for the first ballad, the plaintive 80s with ethereal wash and brushed drums Falling Out Of Reach, before pumping the energy back to a noisy Glitter Band glam stomping Get Over It with its shouty title line and wooo oooh backups.

More electro then in the bleepy marchalong Clarion which swells into a sort of latter day Brill Building tower of pop with George Michael peaks and Oriental ripples. The dance floor takes prominence on Last Kiss, a concoction of throaty bass, Anita Ward disco and medieval cum oriental shades behind a strings laced Toxic beat and unstoppable barrage of drums. Exhaustingly good.

Hitting the home stretch, lush cinematic soaring ballad Cockateels is a James Bond theme for a Bollywood 007, Words a restrained aching stadium folk ballad with harmonica and tinkling keyboards, Standing On The Last Star another pinch of Eastern spice sprinkled over falsetto soaring midtempo Johnny Marr big pop, and Don’t Look Down a padding percussion. starry sky number that lulls you with a gentle, folksy set up before suddenly Greig Stewart’s drumming fireworks explode all around you as it takes off into the universe.

And that just leaves Take Me Home which, borrowing the intro to Mandy, sees the album off with a glorious slow surf into the twilight heavens, firebugs twinkling in the sky, fading away to Fyfe Dangerfield’s baying at the moon. Truckloads of sales and Mercury Music Prize nomination No 2 on the way, then.

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ALBUMS

SHERYL CROW- Detours (A&M)

Maybe it’s taking stock of things after surviving breast cancer, breaking up with Lance Armstrong and adopting a son, but having lost her way and audiences over recent years with slides into AOR pop rock and country Crow’s latest finds her looking back to her early roots with an album of the sort of chunky, funky bluesy swagger that made her name. Indeed, there’s times when she sounds as though she’s recycling the All I Wannna Do riff in an effort to jog memories.
She’s also dug into her political manifesto for songs about the Iraq war, the environment, the Bush administration’s failure to tackle Hurricane Katrina’s aftermath and the oil crisis. The latter provides one of the album’s worst moments with Gasoline, a bluesy funk plodder in which sings about price of petrol protests when "gangs of Mini Coopers took the battle to the streets" in London. What news reports was she watching.
There are songs that do have the old fire and sparkle. God Bless This Mess is a simple acoustic number that moves from the story of a soldier returning home from Iraq to a savaging of a war based on lies and a President shedding crocodile tears. Love Is Free is a laid back loping strummed guitar shuffle from the Jack Johnson campfire tapes, the title track a lovely countrified ballad in which she sings ‘mother teach me to love with a paper-thing heart’, Motivation a sharp put down of the privileged with a strong melody and Lullaby For Wyatt a tender hymn to her son that rises beyond maudlin sentimentality.
But she spoils any good will with some lazy throwaways (Peace Be Upon Us), overwrought dramatics (Diamond Ring), clattering calypso pop banality (Out Our Heads, a song where you’re forever dreading the arrival of a kiddie choir) and, even if it is her response to the cancer, the blues dirge Make It Go Away; sentiments many may find themselves expressing about the track itself. But, perhaps now she’s found her feet again, the next album could also put some legs back into her career.
Mike Davies

KATHLEEN EDWARDS - Asking For Flowers (Zoe)

Bursting on to the country rock scene fully formed with the whisky fumed tales of bruised love on debut album Failer, the Ottawa singer-songwriter followed up with a more standard issue Back To Me which, while not exactly disappointing didn’t really capitalise or advance matters. She’s back now with album number three which shows she’s used the time between profitably, honing her strengths and shedding any flabbiness. She’s also confident enough to open the set with Buffalo, five minutes of moody meandering blues and folk that slowly flexes its muscles to a firm grip, and then hit you with the more instant attack of the gunslinger guitar rocking The Cheapest Key. There’s barely a misstep throughout as she weaves infectious melodies and strong storytelling through the likes of Oh Canada’s Neil Young-inflected tale of drugs, murder and racism, the chiming guitars driven Oil Man’s War account of Bobby and Annabel’s flight from becoming part a conflict in which they didn’t believe, and the spare Alicia Ross which sounds like something from a distaff Nebraska.
The Southern dust coated plaintive Sure As Shit probably won’t be figuring on mainstream country radio anytime soon, but as long as she coming up with material as witty as I Make The Dough, You Get The Glory or as potent as the six minute, mournful strings streamed Goodbye, California they won’t be able to ignore her for much longer.
Mike Davies

