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Regardless of what many a reviewer is saying about the career of Adrian ‘Tricky Kid’ Thaws he hasn’t actually ever made a ‘bad’ album – although some are certainly patchier than others – he just set the bar so high with his debut Maxinquaye that he has been playing catch up ever since. Which brings us to this, his eighth, album and once again it’s loaded with woozy, grimy dub-ridden, lyrically obtuse gems (only Tricky would rhyme Duracell, Durex and vex), his trademark spooked whisper occasionally even breaking into actual singing alongside a slew of guest vocalists. If you want to know where Burial got his best ideas look no further. Drew Bass

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The seventh album from Nottingham’s premier croon-poppers – and their first since 2003's decidedly patchy Waiting For The Moon - sees a reduction in the line-up (the band are now just a trio, Stuart Staples, Neil Fraser and David Boulter), and a relocation across the channel to the home of Brie and wild boar salami, but no real change in the basic approach, which will be a massive relief to the faithful, especially those worried by the departure of the man behind their trademark lush orchestrations (multi-instrumentalist Dickon Hinchliffe), long term ‘sticks watchers even mentioning this in conjunction with late nineties high point Curtains.
Ruby Palmer

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It must be pretty crowed inside the head of Victor Axelrod as Ticklah also resides therein and it’s this meeting of mind(s) that’s produced this modern, dub heavy, roots-reggae classic – no real surprise when you discover he not only has a collaboration list as long as your arm (Lily Allen, Mark Ronson, Amy Winehouse) but was also a prime mover behind the Dub Side Of The Moon album. As if all this roots bounty wasn’t enough Axelrod also tackles reggae versions of Eddie Palmieri Latin classics ‘Mi Sonsito’ and ‘Si Hecho Palante’, both of which leave you keen to hear him have a crack at a whole album of Latin-reggae.
Drew Bass

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One of the most thought provoking of the US hardcore metal outfits System Of A Down have been cranking out high speed, high quality, highly politicised, Middle Eastern influenced rock since the mid ‘90s. Now on indefinite hiatus the bands Serj Tankian is the first to surface with solo material and, no surprises given that he is the vocalist, it sounds a lot like SOAD. The odd scales, manic interludes, heavy riffing and ear for melody are all here, as are the pointed lyrical barbs and some nods to classical and music hall, apparently the talented bugger also played pretty much everything himself as well.


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Two years after the by-turns gorgeous and muted acoustic effort Front Parlour Ballads, Richard Thompson plugs back in for the rollicking Sweet Warrior. Much has been made of the Iraq War-baiting ‘Dad’s Gonna Kill Me’, but it’s only one highlight of a set that also yields the stately ‘Poppy Red’, maritime-flavoured adultery tale ‘Johnny’s Far Away’, and the expansive ‘Guns Are the Tongues’. Elsewhere, RT guitar obsessives will be kept happy by the clawing solos and riffsmanship of opener ‘Needle and Thread’ on an album rich in witty wordplay, fine musicianship (take a bow, drummer Michael Jerome) and sheer bloody enthusiasm.


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Don’t let any of the revisionist’s tell you differently, dance music aside, the ‘80s was a musical black hole, overproduced, over-dressed and thankfully so over. That’s not to say there was no worthwhile pop music being made, Mark Hollis’ Talk Talk (along with bands like Japan), were creating great music despite the hideously, and almost immediately, dated drum and keyboard sounds, and this collection shows a band swiftly outgrowing the likes of Duran, Spandau and Co. Hollis is one of the great lost writers. VFM is added in the form of a second DVD of videos, some actually pretty bloody good.


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Master manipulator Amon Tobin eschews his usual 'record sampling' style for a more organic approach using microphones to capture found (and created) sounds much like the ‘foley artists’ – those who create sound effects for films – the album is named for. Constructed from insects, animals, machines, vehicles, clockwork toys, chick peas and even some actual musical instruments (courtesy of the Kronos Quartet), the results are exciting, brooding, beautiful, claustrophobic, occasionally tumbling away into indulgent cacophony and, given that this is Amon Tobin, driven by huge great walloping beats.


