Daybreaker
Beth Orton

Beth Orton is an enigma wrapped in a conundrum wrapped in a pair of old jeans, on stage she's a giggly girl with a taste for silly jokes but on record she's as miserable as a wet afternoon in Margate. The title "Daybreaker" implies a positive vibe and there's Beth on the back cover happily playing in the sea, but when she opens her mouth she sounds so heartbroken you want to find the guy she's singing about and give him a good kicking. Musically it's a lighter affair than "Central Reservation" and there are lots of strings buffing up the songs to make this her prettiest sounding record yet, though it may also be her least compelling as some of it drifts a little too lazily into bland easy listening music for Latté drinkers. But - and it's a big but with knobs on - with her voice she could be reading a bus timetable and still set me adrift on a memory bliss. [Official site]

We Love Life
Pulp

There's a pastoral motif running through Pulp's new album but there's no sunny meadows and pretty flowers here, this trip around England's green and pleasant land finds it a grotty dump of polluted rivers, smug middle-class wankers and pretty young girls murdered by sad old men. But this ain't just some gloomy wallow in wrist-slitting misery, it's a grand, rousing album that shakes a fist in the face of life and spanks the naughty bottom of death. Jarvis Cocker might not be a buy-the-world-a-Coke kind of guy, but his passionate tone suggests he wouldn’t mind making it a cup of tea and giving it a hug. Sporting a baroque production by Scott Walker that stretches out their glam Britpop sound into lush, widescreen epics, this is like a Mike Leigh script filmed by David Lean - a grim tale of grim folk doing grim things but big, bold and relentlessly entertaining.

Secondhand Sounds
Herbert (Remixes)

This two-disk set of remixes Herbert has done for other artists is a mixed bag of tricks and your enjoyment of it might depend on just how much you love the pitter-patter of little electronic beats. He does his best work when he goes down the abstractly jazzy road like with the lovely tinkling piano and percussion on "Street Lullaby" by Two Banks Of Four (I've no idea who either), but he performs a frontal lobotomy on the bouncy fun of Moloko's "Sing It Back" by chopping it down to one vocal fragment and stapling it to a tinny 4/4 beat - and over 21 tracks Herbert's trademark fragile "microhouse" grooves can start to sound like an army of ants shuffling across a sandy beach. Like the guys in white coats at the start of The Six Million Dollar Man, Herbert has the technology and he can rebuild them, but they don't always end up faster or stronger.

Early
A Certain Ratio

The late 70s and early 80s were the best of times and the worst of times in England. On the downside Maggie Thatcher was in power, unemployment was rising, and no girl would touch my awkward teenage self with a 10-foot pole, but it was also a glorious time of genre-busting bands like A Certain Ratio. Their post-punk funk bridged the gap between Joy Division and Funkadelic with a tribal gothic groove that James Brown might have produced if he’d been an art student from a Manchester council estate. This long-overdue compilation skims the cream of their work for Factory Records and establishes their place as pioneering avant-funkateers (alongside 23 Skidoo and The Pop Group) who got a generation of pale young men in overcoats dancing - well, awkwardly shuffling their feet anyway. Get down with your sad self. [Soul Jazz Records]