JACKSON BROWNE - Solo Acoustic Vol 2 (Inside)

It has to be said that these days Browne’s status is a pale shadow of the days when he was making records like Before The Deluge, The Pretender and For A Dancer. Unless you’re a real devotee, you’d be hard pushed to name anything of his last studio album, The Naked Ride Home, from six years back.
Taken from various live recordings during his solo tour of 2004, Vol 1 pretty much exhausted the set list of popular favourites, which leaves the sequel (a stop gap until the next studio album) to trawl through a clutch of lesser known numbers intercut with his introductions. The voice, of course, remains as haunting as ever, still stained with concern and honesty, and hearing him on older numbers such as In The Shape of a Heart, Sky Blue And Black or Enough Of The Night rekindles the magic. But, whatever the merits of My Stunning Mystery Companion or Casino Nation, it’s hard to image them prompting a rush down the local store.
Mike Davies

TINA DICO - Count To Ten (Finest Gramophone)
The Danish born former Zero 7 singer returns with a powerful new collection that finds her in far more muscular form than past comparisons to Joni Mitchell and Julia Fordham might have anticipated.
She lays her cards on the table with the title track opener which shows her Leonard Cohen influence on an acoustic but urgent and desperation streaked folk blues number that gradually brings ominous piano into the fraying nerves rhythm. On The Run calls to mind Elkie Brooks circa Lilac Wine, Open Wide switches to soaring Radiohead melancholic stately pop and Night Cab hitches a ride on heady femme-rock melodies. And that's just the first four track attack.
With fragile torched balladry of You Know Better, the bitter inner loneliness detailed by Craftsmanship & Poetry, the incisive mix of confession, compassion and observation on the affecting Everybody Knows and Cruel To The Sensitive Kind, and the spidery Kiki Dee meets REM neurosis Sacre Coeur, you can't really go wrong. The Danes have already recognised she's a world class talent, it's about time the rest of us caught up.
Mike Davies

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HOME NEWS (updated 8/2/2008)

Having seemingly been around for years refining and shaping their sound, THE MEXICOLAS finally pop the champagne corks to celebrate the arrival of debut album X (InExile). Past singles, the riff crunching Shame and Come Clean’s Mark Lanegan meets Led Zep and the Chilli Peppers, are included alongside past tasters such as the guitar stabbing melodics of Big In Japan that blends the Foo Fighters and Police and the stadium thumping Easy Smile.

Those who’ve only just discovered them will be pleased to hear that the likes of rasping swagger Evil, Falling Into Myself, Suffer and Lovers Are Not Enemies offer sterling permutations on that QOTSA/Stone Temple Pilots template and while long term fans might lament the absence of their prog folk Race For The Lifeboat and Radioheadish ballad Oblivious, the good news is that Skin Tight with its Imagine borrowings and the towering Fake Plastic Trees beauty of (Times) Infinity are both here in all their majesty.

Add to that a clutch of nagging radio friendly choruses like that on We All Fall Down and the fact that the admirably titled 101 is a staccato pop rush that marries Grohl, Thin Lizzy and the Beach Boys, and they’re patently the next in line to warrant a star of fame on their hometown pavement.

KIDZLIKEDANNY 2 (Dannyboy Music), Matt Tyler’s second compilation of local acts in aid of autistic youngsters, is due for release via Itunes, Napster, Emusic and other download sites from March and, once again, features an eclectic but always interesting variety of names. Other than Aaron Yorke’s opening strummed I Remember The Days and the closing Blue Kids, an unexpected but excellent contribution from veteran country star Raymond Froggatt, as far as I can tell most of these are generally previously unreleased tracks.

