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ISOBEL CAMPBELL & MARK LANEGAN
Sunday at Devil Dirt (V2)
***
The odd musical version of Beauty and the Beast reunite for a successor to their debut Ballad of the Broken Seas. The basic songs, written by Isobel Campbell, are built around Mark Lanegan's low and throaty rasp, while her gossamer tones waft around the mix. Campbell has absorbed the strange and doomy American balladry of long ago, and Seafaring Song and The Raven are quite in love with the rich possibilities of death. Such dark fare needs to be leavened with the life-affirming, and Come On Over (Turn Me On) and Shotgun Blues serve admirably to do so with their sharp erotic charge.
PETE CLARK

POP

HADOUKEN!
Music for an Accelerated Culture (Surface Noise)
**
This Leeds quintet fancy themselves as edgy musical pioneers, which means creating a sound that smashes together grime, rave, emo, indie rock and general shoutiness. In truth, their version of Accelerated Culture sprints from innovative to irritating in seconds. References to MySpace, Hoxton heroes, skinny fit jeans and house parties abound in lyrics that sound as if composed by text message. At best, on That Boy That Girl, it's possible to see why teenagers find them so exciting. At worst, this is music that could actually be improved by blaring from a mobile at the back of a bus.
DAVID SMYTH

DELAYS
Everything's The Rush (Fiction)
****
Their painfully apologetic 2006 album You See Colours and subsequent defenestration by their record label seemed to herald a future of burger-flipping for Southampton's Delays. Instead, they've found a new label, a new producer (Youth) and a shiny new direction. Once purveyors of diffident, grey indie drear, they now embrace, irresistible, widescreen, technicolor pop, brimming with glorious choruses, heavenly harmonies and, in the fabulous Love Made Visible, the sort of irresistible vigour that hitherto seemed beyond them. The transformation of the year.
JOHN AIZLEWOOD

JAZZ

JEREMY PELT
Shock Value (MaxJazz)
****
New York trumpeter Jeremy Pelt had shocking luck when power failure hit his lightning visit to Charlie Wright's club in Hoxton last weekend. Pity, because his latest album shows a major change of direction. The clean, Wynton-via-Clifford neo-bop approach is gone, replaced by a spacier, mid-period electric-Miles ambience. Frank Locrasto's warm Rhodes-piano chords envelop the probing wah-wah trumpet while drum discovery Dana Hawkins flays the kit with youthful abandon. All the new material is absorbing, particularly Pelt's aptly-titled original, Circular.
JACK MASSARIK

WORLD

PERUNIKA TRIO
Introducing (Riverboat)
***
If you've ever heard Le Mystère de Voix Bulgares you'll know how haunting Bulgarian vocal harmonies can be. The Perunika Trio are like an ultra-focused choir with just one voice per part, but perfectly tuned and blended. Eugenia Georgieva, Victoria Mancheva and Victoria Evstatieva are all London-based. Their repertoire here is largely Bulgarian plus a few songs in Macedonian, Russian and Old Church Slavonic. The slimline group works well for most of the songs but it sounds a little thin on the lament Strati and Angelaki which needs more voices with its clashing dissonances.
SIMON BROUGHTON