Alison Moyet - The Turn

Alison Moyet may not have released any original music in five years (and it was eight years before that), but she's certainly been busy. In 2004, Voice showcased her talents (yes, her voice) with a bunch of covers, while since then she's starred on stage in the smash hit musical Chicago and in Smaller, alongside Dawn French. The latter experience in particularly seems to have had a major impact on her, and The Turn has a very theatrical bent to it, from the title down to tracks like The Man In The Wings and the last three songs, World Without End, Home and Smaller, all of which were written and performed in that play. But of course, having sold more than 20 million albums already in her career, Moyet doesn't need too much inspiration from the theatre to be successful, and The Turn sees her in fine form. Obviously the first thing that hits you about the album is her voice, and opener One More Time is a stunning tune with influences from Bowie to Jarvis to Richard Hawley and her Dusty Springfield-esque bluesy vocals that simply soar. It's a majestic start to the album and a perfect choice for a single. While she may have Dusty's pipes, Moyet is very clearly her own woman, and The Turn is certainly no Dusty In Springfield, for better and for worse. After all, she was in Yazoo, people. So for every torch song like The Man In The Wings (which sounds like a less cheesy version of something Barbra Streisand might sing) there's a track like It's Not The Thing Henry, which may or may not be an ode to Thierry Henry, but is certainly a world away from anything Barbra would do, with its jaunty rhythm and edgy percussive rock 'n' roll feel. This kind of variety certainly stops the album from getting stale, but it also makes it slightly less impressive and timeless as a package. Moyet obviously has a great voice and is a good songwriter (along with Peter Glenister), and there are some stunning songs, like The Sharpest Corner, but The Turn is held back from greatness by its patchiness and her desire to try and do too much. Every great artist needs to know how best to use their gift and Moyet doesn't quite seem certain.

LeAnn Rimes - Family

Against my better judgement, I've always found the happy ending (oh, come on, I'm hardly spoiling Citizen Kane for you am I?) of Con Air quite moving, in a cheesy way, and a lot of it has to do with the use of LeAnn Rimes' How Do I Live? in the soundtrack. But then I learned that it wasn't actually her at all, but Trisha Yearwood, while Ms Rimes went on to star in horrific chick flick Coyote Ugly and have a mainstream pop smash with the wretched Can't Fight The Moonlight. Of course, she had also done a poppier version of How Do I Live?, which is why I got confused, but then again it is very easy to get mixed up by LeAnn Rimes. Having emerged on the country music scene as a youngster (seriously, check out the covers of her first couple of independently-released albums on Wikipedia, they're HIDEOUS) and broken through as a sixteen-year-old, she veered towards the pop mainstream after Coyote Ugly, with albums like I Need You and Twisted Angel a world away from her twangy roots. However, the latter of those was slated in the press and didn't achieve the kind of sales that had been expected, so in 2005, she rediscovered her cowboy hat (figuratively speaking) and got back to a pop-country sound with This Woman, which was her best album for some time as well as a commercial success, at least at home in the States. Last year, she really muddied the waters of her cultural identity by releasing another pop alubm called Whatever We Wanna, but only in Europe, presumably because country isn't so popular on the continent and she isn't entirely ready to cut her losses there. A year later and she's back with another 'real' album that is being released everywhere, and Family is definitely a follow-up to This Woman and is very good. It's hardly Lucinda Williams, but the country elements are well-used in what could also be seen as a good adult pop record as well as her first album of entirely original material, all co-written by her. From the twangy title track through some slick ballads (though not too many of them) and the spunky duet with Marc Broussard to the bonus track with Bon Jovi (from their last album), Family is an album that does what it does very well and shows that while Rimes may have flitted between styles throughout her career so far (she's still only 25), she is potentially growing into a very good songwriter as well as a singer, and if she can avoid the temptation to keep trying to be Britney (let's face it, the temptation can't be that strong nowadays), she'll do just fine.

