New music releases

We're not gonna mess about, the best album released this week by several massive hairy horses' heads is a compilation album featuring tracks made up to 34 years ago.

Kid Creole 'Going Places: The August Darnell Years 1974- 983' (Strut) brings together the best tracks and productions by the proto-Cat from Red Dwarf, best known for his 1982 hit 'Annie, I'm Not Your Daddy'. Forget everything you've known (unless you know the cure for death or the secret formula for Frosties) as these are some of the most inventive, bordering on insane, disco tracks ever made, including Cristina's outrageously jaded re-working of Peggy Lee's 'Is That All There Is?' and Machine's seminal 'There But For The Grace Of God Go I'. We can't stop playing it. Bloody amazing.

Naturally, we now resent all other albums for preventing us from listening to Kid Creole. We especially resent Mariah Carey 'E=MC2' (Def Jam) for being a virtually unlistenable collection of soulless modernity, and she gets her tit out on the back cover. We're retching while we write this. We also found it necessary to turn off Jim Noir 'Jim Noir' (My Dad) as, despite obvious talent, his woozy, bedroom pop suffocates under the weight of ideas pilfered from a sixties-heavy record collection. The Kooks 'Konk' (Virgin) will probably go to number one because they still turn out songs that your Auntie can whistle, while fooling the world that they're all cool and indie-like. In reality there's little difference between these former Brit Schoolers and The Feeling, except The Feeling write far better songs that your Auntie can whistle and thay don't sing them in a phoney 'waster' voice.

The B-52s are back with Funplex (EMI). Are you excited by that? Do you even remember who they are? We do, but we're not. Contrary to what Oscar Wilde believed, wackiness is the lowest form of wit.

Elliot Minor 'Elliot Minor' (Warner Bros) is the ridiculously-ambitious pomp rock debut from some young boys we had a bit of a silly conversation with recently. We rather admire their attempts to bring a Jim Steinman-esque hugeness to modern guitar pop. We'll never listen to it again, of course. But that's what we're like.

We'd never heard of Morgan Page before but his debut album, 'Elevate' (Nettwerk), collects solo tracks and 'banging' remixes he's done for the likes of Nelly Furtado, Delerium and that great Jenny Owen Youngs song with the swear word* in the title. It's also got Amy Winehouse's friend Tyler James on it. We'd been wondering what had happened to him.

Rushing through the last of them then: The Accidental 'There Were Wolves' (Full Time Hobby) is pastoral and psych-folky and we like it; Blood Red Shoes 'Box Of Secrets' (V2) is affected and hackneyed and we don't like it; and Muscles 'Guns Babes Lemonade' (Modular) is glitchy-cool, electronically noisy and made for people who design their own MySpace layouts with garish colours and child-like drawings. And that ain't us.


*F#ck

» Reviewed by: Tim
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