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Steve Hillage is cropping up everywhere just now, this time alongside Evan ‘Bluetech’ Marc, weaving his trademark warm and mellow psychedelic trance-like guitar washes with Marc’s ambient techno tinged dub, the results meld seamlessly into a hugely atmospheric underwater themed journey which is best heard in the continuous mix (an unmixed version is available from the Somnia website), and is well worth tracking down in the lovely signed and numbered limited edition slip-case, printed with soy inks on recycled paper, sewn and sealed with wax. If you love your chill-out dub infused and dreamlike, track this delightful album down.
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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Ostensibly an alt-country effort by what might politely be described as an indie super-ish group (featuring members of Mojave 3, Chapterhouse and Seafood), The Problem Of Knowledge makes no attempt whatsoever to grab your attention, gently meandering into a full on dawdle and sounding not unlike a somnambulant Leonard Cohen in places. But Holton’s Opulent Oog reward repeat listens as the fragile beauty of the songs reluctantly reveal themselves and aside from some ill-advised Jetson’s sound effects on ‘Fountains Of Hate’ The Problem Of Knowledge languidly insinuates itself under your skin. Music to loiter to. Ruby Palmer

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Fans of Hiorthøy’s glitchy dislocated debut album Hei or his more dance-floor friendly but equally demented and off-kilter live outing Live Shet will be delighted to discover that the Norwegian musician/artist/designer has drawn on elements of both to create the slightly more accessible but no less intriguing My Last Day. Songs still lurch and stutter like discombobulated Weebles but now they exhibit a lo-fi melodic sway, Hiorthøy’s jazz, folk and hip hop influences apparent but never overpowering. This is not likely to launch him into the limelight as it is still an acquired taste, but have a listen, we reckon it’s a taste worth acquiring.
Drew Bass

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Re-issued alongside the better known (and better selling) Pills ‘N’ Thrills & Bellyaches this is actually well worth picking up, if you don’t already have it, to find out where Pills ‘N’ Thrills came from, including Monday classics like ‘Lazy Itis’, ‘Mad Cyril’, ‘Wrote for Luck’ and, in this expanded form, possibly their finest moment ‘Hallelujah’. Re-mastered and now stretching to two discs Bummed features the original album the ‘Rave On’ E.P. a bushel of bonus bits, bobs and B-sides and an entire disc of extended mixes such as the Vince Clarke remix of ‘W.F.L’ and the rare promo-only Deadstock mix of ‘Hallelujah’.
Ruby Palmer

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You may feel that the mid 2000’s has spawned some of the worst music since the ‘80s and is therefore only suitable for going back to your record collection and digging out those old classics and you would, at least in part, be right. But before we start tolling the death knell of popular music let us not forget that artists like Bjork, Nick Cave, Aphex Twin and the ever reliable PJ Harvey continue to view each new release as a challenge, a way to revisit, reinvent and revitalise their music and this is just such an album of beautiful, stripped down, piano driven laments that positively drip with emotional depth. Is there no end to this womens talents?


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This classy jazz trio record is currently only available in the UK as an import but is fully deserving of coverage here, not least because Hornsby is still highly underrated in Britain, possibly because we tend to frown on technically accomplished musicians these days. Hot on the heels of a fine collaboration with bluegrass legend Ricky Skaggs, Camp Meeting is dominated by joyful interpretations of modern jazz standards by greats such as Monk and Coltrane. The few Hornsby originals are also first-rate, however, with the title track’s mid-point mutation into a deep-funk groove sure to put a smile on your face.


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The second release by Honeyroot – who are Glen Gregory, best known as the suited and booted front man of Heaven 17, and Keith Lowndes, less well known former ABC member. This is aimed squarely at the more ambient, chilled end of the market (think Air, or Morcheeba) and there’s no doubting much of The Sun Will Come would sound great whilst watching the sun rise, or set, blissed out on a golden stretch of beach. Using five different vocalists means it plays more like a various artists collection at times but as most of the best chill out CD’s are just that, perhaps that’s what they had in mind.


