The Diary of Alicia Keys
Alicia Keys

She may be more beautiful than Cleopatra's better-looking younger sister and sold warehouses full of records but Alicia Keys wants to be thought of as a serious artiste. The album title just screams "I write my own songs and they're really deep and personal and shit" but unfortunately her lyrics are more like someone with a Hello Kitty diary than Joni Mitchell and in the sleeve notes she writes "these songs are like my daily entrees" apparently unaware that an entree is something you have in a restaurant before your pudding. And just in case we'd forgotten that she can play the piano – she's classically trained you know! – she opens this album in exactly the same way as her first with an instrumental full of frilly ivory-tinkling. Sorry, I'm being a big meanie, she does have a terrific soul voice and this is a stronger record than her debut but it suffers from the same problem of being several tracks too long and needing a good editor to put a blue pencil through a few of them. The good news is the single "U Don't Know My Name" is the best thing she's done to date, as gorgeous a slice of faux-Philly soul as I've ever heard with a wonderfully corny spoken word bit that evokes classics like "Have You Seen Her?" and "Kiss And Say Goodbye." The bad news is nothing else here is quite as wonderful, she attempts to "street" up her sound with the Timbaland-produced "Heartburn" which is pretty good in it's jiggy way but Princess Alicia doesn't sound quite right doing the Beyoncé thang. The quiet storm ballad is what she's really built for and there's a smattering of good ones here like "Nobody Not Really" and the quirky "So Simple" but while "If I Ain't Got You" is obviously meant to be the big emotional roof-raiser of the album you have to pretend she's singing better lyrics to really enjoy it. I like Alicia but I sometimes think she might have a better chance of fulfilling her potential if she had a face like a bulldog chewing a wasp and was on some indie label because she sounds as if she's trying too hard to live up to the burden of being the "it" girl of neo-soul. Relax Alicia, it's not rocket science. [Official site]

Frank
Amy Winehouse

Even though she's only a mere slip of a girl of 20 Amy Winehouse sounds like one hell of a bold and brassy broad who eats guys like me for breakfast and washes it down with black coffee and a Marlboro Red. Her amazing, raspy voice has all the jazzy swagger of a Dinah Washington and is so thick with bluesy soul juices you could stand a spoon up in it. While she might sound like an old-time smoky nightclub chanteuse her stunning debut album has it's high heels planted firmly in the here and now with modern funky beats adding urban grit to classic jazz-soul stylings and a set of razor-sharp songs about the squelchy minefield of sex and relationships as seen through the eyes of a brutally honest and often downright bitchy girl about London town. "Take The Box" is a beautiful ballad about the bitter end of a relationship, the savagely funny "Fuck Me Pumps" pokes a sharp stick at silicone-boobed Gucci tarts on the bar prowl, while on the finger-wagging funk of "Stronger Than Me" she gives her nice, sensitive boyfriend a severe tongue-lashing for not being masculine enough and sticks the knife in with the taunt feared by all of us fully paid up members of the nice, sensitive boys club: "Are you gay?" She isn't a total ball-buster though, she shows her romantic side by covering a couple of swoony old jazz chestnuts ("Moody's Mood For Love" and "There is No Greater Love") and on her own "You Sent Me Flying" she sounds completely discombobulated by love. With her acid tongue Amy isn't the sort of girl you take home to meet your mother for tea and cucumber sandwiches but I've always had a thing for mouthy broads and when they make records as blazingly great as this then, well, who cares who cares what my mother thinks about her? [Official site]

Cedars
Clearlake

Though I swear to you that it doesn't actually rain all the time in England and we do have quite nice weather some days (the second Tuesday in July usually) there is a strain of damp fatalism in the English as if we were always waiting in the rain for a bus that never comes and the bands seen as the most "English" are usually the ones that sound sort of mopey and soaked to the skin in grey drizzle. Morrissey's "Every Day Is Like Sunday" is the quintessential example of this and Clearlake have clearly studied at the feet of Moz's melodramatic miserablism, though by the sound of them they've also spent a lot of their pocket money on Pulp records. Lead singer Jason Pegg has a skinny-boy whine that sounds like he lives on cold baked beans while the band play a highly theatrical Britpop-ish indie rock that swoops and swirls like a nasty wind on Margate seafront and "Cedars" is a big, baroque extravaganza about not liking yourself or other people very much and diving under the bedclothes when life gets a bit crap. Their moody dramatics work best at funeral procession speed as on the three-hanky tearjerker "I Wonder If The Snow Will Settle" and the malevolent "I'd Really Like To Hurt You" which is made all the more sinister by being sung by someone who sounds like he couldn't punch his way out of a wet bag of chips – "you have to watch the quiet ones" he sings. You certainly do. When things get more blustery and the guitars get louder on the rocking likes of "Come Into The Darkness" they sound like Jarvis Cocker And The Spiders From Mars which is no bad thing at all in my book, they might be as dour as a muddy puddle but their bombastic, chandelier-tinkling sound makes being a bit glum sound very good indeed. [Domino Records]

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