Politcial alt-ska outfit Cracked Actors are on fiery form with Captive nestling in complete contrast alongside Take And Give from Bloxwich acoustic singer-songwriter Caroline 7 which in turn gives way to the old school bluesy pub rock of Crisis Blues Band with Truth And Lies. Everett come from Dudley with their Sit And Listen bearing witness to their Snow Patrol influences, Close Your Eyes is from Leicester folkie Ian Babington, Kristy Gallacher (misspelled as Gallagher on my copy) sings Broken Record Player and sounds like Coventry’s answer to Kate Nash.

A more familiar name, Matt Geary has been around a while winning admirers for his Elliot Smith/Dylan influenced indie alt-folk. Recently signed to Boy Wonder Records, he has a new album in the works for later this year, meanwhile his 2006 track Temperance gets an Andy Wickett remix. I have no idea who Mavoxor are but The Man Who Wants Everything is very much prog-folk in a good way. Onion Child is Kidderminster singer-songwriter Ryan Jordan who numbers Robert Johnson, Charlie Parker, John Martyn and The Bluetones among his influences, and gives good acoustic blues on The Bailiff while Stourbridge’s Raging Angel are, as the name might suggest, a rock outfit whose Hole In The Head is pretty standard stuff for the blues metal genre. Which just leaves Stranger Within, seemingly a hitherto unrecorded track from local Celtic folk oar veterans Quill.

Not everything is going to appeal to everyone, but there’s more than enough here to repay the purchase, and it’s for a good cause.

Check out the RED SHOES MySpace (www.myspace.com/redshoes1) for a new set of their folksy home demos that include a cover of the trad Quiet Joys of Brotherhood alongside new numbers Only A Fool, the Dennyish excellence of Celtic Moon and Carolyn’s moving, angry My Father’s Green Beret, a stark number about her war hero father who contracted MRSA in hospital, sung to just daughter Megan’s piano accompaniment and a tune reminiscent of Greensleeves crossed with Liverpool Lullaby.

ALBUMS

JACK JOHNSON - Sleep Through The Static (Brushfire)
Here’s a surprise as the laid back surfer ditches his familiar style and plunges into hardcore, throat scraping yowls and flesh-flaying feedback guitars. Nah, just kidding. It’s business as usual then with those reggae inflected soft rock and campfire surfer folk melodies, songs about cosy romantic snuggle-ups with the wife and kids occasionally punctuated by slightly more worried numbers that detail broken relationships (If I Had Eyes) and concerns about the ecology or war (They Do They Don’t, Sleep Through The Static). Lightly brushed and served with gentle guitars, lazy rhythms, it never works up a sweat but as long as there’s those who like to contemplate domestic bliss and environmental issues as they drift away in the sweet smoke, he’s going to keep shifting albums by the truckload. But please, no more dreadful wordplay like Monsooner or later! Mike Davies

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HOME NEWS (updated 18/1/2008)

Belated congratulations to ENVY & OTHER SINS who picked up a £1million deal with A&M after winning the Mobile Act best new band competition. Not bad given they were ejected from the comp after reaching the final 12 only to be returned via a wild card public vote. I predicted big things for them three years back with debut single Prodigal Son, so hopefully the rest of the world's now going to catch up. New single Highness is due out sometime in February and they're currently busy spending that money recording the album.

Plaudits too for DANIEL RACHEL who took the enterprising step of donating all profits from the download his Let It Be Mine single to Tender, the arts organisation working to combat domestic abuse and sexual violence. You can add to the support by buying it from iTunes for 79p.

Those interested in checking out RICH BATSFORD's piano talents can now see him in action on line, performing self-penned number Namaste. Visit his website www.richbatsford.com where you can also get a free download of the entire Valentine Court solo piano album.