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One of the downsides of refusing to be pigeonholed, like Trans Am’s 'guitar racket meets krautrock approach' – which has often seen the band alienating dance fans whilst leaving traditional rock fans cold – is you’re never quite sure where to look for the albums in record shops. Sex Change does little to address this with yet more riffage strewn electronica lurching from the heavy metal thunder of ‘Shining Path’ to the Electro squelching of ‘Obscene Strategies’ and motorik beats of ‘Exit Management Solution’. Still, who needs record shops when you've got downloads, and you've gotta love a track entitled ‘Tesco V. Sainsbury’s’.


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Long a cult act in their native Australia, The Triffids were just beginning to win greater recognition on the festival scene when they disbanded in 1989. Now, eight years after the death of singer/guitarist David McComb, Domino looks set to win the band a wider audience through an extensive reissue campaign. Their penultimate studio album, 1987’s Calenture is a strange but alluring beast, encompassing quirky rock, soul and string-backed melancholia. Augmented here by B-sides and a bonus disc of demos, the album is heaving with well-crafted songs – not least the gorgeous ‘Save What You Can’ – and is eminently worthy of (re)discovery.


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Collected from the bands latter years with EMI (although live cuts like ‘Psycho Killer’, ‘Burning Down The House’ and ‘Girlfriend Is Better’ from Stop Making Sense allow the compilers to dip into the bands Sire/Warner years), these years are generally held to be the bands most overtly commercial. It’s hard to imagine who will actually buy this with so many compilations already out there but there is absolutely no doubting the quality of the content with tracks cherry picked from Little Creatures, True Stories and Naked the latter clearly signposting the direction in which Byrne was headed next.


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Listen to any ‘classic oldies’ rock station for a few days and the chances are that you will eventually hear one or more of 10CC’s handful of prime-era chart-frighteners. ‘Art For Art’s Sake’, ‘Things We Do For Love’ and several others from the same period are so catchy, sonically-polished and damn well listenable that their appeal is never likely to diminish. As this double-CD of hits, rarities and solo/off-shoot tracks further confirms, 10CC – Graham Gouldman, Eric Stewart, Lol Creme and Kevin Godley – were master craftsmen of a high order who never forgot that pop music should, above all, be fun.


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Those of us that ‘get’ Tortoise have been waiting for this 3 CD/1 DVD box-set for some time – real train-spotter stuff, rare singles, foreign releases, tour EP’s compilation tracks and unreleased material – and the results have been well worth the wait. Having devoured this melange of lo-fi, minimalist, avant-electronic, dub-jazz in one sitting this reviewer then insisted two friends do likewise and found himself being roundly castigated. They are of course fools, and probably like Dire Straits. Oh, and the packaging, photography etc is a thing of beauty, and not, as one ex-friend would have it, ‘mundane black and white cobblers’.


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Named after a quote from Clockwork Orange, The Headlight Serenade is ostensibly a jazz recording, but as with most worthwhile music being made in the margins these days that is far from the whole story as unsettling electronica and skittering percussive penumbra rub shoulders with traditional piano/double bass/drum line-up, creating soundscapes that are both beautiful and sinister. You occasionally find yourself wishing things would break into a full scale clatter (last track ‘Fear Survivor’ has a bash but even this wilful racket slides into subtle piano motifs), this is however a minor gripe about an otherwise fine album.


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English post-punk singer/songwriter Dan Treacy – the man/band behind the splendid ‘Where's Bill Grundy Now?’ EP (’78), home to unsung punk classic ‘Part Time Punks’ – has been battling a myriad of demons over the last twenty-odd years. With mental health, heroin, amphetamine and alcohol addiction problems, brushes with the police and periods of sleeping rough Treacy’s is not a life tinged with pop star glamour and as you might imagine, given his recent past, this is not an easy album to listen to. At it’s best it sounds not unlike a melancholic amalgam of Syd Barrett and Robert Wyatt at it’s worst it’s just bloody sad.

