CDs of the week

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Leona Lewis: A spirited album release

Sigur Ros's latest offering Hvarf-Heim

The Raveonettes get Lust lust lusty with their latest album

Daniel Szabo Trio: Frictions is a brilliantly fluent album

Various artists: Imagined Village brings real musical engagement

Backstreet Boys: Walking the fine line between mature and pop

Robert Plant: An album of nuance and shadows

This weeks new CD releases include Leona Lewis, quirky icelandic band Sigur Ross and The Raveonettes.

POP
Leona Lewis
Spirit (Sony BMG)
****
On the back of a resounding X Factor victory, young Londoner Leona Lewis scored a festive number one with A Moment Like This last year. Recorded largely in the US under Simon Cowell's guidance, her debut album reveals a strong American influence. Showing off the power of Lewis's Whitney Houston-like vocals, Footprints In the Sand is a beefy, string-fuelled, gospel-tinged power ballad that would make a good theme to a Disney movie. Take a Bow provides a Timbaland-style urban twist on things which works well too. The highlight, however, is current number one single Bleeding Love, whose sparse drumbeat and edgy lyrics inject what will be a very successful album with some much-needed grit.
Chris Elwell-Sutton

Sigur Ros
Hvarf-Heim (EMI)
****
Questing, quirky Icelandic duo Sigur Rós have crept their way from cultdom to the mainstream (they're a Top 30 act in the United States), via a succession of dreamy but increasingly accessible albums. Hvarf-Heim (Haven-Home) is the double-disc soundtrack to their Heima film, which features them pootling around various Icelandic locations including, inevitably, a disused herring factory. The Hvarf disc features radical, spirited re-workings of five old tracks, most notably the peerless Hljomalind, formerly known as Rokklagio. Heim, meanwhile, comprises another six dips into the back catalogue, all rendered acoustically and, allegedly, live. Von, the only track to appear on both discs, benefits most obviously, but each play reveals something else to treasure. Mostly gorgeous.
Jon Aizlewood

The Raveonettes
Lust Lust Lust (Fierce Panda)
**
A boy-girl duo who placed deliberate restrictions on their vintage-rock sound, Denmark's Raveonettes rose on early White Stripes comparisons to release two albums on major label Columbia. Now they've been dropped and are reappearing on Fierce Panda, the tiny indie that was once an early stepping stone for Keane and Coldplay. It's unsurprising that a real breakthrough never came for a band whose speciality was taking the sweetness of Sixties girl groups and drenching it in ear-splitting guitar feedback. This album is their bleakest work yet, a predominantly slow, gloomy journey that resembles the darker moments of earlier noise enthusiasts the Jesus and Mary Chain more than ever. It's a cool sound but hasn't progressed. The masses won't be changing their minds.
David Smyth

Westlife
Back Home (RCA)
**
I have nothing against boy bands - I don't care where great pop music comes from. I love that new Take That song, Rule The World, for instance. If a song is great, it's great full stop. That said, I really do have a problem with Westlife. Simon Cowell and his charges are a force for pure pop evil.

Anyone who loves music knows this to be true. Yet it took me a long time to realise this. I spent most of the past 10 years in blissful ignorance - Westlife were just that band who filmed all their videos on cliff tops, occasionally looking over their shoulders for any oncoming bulldozers. They were just a harmless sideshow in pop. It took me time spent in Ireland in the winter of 2005 to realise that I was guilty of gross complacency. Their Christmas single When You Tell Me That You Love Me was bad enough - a sick, mewling monster of a track, stitched together from Johnny Mathis's When A Child Is Born and Celine Dion's My Heart Will Go On - but it was what it represented that most enraged me. Blank-eyed, cold-hearted cynicism. There was and still is little desire by the act, or their mentors Messrs Cowell and Walsh, to be creative.

They appear to have absolutely no interest in music - it's just an art form they exploit in order to make money. Furthermore, those that like Westlife are not music fans. They're the type of person that cries when they see a picture of a puppy, draws hearts rather than dots over their i's and thinks that Will Young is the new George Michael. In short, they're cultural barbarians.

So you can imagine how much it pains me to make the following admission: I quite like two songs on Westlife's seventh studio album. Hell, one track might even make it on to my iPod.

True, the hook of Something Right is cadged off a dodgy old club tune but The Easy Way (buried deep in the album, probably in the hope that Cowell wouldn't hear it and tell them to chuck it out for being too upbeat) is rather fabulous. It's built on a cheeky little synth riff and fairly rattles along to its joyous chorus, "I love you, what's wrong with saying it the easy way?" It's, gulp, perfect pop. It goes without saying that the rest of Back Home is the usual gloopy porridge: horrid, bloated proto-showtunes with lyrics that would shame Mills & Boon and arrangements that are never knowingly undersold on strings or, more likely, synthesizers that sound like strings.