JAKE FLOWERS is a Shropshire based singer-songwriter who warrants your attention. He's been releasing home recordings on his Shackled Ram Records label for a while, most recently the Fireworks EP, the title track being a lovely tale of a relationship's lost spark setting off stolen fireworks that in turn reignite the romance. He kicks 2008 off with new single Anyhow, produced by the esteemed Gavin Monaghan at his Magic Garden studio. A witty story about an invented romantic conquest, it tumbles along with an infectious folksy bounce that conjures thoughts of the young Steve Forbert while the accompanying Annabel, a tale of sex, seduction and Catholicism, is a bluesier affair that suggests the prime days of Matthews Southern Comfort and does a good job of showcasing the lad's guitar picking. Check out more music at
www.myspace.com/jakeflowers

Drummer with The Heathers, erstwhile half of We'll Always have Paris and musical partner to Della Roberts, it's eight years since ROB PETERS last released a solo album of new material. But he's back now with the totally self-played Copper Heart (Wafer Thin), opening with the beguiling six minute steady walking rhythm and drone guitar of Evergreen's history of a relationship and closing with the reflective, introspective spare strummed My Stage.

Between the two is a 35 minute, nine part prog/psychedelic folk concept suite titled Copper Dreams And Bare-Boned Dreams. Comprising both songs and instrumentals, framed by the Clouds into and outro, it's part questioning, part accusatory, part despairing and part jubilant, often highly reminiscent (especially in the often Eastern hued guitar work) of Roy Harper's late 70s/early 80s albums like HQ and Work Of Heart. You can hear his pop sensibility churning away under the distortions of Cry while Why God Is So Slow To Punish The Wicked harks to the traditional acoustic ballad on a theme of regrets, wasted moments and acceptance of a life lived. Young daughter Emily also gets to put in her vocal contribution on the Zep-folk raga drone Finger Rain.

It could probably have done without Hey! Andy! which basically just intones the line Hey! (fill in name here)! What you gonna do about it? over and over to acoustic and electric guitar backing and rather too much of the wrong sort of Roger Waters influence, but otherwise this is a welcome return from an under exposed talent.

ALBUMS

FINNISTON - Organised For Hard Fi (Ruby)
That'll be Scots brother/sister duo Steven Finnie and Jolene Crawford who, with Andrew Gifford on double bass and Jamie Attridge on drums, have put together this debut album after garnering solid praise for their live work.
Basically vocal harmony indie guitar pop with folk foundations, there's some nice touches here with things like the accordion wheezing away behind the chiming guitars and swirling beats of Love Is Hard To Find, the church organ intro to Complicated Mind before it takes off into the lilting piano tinkling mists where the Velvet Underground hang out in Hebridean folk clubs, the tumbling Celtic folk-pop of We're Waiting or the chirpy 60s flavoured Another Love Song where the La's and Beautiful South get together for a knees up.
Ballad fans will be swaying along to The Look (a sort of low-key Snow Patrol), the wistful country flavoured Words Can Only Try and the piano-backed, almost hymnal Travis feel to The Look, but it's hard to imagine anyone not warming to everything here.
Mike Davies

ALO - Roses & Clover (Brushfire)
Aka Animal Liberation Orchetsra, mates of college chum Jack Johnson and now signed to his label, this is a classic 70s style SoCal lite soul-funk jam band stuff in the vein of the Grateful Dead, Dave Matthews Band, Bruce Hornsby, and Phish with shades of Steely Dan, The Band. It plays its strongest most commercial card with piano led opening track Marian but if this is your groove then the likes of the bluesy Empty Vessels, reggae lurch Try, beach soul pop Monday (which lyrically references the Mamas and Papas classic), a jazzy The Water Song and the Becker-Fagan feel title track will have you glowing. Everyone else may favour vivisection.
Mike Davies