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Naked (EMI)

Reissued as a double-disc set featuring the album in both remastered stereo and surround sound versions, Naked marked the band’s retreat from the mainstream after the MTV-friendly perfect pop of Little Creatures. Frontman David Byrne’s then-burgeoning passion for African and Brazilian music led to some beguiling arrangements; ‘(Nothing But) Flowers’ is particularly striking, all congas and rippling highlife guitar. The horn-driven ‘Blind’ and bonus track ‘Sax & Violins’ are the other top picks from a set that suffers from a mid-album sag but ultimately established a template for Byrne’s post-Heads debut, the remarkable Rei Momo.


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Tortoise & Bonnie Prince Billy
The Brave And The Bold (Domino)

You might imagine Will (Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy) Oldham and Chicago post rock experi-mentalists Tortoise’s first excursion together would be a leftfield mishmash of jazz, electronics and lugubrious vocalising, which in a very real sense this is, but what is perhaps surprising is the choice of material as the guys plump for a typically warped take on tracks by artists as diverse as Elton John, Bruce Springsteen, Devo and Richard Thompson. Kicking off with a cracking version of Milton Nascimento’s ‘Cravo E Canela’ Oldham and Tortoise take gleeful liberties with the source material and, on the whole, achieve very pleasing results indeed.


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Richard Thompson
Front Parlour Ballads (Cooking Vinyl)

So the long-promised acoustic album finally arrives, recorded not in Thompson’s no-doubt fragrant front parlour but in the garage of his California home. If the first half of the CD is a little patchy, the second yields a run of five songs – peopled by various tragics and the otherwise confused – that count among Thompson’s very best. ‘Mutton Street’ and ‘Should I Betray?’ are peerless character studies driven by Thompson’s ever-stringent guitar, but even these are eclipsed by ‘A Solitary Life’, an evocation of a life-avoiding loner so brilliantly sustained that you suspect this remarkable songwriter might have reached a new peak


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Richard Thompson
The Old Kit Bag (Silverline: DualDisc)

Another Silverline re-release, adding extra VFM to TotalMusic-Online favourite Richard Thompson’s excellent 2003 album The Old Kit Bag, with the addition of the entire Album in 5.1 Surround Sound and live performance videos of ‘Outside Of The Inside’ and ‘Jealous Words’ (recorded in Providence U.S. July 24th 2003), lyrics for all titles, reviews of the album and a brief biography complete the package. Once again this can’t be said to really take full advantage of the DualDisc format but audiophiles will lap up the surround sound and it’s well worth plumping for this if you have yet to pick it up for the extra sound and video content.

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Toots And The Maytals
Roots Reggae (Trojan)

Frederick Toots Hibbert, Henry Raleigh Gordon and Nathaniel Jerry Matthias/McCarthy, were the single most important Jamaican act of the ‘60s and early ‘70s, and when Marley led the charge beyond Jamaica’s borders everyone was certain the Maytals would follow. Lending an ear to this magnificent box-set will leave you wondering why that failed to happen. Featuring four of the bands original seven releases - The Sensational Maytals, The Maytals’ Greatest Hits, Stoot Slatyam and Roots Reggae (plus their classic ‘69 albums, Sweet And Dandy and Monkey Man) - this collection is a reggae collectors dream

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10,000 Things
10,000 Things (Fiction)

It’s widely accepted that most musical styles are cyclical, if it’s happened before chances are it will happen, albeit in a slightly updated form, again. However this rule seemed not to have held true for the legions of ‘70s era raggedy arsed, shambolic rockers best epitomised by the Faces. Untrue that is until now, although if the truth be known 10,000 Things are actually more akin to the bastard sons of The Incredible Alex Harvey Band, documenting the grubby, temptation-strewn, beer, spit and sawdust dregs of society with humour, plenty of yelling and, yup, loads of raggedy arsed, shambolic rock.


