This Week's Album Releases

BIG YOUTH | Natty Universal Dread (Blood & Fire)

BIG YOUTH | Natty Universal Dread (Blood & Fire)

Big Youth was not the first Jamaican MC to start toasting over dub plates - that honour goes to either Dennis Alcapone or U-Roy, whose boisterous, swaggering style was taken to new heights by the charismatic giant with the red, gold and green jewel-encrusted teeth. His impact outside Jamaica, though, was explosive: in the early Seventies, Big Youth was one of the small core of breakthrough artists whose work converted rock fans to roots reggae, with albums such as Dread Locks Dread and Natty Cultural Dread second in sales only to Bob Marley's. This was the first time white kids had heard either rapping or the innovative sonic strategies of dub, and as this splendidly annotated three-disc anthology demonstrates, his ebullient charm remains impervious to the ravages of time. Punctuated by his trademark cry of "Move, y'all!", Youth's toasts covered the usual territory of ghetto oppression and rasta righteousness, along with stuff that was completely off the radar - check out his conflation of Last Poets' lines about birth control and John Coltrane in the twitchy "Jim Screechy", still a high point of the form. Avoiding, for the most part, his ill-judged excursions into singing, this collection showcases the unique qualities that made him a Reggae Phenomenon. Vital ital, as he might say.

THIGHPAULSANDRA | I, Thighpaulsandra (Eskaton)

Wizard's robe, mini-Mohawk tonsure, wand - you'd never guess from the album sleeve that Thighpaulsandra was a mate of Julian Cope's, now would you? The man whose name contains not just male and female principles but the upper-leg principle, too, is helped out by Cope on this début double-album, along with fellow-members of Coil and Spiritualized, his other main musical outlets. It's a fantastic record, in all senses of the word, packed with cosmic synth-scapes, prodigious Krautrock riffing and a courageous strain of art-rock improvisation that miraculously steers clear of longueurs. For all its experimental leanings, it is articulate and approachable - whether hammering away at a 10-league-boot feedback stomp like "Home Butt Club" or sticking a French horn through a ring modulator on "Celine And Julie Go Boating", Thighpaulsandra strives to avoid the solipsistic tendencies of much improvised music. Indeed, the best pieces aren't shamed by comparisons with such illustrious influences as Zappa (the clarinet and furtive strings of "Abuse Foundation IV") and Sun Ra (the organ overload of "Lycraland"), while the baritone saxophone and marimba of "The Angelica Declaration" combine to conjure up the mutant jazz of the whole Pop Group/Pigbag Bristol boho-punk scene.

HAMELL ON TRIAL | Choochtown (Such-a-Punch/Evangeline)

If the current wave of new acoustic music is a little too genteel for your taste, the American singer-songwriter Hamell on Trial may be just what you need. Not so much folk singer as anarchist ranter, he's like Billy Bragg with a bad attitude or, more accurately, Bill Hicks wielding his guitar like a scythe: the bile-drenched, expletive-ridden observations and lowlife narratives that make up Choochtown have an immediacy and satiric charge that owes more to the late comedian than to any folkie forebears, while Hamell's frantic strumming betrays his taste for the primitive rock of The Stooges, early MC5 and The Velvet Underground.

The album opens in arresting style, with backward guitar slithering like a serpent behind Hamell's hilariously obscene DeNiro impression, a blunderbuss diatribe dissing all comers, be they rich, poor, smart or stupid. The mood is sustained through "Hamell's Ramble" - a 100-miles-an-hour talking blues whose urgency reflects the singer's simmering anger - and "Uncle Morris", a razor-sharp vignette of survivalist attitude that takes no prisoners: "Arm yourself, says Uncle Morris/ Look out 'fore it is too late/ What the hell's the country built on?/ Teach your children how to hate."

But anger isn't Hamell's only spur. Alongside his splenetic outbursts is a series of vivid narratives featuring a cast of hustlers, drug dealers and bohemian scufflers who one suspects are based on the singer's friends and acquaintances.

People such as Joe Brush, a guitarist who, inspired by Van Gogh, chops off his fretting finger when his girlfriend dumps him, and "now plays a mean slide guitar"; Judy, whose imminent return from rehab is anticipated with a raw grind akin to "Sister Ray"; and the doper antihero of "When Bobby Comes Down", whose disgusting restaurant altercation is related in a deadpan rap snarl: "Fun to hang with when he's high/ You couldn't find a nicer guy/ He would give you his own shirt/ He starts to crash and you get hurt."

Most impressive of all are a couple of private-dick scenarios sketched in the disillusioned, world-weary tone of James Crumley. In "The Long Drive", the gumshoe discovers a drug dealer's widow poisoning her late husband's business rivals with his ashes (he takes off with her, of course), while "Choochtown" finds the eponymous Chooch, hired to hunt down a blackmailer, himself taking advantage of the blackmailed paedophile. As perhaps befits a country that could elect Dubya Bush as its president, Hamell depicts an America sliding inexorably into a moral vacuum, with few, if any, stable principles to slow the descent. Faced with which, a loner like him has only one recourse: gangsta folk.

FRANK BLACK & THE CATHOLICS | Dog in the Sand (Cooking Vinyl)

The decline of the one-time Pixies frontman's career is one of rock's more regrettable occurrences. Dog in the Sand may be marginally more appealing than his last couple of albums, but it's still an awfully long way down from the fiery, melodic punk-pop with which he in effect kick-started grunge back in the late Eighties. At least this time his backing band come close to living up to their name, working with a wide stylistic palette that ranges from the understated R&B croon of "Stupid Me" to the Neil Young-style ragged rock of "St Francis Dam Disaster", though the results are still nowhere near as inspirational as you might expect from a band with not one but two former members of Captain Beefheart's Magic Band. They're particularly disappointing given that Dog in the Sand comprises the first material from Frank Black's reunion with his old Pixies guitarist Joey Santiago. It speaks volumes, that the most galvanised music is on "Hermaphroditos" and "Blast Off", which are just exercises in Stones raunch, their Keef riffing streaked with surly slide guitar or rollicking Ian Stewart-style piano. Apart from on those two tracks, the decision to record live in the studio hasn't really worked to their advantage: most of the songs sound flat and oddly characterless.

THE FRANK AND WALTERS | Glass (Setanta)

Like me, you probably thought The Frank And Walters had long since dissolved, if you thought about them at all. Best remembered for scraping the Top 40 with 1993's Trains, Boats And Planes, little has been heard of the Irish trio since the days when Noel Gallagher humped gear as their guitar roadie, and they were supported on tour by Radiohead and Suede. Obviously, their respective fortunes have changed considerably since then - and so has The F&Ws' music, which has developed a cheesy but appealing Eighties synth-pop pulse in the interim. Their gift for melody, though, remains as strong as ever, and when harnessed to the ticking techno grooves, the memorable hooks and morose delivery of songs like "Talking About You" and "Isn't It Time" irresistibly recall the Technique heyday of New Order. Judging by "Looking For America" ("I was looking for America, but instead I found you/ I was looking for a dream to dream in the last days of my youth"), their Nineties may well have been spent vainly pursuing some American Dream, though if their sojourn helped inspire "New York" - a romantic epic lent epiphany-like grace by a Morricone vocal hook - it was worthwhile. Less successful is "Sinking", a Tindersticky wallow in self-pity that doesn't suit their style at all.