The listener

They’re still alive, then. Chuggedy-chug, grawk, screech screech, chuggedy-chug. First mention of demons — line one, song two. Song one is about blowing people to bits with firepower, cos they’re really EVIL. There are spurts of lead guitar that sound like knives slashing at an empty plate and those strange, pompous, strangulated vocals — operatic diva meets Freddy Krueger — common to most UK heavy metal. Anything to hide the Brummie accent, I suppose. Thank you, the West Midlands, for foisting on the world the blind alley of HM, blues with the rhythm, wit and soul replaced by volume and bellowing and posturing and almost continual references to the poor

Grade: B+ Another ex-Long Beach crip replanted in pleasant Orange County via the conduit of very large amounts of record company money and thus now able to draw on his time as a gangsta, while telling us all it was a very naughty thing to have done. The difference between Staples and much of the similarly uprooted West Coast hip-hop crew is twofold. First, off-stage the man is thoughtful, articulate and refuses to hunker down beneath the comfort blanket of black victimhood. Further, he eschews all drugs and alcohol and loathes the glorification of gang culture — something he calls coonery — and is a Christian. (Although it is hard

Grade: A Yay, people with a modicum of wit. They come along so very rarely these days. A decade on and that punky, guitar-driven power-pop funk has long since been expunged. Singer Alex Kapranos expressed a wish for Franz Ferdinand to reinvent themselves — and has turned to the same source inspiration as did their recent collaborators Sparks when they, too, needed a swift reboot at the end of the 1970s: Giorgio Moroder. But Kapranos and co. have laced those metronomic German beats with camp glamour and swirling, unpredictable melodies — and, of course, the frequent touch of Bowie. This is a disco-pop album. But even at its dumbest —

Grade: D– You’re in a minicab, on the way home from some bash that was considerably less pleasing than you had anticipated. The driver has the radio on and this limp, witless, landfill R&B crap is hammering into your sinuses. You want to tell him to turn it off right now but don’t because you are too polite, too aware of sensitivities. You want your driver to like you. I don’t know why. You sort that out with yourself. But anyway, that stuff on the radio — it’s actually Portsmouth’s gift to the world of music, digging like a maniac into the enamel of your teeth. Craig David, recently reinvented

Grade: A-   Berlioz’s Les Troyens, one of the greatest operatic masterpieces, manages to be neglected even if it is quite often performed. The vast reputations of the most popular operatic composers seem to grow ever larger with the years, but Berlioz somehow always needs defending. Listening to this latest CD set, ‘live’ from Strasbourg, I was struck as always by the magnificence of much of the music, and the characteristic lurches into banality or irrelevance that account, I suspect, for the work being so often underrated. But when you get to the last half-hour, Aeneas’s departure for Rome, and Dido’s rage, misery, curses, sudden accesses of calm, fresh outbursts,

Grade: D+ I was suckered in by the brio of Taylor Swift’s first big single, ‘Love Story’, despite the clunking lyrics, which one forgave because of her youth. Just a nice slice of maybe overproduced FM country rock with a simple, but effective, chorus. Forgive me. I did not see the monster she would become. The morphing, over nine years, into a hideous colossus, a purveyor of ever more derivative and anodyne Kardashian pop. Music built not upon a compelling melody or rhythm or slice of lyrical wit but upon the exploitation of the image she has built for herself (cleverly enough, it has to be said). She has spent

Grade: A The old Tulsa sound was a rather agreeable low-key, shuffling, blues-inflected rockabilly — primarily J.J. Cale and Leon Russell. Which then somehow mutated into the anglophile pop of Dwight Twilley. Here’s the third wave of it — probably the best yet, much though I admire all the aforementioned. A strange lady, St Vincent — in real life plain ol’ gender-fluid Annie Clark from Oklahoma. And this is another rather wonderful album from the woman. She may be this decade’s Prince, for the breadth of vision and the invention and crucial ability to wring melodies out of the dead ground. Here and there the listener must navigate around slabs

Grade: B+ Number one. Everywhere, just about. You have to say that the man has a certain sureness of touch. Hip enough not to be quite mainstream, rock enough not to be quite pop. The knowing nods — to Depeche Mode, Eno, 1970s post-punk and 1980s grandiosity and always, always, Bowie. Fifteen years on from James Murphy’s first excursion in these clothes and the man from New Jersey, now grizzled and greying, has come up with an album as good as any he’s made — which is a qualified nod of admiration: I often find his tunes too eager to please, the neatly corralled stabs of funk a little forced.

