The Go! Team - Proof Of Youth

Can you ever have too much of a good thing? If someone delivered a year's supply of chocolate to your house, would you get sick of eating it? That's certainly a question you have to keep in mind when listening to The Go! Team, because their new album Proof Of Youth is the audio equivalent of a year's supply of chocolate being eaten in just over half an hour. It also sounds like an explosion in a Ben and Jerry's ice cream factory, with every single song literally over-stuffed with colours and flavours to make an intoxicating if slightly sickly mixture. Anyone who has heard Thunder. Lightning. Strike. will know what to expect, but if anything, the three years in between that album and this have only served to make these Brighton maniacs more hungry to show every possible kind of music into each and every song, and it can certainly be overpowering at times. In short bursts though, it's genius. Opening track and lead single Grip Like A Vice is the perfect example, an infectious burst of fizzy noise and attitude, with rapper Ninja just about managing to not only keep up with the hurricane force instrumentation but also impose herself on the song. It's a great opening track, but Proof Of Youth never really slows down after that, following it up immediately with the equally raucous Doing It Right. My World, a version of Alan Parker's The Free Life, is a little bit more calm, but only in comparison with what is around it, and the presence of special guests like The Double Dutch Divas and the infectiously delightful Rapper's Delight Club (a load of rapping American school kids) elsewhere on the album ensure that there is plenty of fun to be had here. Flashlight Fight steps things up even more with Chuck D providing trademark vocals, making it sound like the craziest Public Enemy track ever. Proof Of Youth is certainly an energetic album and you'd have to be pretty dour not to find plenty to enjoy here, but there's almost too much good stuff crammed into each tune, which has the effect of making it sometimes seem like a study in pop music rather than something that is just fun to listen to. However, by the relatively chilled-out Brazilian beats of Patricia's Moving Picture (where DO they come up with their song titles?), you can't deny that The Go! Team have certainly taken you on a journey and their live shows (playing at The Ritz this week) should be a riot...

U2 - Popmart Live From Mexico City DVD

Ever since the mid-1980s, every U2 tour has been a major event, but not many have been quite so major as their Popmart tour in 1997. At that stage, they were quite clearly the biggest band in the world and were putting on stage-shows that emphasised the point beyond a shadow of a doubt. They weren't just big, they were MASSIVE. Touring their most experimental album, Pop, U2 were clearly feeling inventive and colourful and they put together a tour that was certainly both of those things, from the melodramatic entrance (walking to the stage with a big entourage, with Bono wearing a hoodie and shadowboxing) to the bit where they emerge - looking like the Village People - from a gigantic flashing lemon, Popmart was all about rock 'n' roll excess. In that sense, it's perfect for a live DVD, and with an enormous (note that we are running out of ways of saying 'big') crowd in Mexico City lapping up all of the madness on stage, it's a great show. The setlist, as you'd expect, is big on hits like Pride (In The Name Of Love), Mysterious Ways, With Or Without You, I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For and all that stuff, but also has some less well-known classics thrown in there alongside plenty from the Pop album. Unsurprisingly, the show is all about Bono, and his many personas are all on display, from the stadium rock god belting out the anthems to the sensitive troubadour playing the acoustic guitar on a small stage for Staring At The Sun to the vampish icon of Hold Me Thrill Me Kiss Me Kill Me. He waffles on a bit of course, but much of it is in Spanish, so you don't have to care what he's saying, which is often a benefit, but you can't deny that there are not many frontmen out there with his charisma and energy on stage and he's always engaging here, and looking every inch the rock star with his close-cropped hair and trademark shades. The concert itself drags a little at times and is just too flashy for its own good at other times, but fans will lap it up for the improved 5.1 sound from the original VHS. Some special features about the making of the tour might have been nice, but overall it's such a different kind of show to most of their other tours - and certainly all those more down-to-earth ones since - that it's a welcome addition to any U2 fan's DVD collection.