CROSBY LOGGINS & THE LIGHT - We All Go Home (Provogue)
Yet another 70s star's offspring strikes out to follow in dad's foosteps. Son of Kenny Loggins (which begs why he seems to have been named after David), this debut album is polished standard issue California soft folk-soul pop, replete with regulation radio friendly hooks, sunny melodies, and buttery but sensitive male vocals. It gets a bit musically hot under the collar with Always Catching Up, the heated rock-funk 'political' March On, America, and Rocks Into Sand where a hint of gospel and r&b (and perhaps Gotta Get You Into My Life) colours the piano boogie swing, but otherwise it's exactly the kind of slick but wholly interchangeable ballads and mid-tempo AOR you'd expect from an album that includes a track titled Radio Song. Oddly the best thing here is the last, acoustic folk-country number Same Old Song (La La La) where he goes on about the burdens of living up to the name. But ironically sounds more like the son of James Taylor.
Mike Davies

KIM NOVAK - Luck & Accident (Talitres)
A French art rock quartet named after the Hollywood star and Hitchcock muse and drawing influences from the likes of Radiohead, Interpol and Tindersticks, you'd be forgiven for passing by on the other side and thinking you've heard it all before. But hang on, this is rather good.
The opening chiming Better Run is gorgeously world weary, the singer (who may be Jeremie, Ugo, Cyrill or Hairday, the bio doesn't identify who does what) sounding quintessentially English in that Noel Harrison/Al Stewart/Stephen Duffy/Snow Patrol way while elsewhere In The Mirror does that Lou Reed/Tindersticks talk-sing thing with deliberate quotes from the Velvets, If comes over like a Gallic Bryan Ferry, Female Friends conjures The Cure while the jerky flurries of Swallow light a Gauloise under Talking Heads. With Crash and On My Back perfect absinthe-drenched soundtracks to some end of tether, end of the universe party, they could well follow Air in proving French rock can cross the channel.
Mike Davies

THE CAPSTAN SHAFTS - Environ Maiden (Rainbow Quartz)
Vermont's answer to the Cleaners From Venus, or for younger viewers, Baby Bird, Dean Wells doesn't seem to have a life. Instead he appears to spend his time holed up in his 4 track home studio banging down song after song. In the past five years released 16 lo fi albums. Here's the 17th, with 29 tracks, only one of them passing the two minute mark. Devoid of even rudimentary production and sporting titles like The Giving Earth And Her Oils Of Love, The Flowering Universe Confounds and My Family Was Welsh, I'm Just Tired, you get a rough picture of what to expect as Wells bashes at his guitar and whatever else comes to hand. In among the pile there's some bright flashes, the Velvets surging One Of us Should Be Further Away, mini psych-folk ballad The Ballad of Kid Butane, the ramshackle sherbet acid pop Better Get A Dream From This and the Otway punk The Complete History of Greenland in 70 seconds. But so much sounds like work in progress, some of the songs feeling like separate parts of one fragmented track. If he gets a handle on the quality control though, you might yet understand why Guides By Voices hold him in such high esteem.
Mike Davies

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HOME NEWS (updated 12/12/2007)

On April 3, 2006, aged 41, MARTIN GILKS, former drummer with The Mighty Lemon Drops and then The Wonder Stuff, died following a motorbike accident. Voted the best drummer on the planet in a NME poll in 1989, earlier in 2007 his legend was again honoured by BBC6 when a poll named him the UK’s best drummer in living memory. Following the Stuffies split in 1994, Martin joined forces with Malc Treece and Paul Clifford to form WeKnowWhereYouLive, quitting a year later to join his brother in a management company looking after Reef, A and A Hundred Reasons. When the Stuffies reformed in 2000, Martin then spent the four years until their next acrimonious split, as the band’s manager.

However, other than the material recorded with The Wonder Stuff, his musical output remains somewhat overlooked. So, plaudits then to Room 512, the Stuffies unofficial website, who put together It’s Nice To Be Nice, a double album’s worth of WKWYL album demos and live tracks from 1995. Released in the November following Martin’s death with all profits going to CARE, a charity nominated by his family, it’s raised nearly £2500 to date. The CD is still available; hence this little reminder. Consisting of 30 tracks, it makes no bones about the sometimes rough sound quality, the live material taken from audience recordings, but, as the label points out, there are no other, better versions and this is the only place the music is available.

