Alice Gold - Seven Rainbows Melodies are the key for the hotly tipped Alice Gold and her debut of 10 sunshine songs to soundtrack a middle-class hen party. This album mixes the whimsical and the weird, so for every Sadness Is Coming — a show-tunes special, sure to be covered on Glee — there is a How Long Have These Streets Been Empty?, which ends in more than a minute of chanting, wailing and distortion. It is well sung and diverse, but with lyrics that bear out the fact that it was completed in 22 days. Runaway Love, for instance, on the subject of Paris, explains that “these days you can get there by train”, before ending the verse with “Seine” and a bleedingly obvious mention of “champagne”. Very Des’ree, then, but that singer’s effortless pop isn’t too far from Gold’s grasp. JD
Dave Stewart - The Blackbird Diaries You have to feel sorry for Dave Stewart. (Well, as sorry as you can feel for someone who’s sold 100m albums and is mates with Bob Dylan.) He was fortunate once to find the most extraordinary muse/collaborator, but all his post-Eurythmics work has, inevitably, seemed to have an Annie Lennox-shaped piece missing. Perhaps that explains why he’s taken 13 years to get round to making this album — he’s as unconvinced as the rest of us that he’s really a solo artist. That would explain the decision to write all the songs in less than a week, rather than working longer and harder on a more definitive statement. Result? A series of unremarkable country-rock workouts, although the best track, All Messed Up, a duet with Martina McBride, suggests a possibly fruitful new partnership. ME
Beverley Knight - Soul UK Most covers albums are stopgaps, relatively easy ways to get product on the shelves from artists who have run out of songs/ideas/steam. Every now and then, though, you get a covers album with a theme that links the songs and moves the whole venture beyond “these are a few of my favourite things” aimlessness into a worthwhile act of curation. Soul UK is just such an album, Beverley Knight’s homage to the often overlooked or undervalued British soul scene. It’s a laudable idea, and Knight makes an excellent curator, putting together a set that includes Soul II Soul’s Fairplay, Junior’s Mama Used to Say and the Young Disciples’ Apparently Nothin’. She saves her best for Princess’s yearning Say I’m Your Number One and a storming run-through of Roachford’s Cuddly Toy. ME
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Gypsy & the Cat - Gilgamesh This week’s new MGMT are the Australians Xavier Bacash and Lionel Towers, who fill the void left by the blissful pop-psychedelic Americans when they opted to create 11-minute experiments in sound. Helium vocals wash over choruses as slick as the titles are stodgy (Jona Vark?), with Sight of a Tear sounding as much like Duran Duran as it suggests, and Watching Me, Watching You escaping Alan Partridge origins to become sweet and sing-along. Gilgamesh — very possibly a homage to a pan-Asian eatery in Camden — is samey, but, as the closing A Perfect 2 euphorically boasts of “this mountain of love”, it dawns that Gypsy & the Cat’s debut could well soundtrack your summer, despite their name sounding as if it were the result of losing a bet. JD
GNOD - Ingnodwetrust Gnod underpin echoing guitar and bad-dream vocal snippets with krautrock rhythms. Ingnodwetrust’s two offensively single-minded epics are available on vinyl or as downloads only, the band looking from their Salford lair towards the future and the past, oblivious to the decaying present. The 20-minute monochromatic splurge of Tony’s First Communion is belatedly brightened by a two-chord keyboard part. Vatican’s compellingly turgid 14 minutes sound like a clinically depressed Can. Halfway through, someone screams, and a wonky Italian prog-rock cathedral organ clouds the closing section oppressively. Impressively unapologetic. SL
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White Hills - H-p1 Great! A new White Hills album. Objectivity is suspended as the Brooklyn four-piece grind their guitars, heavy 1970s Detroit scum-punk style, while keeping a stormy weather eye on appropriate egghead art strategies. Thus, the locked groove of The Condition of Nothing dissolves into the bell-like clatter and insect interference of the electroacoustic Movement, and the title track is a revved-up, 17-minute, biker-booted space-rock classic. For their fifth full-length, White Hills have added vintage swooshy synthesizers, suggesting a Chomsky Hawkwind, the swords and sorcery shtick swapped for chapbook anticapitalism. SL