TOP 5 ROCK / POP
1. Kanye West: My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasty | Rating: * * * *
Kanye West is clearly a man who loves a fight. The middle-class Chicago art-school kid muscled his way into the street-tough world of hip hop by proving he could spit rhymes like a block hustler while armed with the nerdy production chops of Phil Spector.
2. Justin Bieber: My Worlds: The Collection | Rating: * * * *
Joining the likes of Nirvana, Eric Clapton and Lauryn Hill, Justin Bieber has released an unplugged album. Except it's only taken him two years. Such is the accelerated effect of the internet fame he has achieved since his mother started posting videos of him on YouTube in 2007.
3. Cee Lo Green: The Lady Killer | Rating: * * * *
Buoyantly eccentric American soul singer Cee Lo Green caught the mood of the moment with Gnarls Barkley’s breakout single Crazy in 2006, the singalong smash of the year. And it looks like he has done it again with his ebullient solo hit, the unprintably titled F--k You.
4. Jamiroquai: Rock Dust Light Star | Rating: * * * *
It’s five years since Jay Kay was last in the spotlight with Dynamite, an album he now considers “a little sterile” due to its electronic stylings. He returns, then, with a more organically recorded set of songs that practically glow with sunny brass and Californian Seventies funk rock flavours.
5. Hawkwind: Blood of the Earth | Rating: * * *
The Seventies space rock band’s second full album of the 21st century is thoroughly entertaining.
TOP 5 CLASSICAL / JAZZ / WORLD
1.The Creole Choir of Cuba: Tande-la (World)| Rating: * * * *
These descendants of Haitian migrant labourers long resident in Cuba make a powerful, invocatory sound that has a huge impact live.
2. Schumann: Davidsbundlertanze; Kinderszenen; Sonata No 2 in G Minor | Rating: * * * * *
There is a notorious interpretative conundrum in Schumann’s G minor Sonata. The pianist is instructed to start the first movement “as fast as possible”. Towards the end of the movement, there are further urgings to play “faster” and then “faster still”.
3. In the Depths of the Night: Songs by Berg & Hartmann | Rating: * * * * *
Alban Berg’s Seven Early Songs have a fascinating sense of an overripe romantic world on the edge of dissolution, shot through with glimpses of a modernism just around the corner.
4.Mendelssohn: Violin. Concerto; Octet (Classical)| Rating: * * * * *
James Ehnes consolidates his position as one of the most sublime and stylish of musicians on this new recording of Mendelssohn’s Violin Concerto.
5. Various Artists: Tradi-mods vs Rockers: Alternative Takes on Congotronics | Rating: * * * *
Who could have imagined that the once impoverished Congolese sound systems Konono No1 and Kasai Allstars would inspire a double album of remixes and tributes from high-end, left-field Western artists such as Animal Collective and Lonely Drifter Karen.
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