PALOMA FAITH – Do You Want The Truth Or Something Beautiful? (Epic)

An former magician’s assistant, actress (Andrea the Emo in St Trinian’s and Terry Gilliam’s upcoming The Imaginarium Of Dr. Parnassus), dancer and soon to be heard on the new Basement Jaxx album, the Anglo-Spanish singer’s debut album is an intriguing confection of Eartha Kitt, Amy Winehouse, Duffy, Billie Holiday and Shirley Bassey.

Her theatrically mannered slightly squeaky voice stylistically trampolining between r&b, torch soul, jazz, blues, swing and vaudeville, she knows how to sock out a tune and from the opening slinky Tina Turner prowl of Stone Cold Sober and the Gloria Gaynor disco suggestions of  Smoke & Mirrors through the title track’s pantherish ballad with its Bond theme persuasions to Upside Down’s finger-clicking sassy soul swing, the Broadway and gospel infused New York and Stargazer’s harp shimmering contempo dreamy r&b ballad it’s patently obvious that she’s about to become something of a sensation.

Mike Davies

THE VICTORIAN ENGLISH GENTLEMENS CLUB – Love On An Oil Rig (This Is Fake DIY)

Their self-titled debut album saw the Cardiff art school trio parading their B52s, Talking Heads, Gang of Four and Devo influences on songs like Under The Yews,  My Son Spells Backwards and Ban The Gin. Two years on they’re back (though the album was recorded before the line up shuffled and expanded) with the follow up and not a great deal’s changed in the interim. Except they now appear to have added a dose of The Fall and Pixies to the mixture.

Opening with the title track’s abrasive, industrial thrumming meld of squally noise and sliding into Parrot’s angular funk shapes, throbbing basslines, spine jerking rhythms and twitchy vocals, it’s immediately obvious it has no intention of providing anything remotely resembling an easy listen.

But if you’re prepared to work at it, and cover your ears when it gets a bit too scuzzy for comfort and don’t mind the unsettling lyrics, then the driving drum beat and tribal folk rhythms of Watching The Burglars, Periscope Envy’s jittery Talking Heads in extremis, Driver’s Companion’s lurching White Stripes drum clattering blues about the sexual life of a long distance lorry driver reap rewards while the skewed lurching rockabilly that is Bored In Belgium, the subversive shanty Women And Children and the noir surf and paranoid fuzzed rumble of God Save Us From Being So Damn Primitive veer on fractured genius.

Mike Davies

MAPS – Turning The Mind (Mute)

Shortlisted for the Mercury Music Prize with his debut, We Can Create, James Chapman returns with a sophomore album that apparently explores a theme about journeys between mental and emotional extremes and the way chemicals can affect the mind. And no, it’s not a hymn to drugs. Apparently it’s all inspired by Mindfulness, a cognitive therapy that teaches you to turn negative thoughts into positive by accepting things as they are.

Well, let’s hope it works because, while there’s some pretty electro melodies dotted around and Chapman occasionally coats catchy hooks with splashes of lushness (as on the title track), it doesn’t really even nudge the envelope for dance floor space pop and his voice  is just to anaemic to keep you interested when the songs degenerate into mere doodles. Which happens rather a lot.

It’s not going to have you rushing for the off switch, but even the best tracks, the slightly majestic Ultravox meets Pet Shop Boys of The Note (These Voices), Let Go Of The Fear’s dark disco, and tumbling, squiggly anthemic handclapper Without You aren’t what you’d call substantially memorable and, with a running time of an hour patience will be exhausted long before it ends.

Mike Davies

JUST JACK – All Night Cinema (Mercury)

Sounding particularly weedy when he played live on Britain’s Got More Talent, Jack Allsopp's second album delivers eleven tunes that do little to sway opinion that he’s just a jobbing synth popster with a nasal speak sing delivery that swiftly wears outs welcome, some ‘clever’ streetsy wordplay and a few decent catchy hooks and arrangements to distract from the sometimes so so nature of the music.

Accentuating the positive, 253 charts a suburban relationship sounding like The Streets with a sense of swing, The Day I Died offers a wryly ironic tale about cashing in your chips just as the 9-5 slog takes on a rosy hue, and Goth In A Disco spins a tongue in cheeky line in cod electro about a Saturday night misfit, bored but with nothing better to do.

