The Auteurs: How I Learned To Love The Bootboys (Hut)
Welcome back, Luke Haines; although, strictly speaking, he never went away. This may be the first Auteurs album since 1996's After Murder Park, but the intervening years have seen Haines subvert pop's cosy flightpath with his Baader-Meinhof and Black Box Recorder projects. How I Learned To Love The Bootboys puts the boot into the modern obsession with nostalgia, and songs such as The Rubettes, Your Gang, Our Gang and Sick Of Hari Krishna stare glumly at the past through venom-tinted glasses. This could be the true follow-up to Pulp's Different Class, and Some Changes, School and Asti Spumante could be dog-eared snapshots of an indifferent era. Ironically, while Haines pours vitriol on all things nostalgic, he manages to recreate the musical magic of glam rock, teenypop and punk rock.
Kevin Courtney
Scritti Politti: Anomie & Bonhomie (Virgin)
Green Gartside has been away for a long time: it's been more than a decade since Scritti's last album, Provision. Tired of playing darts in his local pub in Wales, however, Gartside started writing songs for a new album instead, and some of them - particularly Tinseltown To The Boogiedown, Mystic Handyman and Brushed With Oil, Dusted With Powder - are very good indeed, with Gartside's fey, white soul voice finely balanced by the rapping of Lee Majors, Mos' Def and Me'Shell Ndegeocello. Gartside hasn't lost his passion for American r&b, and this album sees him adding hip-hop, rap and new power funk to the equation. It doesn't work all the time - Die Alone and Smith 'n' Slappy sound a bit cut 'n' paste - but Gartside keeps his eye on the prize, steering everything to a satisfying conclusion.
Kevin Courtney
Quannum: Spectrum (Mo' Wax)
While we're waiting for DJ Shadow's follow-up to the epic Endtroducing to drop, there has been plenty from the Bay Area genius to keep us tapping along. After the superstar highs and lows of UNKLE comes another superstar outing, this time in the shape of Quannum's various hip-hop masterclasses. With Shadow supplying a large share of the beats, the likes of Blackalicious and Latryx have been gathering MCs from all over to the cause. It's one funky set, from the opening Concentration (with Jurassic 5 adding their rhymes to the mix) to the sweet soul of People Like Me and the awesome punch and verve of Looking Over A City. Proof yet again that hip-hop is more than just about the size of Puff Daddy's entourage.
Jim Carroll