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POP
Lily Allen
It's Not Me, It's You (EMI)
****
Lily returns with a new album that explores the various layers, not to say contradictions, of her personality, all set to a beautifully produced retro groove, from Seventies ballads to Eighties electronic pop. Her voice is at once little girl lost and woman of experience, and her lyrics range from feisty to touchingly romantic, which is what she really is underneath. Everyone's At It opens proceedings with admirable verve. The first swear words appear on The Fear and there's plenty more to come. Not Fair returns to a favourite topic — the chap who doesn't do anything for Lily in bed — but Who'd Have Known gives us the girl who's blissfully happy with her man. Lily has it all ways.
PETE CLARK

Van Morrison
Astral Weeks Live at the Hollywood Bowl (Listen to the Lion)
*****
A band performing their classic album track by track in concert is still special, but now virtually an everyday occurrence. Trust Van Morrison to take the idea to the next level. Forty years after he recorded his first proper solo album in two live sessions, he returned to it in full for the first time in Los Angeles last November and enhanced that transcendent, improvised feel. He changes the song order and adds new extended flourishes to tracks such as Slim Slow Slider, as well as performing two later compositions as his encore, Listen to the Lion and Common One. The voice is deeper, the music richer with the help of an orchestra, but the original magic is still very much in evidence.
DAVID SMYTH

Hot Leg
Red Light Fever (Barbecue Rock)
**
With singer Justin Hawkins in rehab, novelty group The Darkness imploded in 2006. Since then, Hawkins's British Whale have come and gone with nary a ripple upon the pop ocean. Now with Hot Leg he's reinvented The Darkness, lock, stock and parodic barrel. So we have screechy, Freddie Mercury-esque vocals, mildly amusing lyrics ("cock, cock, cock, cocktails", indeed), guitar solos at every turn, titles such as Gay in the '80s, a woman in a thong on the front cover and an invitation to "file under man-rock" on the back. As with The Darkness, it's fairly chucklesome in parts, but we've been down this road too recently for reappraisal.
JOHN AIZLEWOOD

JAZZ
Till Brönner
Rio (Universal)
****
Many a jazz star has fallen for the bossa-nova — Cannonball Adderley, George Duke, Stan Getz and more. Till Brönner, the hip German trumpeter whose breathy tone and cool vocals owe so much to Chet Baker, is the latest. Once I Loved, She's a Carioca and newer classics like Ligia and Café com Pão capture Brazilian samba's charms. Guest singers include Melody Gardot (suitably laid-back), Annie Lennox (less so), Luciana Souza (delightful), Milton Nascimento (bossa royalty) and Kurt Elling (in fair Portuguese). Imagine the Chet Does Rio album that never was.
JACK MASSARIK

WORLD
Bonga
Bairro (Lusafrica)
****
Bonga is well-known in the Portuguese-speaking world but deserves wider familiarity. Originally from Angola, he was a champion sprinter but also a vocal supporter of Angolan independence which got him exiled from Angola and Portugal, the colonial power, until the fall of the Portuguese dictatorship in 1974. Now in his sixties and recognised as one of Angola's greatest singers, he moves between Angola, Lisbon and Paris. His distinctive gravelly voice and self-penned songs bring in elements from Brazil, Cape Verde and Congolese dance music.
SIMON BROUGHTON