ACID HOUSE KINGS

Sing Along With Acid House Kings

Labrador LAB075

Drawing inspiration from the 1960s (Motown, Bacharach, Herman’s Hermits), these Swedes produce a homage so perfect that it’s best in small helpings, to avoid OD-ing on tweeness. Taken all at once, the Kings can begin to seem like crazed revivalists, all polo necks and tambourines, smiles of glee on their lips but hard fanaticism in their eyes. In a strange way, though, homage can be preferable to the real thing: this is sacrilege, I know, but the embrace of distant pop history does get a bit stifling at times. And does it matter where indie gems such as This Heart Is a Stone and London School of Economics come from when they’re so scrumptious? Two stars

MARY J BLIGE

The Breakthrough

Geffen/Universal 9889349

“No more drama,” Mary J promised in 2001; she was through with crisis, with complaining. God and a new love had combined to see them off. It’s hard to tell how things stand in Mary land, four years on: the opener, No One Will Do, implies that all is well, but by Enough Cryin, Blige is lambasting her beau and lamenting her own gullibility (“So dumb to think you gonna marry me”). Okay, The Breakthrough’s not likely to be purely autobiographical, but this sense of constant, well, drama tries the patience. Nobody wants to hear a crease-free Mary J cooing sweetly about flora and fauna, but eight studio albums into her career, the girl from Yonkers is beginning to sound like a record that is stuck. Time, perhaps, for the drum’n’bass makeover? One star

SWEET BILLY PILGRIM

We Just Did What Happened and No One Came

Wonderland Avenue WLMCD002

When it’s time to decide just what is the best piece of art to emerge from a shed recently, the Turner prize-winner Simon Starling will have a fight on his hands. Sweet Billy Pilgrim’s album was recorded in a shed, and it’s a gem (the album, not the shed — I haven’t seen the shed). Gently wandering through a landscape inhabited by the Blue Nile, Elbow and Sparklehorse, SBP have put together one of those albums that, given the slightest encouragement, will take up residence in your CD player (or other favoured playback device), stubbornly refusing to make way for anything else. This calm, pretty folktronica is strange but not difficult: there are choruses here that, if Chris Martin had stumbled across them, would have shifted another million Coldplay albums. A rather special debut. Three stars

Download Experience at www.sweetbillypilgrim.com

THE STROKES

First Impressions of Earth

Rough Trade RTRADCDX330

The first impression of First Impressions of Earth is that the Strokes are back in business. The first four tracks comprise a stunning EP: lovely dual-guitar interplay on You Only Live Once, appealing attention-deficit structure on Juicebox, butch Iggy Pop vocals on Heart in a Cage, a melody stolen from Barry Manilow’s Mandy on Razor Blade (disapproval of the theft is easily outweighed by delight at its unexpected source). Then it all unravels. Too many tracks (at almost an hour, it ’s twice as long as a Strokes album needs to be); too many guitar solos (when on earth did they creep in?); and some uninterested and uninteresting vocals. Julian Casablancas has always been a mumbler, but he just sounds bored here, with his band (unfairly) and with his own lyrics (justifiably). Two stars

VARIOUS ARTISTS

Good for What Ails You: Music of the Medicine Shows 1926-1937

Old Hat OLDHATCD1005

Excavations into the abandoned mine marked “Danger: old weird Americana” continue. Here are performances by 48 forgotten jazz and blues artists, employed by travelling mountebanks to flog dubious wonder cures and transcribed from crumbling vintage 78s. Two CDs showcase fascinating oddities: an extract from Alec Johnson’s A Trip to Coontown, the first musical ever written and performed by black Americans; the cowboy Frank Hutchison’s curiously upbeat reading of the murder ballad Stackalee; and Daddy Stovepipe and Mississippi Sarah’s The Spasm, a jaunty look at domestic disunity. Three stars

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