THE RIFLES: Freedom Run.It’s natural to want to like this lot who have popped a 60s moptop spirit into a 2011 setting and, let’s face it, the string-blessed infectious single Tangled Up In Love captures the sheer exuberance life can sometimes deliver. One minute they’re all boyish charm as on the knockabout Love Is A Key and then the next they’re lost in a psychedelic haze.
JOSS STONE: The Best Of Joss Stone 2003-2009.She shot to fame aged just 16 with her 2003 album The Soul Sessions and its stand out track Fell In Love With A Boy – her reworking of The White Stripes’ Fell In Love With A Girl. She’s opened her generation’s ears, minds and hearts to blues and Motown with tracks like Super Duper Love, You Had Me, Right To Be Wrong yet the top track is the echoingly emotive ballad Spoiled. Most could have been penned in the late 60s or early 70s.
LISA HANNIGAN: Passenger.Follow-up to her Mercury-nominated Sea View and sets sail promisingly enough with the tender warbling Home. As the album unfolds it’s clear she’s using it to interweave relationships old and new from defiance to despair. There’s a breathy ever-so-slight husk to her voice and current single Knots draws in a sense of the American south as it tells of a night of debauchery. Now she’s talking. The themes are love, heartbreak, confusions and friendship but the music rarely hits the spot as it drifts more and more towards ever-so-quiet folk.