David Ford - Songs For The Road

It's always a bit of a mystery how one artist can become massively famous while another languishes in obscurity. Damien Rice recently headlined a gig at the MEN Arena, and while he's a massive talent, his mainstream success is a bit strange, because he's hardly the kind of artist who you would expect to appeal to millions of people. And if he can do it, why can't David Ford? Ford's songs are, if anything, more straightforward and accessible than Rice's folky tunes, and they are certainly no less impressive for that. But Songs For The Road will come out, get great reviews and will sell a respectable number of albums, but will it achieve the kind of success that Rice or David Gray have managed? Nope, though at least he knows there is still hope, as it took Gray a very long time to breakthrough to the mainstream. It's not like Ford isn't used to being criminally ignored either, having been in the underrated Easyworld at the start of the decade, an indie rock group who put out two albums, not that anyone noticed. His solo career started in 2005 with I Sincerely Apologise For All The Trouble I've Caused, an album that was again mostly ignored, but critically-acclaimed, not least by this site, which put it in our Top 20 Albums of 2005 list, and pretty high up too. Stripping back the rock sound of Easyworld for a sparse acoustic feel, it was powerful and stirring stuff, not least the awesome State Of The Union, his debut single. Songs For The Road doesn't change the blueprint too much, right down to the fact that there are only nine tracks on it again (we're not entirely sure why), but the production is slightly more 'warm', taking him a bit closer to the sound of someone like Duke Special (who supported him on tour last year), and while he's still outspoken on tracks like I'm Alright Now, the title alone indicates that he's not quite as angry. Maybe he took his own advice from his first album's track Cheer Up You Miserable Fuck... The good news is that while Songs For The Road isn't as fiery or sparse, it's still an excellent album with no weak tracks and really should be the one that gets him the success he deserves.

Matchbox Twenty - Exile On Mainstream

Here's a confusing album. Matchbox Twenty first broke onto the scene ten years ago, but after three albums, they've been pretty much dormant for the last five years, with singer Rob Thomas having success as a solo artist in that time. So, now they've back with a new album. Or is it a greatest hits album? Well, it's a bit of both, almost like they couldn't quite be bothered doing a full new album, but didn't think that anyone would buy a 'best of' from a band who have only released three proper albums anyway. So there are six new songs, followed by 11 old ones, making for a record that is neither one thing nor the other. In some ways, it's genius, because anyone who gets into the band now will get the new tracks plus tasters for each of the other records, enticing them to go buy them too, but for established fans, they're getting a mini-album with a load of extra stuff they've already got. Of course, that probably won't bother people over here much, as Matchbox Twenty are a very American band, shifting 15 million copies of their debut album in the States and around 15 copies over here, with rock fans turned off by their very mainstream approach to music, as referenced in this album's title. But listening to the 'hits' you can see why Matchbox have been so successful, because songs like 3am, Bent and Unwell are all incredibly good songs and even if your inner snob feels like you should sneer at them, they're hardly Nickelback or Creed. Even more impressive though is that the new songs don't sound out of place at all, with each of them clearly more than just 'tracks thrown onto a greatest hits to get the fans to buy it'. New single How Far We've Come sets the standard, with Steve Lilywhite's production and a rather more musically upbeat sound keeping all six tracks quite fresh and interesting, even with the trademark winsome lyrics. Exile On Mainstream is a curious kind of album that isn't necessarily perfect for either new or old fans, but it succeeds because it's well worth purchasing anyway.

Underworld - Oblivion With Bells

Twenty-seven years into their career and eleven years after their commercial high-water mark of Born Slippy .NUXX, Underworld are back with their fifth studio album and they are still trying to recapture the magic of 1993's dubnobasswithmyheadman. Oblivion With Bells is their follow-up to the underwhelming A Hundred Days Off, and Karl Hyde and Rick Smith find themselves working with very little mainstream interest, so they've used that to shrug off any preconceptions or expectations and made an album that is unabashedly adventurous. They've always enjoyed making audio-soundscapes and this record takes that to a new level, with some very long tracks and some very good tracks, not least the epic single Crocodile. With increased use of live instrumentation as well as their trademark trance beats Oblivion With Bells is well-named and does stand out slightly from the rest of their albums, but like those, it's not without its weaknessess, and as with the others, it tends to be when vocals come into the mix. Hyde's vocals became so ubiquitous with Born Slippy .NUXX and its 'lager, lager, shouting' refrain, but Underworld have always been best when he shuts up, so tracks like the painful Ring Road really drag this down. Sounding like something Mike Skinner might write and then destroy so that no-one could ever hear it, Ring Road is a stream of consciousness ramble about British life that clearly thinks it's saying something important, but there's just nothing special or interesting about it. As a result of this and a few other poor tracks, Oblivion With Bells is still too patchy to be a classic album, and Underworld are still too inconsistent to be a truly great band.