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Housed in a sleeve which will have old Uriah Heep fans reaching for their vinyl copies of Look At Yourself (for the uninitiated both sport a mirror), Ken Hensley, ex-Heep keyboard maestro, has crafted a good old fashioned concept album about being a rock musician in the seventies, although his decision to use a variety of vocalists means the album does occasionally lack cohesion, the tracks that work best being those fronted by Norwegian Jern Lande whose David Coverdale style of emoting best suit Hensley’s songwriting. It won’t worry the UK charts but old Heep-sters and Euro-rock fans will find much here to enjoy.


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Featuring, for many, the holy grail of Hawkwind line-ups (Robert Calvert, Dave Brock, Nik Turner, Lemmy, Dik Mik, Del Dettmar and Simon King), Space Ritual – a live album recorded whilst promoting their Doremi Fasol Latido studio album - found the band fully embracing their audio-visual space fantasies with dancers, spoken word interludes, full blown psychedelic light shows and a wall of thundering trance rock wig-outs which still sound as unhinged as they did in 1972. If you only ever own one Hawkwind album this should be it, especially now with extra tracks and the suitably lo-fi videos for singles ‘Silver Machine’ and ‘Urban Guerilla’.


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Hands up who thought Shaun Ryder had blown it? An inspired Gorillaz appearance aside Shaun hasn’t recorded much worth hearing for a very, very long time indeed – the hit and miss days of Black Grape in fact - so news of a Happy Mondays (partial) reunion left many people seriously underwhelmed, but it appears the newly cleaned up Ryder has found a massive dose of inspiration without the aid of chemical assistance as this swaggers around like a dealer at the back of the Hacienda. Ryder is in fine, if typically obtuse, lyrical form, the tunes recalling the baggy grooves of prime time Mondays, call the cops!


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The idiotically underrated Ex-Mott main-main seems to be on something of a roll of late following two excellent albums (The Artful Dodger – criminally out of print - and Rant) with yet another cracker and yet, his core fan-base aside, this album will undoubtedly go the way of the previous two, i.e. no-bloody-where. As so called ‘legacy’ artists queue up to hark back to ‘the day’ via avalanches of re-issues Hunter continues to move forward, creating new and vibrant material, proving himself to be a songwriter of no little skill, providing rather more bite and thought provoking lyrical content than his hero Dylan can muster nowadays.


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Having finally replaced its knackered old stereo several days beforehand, TMOnline was seriously concerned that it might have been sold a dud during the opening moments of Tongues. Never fear: bleeps, bloops, judders and all manner of sonic disruption are part-and-parcel of the deeply curious soundworld fashioned here by veteran percussionist Steve Reid (he played with Fela Kuti, you know) and Kieran Hebden, otherwise known as one third of Four Tet. Recorded live with no overdubs or edits, Tongues is a challenging work that at its best fuses a radical jazz feel with cutting-edge technology to jaw-dropping effect.


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The second batch of Hillage re-releases - ensuring his Virgin back catalogue is now once again available, re-mastered and featuring extra tracks - includes this ‘78 release which is chock full of the sort of trance inducing wig-outs that would later find a welcome home in dance venues alongside bands like Orbital, Eat Static and Banco De Gaia – albeit shorn of Hillage’s Syd Barrett-esque vocals. Occasionally Hillage lets his old rock roots show (like on the live trot through old chestnut ‘Not Fade Away’ recorded at the Rainbow in 1977), but tracks like ‘Ether Ships’, 'Leylines To Glassdom’ and ‘The Glorious Om Riff’ still sound wonderfully narcotic.


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The opening salvo from the first four (of eight) re-mastered and expanded Virgin re-releases, Fish Rising was Hillage's first solo effort after leaving Gong – although it features plenty of old Gong-sters plus the likes of Dave Stewart and Henry Cow’s Lindsay Cooper – this is arguably the birth place of space rock (Ozric Tentacles have sculpted a fine career from album opener ‘Solar Musick Suite’) mixing acid rock with Canterbury jazz to stratosphere scraping effect. The best of the remaining three releases, although entirely different, is ambient classic Rainbow Dome Musick, which would later prove to be so influential to The Orb.