However, it more often comes up short. Embers does a nice intro line of strings and flamenco handclaps but the song itself’s a bit limp, Blood lacks the lyrical depth to pull off its tale of an inner city stabbing and has mediocre tune and beats into the bargain, while the Latin beats percussion driven So Wrong and Astronaut’s London slacker send up both have you thinking of an electro minded Madness. He’s got a keen observational eye and when things click he’s got good songs, but there’s just too much filler here for it to stand comparison to his debut.

Mike Davies

DAMON & NAOMI – The Sub Pop Years (202020)

What it says, an anthology of the material the duo recorded for the label between 1995-2002 following the demise of Galaxie 500. Drawn from The Wondrous World of Damon & Naomi, Playback Singers, Damon & Naomi With Ghost and the live Song To The Siren, it’s a journey through lo fi dreamy and tranquil narcotic psychedelia that gathers together such forgotten hushed gems as Judah And The Maccabees, the eight minute Great Wall with its leisurely drift from somnambulant Glen Campbell chill to the electric guitar solo climax, the twangy noir guitar and dark, brooding folk of I’m Yours, Eye of the Storm’s feedback freak folk, In The Sun (where they sound like Nico fronting The Cowboy Junkies) and, of course, their euphoric cover of the Tim Buckley classic. A useful recap for fans and an excellent primer for newcomers, and hopefully a follow up to Within These Walls should be along sometimes next year.

Mike Davies

frYars – Dark Young Hearts (frYarcorp)

Recorded through the Bandstocks scheme whereby fans invest into in exchange for a percentage of the profit, 19 year old Ben Garett’s debut  mixes 80s electro with pop sensibility. Given Depeche Mode's Dave Gahan offered to provide backing vocals for goth-noir single Visitor, he’s clearly impressing the right people. He even got his gran to agree to sing on Happy.

The influences are fairly apparent with echoes of early Human League, Pet Shop Boys, New Order, Heaven 17 and, on a more contemporary note with The Novelist’s Wife, The Streets. But, swivelling from the jaunty strummed flamenco of  A Last Resort  through the dance floor sways of Olive Eyes to the dark pulses of the Lakehouse and the plinketty puppet jerky The Ides, he has the imagination and the emotions to bring something fresh to the blueprints.

Mike Davies

MILLION DEAD – A Song To Ruin (XtraMile)

Calling it a day four years ago, various members have since gone on to other bands while former frontman Frank Turner is carving an impressive solo folk career. The Welsh-Australian outfit’s 2003 debut album has been out of print since their demise but now resurfaces remastered and repackaged along with a DVD featuring the singles promos and their final live show.

Left wing polemic lashed to post hardcore churning guitars, pummelling drums and shouty vocals, Taylor sticks in the knife and peels pack the skin of Walt Disney and Roald Dahl to expose capitalist and social agendas on Pornography For Cowards and Charlie and the Propaganda Myth Machine. At times he sounds like every blood vessel in his throat is about to erupt, but  the title track shows he can could things down too, a welcome relief given the coruscating buzzsaw guitars that chew up most of the tracks. Clearly bred from the Fugazi womb by way of At The Drive In with its howling vocals and churning riffs, the closing The Rise and Fall even breaking into a lengthy lacerating guitar solo, and, as Smiling At Strangers On Trains shows,  they also knew a good hard pop hook when they saw one. The original 10 tracks are all here along with five extras consisting of B sides Medicine and Tonight, rare demo Asthma, Gnostic Front from the album’s Japanese edition and the single, I Gave My Eyes To Stevie Wonder.

Mike Davies

REUBEN – We Should Have Gone To University (XtraMile)

Having thrown in the towel last year, the alt-rock/metal fusion trio has put together a farewell package for loyal fans with a double CD and DVD (with all 15 promo videos) featuring 47 tracks made up of B sides, album demos, sessions and previously unreleased material. While you’d have to be a real devotee to resist the skip button during the mess that is the acoustic version of Deadly Lethal Ninja Assassin, there’s still a veritable treasure trove  of gems, most notably a fiery Miffy In Auschwitz live at the BBC, the single version of the screamy raw Stuck In My Throat, the swaggeringly fine hard pop of unreleased single Blitzkrieg and, by way of a change from the usual festive ditties, a throat shredding, sweary Christmas Is Awesome. A posthumous second class honours all round then.