Despite the brief dalliance with pop it's clear nothing much has changed. Westlife are still Cliff Richard with a six-pack. Paul Connolly

Backstreet Boys
Unbreakable (Jive)
***
Given the horror of the Westlife album it's nice to see that Howie, Nick, AJ and Brian are back. But no Kevin (Richardson), who's left to find a more interesting name. Backstreet Boys, like Take That, know that an old boy band needs to acknowledge that they can now grow beards and can no longer rely on the little girls. Unbreakable just about manages to walk the fine line between mature and pop without becoming boring. Everything But Mine features lovelorn lyrics overlaid on a ravey hip hop groove, while Any Other Way sees the boys coming over all Duran Duran. A few too many of the 14 tracks are close to sappy ballad territory but compared to Westlife, the Backstreet Boys are ripping up the boy band rule book. Paul Connolly

The Wombats
A Guide To Love, Loss And Desperation (14th Floor)
***
"Let's dance to Joy Division and celebrate the irony, everything is going wrong but we're so happy" chime the Liverpudlian/Norwegian marsupials on their jubilant debut. No kidding. The trio brim with grins, though they're crippled with insomnia, sabotaging relationships and smitten with prostitutes. Rather than taking grey leaves out of the Kaisers' songbook, whingeing about everything being crap nowadays, they've donned jester hats and dived into a ballpit. The indie-pop gleefulness of Let's Dance To Joy Division will camp in your inner ear until Joy Division reform and harmonysoaked Little Miss Pipedream is as cutesily heart-tugging as Lily Allen's Littlest Things but boasts the wonderful line "I saw her slam back tequilas like Oliver Reed on an Irish stag do". Martha De Lacey

DANCE
Groove Armada
GA10: From The Vaults 1997-2007 (SonyBMG)
****
Greatest hits albums of still-breathing bands discombobulate me. They suggest that an artist's shelf life may be coming to an end. Luckily, dance music wizards Tom Findlay and Andy Cato aren't about to hang up their wands just yet. They're simply celebrating Groove Armada's 10th birthday with a double CD of remixed, retweaked and re-rubbed GA stompers and smoothies. Tom has fashioned the uptempo CD, while Andy got busy with their mellower tunes. Old friends (Chicago, Dusk You & Me) meet the new kids in class (Song 4 Mutya, What's Your Version) and the middle lot (Remember and GA's signature smash Superstylin') glue the party together. It's a costumed affair where everybody looks the same as when we fell in love with them - but some are fancy dressed. Martha De Lacey

ROCK
Robert Plant & Alison Krauss
Raising Sand (Universal)
***
The recent announcement that the remaining members of Led Zeppelin are to reform soon has rather overshadowed this fine record. And anyone expecting Robert Plant to bellow Led Zep-style will be disappointed because Raising Sand, recorded with American bluegrass star Alison Krauss, is an understated little gem of an album. Produced by T-Bone Burnett, Raising Sand features a diverse mix of blues, country, folk and roots rock songs from a wide range of writers, including Tom Waits and Phil and Don Everly. Plant and Krauss's voices blend beautifully, with the album's standout being a particularly moving Stick With Me Baby, an account of a couple in love against all the odds. An album of nuance and shadows. Paul Connolly

JAZZ
Daniel Szabo Trio
Frictions (Warner Jazz)

This brilliantly fluent newcomer from Hungary recently won the Martial Solal international piano prize, impressing Solal, Danilo Perez and all the other keyboard eminences on the judging panel. One could describe Szabo's highly original, closely bonded trio music as chamber jazz but for the additional fire and sensuality of their Hungarian blood, which keeps things as forceful as they are lyrical. Nikoletta Szˆke contributes one ballad vocal and three tracks feature Kurt Rosenwinkel, a New York guitarist who combines post-bop agility with a willingness to let particularly telling notes sing out over the rhythm. Szabo speaks of a natural empathy between them, which shows in this cerebral yet enjoyably freewheeling collaboration. Jack Massarik

WORLD
Various Artists
The Imagined Village (Real World)

The re-imagined Willow Pattern with tower blocks on the cover suggests what this excellent album is about - re-inventing English folk music for the 21st century. Many stars of the folk scene are here - Martin and Eliza Carthy and the Copper Family, but joined by Paul Weller, Sheila Chandra and the Dhol Foundation. Producer Simon Emmerson says that after years of travelling as a musician he wanted to explore his own roots. In Hard Times of Old England Retold, Billy Bragg laments the economic decline of the countryside and, perhaps most memorably, in Tam Lyn Retold, Benjamin Zephaniah tells explicit details of an unplanned pregnancy with an "alien". There's great instrumental playing and a real engagement with what these songs are about.
Simon Broughton

 

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