Bette Midler: "Bathouse Betty" (Warner Brothers)

Let's face it, Bette Midler is the queen of camp. As is patently obvious from the garish, pink-based cover of this haphazard romp through the corridors of pop. Unfortunately, it opens with a version of Leonard Cohen's Song Of Bernadette, which as sung by Jennifer Warnes, was a prayer, but here is reduced to a scrawl on a toilet wall. Midler really doesn't have a clue how to interpret song poetry. Far better suited to her brash sensibility are vaudevillian ditties such I'm Beautiful, Ukelele Lady and I'm Hip.

Of course, some people adore her overstated stomp through love songs such as From A Distance and that particular audience is given My One True Friend from the movie One True Thing. But our Bette really should keep the acting for movies. Joe Jackson

Eels: "Electro-Shock Blues" (Dreamworks)

Success hasn't made Mark Everett any happier, but hasn't dulled his gallows humour either. The follow-up to last year's Beautiful Freak debut is a relentlessly morbid but eminently listenable record, and Everett gleefully piles on the misery through tracks such as Going To Your Funeral and Cancer For The Cure. The instrumentation is a sparse mix of dark basslines, music-box keyboards and death-rattle drums, topped off by Everett's detached, sardonic vocals. Hospital Food is Fun Lovin' Criminals turned loose in the terminal ward, while Last Stop: This Town is Mary Poppins on a downer. The mood begins to lift with Climbing To The Moon, and there's even a shard of hope in P.S. You Rock My World. Kevin Courtney

The Ultra Montanes: "The Ultra Montanes" (Lakota)

From the Roxy Music keyboards of Ageing Starlet to the early Ultravox backbeat of Suburbs, the debut album from The Ultra Montanes manages to touch on every trashy but cool reference point from glam-rock to punk, from Warhol's New York to Bowie's London, from Television at CBGBs to The Sex Pistols at the 100 Club. There's an effete delicacy to songs such as Skin and Crooked Smile, but Weird Turn Pro and Corridors are hard-wired power-pop tunes which show the tough skin beneath the make-up and mascara. Rory O'Keeffe's voice teeters nicely between Bryan Ferry, Feargal Sharkey and Tom Verlaine, but stalls a little on Turnstile, falling somewhere between inane and ineffectual. Otherwise, this is a sharp, snappy debut with just the right sprinkling of spit and glitter. Kevin Courtney