Tricky: Juxtapose (Island)
With Juxtapose, Tricky has headed for home. What began as a voyage into new frontiers for Maxinquaye has slowly, but irresistibly, become the work of a hip-hop Captain Beefheart, an artist who may operate within a genre but has little in common with what everyone else is producing. With highly individual takes on what hip-hop can do and an ever-prevalent voodoo blues feel, Juxtapose is a work of significant depth. Besides the skills of his various collaborators (DJ Muggs from Cypress Hill, Mad Dog from oldskool ragga kings London Posse, newcomer Kioka Williams), it's Tricky's voice which draws you closer and closer. The eerie banshee blues of Call Me, the full-on baiting of For Real, the wonderful rhyme and swing of She Said - it's Tricky's world and you're welcome to stay.
Jim Carroll
The Church: A Box Of Birds (Cooking Vinyl)
The new album by Australia's most oblique rockers is a collection of cover versions, some well-known (Bowie's All The Young Dudes and Neil Young's Cortez The Killer), some obscure (Kevin Ayers's Decadence and Alex Harvey's The Faith Healer), and some oft-overlooked classics (The Beatles' It's All Too Much and The Monkees' The Porpoise Song). Steve Kilbey, Peter Koppes, Tim Fowles and Marty Willson-Piper tackle each song with a respectful air of experimentation, adjusting each one carefully to suit the band's artful indie sound. By choosing to do an entire album of cover versions, The Church is treading on dangerous ground - remember Duran Duran's dreadful covers album from a few years ago? Me neither - but luckily they do rough'n'ready justice to most of these nuggets.
Kevin Courtney
Ben Christophers: My Beautiful Demon (V2)
A sensitive, slightly nervous young singer-songwriter, Ben Christophers is unlikely to be found swigging lager and chanting rugby songs on the streets of his native Wolverhampton. He has been compared to Jeff Buckley or Thom Yorke - Give Me Everything and Before The Winter Parade certainly sound like a doubly tortured Radiohead - but Christophers's fragile, plaintive voice often pushes the emotional gauge up to near-overload. There's no doubting the wounded beauty of songs such as Healer and It's Been A Beautiful Day, and the electronic effects add to the album's sense of modern-day dislocation, but as the music continues along the same slashed vein, the singer's self-inflicted boundaries begin to close in. By the end of it all, it feels like you're crouched in a cramped student bedsit with nothing but a Pot Noodle for comfort.
Kevin Courtney