This Week's Album Releases

THE DIVINE COMEDY | Regeneration (Parlophone)

THE DIVINE COMEDY | Regeneration (Parlophone)

EIther The div.com songwriter Neil Hannon is suffering from a midlife crisis, or he's a cannier, more commercially minded cove than you'd imagine, metamorphosing from his Nineties Britfop persona - all wide-screen Blighty irony and chumming it up with Robbie Williams - to the millennial-angst Thom Yorke-style melancholic portrayed on Regeneration. Much of the Radiohead comparison has to be down to the producer Nigel Godrich, whose trademark mysterious hints and haunting noises lend a new emotional depth to the Divine Comedy sound, though the comparative restraint and pared-down precision of the band's arrangements attest to the players' increased sensitivities. The main change, though, is in Hannon's songwriting, which despite the usual clever-dick checklists of British imagery ("Passports and parkas, mobiles and chargers/ Silk Cuts and Bennies, 10-packs and 20s", etc) has developed a hitherto unseen introspective side, with mordant ruminations on topics such as God, the media and fashion sharing space with the kind of glumly solipsistic anthems beloved of Travis and Radiohead fans. At their best - "Mastermind" and the single "Love What You Do" - these possess an epiphanic grace akin to Pet Sounds, though the group have some way to go before they wield such sustained emotional power. But it's unlikely that 2001 will bring another pop rehabilitation quite as pronounced as Regeneration.

PETER BLEGVAD | Choices Under Pressure (Resurgence)

With its simple but elegant arrangements - mostly just Peter Blegvad's acoustic guitar underpinned by Danny Thompson or John Greaves' bass, with minimal embellishment from the producer, Jakko Jakszyk - Choices Under Pressure effectively presents the multi-talented musician/cartoonist in the relatively straightforward guise of folk singer. It's a form he inhabits comfortably, not least since the album (subtitled "An Acoustic Retrospective") consists mostly of reinterpretations of songs from Blegvad's Nineties albums - a compilation that skips nimbly from the doting dad's pride and joy in his "Daughter" to the altogether more troubled, Richard Thompson territory of "Scarred for Life", and the Dylanesque parable "King Strut". What remains constant throughout is Blegvad's philosophic cast of mind, applied to deceptively whimsical reflections on such weighty matters as materialism ("Gold"), time ("Meantime") and religion ("That'll Be Him Now" and "God Detector"). Most rewarding are his musings on the process of creation, both in "Haiku" - the earliest piece here, originally recorded in 1974 with Slapp Happy - and "Waste of Time", which opens the album, with Blegvad quietly shouting down the inner demons that decry his art as pointless (the penalty of being artistic and philosophical): "What are Truth and Beauty, rescued from the slime?/ Nothing but another waste of time." Long may he continue to waste it.

NELLY FURTADO | Whoa, Nelly! (Dreamworks)

It's hard to see where Nelly Furtado fits into the present pop landscape, being neither R&B soul diva, country crooner, indie whiner nor rave sound bite - though happily, that hasn't prevented her from crashing into the Top Five with "I'm Like a Bird", an early contender for the single of the year.

Rarely has a warning of romantic inconstancy sounded this fresh and joyous: blessed with a skittish, bubbly manner and a classic hook that sounds familiar the first time you hear it, "I'm Like a Bird" has the rare ability to melt hardened hearts, like spring sunshine on frosted meadows. But while the rest of this début album sustains that general mood, its 13 tracks shoot off at so many different tangents - often simultaneously - that there's no easy way to shoe-horn Furtado's talents into any neat category.

Her attitude is cheerfully self-assertive, like a happy Alanis Morissette (if such a thing exists), and her muse is as poetically self-involved as Tori Amos or Fiona Apple's, but Nelly's music brims over with all manner of influences, from swingbeat to hip hop to the fado and Brazilian modes that hint at her Portuguese-Canadian upbringing.

