Mansun: "Six" (Parlophone)
You can run and you can hide, but you can't escape the all-devouring jaws of the progrock revival, coming to a megastore near you. Mansun (not to be confused with Marilyn Manson or Shirley Manson) have followed up their auspicious debut, Attack Of The Grey Lantern, with a full-blown concept album, complete with double gatefold sleeve, three-part mini-epics, operatic interludes, fiddly instrumental bits and inscrutable lyrics like "the nature of uncarved blocks/ is how to describe what's hard to describe". Six is eminently listenable, thanks to Mansun's brash, post-punk attitude, which ensures that the Yes/ Genesis-style noodles are balanced by some buzzed-up riffs reminiscent of early Police or XTC.
Kevin Courtney
Hole: "Celebrity Skin" (Geffen)
Courtney Love has been basking in the sequinned Hollywood spotlight, but now it's time for her to fish the old Cinderella rags out of the wardrobe and play the grungebunny once again. Hole's last album, 1994's Live Through This, came out in the same week that Courtney's husband, Kurt Cobain, committed suicide, and Celebrity Skin is Love's attempt to rewrite her life and fabricate a twisted fairy-tale come true. Courtney may snarl like Patti Smith on the title track, but Malibu finds her fulfilling her stated ambition to become the new Stevie Nicks. Hit So Hard and Use Once And Destroy are hard-driving nuggets of West Coast noise, but they seem uncouth beside the jangly breeziness of Awful and Boys On The Radio. Northern Lights attempts a Smashing Pumpkins-style epiphany, but Love can't quite reach the emotional heights, and ends up sounding like a punk Phoebe from Friends.
Kevin Courtney
Suggs: "The Three Pyramids Club" (Warners)
The ex-Madness man is still skanking away, purveying the same old nutty sound, and adding a sprinkling of rap, a splash of ragga, and a soupcon of scratch 'n' skiffle. The songs run from mildly entertaining (Invisible Man, The Greatest Show On Earth) to rude boy slapstick (Straight Banana, Our Man) to plain daft Euroska pop (Girl). The cover art shows Suggs in Graham Greene "our-man-in-Cairo" mode, wearing a fez and holding a skull-capped cane, but the music is unable to wriggle out of the pigeonhole which Suggs has been digging himself into. The flagship single, I Am, is also featured on the soundtrack of The Avengers, but there's a sense that Suggs is just following a well-trodden pop plotline and trudging down the same old reggae-beaten path.
Kevin Courtney