Grade: A– There are plenty of websites where fans try to discern, without any success, what in the name of Christ The National are actually singing about. Thousands of words have been expended on just one — rather lovely — song, ‘Vanderlyle Crybaby Geeks’, from the album High Violet. The answer is, they’re more often than not singing about nothing. They’re just nice words that sound good next to each other. It’s euphonious gibberish. The Cincinnati boys are back doing the same stuff with their first album in four years. The lead single is entitled ‘The System Only Dreams in Total Darkness’, which may be the most pretentious and pompous

Grade: D+ Well, this is truly awful. Perhaps the worst album by a major band since Mardi Gras by Creedence Clearwater Revival back in ’72. And that’s a lot better than this pompous, trite and at times desperate drivel. Their first album, Funeral, was quirkily anthemic and packed with memorable tunes. The second — Neon Bible — reminded me, chillingly, of Echo and the Bunnymen outtakes. The decline has continued apace. This time, Daft Punk have stapled on some bangin’ beats in an attempt to make the band seem hip. This stratagem has not worked. It makes them seem like dads at a rave. They still plough that post-punk early-1980s

Two songs in which Sir Michael informs us that he is distressed by both Brexit and Donald Trump. Released with, according to the 70-year-old singer, ‘urgency’: he can see that we are in trouble and was naturally anxious to help us out. The first, ‘England Lost’, is at least redeemed by a soupçon of wit. Jagger explains that he went to see England play football but that they lost, and he got wet in the rain. But it then turns into a sort of state of the nation thing, by the simple addition of an apostrophe and the letter ‘s’. England’s lost, he bemoans, and chucks in an incoherent allusion

When you first encounter it, Beethoven’s Missa solemnis can sound like the Ninth Symphony with more singing but no tunes. But the more I listen to it, the more I agree with the composer that it’s his greatest work — or, at least, up there with the last two piano sonatas and his String Quartet Op. 131, my other nominees. Despite its titanic scale, the Missa solemnis inhabits their intimate sound world: it is built from the harmonically ambiguous motifs of Beethoven’s ‘third style’. Nothing in it is as catchy as the ‘Ode to Joy’. On the other hand, nothing in the Ninth reaches the spiritual stratosphere of the Benedictus,

Boy is she fat, and getting fatter. I realise this is something we’re not meant to mention when talking about Beth — but it’s kinda the elephant in the room. Literally. And I worry about the lass. These days she makes Mama Cass look like Edie Sedgwick. Of course, we should accept her as she is — a lesbian-identifying, very hefty babe from good ol’ down-home Ar-kin-saw. Her difference, then, is part of the schtick, breaking the mould, etc. — and that’s just fine and (Jim) dandy, providing something palpably ‘different’ actually emanates from the stuff she does. That the proud revelling in difference is not merely a cosmetic exercise

The problem Calvin Broadus has is persuading the rest of us that he still a baaaad muthafucka. Snoop is now 45 and a rather avuncular figure in the US, with his own reality TV show in which he comes across as, God help us, likeable. Those days of running with the Crips in Los Angeles are long behind him, a testament to the redemptive power of huge amounts of money. Is he still of the streets? Neva Left is the defiant response, his best collection for many years. Snoop has immersed himself in a studio with a collection of artists who broke through at about the same time as he

How about some queercore garage punk? PWR BTTM — the name means something empowering to do with buggery — are a young, gay, two-piece band from New York State who live apparently hectic lives. Their new album, Pageant, was released last week and a couple of days later they were kicked off their record label and current tour after allegations of sexual predation were made against the pantomimely camp singer, Ben Hopkins. The greatest surprise was that the complaints came from a woman. Their career is now in limbo. Hopkins denies the allegations, of course, claiming that he is a consensual and democratic kind of chap. But it’s all rather

Ah, Blondie. Those happy days of glorious power pop, chilly disco and rich, fruity vocals — Debbie Harry yearning away like a very bad alleycat on heat. ‘X Offender’, ‘In the Flesh’, ‘Picture This’ and that one where she’s in the phone booth, apparently gagging for it. People knock it, but the late 1970s wasn’t a bad time to be a teenager. And while Blondie may have been a rather calculating act, cleverly positioned on the fringe of punk and the fringe of pop and the fringe of disco and later even rap, they were at least likeable and the tunes were, largely, effortlessly and simplistically terrific. And then there

There is some surprise that after all these years Ray Davies has turned his attention to America. He is the most quintessentially English of pop musicians, a witty and acute observer of the British way of life whose best tunes were drawn from music hall and calypso — even while, with his brother Dave, he was inventing that most doggedly, turgidly, horribly English of genres, heavy metal. And yet The Kinks most famous hit, ‘Lola’, had a real American swagger about it, in the wonderful rolling rhythm, as Davies expressed his profound confusion at meeting a transgendered lady in a Soho bar. It was the first record I ever bought,