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OK, so it’s not everything Peej recorded for Peel, more a 12 track snapshot taken from various sessions spread over her many visits with the venerable DJ. In purely VFM terms three of the songs here - ‘Wang Dang Doodle’, ‘Naked Cousin’ and ‘Losing Ground’ - are of the non-album variety, so fans will be happy to pick it up for this trio alone. The rest may be album numbers but are delivered in Harvey’s usual viscerally unhinged live style which, as anyone who has encountered the angular banshee onstage will already be aware, infuse her recorded material with an altogether more, erm, carnal edge. Cracking stuff.


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A massive 3 CD trawl through the various guises Steve Harley has adopted over the years, by far the most impressive and unorthodox being his gothic glam/folk debut incarnation. If he had recorded nothing else but debut album The Human Menagerie – featuring magnificently overblown, eastern European tinged, gothic classical lunacy like ‘Sebastian’ and ‘Death Trip’ – his place in pop history would have been secure, but he still had the violin-drenched The Psychomodo up his sleeve featuring the loopy pop of 'Mr Soft' and one of the finest trio of album closers – ‘Bed In The Corner’, ‘Sling It’ and ‘Tumbling Down’ - ever recorded.


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Robyn Hitchcock’s UK tour earlier this year with The Venus 3 – effectively a part-time band for supergroup escapees like REM’s Peter Buck – occasioned some of the great man’s most fiery performances in a long career. Along the way, he debuted a number of fine new songs, translated to disc here in a blaze of energy and electricity. ‘Adventure Rocket Ship’ achieves vertical lift-off, while the exultant title track rolls home on a bed of parping horns. Hitchcock’s gift is undiminished, although the fact that large parts of his back catalogue remain unavailable on CD suggests it’s still not widely acknowledged.


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It must have genuinely been very trying being George Harrison, imagine being in the biggest band in the world, ever, but not being either Lennon or McCartney (Ringo always seemed happy just to be along for the ride). Then we have his solo years positively awash with pious pronouncements made from his massive country house about how we don’t need material objects but spiritual peace. But, as with Dylan, if you step around the tiresome preaching there is wonderful, heartfelt music to be found and this newly expanded reissue contains ample proof that in any other band Harrison would have been hailed a genius.


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Part of a reissue series which also includes ‘83s The Luxury Gap, ‘84s How Men Are and this, possibly their finest moment, Penthouse and Pavement (’81). Created just after Ian Craig Marsh and Martyn Ware’s acrimonious spilt from The Human League, P&P would become the blueprint for much of the synthetic sound that would underpin the entire era, new vocalist Glenn Gregory perfectly suiting the angular clipped electronic robo-funk wrested from Mare and Marsh’s boxes of tricks. All three releases have been re-mastered and boast bonus tracks – pointing the way for catalogue releases digital downloads include further bonus tracks.


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Ostensibly intended to be approached as a ‘single album with two sides’ (a bit like an old vinyl record really), one side featuring a blend of Stones type-rock, funk and blues, the other hosting a more downbeat and melancholy vibe, the whole eighteen track shebang clocking in at just over an hour in length. Grouping material this way works pretty well, allowing you to fit the sounds to your mood (although it would be interesting to see which album is played more often, certainly the upbeat CD made more repeat visits to the player here), and if there’s any justice this will raise Harpers profile in the UK.


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Kill Your Own (V2)

This album has received some less than glowing reviews of late, and in truth Hundred Reasons did lose their way slightly after such a promising debut in Ideas Above Our Station, but ignore the nay-sayers as this, their fourth album, is actually a belter, balancing the expected ear shredding hardcore with more than enough melody to keep all those sniffy emo haters at bay. 'Broken Hands', 'Feed The Fire' and the title track are the most immediate moments but there’s a good deal of depth here, as repeat listens reveal, and Colin Doran even proves he has a decent voice on him when he gives the bellowing a breather.


