RICKIE LEE JONES
The Sermon on Exposition Boulevard (MIA)
Rickie Lee Jones is back with a raw but spectacularly beautiful collection of songs based on a book called The Words by Lee Cantelon. Cantelon’s book is meant to be a modern rendering of the words of Christ. Most of the songs are first-take improvisations — and all the better for it. They soar in all their stripped-back glory, veering from minimalist punk the one minute to fragile musings on faith in the next. Jones has the kind of voice that would make the telephone directory sound like sweet golden poetry, so when she wraps those cords around these delicate, intimate songs, she sounds like an angel come down to save us sinners from ourselves. — Lloyd Gedye
BEIRUT
Gulag Orkestar (Just)
The melancholic trumpet fires the opening salvo, a mournful intro that is met with a rhythm straight out of Eastern European marching-band music. This crazy folk music is otherworldly and yet it’s coming to you straight from some kid from Long Island, New York. This funeral march is the title track to Gulag Orkestar, the debut offering from wunderkind Zach Condon. The story goes that young Zach spent a fair bit of time backpacking in Eastern Europe and fell in love with the music that he was exposed to, hence Beirut. Regardless of your feelings about this cultural appropriation, this album is a sublime treat. Condon’s voice is spectacular, somewhere between Rufus Wainwright, David Byrne and Thom Yorke. And the music is melancholic, beautiful and a lot more interesting than most stuff available in the market. Plus you get the Lon Gisland EP as a bonus disc. Be brave: try something different. — LG
STEPHEN MARLEY
Mind Control (Universal)
When Stephen Marley was initially about to release his first solo album Got Music? in early 2005, his younger brother and protégé Damian Marley’s red-hot single Welcome to Jamrock began blazing a trail through all the world’s major ghettoes, while simultaneously scorching the Billboard charts. Stephen, who had produced his younger brother’s two preceding albums, put his own debut on hold, preferring to complete Damian’s project first. The resulting album went on to nab two Grammys in 2006 and was a coming-of-age for both Damian (as a vocalist) and Stephen (as a producer). While Jamrock gutted dancehalls everywhere, Stephen fine-tuned Got Music?‘s all-round board work, added a crooning Mos Def to the travelling man’s hip-hop lament Hey Baby and inserting an old-school, beatbox-powered ragga track called Traffic Jam to lead the album, which by now had been renamed Mind Control. This polished gem showcases the many moods of “Raggamuffin”, as he is also known, with plenty of booming Jeep beats, a few melancholic love songs and a reflective Nyabinghi arrangement featuring Ben Harper on slide guitar. The collection packs devastating crossover steel and reaffirms reggae’s powerful new position in today’s pop world. — Kwanele Sosibo
SPARKLEHORSE
Dreamt for Light Years in the Belly of a Mountain (EMI)
This has become one of those albums that I want to keep to myself. I’m scared that if I review it other people will buy it and then it won’t be just mine anymore. It’s possible that many reviewers feel the same way — this would explain why Sparklehorse have, largely, been underrated and ignored. Maybe it’s also because music along the lines of the Flaming Lips and Mercury Rev isn’t really at the forefront of the current, hip, indie agenda. Sparklehorse make music along these lines — only better. It’s psychedelic and folksy and otherworldly. It’s melancholy listening music, but uses a palette of bright colours to paint its musical landscape — seemingly in defiance of the idea that melancholy listening music has to sound grey. A charmingly strange and beautiful album. — Daniel Friedman
K-OS
Atlantis (EMI)
With his second album, Joyful Rebellion, the dreadlocked Canadian MC hit his stride, fluidly hopping from one genre to the next in a manner that made Wyclef Jean sort of irrelevant. Atlantis (Hymns for Disco) masquerades as a concept album on which the artist, disaffected with fame, tries to subvert the concept of the superstar and writes inward lyrics for his own catharsis rather than public consumption. K-Os’s self-importance is my main beef with this album. What the hell is he going on about? On the flip side, though, he manages to distil his disparate musical influences into a pop gumbo that, in the absence of decipherable lyrics, provides a pleasurable, somewhat psychedelic listening experience. Once the album hits it stride with Sunday Morning, it becomes an artfully sequenced journey into a fanciful netherworld. Be prepared however, to spend the rest of your life picking the lyrics apart. — KS