Those of you looking for the feedback drenched white noise of career highlight Ladies and Gentlemen We Are Floating in Space (’97) may possibly be disappointed by the sheer harmonic accessibility of Songs In A&E but bear with it as there is much to love here, and if Jason Pierce doesn’t really have the necessary vocal presence to warrant its prominence in the mix, he definitely has the song writing skills necessary to create stand out tracks like ‘Death Take Your Fiddle’. Oh, and if you’re looking for insights into his near death bout of pneumonia in 2005 don’t, pretty much everything here was written prior to the illness.
Ruby Palmer

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There can’t be many people left who don’t know that The Raconteurs are the Jack White and Brendan Benson led Detroit outfit who mashed 60's rock, garage and Beatles style pop into Led Zeppelin riffs and clonking great blues stompers on their debut album Broken Boy Soldiers. Well now you can also add county, folk and psychedelia to the mix as the band delight in nicking whatever they damn well please from the past and recycling it into a huge great genre-mashing melting pot of an album, accusations of retro-thievery being bypassed by the simple expedient of it all being bloody huge fun.
Ruby Palmer

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Usually the last resort of the artistically bereft, or the contractually constricted, the covers album can occasionally throw up moments of genius (track down Cat Powers complete deconstruction of ‘Satisfaction’), but seldom makes for a satisfying whole until now, as this nu-folk strummer and one third of electronic mavericks Fridge, delivers twelve stripped down covers of tracks by (amongst others) Tortoise, Yo La Tengo, PJ Harvey, Bjork and, lord help us, the Aphex Twin. That he succeeds so admirably is entirely testament to his cracking taste in music and his remarkable musical ability, playing and producing absolutely everything.
Drew Bass

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Ask most people what they think of Half Man Half Biscuit (if indeed they know who they are at all), and they will generally refer to Nigel Blackwell and Co. as a ‘comedy punk band’, which is so far wide of the mark it’s, well quite funny actually. Yes they are very funny, and yes they do occasionally sound like an even more ramshackle version of The Fall (never more so than on album closer and album highlight ‘National Shite Day’), but, as Blackwell himself admits on ‘Lord Herefords Knob’, ‘all of our songs sound the same’ and that’s because what matters here are the acerbic, observant, scathingly intelligent lyrics.
Ruby Palmer

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The second album by Thomas Holst, Keld Dam Schmidt and Mads Bødker (their first, Fabula, was released in 2004), Avellaneda’s ambient mix of traditional instruments, glitchy electronica, cyclical classical passages and folk will be immediately appealing to anyone who likes their music both angular and chilled, and will definitely appeal to admirers of bands like amiina and Efterklang. Ambient music’s reputation has taken a battering over the last decade, so it’s great to see bands like Skyphone reclaiming this much maligned genre and giving it a much needed shot in the arm. Lush, slightly skewed and altogether beautiful.
Drew Bass

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Never the coolest of the UK’s late ‘60s/early ‘70s rock acts, quite possibly due to their penchant for belting out power ballads (like their massive hit cover of ‘Love Hurts’), but there’s no doubting they were up there with AC/DC in the riff driven rocker stakes, and could crank it out when they wanted to, something they have continued to do for forty years now, releasing thirty odd albums along the way. So what do Nazareth 2008 sound like? Well more or less the same, which given Dan McCafferty’s much aped, throat shredding, metal yelp is bloody remarkable, and ‘Liar’, ‘Warning’ and ‘Road Trip’ are as good as anything they've ever done.
Ray Harper

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One problem with reviewing huge great wobbly piles of CD’s in short order is that less immediate albums regularly get overlooked and don’t actually register until it’s often too late. Enter Subtle. This has been out for a little while now but if you haven’t heard it yet do yourself a favour and do so. Imagine, if you can, a melding of the Beta Bands loose genre mashing psychedelia, Parliament Funkadelic’s groove driven ‘fonk’, a more than passing acquaintance with the clanking glitchy end of electronica and definite collective ear for what’s catchy and what’s eyebrow hiking. Doesn’t sound ‘subtle’ at all does it? And yet...
Drew Bass

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As the major label end of the record industry continues to self-destruct in front of our very eyes bands continue to look for other ways to get their music out there and Genuine Sun must surely be the first band ever to be promoted alongside penetrants and lubricants (and no, Blaster Chemicals are nothing to do with sex aids), but if that means more people might get to hear the grown up rock of Return then that’s no bad thing. AOR gets a pretty bad press in the UK’s ‘cool’ obsessed music media but done well it’s capable of shifting tons of units and Genuine Sun’s Foreigner-esque melodic rock is certainly done well.
Ray Harper

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Okay, so lyrically things don’t extend much past things being wrong - like ladies doing him wrong or being wrongly accused of some wrongdoing or other - but you no more buy an album by a bluesy power trio for the depth of the wordplay than you pick up a Fifty Cent album for the feminist tendencies on display therein, nope the guitar’s the thing here and make no mistake McCormack has a fiery way with a string and a plectrum, and if this isn’t enough to tempt you how about the last thing Rory Gallagher ever played on – whipping up a typically wicked piece of bottleneck wizardry on ‘Falsely Accused’.
Ray Harper

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Originally founded by Lou Barlow - after being ignominiously chucked out of Dinosaur Jr - and Eric Gaffney as an excuse to fanny about with found sounds, tape hiss and then glue the ensuing mess together with some rather spectacular songs this, their fourth studio album would be the last to feature Gaffney (which in turn allowed for the full flowering of the song-writing talents of Jason Loewenstein on follow up Bakesale), Bubble And Scrape mashes up gentle balladry with in your face racket and downright mental stuff and was the first real sign that Sebadoh were a proper band rather than a glorified side project.
Ruby Palmer

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The follow up to 2003's Legend Of A Mind collection this continues the story of Decca Records between 1967 and 1975 plundering the Decca/Deram/Nova archives for esoteric nuggets by the labels lesser known artists including Egg, East Of Eden, Darryl Way's Wolf, The Deviants, Touch and early Steve Hillage vehicle Kahn – although bigger names like Caravan, Moody Blues and Thin Lizzy are also present and correct. The real treats here however, as is often the case when digging through the vaults, are the genuine peculiarities such as Tintern Abbey and Principal Edwards, and the accompanying booklet is particularly excellent.
Ray Harper

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Finding your way into the labyrinthine Captain Beefheart back catalogue (including later compilations), can be a disheartening task for any new traveller, certainly you will want a copy of the flawed masterpiece Trout Mask Replica and the later, some believe better, Shiny Beast (Bat Chain Puller), but what else? Well this collection of tracks from The Magic Band's earliest releases, Safe As Milk and the unreleased It Comes to You in a Plain Brown Wrapper (an abbreviated form of which became the second release Strictly Personal) is a fine example of the raw bluesy/R&B the band excelled in before it all went a bit ‘fast ‘n bulbous’.
Ray Harper

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