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Heligoland
Pitcher, Flask & Foxie Moxie (Independent Redords)

The second album by Tim Friese-Greene - the man who occupied the producers chair for classic Talk Talk albums Spirit Of Eden and The Colour Of Spring - once again taking the low key release route, which is a great pity because this is a truly wonderful album, full of maddeningly infectious melodies, laid over what can only really be described as multi-layered soundscapes. Not unlike Tom Waits Swordfishtrombones in it’s wildly experimental, clonking and lurching, occasionally arrhythmic scope, and anyone that mentions Darcy Bustle in a song about Semantics has got to be worth a few minutes of anyone’s time.


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The Human League
Original Remixes & Rarities (EMI)

If, like us, you loved the League Unlimited Orchestra remix of the mighty Dare (entitled Love And Dancing), then this is almost certainly going to float your boat as the 12” remix format suited the League’s angular synth-pop like Keith Harris's right hand fits the loveable Orville. This will also satisfy all you Human League train-spotters as the vast majority of the material here has never made it onto CD before, or only as extra's on single releases. Whether Oakey and Co. will ever again scale the dizzy musical heights of the Dare era is a moot point, but this is a timely reminder of just what a great pop band they really were back in the day.


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Luke Haines
Luke Haines Is Dead (EMI)

Possibly not quite as deceased as the title of this huge great treble CD retrospective would have you believe, Luke Haines Is Dead is actually just a succinct way of rounding up, and popping a neat full stop behind, the grumpy anaemic looking bugger’s work to date, and in truth what work! Busying himself in the margins since the late ‘80s – initially in the Servants, then signed to Hut in ‘92 as The Auteurs and finally solo – poison penning such lost classics as How To Hate The Working Classes, Bugger Bognor, Essex Boot Boys and Unsolved Child Murder, a grim-but-amused Morrissey who didn’t flee to L.A. in fact


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Imogen Heap
Speak For Yourself (Magaphonic)

Fans of the OC will doubtless already be aware of recent single Hide And Seek featuring that distinctive vocodered Laurie Anderson meets Alanis Morissette skip-yodel meets ethereal Kate Bush vocal style. Indeed it’s with Kate Bush that the most useful parallels can be drawn, as Heap writes, plays and produces all her own work – in her Pro-Tool driven London studio – and is prone to the same sort of bold experimental mucking about, the same scant regard for what is current or hip, the same attention to detail (the CD packaging is excellent), it’s probably about time she was accorded the same levels of success


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Ed Harcourt
Elephants Graveyard (Heavenly)

Ed Harcourt seems to have slipped past the CD radar here at TotalMusic towers so it wasn’t with any real enthusiasm that this was slipped into the communal tray, but the sheer bravura eclecticism of the material soon began to seep through the office fug as howled vocals and sheets of guitar noise vied with torch songs, ballads, Nick Drake style folk and spooked electronic beats, which is all the more remarkable when you consider that this is a collection of odds and sods, b-sides and unreleased little gems which will only be made available via download (28 tracks for £7.99, which sounds like a bargain to us). Snap It Up


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The Howling Hex
You Can’t Beat Tomorrow: CD & DVD (Drag City)

Essentially Neil Michael Hagerty with mates (in this case The Theatre Fire) doing what Hagerty has done since his early days in Pussy Galore and long lunatic stint as one half of Royal Trux, i.e. arse about, sometimes engagingly, sometimes wilfully and sometimes teeth gratingly badly. In this instance things generally lean towards the first two of these instances - despite sounding like it was recorded in a bag. Comes complete with what can best be described as a lo-fi slacker road movie complete with dismally drawn cartoons, badly lit performances and loads of unrelated film clips, in fact just the thing for the local neighbourhood Wire fan.

