The record store shelves may be heaving with digital debris, but electro-veteran Benge has been at it since the mid-’90s, taking every opportunity to refine his twitchy noodlings and invest them with a distinctive melancholy warmth. These 11 tracks take the ‘discreet music’ of ’70s Eno and filter it through a thoroughly modernist and meticulous electronic aesthetic.

With atmospheric tracks like “Pica Unit” and “Urban”, Benge exhibits a keen sense of melody that elevates him above the competition.

From Monterey, Mexico, Kinky’s extraordinary debut album was recently shortlisted for the American equivalent of the Mercury Music Prize, and it’s easy to hear why. The quartet mix funk, house, rock-en-Espa

Right at the death of the year comes the belated British release of a magnificent debut album by a name we’re surely destined to hear a lot more of in 2003. Erin McKeown is a young woman from Massachusetts who dresses like she just stepped out of a sepia postcard mailed from somewhere in the Appalachian mountains circa 1930. She sounds like a cross between a less twee Be Good Tanyas and a more cheerful Gillian Welch, and Distillation could almost be a female companion volume to such early Ry Cooder albums as Boomer’s Story or Into The Purple Valley. Like those records, it leaves you wondering whether it’s folk, country or acoustic blues. The answer, of course, is that it’s all of them and more, with the odd washboard and yodel for good measure. McKeown’s voice has a delightfully unmediated honesty, and Dave Chalfant’s production sparkles with a bright, earthy, slightly brittle analogue sound that makes you wonder why anyone ever needed multi-tracking. Unlike Cooder, who was always essentially an interpreter, she’s a great songwriter, too. Memo to editor?can we please hear “How To Open My Heart In 4 Easy Steps” on the next free Uncut CD? It’s just about the track of the year.

What made The Blueprint so great was Jay-Z’s opulent showbiz, magnifying his ego to global proportions. But can such an ego be tolerated over a double album?

Alas, despite individually powerful tracks like “Hovi Baby” and “Bitches & Sisters”, we’ve heard too much of this before. There are obligatory contributions from the Neptunes and Timbaland, of which the former come out much the better (“Fuck All Nite”, “Nigga Please”), and equally predictable appearances by Jay-Z’s current other half Beyonc

In light of the recent death of Left-Eye in a car crash, one can understand how difficult it must have been for the rest of TLC, the En Vogue with attitude, to finish this, their fourth album. However heartfelt ballads such as “Turntable” might be, they don’t hide the gaping hole of mischief which Left-Eye filled. The four tracks involving her are superb, especially “Quickie”, their funniest-ever putdown of male impotence. Elsewhere they audibly struggle. A Greatest Hits with these four tracks added would have been advisable.

The overthrow of punk’s sweeping anti-prog diktats in recent times, 2000’s heavy-selling Van der Graaf overview The Box, last year’s sold-out, 50-song solo concert cycle, and fans from Graham Coxon to John Lydon?these have all contributed to the re-emergence of Peter Hammill from self-imposed exile on the far fringe of English rock (Bath, to be exact). But this astringent new album shows him still locked on his own uncompromising, unpopular path.

Written on acoustic guitar?attempting, Hammill says, to return to “first principles”?the songs here are still expansive in a way, with ambient guitar squeaks, strings, and Van der Graaf sax man David Jackson among the embellishments. “The Ice Hotel” especially, with its fantastical metaphor for human vanity, floating, full textures and shifting time signatures, could be an outtake from Hammill’s old crew. But what’s striking are the dark, intimate lessons Hammill (54) has to offer, uncomfortable revelations of time’s cost. Delivered in his familiar tones?melodramatically howling one minute, melancholically soft the next?it’s not an easy ride, and sometimes verges on pompous. But when Hammill hits the spot, he’s doing so in unsavoury corners few others care to turn.

“Once You Called Me” is the most naked song here, about a father’s helpless love for his daughter (“And if trouble’s on its way you know I’d lay my life down for you gladly… Oh, my precious girl”). But “We Are Written” and “Driven” are the cornerstones, about how fate tramples our futile plans, while “Bareknuckle Trade” presents a lifetime metaphor of scarring aptness. Spread over eight minutes, it’s an epic, complex sprawl, from regular folk strums to treated sax and violas meeting in some sinuous, snake-charmer’s sonic space. The song’s rests and surges, and Hammill’s voice at its most crooningly sorrowful, support his lyrics’ lament for the price of a life: the (sometimes literal) scraped knuckles, bruised skin and half-healed black eyes we accrue through the years, till we’re too tired to keep up the fight. Worth your attention.

Dance culture, so rarely political, here provides the often brutal ambience for a shattering protest record. Grant Wakefield’s narration of the Gulf War’s deep background and consequences collages colonial history, news bulletins and UN data, and is perfectly served by the sounds he’s assembled: the slow build to the thunderous “Black Dog” mix of Aphex Twin’s “Come To Daddy” as the War’s turkey shoot rages, and the long, quiet coda of electronic and Arab textures played under evidence of the silent slaughter of Iraqis by sanctions since is shocking and shaming.

KTB is 19-year-old Katherine Bennett and the most obvious comparison suggested by her debut album is with Kathryn Williams. Both favour gentle acoustics from the Nick Drake school and write literate songs which ride youth’s emotional rollercoaster. Sometimes she’s breezy, as on “Do You Or Don’t You”. At other times, as on the delicious “End Of The Day”, she’s more introspective.

