Regina Spektor - Begin To Hope

Singing Lady, Regina Spektor sounds every inch (or centimetre, if you prefer the metric) as pained, fragile and damaged as Lady Day, Billie Holiday. That voice does creep into several of the other tracks on Begin To Hope, moving CD closer Summer in the City included, and the sparser the song, the more anti-folk than producer-polished, the better the voice. But Spektor's let down by a dearth of quality tracks. Indeed, there's a lot of gurgling, dribbly light weight nonsense and general all round daft noises on here, skidding ungraciously into something that wouldn't be amiss on a Lily Allen effort. This is Spektor's third - and weakest - album. On The Radio is amusing pop but it could well be Nelly Furtado, such is the depth of the track; ditto opener Fidelity. There is enough quality here to warrant a purchase. It's just a shade disappointing, that's all.

Muse - Black Holes And Revelations

In which the trio of Muses scarper away from their ambition of being a second class Radiohead and finally, with a bit of added funk, come into their own.
Black Holes... is an incredibly listenable album. The angst, the Yorke-esque warblings, have been reduced to a minimum. Supermassive Black Hole, the first single to be lifted from this CD, is a fantastic collision of Bootsy Collins-style bass and ridiculous falsetto vocals. And the rest? Well, for Muse, this is all pretty upbeat stuff, while the outstanding Soldier's Poem is, for a song one suspects was intended as a novelty item, just a heavenly track. That tune nicely segues into the theremin infused Invincible, which will find itself on repeat on many a CD player. Yes, Muse have lightened up and the stadiums they will fill as a result will be much happier places for it.

James Dean Bradfield - The Great Western

I always wondered who was behind those ridiculously lengthy Manics song titles. At last, the truth can be told - guitarist Bradders has a song on his solo debut christened On Saturday Morning We Will Rule The World. Hmmf. Case closed.
The Great Western is a nice change from the chore that the Street Preachers have become. Post-Everything Must Go, and, one suspects, with the 'genius' of Richey Edwards hanging over their every move adding a hefty amount of pressure, the band entered a steady decline. Save for the odd song, the Manics have disappointed. With a drummer as idiotically dumb as the finest and Nicky Wire's dreadful sixth form poetry, Bradfield always stood out as the true talent. Anyone that can play guitar that well whilst spinning 360 degrees and crow barring 25 words into spaces designed for ten has got it going on.
Naturally, there's a Manics vibe throughout The Great Western, although it's a stripped down version of the bombastic, anthemic sound we've grown to barely tolerate, with more acoustic work and, here and there, hand claps. Vocally, Bradfield's better than he's ever been, lyrically these words seem much more honest and emotive than anything Wire has ever produced (although curiously Wire does deliver on this album with the words for Bad Boys and Painkillers) and, instrumentally, Bradfield's attacking his fretboard like a man attempting to prove a point, revealing a confidence that many thought had slipped away several albums ago.