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Alan Hull
We Can All Swing Together (Sanctuary)

Another sadly missed, and wildly underrated artist – if nothing else this constant avalanche of reissues allows us to revisit some of the, often overlooked, highpoints of the recent past - who is ripe for rediscovery. Of course there can be few people who haven’t heard tracks like Lady Eleanor by his most famous band Lindisfarne, but precious few will have heard his, often superior, solo material (or indeed his early work with the Chosen Few and Skip Bifferty), something this collection happily remedies. Hull died of a heart attack in 1995, leaving a small but fine collection of albums and this is a great starting point


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Kim Hiorthøy
Live Shet (Smalltown Supersound)

Kim Hiorthøy’s debut album Hei (2000) was a remarkable album that left many a reviewer (including this one) gob-smacked. Mixing beats, electronics, hip-hop, jazz and folk music Hiorthøy created something pretty damn unique. What he didn’t create however was anything like a faithful reproduction of his live material which was altogether more, erm, banging. Cue Live Shet, not a live album as such but a studio recording of the man’s favourite slices of his live set, and what a cracking blast of rug cutting mayhem it is. If you only buy one Scandinavian techno break-beat album this year make sure this is it.

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The Heptones
Peace And Harmony - Anthology (Trojan)

Due to the positive avalanche of repackaged material issuing forth from Trojan of late, it’s easy to miss the odd little gem (like the recent brilliant Am I Black Enough collection). However we couldn’t let a collection by the nearly men of reggae slide past without comment, especially as it comes with news that the original line-up may be performing again. In short the Heptones could have been as big as The Wailers. That they weren’t is down to poor judgment and even worse luck, that they were undoubtedly capable of doing so is attested to here in spades. Essential.

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Hayley Hutchinson
Independently Blue (Gut)

Somewhere in the deep dark depths of the 70s ‘pop’ music began it’s inexorable slide into the realms of the trivial, pop ceased to mean the Beatles and became short hand for soulless anodyne slop like Blue, Boyzone and (insert your own money spinning tripe here). All of which leaves Hayley Hutchinson with something of a problem as this is resolutely, no arguments, ‘pop’, the sort of proper grown up ‘pop’ made by Mary Hopkins or Carol King – she’s already been championed by Terry Wogan – and in all honesty sits about as comfortably in the current marketplace as Germaine Greer would on the cover of Nuts


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Hangface
Freak Show (K-Ent)

It probably goes without saying nowadays that the words ‘hard rock band’ will inevitably be followed by the words ‘shite cover art’, and Hangface are no exception. But putting aside for the moment the naked fish woman being netted in a pond (or indeed the naked lass, with the band tattooed on her back, perched on a stool getting her wobbly bits sprayed), these Norwegian rockers are actually not at all bad – stylistically paddling in the same gene pool as the Stone Temple Pilots, Alice in Chains or Pearl Jam – the only real problem is the feeling that they might just possibly be ten years too late


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Trevor Horn
Trevor Horn Compilation (ZTT)

Like him or loathe him (and many undoubtedly blame him for that whole ‘everything but the kitchen sink’ production style beloved of many ‘80s acts), only a churlish luddite would argue against the beauty of Art Of Noises Moments In Love, against the disco grandeur of Grace Jones’ Slave To The Rhythm or indeed the pop perfection of ABC’s Poison Arrow. Buggles may have been horrible (as indeed were Dollar) and many a prog fan rues the day Horn loaded massed string stabs upon Yes but if you can remain still during Frankie’s Two Tribes you should probably see a doctor immediately.

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Billie Holiday
The Essential (Metro)

Dead of cirrhosis by the ludicrously early age of 44 Billie Holiday is the stuff of legends. If however the Lady Day you know is from the dodgy Diana Ross film Lady Sings The Blues then this double CD collection - with excellent notes - which cherry picks moments throughout her tragically truncated career, will hopefully go some way towards restoring the balance between the tragic person and the wondrous vocalist. Compared to today’s technically adept ‘soul’ singers (from Carey to Stone) the results are as different as fish fingers and fresh salmon. As Holiday herself once opined ‘anything I do sing… It’s part of my life’.

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