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Amon Tobin
Chaos Theory (Ninja Tune)

Ostensibly the soundtrack to the new Tom Clancy inspired computer game Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory – Lalo Schifrin was pencilled in as a prospective composer at one point – Tobin apparently approached the project like he was scoring a Dario Argento movie. All of which would amount to sweet fanny adams if the music wasn’t up to Tobin’s usual beat laden, darkly atmospheric best which rest assured it is. Clattering and lurching around in a fine old style fans of the mans more break-beat driven material will still find much to love here and the album comfortably transcends it’s joystick related origins.

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Tears For Fears
Everybody Loves A Happy Ending (Gut)

Whether due to two of the most spectacularly bad haircuts in the history of music or just because they failed to impress some punk casualty NME journo with the right list of influences Tears For Fears were never, ‘cool’, which given their cracking grasp of ‘big-pop’ is frankly sad and after bashing their heads against a wall of indifference Roland Orzabel and Curt Smith fell out big time and called it a day. Having put aside their differences - and still happily remaining in thrall to those big Beatle-esque melodies - they are now back and maybe this time will get the happy ending they deserve.


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Talking Heads
The Best Of… (Rhino)

Leaving aside the record industries predilection for repackaging the buggery out of everything for the moment – and it’s hard to image there is anyone out there into Talking Heads that won’t already have all of this – this really is THE definitive Talking Heads collection for those of you keen to own moments cherry picked from their whole career. Psycho Killer, Once In A Lifetime, Burning Down The House, Road To Nowhere are all present and correct, as are less feted, but equally exquisite moments like Found A Job, Life During Wartime and Blind.

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Thee More Shallows
More Deep Cuts (Monotreme)

Compared favourably to Grandaddy, Sparklehorse and Yo La Tengo on their last album A History Of Sport Fishing, Thee More Shallows are certainly paddling in the same pool as these illustrious peers but to simply lump them into a spurious alt-rock grab bag is to do them a disservice. On this release they also indulge in some impressive use of noise, al la Mogwai and Godspeed You Black Emperor as the stark beauty of the songs are often undermined by an unsettling undercurrent that whips your legs away just as you begin to feel you're on solid ground.


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Travis
Singles (independiente)

Like the recently resurrected Embrace, Travis looked set to break big-time after capturing our hearts and twanging our sing-a-long-a-vocal-chords on tracks like Why Does It Always Rain On Me, Sing and Turn, in fact if drummer Neil Primrose hadn’t chucked a spanner in the ‘impetus’ works by breaking his back (and the band hadn’t laudably put everything on hold to wait for him to get better), Fran Healy may well have been trotting up red carpets with Gwyneth Paltrow instead of old misery guts Martin. Do yourself a favour, pick this up and remind yourself just how good Travis really are.

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Richard & Linda Thompson
Hokey Pokey; Pour Down Like Silver (Island)

A pair of 1975 albums receive the expanded reissue treatment, along with the classic I Want To See the Bright Lights Tonight. While Hokey Pokey boasts some strong moments, it now feels like a minor work – not something that could be said about Pour Down..., recorded later the same year but seemingly the work of different people. The profound effect of the Sufi faith on Richard is evident in an extraordinary set of songs that seems to be trying to say the unsayable. The highlight is ‘Night Comes In’, whose sense of mystery doesn’t nearly exhaust itself over eight minutes.


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Glenn Tilbrook
Transatlantic Ping Pong (Quixotic)

Having established himself as a solo force with his 2001 debut, Transatlantic Ping Pong finds Tilbrook adopting a more experimental approach, adding all manner of unlikely variations to his trademark, harmony-laden rock. Lead-off single Untouchable is the most conventional thing here; by contrast, lush standout Lost In Space features Innervisions-style Moog vamps and some fine dub-style drop-outs. There’s also another instalment in the ongoing, on-off relationship with Chris Difford, one new co-written track not preventing Tilbrook from ever-so-politely telling his erstwhile Squeeze collaborator to fuck off on Neptune.


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