Stephen Fretwell - Man On The Roof

A quick geography lesson. Stephen Fretwell is a Mancunian from Scunthorpe, right, but he made this album in New York. As you would do if someone offered you that chance. It's been three years since he made his debut, Magpie, but it doesn't really feel like it has been that long, because it only really got noticed a year or so after it was first released. Even then, he is still hardly a household name, lagging way behind Damien Rice in the folky-superstar stakes, so hopefully Man On The Roof can rectify that, because it is really is a very special album from a very special talent. His live shows - including a stunning cameo appearance at the first Manchester Vs Cancer concert in 2006 - have shown just how much he has grown since the release of Magpie, and this new record just confirms that. From the noisy and almost discordant opening of Coney to the fantastically-named William Shatner's Dog, Fretwell never puts a foot wrong in Man On The Roof and whether on his own on sparse and melancholy ballads or with the backing of a band, he sounds confident and rightly so. Songs like single Scar, Now and Sleep are simply awesome and while his voice maybe isn't as strong as Rice or some of the poppy singer-songwriter types out there, there's so much power and emotion in the songs that it doesn't matter at all. On the album, it says 'Stephen Fretwell announces Man On The Roof', but really it should be us announcing his arrival as one of the country's top artists.

Plain White T's - Every Second Counts

Plain White T's may seem like they are just the latest jumpers-on of the emo bandwagon, but in reality they've been going for a decade and Every Second Counts, which was originally released last year, is actually their fourth album. It's been re-released over here because of the success of single Hey There Delilah, a song originally from their previous album All That We Needed, shoehorned onto this album at the start to cash in on it getting to number 3 in the UK charts. The problem with that is that the song itself isn't really very representative of their sound, with its folky acoustic sound very different from the three-chord punk-pop that makes up most of Every Second Counts. Indeed, when Plain White T's do deviate from that and try balladry with Making A Memory and Write You A Song, the results are pretty dismal, sounding about as meaningful and sincere as a really bad Bon Jovi power-ballad. It's a shame, because they are quite good at what they do when they stick to the formula, and despite clever-clever song titles like Friends Don't Let Friends Dial Drunk and Hate (I Really Don't Like You), they aren't particularly another band on the emo bandwagon, because they sound much more like Jimmy Eat World than Fall Out Boy or Panic! At The Disco, with the lyrics mostly fairly low-key and the themes mostly quite down-to-earth rather than the very affected style favoured by those bands. Every Second Counts is hardly a classic album and Plain White T's are hardly an amazing band, but it has its charms and fans of this kind of music will enjoy it. Whether fans of Hey There Delilah will is less certain though, so you should probably check out that rest before you buy it if you're hoping for more songs like that...

Alabama 3 - M.O.R.

Alabama 3's last album, Outlaw, was a great return to form after the messy Power In The Blood, with the band seemingly finding that loose focus necessary to keep all of their eclectic influences under check and sounding like a cohesive piece of work. With great songs like Hello I'm Johnny Cash, Keep Your Shades On and How Can I Protect You, it was up there with Exile On Coldharbour Lane as their most accessible and impressive album. Needless to say, it was ignored by the masses again and their acid house country music remains a minority interest. Since then, lead singer Larry Love/Rob Spragg/Robert Love released a solo album that was even more straightforward and stripped down, so it's perhaps no surprise that the band have returned with an album that takes in all kinds of weird trips and diversions down the rocky road of musical history. The problem is that M.O.R. is a bit of a mess. At the start, there is a loose theme of the band having an airline, which continues in the album packaging, but after the tepid Fly, that disappears completely. Mind you, any plane being piloted by D.Wayne Love would probably also disappear pretty quickly. Unfortunately, such scrappiness is continued throughout, with experimental tracks like the dirgy cover of Jerry Reed's Amos Moses just dragging things down while the likes of Hooked and Monday Don't Mean A Thing are pretty insipid. Are You A Souljah? is certainly an exception to these disappointments though, with a gospel groove making it a real classic. Also of note is the album closer Sweet Joy, which quite bizarrely features The Proclaimers, of all people and even more bizarrely, is really good. Alabama 3 might have made a disappointing album (still better than Power In The Blood though) but they have managed to get The Proclaimers to sound good, so clearly they haven't completely misplaced their touch.