Mike Davies

DOLORES O’RIORDAN – No Baggage (Cooking Vinyl)

After her rather lovely solo debut, Are You Listening?, anticipation was high for the former voice of the Cranberries’ sophomore release. Unfortunately, reaction to this is likely to be almost the polar opposite. It’s not just that she’s sounding so especially vocally mannered that you remember there were always times when it was a toss up whose warble sounded the more irritating, her breathy trill or Heather Small’s gargling vibrato. No, it’s more that the music itself is so relentlessly stodgy with the indie folk tinges of its predecessor supplanted by laboured bland stadium pop rock and the personal confessionals forged by her mother’s death and the birth of her child replaced by trite, platitude riddled lyrics and lines like  The Journey’s “this is your life, this is your moment”, Fly Through’s  “life, it's a wonderful ride, it's a difficult ride an unpredictable ride”  and, oh dear,  “tranquiliser, desensitise her” from the soporifically dull anthemic wannabe Tranquilizer.

It’s not all terrible; Skeleton recalls the best of her band glories, the rhythmically rolling Switch Off The Moment is sufficiently liltingly melodic to distract from her vocal acrobatics, the hand percussion and Native American tribal touches to Throw Your Arms Around Me prove hypnotic and the simple Satie-like piano arrangement of Lunatic perfectly complements its poignancy.  In the end though, the decision to re-record the debut’s Apple Of My Eye merely reinforces the damning by comparison.

Mike Davies

IMOGEN HEAP - Ellipse (Epic)

She does like to take her time. It took three years to make her solo debut after the demise of Frou Frou, then another seven for the follow up. Now, four years later comes album number three. Unfortunately the creative spark would appear to have diminished along with public interest. Her arty electropop has always been of the coffee table variety, but it used to have a twinkling sophistication that lifted it above aural wallpaper. No longer. This is all pleasant but bland and dated, the tunes often sounding like they’re auditioning for B division American teen soap operas. Lyrically too her edge has been dulled, so that now she’s singing the healing powers of time and a clutch of other clichés.

There’s occasional flashes of past inventiveness, like the found background chatter on breathy piano ballad closer Half Life and the pizzicato buzzing neurotic feel of Aha, but then Earth sounds like a feeble attempt at pastiching Lily Allen while Bad Body Double takes an intriguing idea about the dodgy alter-ego in the mirror and drains it of any lyrical or musical interest.  A total ellipse of the art, I’m afraid.

Mike Davies

THE LANCASHIRE HOTPOTS – Pot Sounds (Fuss)

A couple of years back I came across a comedy folk album called Never Mind The Hotpots from a Lancashire outfit featuring members by the names of Bernard Thresher Bob Wriggles, Dickie Ticker and Willie Eckerslike. A novelty affair in the manner of the Barron Knights and Wurzels perhaps, but  also very funny and very well sussed, sending up Lancashire misogyny with I Met A Girl On MySpace and regional stereotypes on Chippy Tea and Bitter Lager Cider Ale Stout alongside songs about Firewalls, EBay, Sat Nav, PC World, PSPs, t'Internet, Blue Tooth and (to a tune akin to Matchstick Cats and Dogs) the advantages of Dolby 5.1 while the infuriatingly catchy He's Turned Emo  with its singalong chorus namechecked Jimmy Eat World, Bullet For My Valentine and Fall Out Boy.

I loved it but thought it was just a one off. However, it turns out that the band have also released a live album (2007’s Never Mind The Hotpots – Live At The Citadel) and this studio follow up from 2008.

Again it turns a wry eye on modern British culture and Lancashire life and yet again it shows the guys to have their fingers firmly on the contemporary music scene pulse with references to the likes of Hot Chip, The Killers, and CSS. Live favourite Keys Wallet Phone (a memo about what not to forget when leaving home) opens the set and they proceed wickedly through I Fear Ikea (to the tune of Wild Rover), the George Formby-like I Heart YouTube (about the dangers of surfing for Queen’s Flash) and, pasttching Granddad, Uncle Bernard’s memories of growing up in Lancashire in the 80s. Elsewhere Ruby, Don’t Take Your Love To Town provides the template for the timely file-sharing number Deirdre, Don’t Make The Polar Bears Cry tackles global warming, Esc, Alt F4 offers advice on how to quickly shut down the porn sites when the wife returns unexpectedly, borrowing from the Rawhide theme Chav rounds up the hoodies and their breed (though the Jade Goody reference is now a touch unfortunate), The Beer Olympics envisions getting bladdered for Team GB, BOGOFF goes down the supermarket, On The Box is basically their equivalent to Springsteen’s 57 Channels (And Nothin’ On), leaving Angels to provide the musical template for The Girl From Bargain Booze’s temptation tale of  cheap alcohol induced adultery. Sheer genius from start to finish.

Mike Davies