Black Cherry
Goldfrapp

The trip-hop bus has pretty much left town since Goldfrapp's debut album "Felt Mountain" came out draped in the same movie soundtrack atmospherics and doomy decadence that Portishead had made trendy, so now it sounds as if they're trying to hitch a ride on the electroclash bandwagon by loading up "Black Cherry" with the glitchy synth noises and robo-beats currently in vogue with the hipster world and it's wife. So is this a genuine artistic progression or are they just a pair of thieving bastards? Thankfully the album has just enough sparkling synth-pop thrills to make the question seem (almost) beside the point, the single "Train" marches on an insistent "Personal Jesus"-style beat and "Twist" is a dirty dazzler straight from from the Soft Cell school of porno-electro-disco. To match the new chromium decor Alison has swapped her fur mittens for PVC boots and she vamps it up like a schoolgirl who just discovered sex which is certainly more fun to listen to than the chilly chanteuse she was before – though her voice sounds in a bit of a straightjacket with these more conventional pop songs. Some of their old romantic lushness crops up on the ballads but unfortunately the spooky howls and whistles of before have been toned down and none of them tingle the spine the way "Lovely Head" did. I'm not one of those who throws up his hands in horror when a band I like cops a few populist licks and this is a tasty enough album, but it's hard to shake the notion that Goldfrapp are the Zeligs of the electronic world, assuming the characteristics of whatever musical trends happen to be in the room at the time. [Official site]

Hate
The Delgados

The Delgados clearly never got the memo about quiet being the new loud and less being more and all that because every song on this stunning album is accompanied by a gazillion-piece orchestra, brass, a choir, and a troupe of interpretive dancers (not really) – is it time for an ELO revival? The opening track "The Light Before We Land" is a perfect example of their style, it starts quietly enough but then – Boom! – a Wagnerian wall of orchestral noise crashes in like a blinding flash of heavenly thunder with a force that could part the Red Sea. Listen closely and you can hear the sound of angels weeping at the grandeur of it all. It's a breathtaking start and the album continues with one spine-tingling, heart-stopping, trouser-rousing moment after another. The lyrics suggest that singers Emma Pollock and Alun Woodward are more miserable than a barrel full of Morrisseys and their fragile vocals have a soothing nursery rhyme quality, but if you were to sing a song like "All You Need Is Hate" to your kids they'd have nightmares for a week and probably spend most of their adult lives in therapy. But the combination of their affecting songs and the epic production that has everything turned up to 11 gives "Hate" an emotional power that is quite flabbergasting. Rarely has my flabber been so gasted. [Official Site]

Monday at The Hug & Pint
Arab Strap

I like a beer, I usually like several beers actually. I like women too, and have spent many an evening drinking beer and talking - moaning mostly - about women. So have Arab Strap from the sound of this. Like Sinatra's "One For My Baby" re-written by Lou Reed this is a drunk's sad lament about life and women but one that's brutal and angry with enough effing and blinding to make a sailor blush. Vocalist Aidan Moffat slurs his words in a Scottish brogue as thick as a North Sea fog, going over the sordid details of his life like The Streets' Mike Skinner out of his head on McEwan's. The album starts off like a Glasgow saturday night out, having a boogie with the dirty drum-machine beat of "The Shy Retirer" and then lurches into someone getting a good kicking outside the chip shop with the vicious black noise of "Fucking Little Bastards" (and they say poetry is dead). After a bit more of this sort of thing the smell of beer and overflowing ashtrays and the ranting of this drunken Jock makes you want to run screaming to the nearest AA meeting, but thankfully relief is at hand with the wonderful "Loch Leven" which rolls in like mist to the sound of bagpipes and rainfall before turning into a lovely Pogues-esque ballad. The rest of the album continues in this downbeat, closing-time mode with mournful songs graced with violins and brass and before you know it the lights are on and the landlord is telling everyone to go home. Beer does funny things to you, some people get violent, some happy, some sad, if you're me you get really sentimental and fall asleep. Some end up lying in a gutter moaning incomprehensibly with puke all over their trousers. This album is all those things. [Official Site]