The arrangements are quirkily eclectic, as brightly accessorised as a boy racer's car, and strongly informed by sampling: take the opener, "Hey, Man!", a demand for unambivalence in which Nelly's bohemian, hippie-chick charm is supported by skittering percussion and a Kronos Quartet string sample; or "Baby Girl", whose frisky two-step groove comes with a little Latin kick that shames the more graceless efforts of Lopez and Aguilera. Elsewhere, the everyday miracle of overdubbing enables her to sound like all of Destiny's Child and All Saints put together on "Shit on the Radio", a vivid folk-soul-hop blend of rap, scratching and acoustic guitars. And that's not even to mention "Turn off the Light", whose infectious, chattery hook surely ensures a hit follow-up to "I'm Like a Bird".

Throughout it all, Furtado's songs project an unashamedly honest and refreshingly positive outlook, whether she's chiding a former-friend-turned-detractor ("It's so much easier to stay down there, guaranteeing you're cool/ Than to sit up here exposing myself, trying to break through"), warning of her own flightiness in tracks such as "I Will Make U Cry" and "I'm Like a Bird", or searching for her own paradise in "Trynna Finda Way". If there's a single line that sums up Nelly's attitude to life, love and music, it would have to be her assertion that: "It's not that my glass is empty, but I need another cup." With talent as protean as hers, it's no wonder it runneth over as abundantly as it does on Whoa, Nelly!.

AEROSMITH | Just Push Play (Columbia)

It says much for Aerosmith's resilience (and managerial smartness) that although Just Push Play is their first album in four years, they've managed to appear an almost constant presence throughout that period - most recently at the Superbowl half-time show, where their swagger and panache effortlessly outshone the more mechanical performances of Britney and NSync. That same self-confidence is the lifeblood of Just Push Play, which displays an energy and ease with the form that must be the envy of rock groups half their age. The light, swingy feel they bring to the title track, without sacrificing an ounce of its heft, is light years away from the turgid, by-numbers riffing of most modern metal bands, while the naughty-boy charm of its chorus ("Just push play/ Fuckin' A/ Just push play/ They're gonna bleep it anyway") peels back the years to a cheerier time, before heroin ground heavy metal into grim grey dust. Though self-produced, after albums helmed by Kevin Shirley and Bruce Fairbairn, Just Push Play retains all the essential Aerosmith characteristics - Steven Tyler's strangulated squawk and visceral imagery, with its references to getting "under your/my skin"; Joe Perry's euphoric guitar breaks; and particularly, Joey Kramer's colossal drum sound. Less welcome are the tentative excursions into U2 territory ("Outta Your Head") and the diluted AOR of "Luv Lies", whose strings and backing vocals recall the dark days of ELO.

DAFT PUNK | Discovery (Virgin)

We Brits are fond of castigating our transatlantic cousins for their lack of irony, but the contemporary French music scene offers a dire warning of the consequences of excessive irony. Take Daft Punk's new album, which presumes that the only thing more amusing than cheesy Eighties disco riffs is the robotic synthesiser recreation of cheesy Eighties disco riffs - as if irony might magically render bad music good. Or maybe I just don't get Daft Punk. With its unchanging riffs, endlessly re-triggered samples and vocoderised vocals, and those achingly slow filter-sweeps that are such a tedious ubiquity in modern house music, Discovery has all the personality of an aerobics video and fulfils much the same function. The real irony about Daft Punk is that, though often compared with Kraftwerk, their mechanistic thump lacks the human presence of Kraftwerk's music. After all, any nerd can make a machine sound like a machine, but it takes real artistry (and real emotional investment) to humanise machines through melody and timbre; one suspects that if Daft Punk ever found themselves stumbling over an emotionally involving melody, they'd discard it as not ironic enough. Instead, they seem to believe that the way to add character to their riffs is to synthesise ghastly prog-rock guitar ostinatos of the type beloved of the Dutch art-rockers Focus, as in "Aerodynamics". Or is that ironic, too? And if so, why does that make it any better?