Jamie Cullum
Catching Tales
(Universal Jazz) £12.99
The Hobbit-resembling Parkinson favourite returns with his third album of blokey background jazz, having sold 2.5 million copies of his last, 2003's Twentysomething, and grown to love his pop-star profile. Here he minimises the unintentionally comic scat routines, limits the jazz-standard covers to a couple and lines up the production and writing talents of former Gorillaz member Dan 'the Automator' Nakamura, Guy Chambers and Ed Harcourt. The result is passable, but not quite lovable. Their edge-smoothing pop expertise may keep Cullum's noodly-piano tendencies in check, but no amount of studio finery can disguise the fist-gnawing artlessness of Cullum's lyrics. If he's not asking his 'baby' to 'take the script and flip it' ('My Yard'), he's 'pondering it all after that call' ('Nothing I Do') and, in quieter moments, having an existential crisis induced by the mixing of metaphors ('Oh God', 'Mind Trick' and several others). Perhaps the scat routines would be preferable after all.
Katie Melua
Piece By Piece
(Dramatico) £13.99
Going head to head with Cullum in the mum-jazz stakes is fellow million-seller Katie Melua, who, along with her Snark-hunting mentor and co-songwriter Mike Batt, has elected not to fix that which is unbroken. Those who loved the gentle whimsy of 'The Closest Thing to Crazy' will find plenty here to drift away to, despite the kind of borderline nonsensical lyrics that characterised her first hit. Try this one, from the delightful 'Nine Million Bicycles': 'There are nine million bicycles in Beijing/That's a fact/ It's a thing we can't deny/ Like the fact that I will love you till I die.' Now, does that suggest genius worthy of Cole Porter or the sort of thing Alan Partridge would come up with on a Comic Relief special? It's hard to tell.
Neil Young
Prairie Wind
(Reprise)
£12.99
Neil Young's first album in three years sees him about to turn 60 and in the kind of reflective, strumming-an-acoustic-guitar-on-the-back-porch mood that characterised earlier records such as Silver and Gold (2000) and Harvest Moon (1992). The Canadian's aneurysm six months ago may also have something to do with his characteristically naive recollections of a happy childhood and the events of his 30-year marriage, brought to life on the jaunty 'Far From Home' and the whispery ballad 'Falling Off the Face of the Earth'. His strong voice on the title track, however, seems to show that Young is as hale and hearty as ever, and as entranced by the romance of his vast, unknowablehome country as he's ever been.
Sean Paul
The Trinity
(Atlantic)
£12.99
It's a guaranteed party situation every time you put on a CD by dancehall's least controversial and - with six million records sold - most successful artist, providing you can put up with the hair-curling rudeness of the subject matter. Sean Paul may have won himself a US number one by duetting with Beyonce, but then he never asked her to sing a song about 'needing the yardie bone' (and if he had, I daresay he'd have got a slap). Once he's in male company, the former Jamaican water-polo champion simply can't stop celebrating the wonder of his downstairs region. His follow-up to the brilliant Dutty Rock charts a dicey, but entertaining, course between the pop-infused party music of current single 'We Be Burnin" and the outright pervitude that characterises straight-up dancehall.
BEST OF THE REST
Soulwax
Nite Versions
(PIAS)
£9.99
The Belgian sometime DJs mash up rock and disco better than Daft Punk these days.
Big star
Big Star in Space
(Rykodisc)
£12.99
Romantic rockers led by Alex Chilton - safe and well after going missing for days in post-Katrina New Orleans - reform after 30 years, sounding like they never went away.