All Calm In Dreamland suggests she isn’t yet the finished article. But a place on the shortlist for Radio 2’s young folk performer of the year is indicative of her potential.

Surly and daft in equal measure, LA’s Xzibit has done rather well for himself, due in no small part to the patronage of Dr Dre and Eminem. Man Vs Machine is business as usual over at Mainstream Rap Central: overlong, with a handful of ace tracks (notably the ultra-silly “Symphony In X Major”); full of jailcell hustler homilies, baroque synth stabs, Cristal references, guest appearances (Dr Dre! Eminem!) and naff samples (Toto’s “Africa”). Entertaining, largely forgettable, with one real shock?no sign whatsoever of the Neptunes.

On any technical level, Johnny Cash can’t sing. He never really could. And at 70, following several years of ill health that have brought him close to death, his deep baritone is shakier than ever. So what do you do? You put the voice centre stage, shine the spotlight on its honesty, authority and emotional conviction and suddenly any technical shortcomings seem like virtues.

The genius of this simple but bold idea belongs mostly to Rick Rubin, who has produced four superb albums with Cash for his American Recordings label, which now goes through the ever-astute Lost Highway, home of Ryan Adams and Lucinda Williams.

There’s nothing quite as cathartic as his extraordinary version of Nick Cave’s “The Mercy Seat” on the third volume in the series. But The Man Comes Around may be the most consistent of the four albums to date. Intimate and stripped down, it sounds like a man reflecting on his long life and mortal failings as he settles back in the cabin porch and prepares to meet his maker.

Nowhere is this truer than his takes on The Beatles’ “In My Life”, “Bridge Over Troubled Water” and “The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face”. Few could bring anything new to them. Cash does in a way that reminds us that there is nothing hackneyed about such songs per se, merely about the uninspiring way we have got used to them being covered. He even does it to “Danny Boy”, and sings “Desperado” in a way that makes The Eagles sound like a boy band.

It’s not all covers. Singing about God, death and divine retribution has always brought out the best in Cash, and the self-written title track is a masterpiece of the genre. But there are some real surprises among the covers, too. Who’d have ever imagined he could sing Nine Inch Nails’ “Hurt”? Yet with its lines about a “crown of thorns”, it was an inspired choice, and it’s arguably the best track on the album. Other highlights include the murder ballads “I Hung My Head” and “Sam Hall”, and the gospel-confessional “Personal Jesus”. God and death and retribution. Of course.

Intriguing names on the guest list include Fiona Apple singing on “Bridge Over Troubled Water” and Nick Cave on Hank Williams’ “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry”. But they’re almost irrelevant alongside Cash’s towering non-voice. ‘Compelling’ is the most over-worked word in the rock reviewer’s lexicon. For once, it’s entirely appropriate.

Is it possible for the astounding to become a routine? Elliott’s fourth album of a miraculously productive career trounces all other hip hop and R&B releases in 2002 with unnerving nonchalance. Her preoccupations this time are sex (as usual), old-school hip hop and the deaths of Aaliyah and TLC’s Lisa “Left-Eye” Lopes, while Timbaland mixes up Afrobeat, acid, playground voices and vintage rap samples to typically breathtaking effect. Yet there’s a suspicion these pioneers are taking it rather easier than on last year’s Miss E: the albums follow uncannily similar patterns, with Method Man and Ludacris guesting on tracks two and three for the second record running. When she’s raised the stakes so high, anything less than the reinvention of music comes as a disappointment.

The numerical milestone has inspired LL’s best album since 1987’s Bigger And Deffer. Predominant are five tracks produced by the Neptunes, who again demonstrate their genius. The woozy post-psychedelic backing they provide on “Luv U Better” is worthy of My Bloody Valentine. Their example seems to have raised LL’s game: the album varies from blissful pop (“Paradise”) to warped fantasies (“Lollipop”) which at times outweird even the Neptunes. He sounds like an older, equally powerful brother to Jay-Z: hear his roars against the choral sample on “10 Million Stars” contrasted with the claustrophobic whispers on “Mirror Mirror”.

Dubbed the ‘Japanese Bj

There’s a physicality to her descriptions of deep desire and romance?licking faces, looking at hair, feeling bones through skin?that sets McGee apart from more feyly folky singer-songwriters. A strong, unfussy voice, confident, careful arrangements and an earthy affinity for barroom abandon and bad-to-know boys also keep her just the right side of sappiness, and make her one to watch.

Best known as the gentle guitar foil to Warren Ellis’ flamboyantly melancholy violin in The Dirty Three, Mick Turner hardly allows himself to cut loose on this, his third solo album. Instead, Moth consists of 19 untitled guitar meditations, reminiscent of Papa M, only far more weathered and haphazard. Turner’s tunes have a pensive, wandering style, but that’s part of their charm. Plus points, too, for the excited dog on “Part One” and the sleeve being designed by a company/individual called “Giant Beer”.

In the mainstream, drum’n’bass died some time during the late ’90s, finished off by jazz-fusion concept albums and the emergence of its plucky young cousin, UK garage. Imagine our surprise, then, when scene veterans Shy FX and T-Power gatecrashed the Top 10 in the summer with the magnificent “Shake Ur Body”, a shiny, Latino soul update of the old formula. Nothing else on this album quite matches it, and there’s some slushy filler on display. But collaborations with Kele Le Roc, ragga king Elephant Man and underrated UK rapper Fallacy are lively and gutsy enough to sustain the revival for a few more months.

Diversion Tactics

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