Actually, the quality isn’t as bad as you might fear. Sure the live numbers are echoey in places, but they’re also mostly pretty clear and sharp and certainly capture the band’s stage energy, the live version of Made Of Water bringing out the folksy influences far more than the studio demo.

Having released two singles, the Beatles influenced furious energy of Don’t Be Too Honest and the swampy bluesy spoken vocal Draped (recorded with Martin but released after his departure), with the record label losing interest the band split without the album ever appearing.

But playing the demos now, it still sounds fresh and arguably even more relevant to the current indie rock music scene than it was 12 years ago. Certainly there’s plenty here that fans of Biffy Clyro, Funeral For A Friend, Fightstar and A Hundred Reasons would appreciate, Mental Hygiene (imagine a harder Cheap Trick), Drug Type Unknown, the squally bulldozing Turn Off Shut Down Give Up, a throaty punked Cry Baby Killers and the acoustic Confessions Of A Thug all substantially solid numbers. Were it to be released now, the band would undoubtedly find themselves being hailed among the new next big things. It’s time Martin’s and their memory were accorded the praise long overdue. Check out www.room521.com and www.wkwylalbum.co.uk for details on how to get a copy

ALBUMS

KID ROCK -Rock N Roll Jesus (Atlantic)

More recently known as the former Mr Pamela Anderson, the Kid reinvents himself again, ditching his hip hop and rap stylings to play the strutting rock star. And, for a moment, you almost think he’s pulled it off. The title track is a solid balls to the wall belter, Amen a powerful diatribe against religious hypocrisy, racism and the war in Iraq complete with gospel choir while the wistful sexual awakening of All Summer Long borrows the piano line from Werewolves of London and parts of Sweet Home Alabama and marries them to a tip of the hat to Bob Seger’s Night Moves.

But then it’s pretty much downhill as the album lets itself be swamped by the genre’s staple topics of sex, drugs and, well, rock n roll as Rock grinds and thrusts with swaggering boasts of being an insatiable sex god stud, telling his ex he’s now doing the nasty with a girlfriend half her age "and twice as hot" and generally piling on the dirty metal guitar licks and rock cliches. It’s punchy and raunchy enough, but it frequently just feels like an exercise in style simply to prove he can and, after adopting the moral racial high ground one minute, come Sugar he’s rapping out lines that could well be seen as anti-Semitic. And, really, the country cheese of When U Love Someone and the posturing salvation of a good woman’s love on Blue Jeans And A Rosemary really should have been left in the recording studio.
Mike Davies

THE ELEPHANTS -The Elephants (Tapete)

Danish sunny psychedelic summer pop with an electro backdrop, this is pleasant enough with its 60s retro melodies, perky harmonies and tints of Brill Building tunes, Brian Wilson, Wannadies and even a little bit of garage band harmonica. But no amount of theramin, banjo, brass or soulful vocals can lift songs like Ann, 5 Minutes, Shivers or Valentine’s Day beyond the forgettably ordinary.
Mike Davies

THE SHAKY HANDS - The Shaky Hands (Memphis Industries)

Joyous American indie guitar pop custom built for a 60s summer’s day, this could warm the coldest winter’s day with its ramshackle feelgood charm and buoyant vocals. Whales Sing (with whalesong) opens proceedings and from thereon you’re encouraged to tap your feet, drum your fingers on the nearest surface and bounce down the street. On Sunburns they even do the happy whistling for you.

Host Your Day and Hold It Up show they’re not lacking in edge when the mood takes, Like A Bird parades their psychedelic colours while the Eastern vibe of Another World takes you back to the days of Donovan’s mellow yellow epistles to dippy. The songs are probably a bit too roughshod to find mainstream acceptance, but the l