Glasvegas - Euphoric ///Heartbreak\\\ Here’s a twist on an old, familiar favourite. On the annoyingly punctuated Euphoric ///Heartbreak\\\, Glasvegas suffer from Difficult Second (Unless You Count the Christmas Album, Then It’s Difficult Third) Album Syndrome. Put it another way: if the Christmas album was a cunning ploy to get the second-album jitters out of their system, it hasn’t worked. This is a real letdown after the band’s wonderful debut. There are two main problems. First, where the band once referenced the Jesus and Mary Chain, they now seem to be channelling late-period Simple Minds, or occasionally Reflex-era Duran Duran. Second, almost every song dials the emotions up to 11, with no attempt at dynamics. This is just annoying. The more measured I Feel Wrong reminds us how good Glasvegas can be. ME
Britney Spears - Femme Fatale Complaining about the absence — in terms of creative input or tangible commitment — of Britney Spears from her albums has always seemed muddle-headed: she has rarely been more than a photogenic facade behind which her producers and songwriters alchemise her career. This was never more true than on 2007’s midmeltdown Blackout, a record so dark, not even its breathtakingly audacious, genre-hopping production could distract you from the fact that you were essentially listening to a cri de coeur sung by the victim, but to words written about her by others. Femme Fatale may not match that album, but, at its best — on the fabulously weird How I Roll and the Europoptastic Trip to Your Heart — it comes close. Semidetached its star may be, but brand Britney can still cut it. DC
The Kills - Blood Pressures In the three years-plus since the release of their last album, Alison Mosshart and Jamie Hince have both been involved in other projects: the former in the Dead Weather, alongside Jack White; the latter as Kate Moss’s much-papped fiancé. Any sense of fatigue or distractedness is immediately dispelled on Blood Pressures’ sensational opening track, Future Starts Slow, a black-as-night vocal two-hander on which Hince cuts through the swamp-blues sonics with menacing staccato guitar stabs. If nothing else quite matches that song’s swagger and snarl, there are some real gems. Heart Is a Beating Drum’s sparse, timp-pocked backing is thrillingly brutal and dark, while the driving, bass-heavy Baby Says has a tremulous, threatening insistence that unsettles as much as it ensnares. DC
Matt & Kim - Sidewalks On their third album, the Brooklyn duo replace their once ramshackle, lo-fi sound with a high-gloss studio finish, and come hopelessly unstuck in the process. Slapdashery prevented the pair’s confections from being too cloying; buffed to a sheen, they are intolerable. Matt Johnson’s tics — that geeky, nasal twang, and his yelping intakes of breath — become, over the course of a whole album, like the strident, verging on deranged exhortations of a CBBC presenter. And the synths-and-drums simplicity that has always motored their songs now seems a contrivance, rather than the inevitable result of budgetary limitations. Twice — on the irrepressible Cameras and the poignant, nostalgic Northeast — the album hits the mark. All else is like an overdose of E numbers. DC
Mani Neumeier and Kawabata Makoto - Samurai Blues Makoto’s bands — Musica Transonic, Mainliner, Acid Mothers Temple — have a cannibalistic relationship with the underground’s first flowering, regurgitating exaggerated forms of psychedelia, hard rock and proto-punk. Here he teams with a true first-generation innovator, the percussionist Mani Neumeier, of the 1970s krautrockers Guru Guru, a kind of free-jazz Stooges. On five spontaneous compositions, Neumeier plugs all available space with clattering splashback, forcing Makoto out of his curatorial comfort zone, his guitar-playing here more reminiscent of the spiky improviser Derek Bailey than any of the long-haired legends he usually channels. SL
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Found - Factorycraft Edinburgh’s art-school guitar popsters FOUND insist on capital letters. Their sometime scratchiness will satiate those weaned on scuffed Scottish indie rock from way back, such as Josef K or Fire Engines, but they’re clean and lean and melodic enough to clobber the casual consumer with chiming guitars, suckable hooks and falsetto vocal leaps, and clever-clever enough for their third album to sport a Scottish Arts Council logo. Ziggy Campbell’s Lowland blab is pleasantly unreconstructed, but, for a band that began as an improvisatory experiment, Factorycraft sometimes sounds a little tidy. Nonetheless, it’s easy to imagine them being huge. SL
David Murray Cuban Ensemble - Plays Nat King Cole en Espanol A word of warning: old-school admirers of the mellifluous Cole, an artist whose superb piano-playing took second place to his equally classy singing, probably won’t warm to the jagged improvisations of Murray, a saxophonist who used to wander the wilder shores of the avant-garde. Yet these reworkings of recordings that Cole made fairly late in his career are bold, brash and often beautiful. The eccentric tango singer Melingo makes a gravelly cameo appearance on Quizas, Quizas, Quizas. Eschewing Copacabana-style nostalgia, Murray hasn’t entirely lost his taste for bombast, but, as with his earlier collaboration with the Gwo-Ka Masters, he unleashes irresistible rhythmic flourishes. CD
Orchestra Poly-Rhythmo - Cotonou Club Unlikely as it may seem, Franz Ferdinand played a part in the veteran West African group’s return to centre stage. (The indie rockers’ guest spot on the song Lion Is Burning forms a suitably heated climax.) Not that the veterans from Benin need too much help in raising the temperature with their slick and undemanding fusion of traditional melodies, James Brown funk, Afrobeat and Francophone pop. Some old favourites get dusted down, and the band’s compatriot Angélique Kidjo — the singer responsible for the most enjoyable and versatile world-music album of 2010 — drops by as well. Even she can’t upstage them. CD