Rooney - Calling The World

To say that Rooney are influenced by The Beatles would be putting it mildly. The US album cover for Calling The World shows the band in positions rather similar to the front cover of Rubber Soul, and while the UK release has a different image, the album packaging is full of images of the band running around, falling over and generally larking about in a very Fab Four manner. Unfortunately, they does make them seem rather a lot like McFly, a band who have taken the marketing style of The Beatles and turned them into a hugely successful boyband-with-guitars. Rooney though are American, and the music market is quite different over there, with not many bands like McFly or Busted blurring the lines between manufactured pop and guitar rock. So where do Rooney fit in? That's hard to say really, because while they seem to want to present themselves as wacky popsters, some of their songs are actually pretty good and wouldn't sound out of place on a Weezer album. Showbiz runs through Rooney, with singer Robert Schwartzman coming from quite a family. His mum is Godfather/Rocky actress Talia Shire, his brother is Rushmore actor Jason Schwartzman, his uncle is Francis Ford Coppola, his cousins are Sofia Coppola and Nicolas Cage. Imagine what Thanksgivings are like for them. Regardless of that, it has not been a smooth ride for Rooney, having released their debut album back in 2003 and with this follow-up originally planned to come out in early 2005. It's taken them three goes to put together Calling The World, but surprisingly it is quite a cohesive record with some cracking pop songs like When Did Your Heart Go Missing? and Don't Come Around Again. It makes The Feeling sound edgy, but it's quite good fun. Oh, and they sent us chocolates, so that's got to be worth three stars, right?

Kosheen - Damage

Alienating a large portion of your fanbase by making your second album sound not much like your first one is generally not considered to be a good idea unless you are shifting towards a more pop-oriented sound and become mega-successful as a result of it. So, for Kosheen to ignore their dance roots on second album Kokopelli was a massive gamble and it is not one that is repeated on Damage, which comes four years later. The chorus on the opening title track contains the line "look at the damage we have done" and the success or failure of this album will probably decide how much damage Kosheen have done to themselves with their musical flitting. Fans of debut Resist will certainly find a lot more to enjoy here, with the trip-hop beats returning in a big way, even though some of the more guitar-based music of Kokopelli remains in evidence across a long and sprawling album. That title track is certainly one of the highlights, with Sian Evans coming across all 'Tracy Thorn on Protection' with her vocals, but at other times she leans a bit too much towards pop-soul and risks making Kosheen sound dangerously like M-People (yes we should like them because they were from Manchester, but we don't). The lyrical themes here are quite dark and personal, with lots of them seeming to dissect the break-up of a relationship (Damage, Same Ground Again, Guilty, Wish You Were Here, Not Enough Love, Cruel Heart, Marching Orders, need we go on?) and it is these that work best, particularly Not Enough Love. If Kosheen could work out what they do best, they would be a really great band, but Damage is merely a good album that could have done with editing down a bit.

Manchester Orchestra - I'm Like A Virgin Losing A Child

Manchester Orchestra? Is this an album released by an orchestra based in our own fine city? Not at all. These Mancunians aren't from here, and aren't even English, hailing from Atlanta, Georgia, and they certainly aren't an orchestra either. But we'll hold neither of these things against them, beacuse I'm Like A Virgin Losing A Child is a very good debut album. Singer Andy Hull's vocals are very, VERY much like those of The Decemberists frontman Colin Malloy, and Manchester Orchestra certainly occupy the same kind of genre as that band, albeit with their lyrics and themes rather more grounded and with far fewer diversions into the realm of prog-rock. That's not to say that they are liked a dumbed-down Decemberists, though they will probably appeal to any indie fans who get scared off by some of the more out-there moments on albums like Picaresque and The Crane Wife. Everything is much more serious here, and fans of Death Cab For Cutie will also find plenty to enjoy in some of the more ponderous moments like the epic and sprawling Where Have You Been? Manchester Orchestra may have a slightly misleading name for those of us who actually live here, but I'm Like A Virgin Losing A Child is good enough that they deserve to be treated as conquering local heroes when they are in town later this month.