Jimmy Eat World - Chase The Light

Jimmy Eat World are a band who shouldn't be so much fun, because they were part of the original emocore scene that pretty much led to the wave of slightly pretentious bands with silly names and sillier song titles that hit our shores last year, but for some reason, we can't stay angry with them for long. For one thing, sixth album Chase This Light is another excellent pop-rock release, full of excellent hooks, anthemic choruses and shimmering production overseen by the legendary Butch Vig. Purists will always sneer at Jimmy Eat World for their unashamedly mainstream take on 'punk', and Chase This Light certainly won't change any minds there, taking as much inspiration from U2 and Coldplay's stadium-filling sounds as from the likes of Weezer and Green Day (we're not even comparing them to 'real' punks here), and despite the explosion of guitars at the start of Big Casino, it's not even as heavy as breakthrough album Bleed American (or Jimmy Eat World, as it got renamed after 9/11). If there is a weakness here it's that it's almost TOO consistent, with pretty much every song sounding like a potential single, which leaves it lacking a bit of light and dark contrast, but the songs are catchy, the production is glossy and it's never dull, so who cares about labels anyway? Jimmy Eat World aren't going to change the world and Chase The Light is hardly going to revolutionise music, but that doesn't make it any less enjoyable or impressive.

Zico Chain - Food

At first, Zico Chain's influences are so obvious that they almost overpower debut album Food. Sounding like what you'd get if you put Nirvana's Nevermind and Velvet Revolver's Contraband in a blender together, Zico Chain certainly don't do anything new or unexpected, but that doesn't matter quite so much when they do what they do so very well. Like Nine Black Alps before them, they have made a debut album that is unpretentious rock 'n' roll that rattles along at a blistering pace, and even if Chris Glithero calls up the spirits of Kurt Cobain and Scott Weiland a little bit too often for his own good, it's all just too much fun to really care about that. From the opener Pretty Pictures to the closer Anaemia, it's prety much unrelenting, without the occasional acoustic moment that NBA had in their debut, but each song is memorable in its own way, even if it may blur into one scuzzy whole at times. Paul Frost's buzzsaw guitars cut through Glithero's melodies with Ollie Middleton's frenetic drumming driving everything along, and while there's nothing big or clever about Food, but you won't hear many better rock albums this year and it's a refreshing alternative to most of what passes for 'rock' out there at the moment.

Dylan Donkin - Food For Thoughtlessness

As Dylan Donkin's last musical project was a band called Echobrain, who featured former Metallica bassist Jason Newsted along with Kirk Hammett and Jim Martin as guest stars, you might expect his solo work to be quite heavy. As it turns out, it's quite the opposite and Food For Thoughtlessness contains some of the most beautiful and wonderful pop music of the year. It's just a shame that it's only a mini-album, with just six songs, and that he might be written off as a Jack Johnson clone because he comes from Hawaii and writes pretty laidback folky music. In reality, Donkin is more like Elliott Smith, with his haunting melodies always ready to take a twist, but still sounding gorgeous. Recent single Make A Choice is the perfect example of Donkin's music, with some woozy acoustic guitars, harmonies and just delightfully simple songwriting, and Food For Thoughtlessness takes a trip (sometimes quite literally a 'trip') through the back catalogues of the likes of Beck, Nirvana (unplugged), The Beatles, The Brian Jonestown Massacre and Syd Barrett, with the instrumental Fell Through The Wall probably the highlight. Donkin is clearly a big talent and this is a great mini-album that has just one problem. It ends too soon...
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