All Saints: Saints & Sinners (London)
Tabloid readers may be surprised to learn that, when they're not stepping out with stars or mooching at the Met, All Saints actually make records, and rather good ones too. Put current hit Black Coffee up against The Spice Girls' wet new effort, and its plain that the Saints completely outclass the Spices. They're the sound of young, streetwise London: sexy, independent, and with a mid-tempo garage beat. With William Orbit behind the production desk, Saints & Sinners exudes the same textures and flavours as Madonna's Music, only with added velvet and chocolate. Buy yourselves another drink, girls: you've earned it.
Limp Bizkit: Chocolate Starfish & The Hot Dog Flavoured Water (Flip/Interscope)
Fred Durst, the Mike Tyson of Sports Metal, and his crew are back to slash your ass with this collection of thumping rap'n'roll, written while the Bizkit were on their Family Values tour. My Generation revisits the Who's sentiment, only this time Durst is smashing skateboards; Take A Look Around (the theme from MI-2), puts TNT under the TV theme. Guest vocalists on the album include Scott Weiland, DMX and Method Man, with bonus voiceovers by Ben Stiller and Mark Wahlberg, but the big cheese here is, of course, Fred himself, the all-rapping, all-swearing, all-round entertainer, Robbie Williams in a baseball cap. Durst spends an inordinate amount of CD space telling us he doesn't give a f***, and wondering why everyone's picking on him. Grown-up kids, eh?
