new releaseS

Leon Jean Marie Bent Out of Shape island iiii8

For all the widespread talk about the music business currently being an industry in crisis, there has rarely been a year of such racing-certainty newcomers as 2008. The more cynical might find something dubious about the way the chart-topping feats of Adele and Duffy followed so swiftly upon predictions of their success - almost as if punters were being invited to fulfil some ancient prophecy, rather than some ancient marketing strategy.

Leon Jean Marie has been less effusively hailed - his album arrives too late to catch the same wave of year-end predictions - but looks every bit a nailed-on a certainty. But then, nobody's taking any chances with Marie, from the support slots with Amy Winehouse and Mika, to the choice of producers for Bent Out of Shape, which arrives via the midas ministrations of Swedish duo Bloodshy & Avant (Britney, Kylie, Madonna), London team The Rural (Gorillaz) and the ubiquitous Mark Ronson, who co-wrote the first single "Bed of Nails" with the singer and Cathy Dennis. It's an odd choice for a single, its jaunty end-of-pier swagger picked more, one suspects, to establish Marie's pop credentials before delivering the album's more obvious sucker-punches.

These include the opener "Fair", on which Marie's harmonies undulate appealingly over a cool tumble of percussion and fluting keyboard funk, the minimal skank-rocker "East End Blues", and "You Must Know", which features an itchy second-line snare shuffle and a coldly logical chord progression. Bloodshy & Avant's other offerings aren't as gilt-edged as these - "Bring It On" is too close to Steve Miller's "Abracadabra" for comfort - but Ronson's ballad "Beg", with its anthemic piano chords, epic string arrangement and elegantly askance melody, reveals the extent of Marie's potential: he's the Seal de nos jours, a diversely talented, confident song stylist with huge transatlantic appeal. The most intriguing settings, however, are those provided by The Rural, whose use of mysterious strings, slinky vibrato guitar and loping funk grooves on "Gotta Have It" conjures the haunted mood of classic Bristol trip-hop.

As a songwriter, Marie has no special grace or insight, but he has the kind of amenable delivery that transforms bland into benign, and a melodic gift that more than compensates for lyrical shortcomings. His most accomplished piece is "Fair", which uses the dodgems as a metaphor for life, Marie advising us not to over-react to insignificant collisions, but to get over them and move on swiftly.

Download this:

'Fair', 'East End Blues', 'Gotta Have It', 'You Must Know', 'Beg'

Little Feat

Join the Band

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There's nothing wrong with a band reviewing their own history in the company of a few guests, but if the collaborators are mostly drawn from country music, it does tend to skew things too much in that direction. Which is fine if it's Vince Gill delving into the New Orleans funk of "Dixie Chicken" and "Spanish Moon", but rather less welcome if it's mainstream stalwarts Brooks & Dunn imposing their somewhat po-faced approach on the usually sublime "Willin'". The comparisons become more evident when a proper rock voice is employed, whether it's Bob Seger's brawny growl on the rollicking rockabilly R&B of "Something in the Water", or Chris Robinson's fiery Southern sneer hot-wiring his hometown anthem "Oh Atlanta". Covers of Huey Smith's "Don't Ya Just Know It" and The Band's "The Weight" are treated with due respect, the latter enlightened by Bela Fleck's funky mandolin, while elsewhere Lowell George's daughter Inara offers a touching solo "Trouble", and Emmylou Harris enlists various bluegrass chums to transform "Sailing Shoes" into a proper hoedown.

Download this:

'Dixie Chicken', 'Spanish Moon', 'Something in the Water', 'Oh Atlanta', 'Trouble'

Seth Lakeman

Poor Man's Heaven

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There can't be many UK folk singers who can shift 100,000 copies of an album, as Seth Lakeman did with 2006's Freedom Fields - and judging by the tenor of Poor Man's Heaven, Lakeman may be only as temporarily beholden to the notoriously purist folk scene as Bob Dylan was in 1965. For all the Celtic tang to his fiddle-playing on a track like "Blood Red Sky", the backbeat is pure rock'n'roll, with an edge of funk for good measure; and his delivery of "The Hurlers" finds Lakeman bellowing it out with the brawny conviction of a Springsteen or Bon Jovi. But in the most important respect, he remains true to folk principles, celebrating the maritime culture of his native Cornwall through a series of electric shanties such as "Feather in the Storm" and the whaling tale "Race to be King", on which his fiddling offers a bridge between folk and bluegrass modes. Especially impressive is "Solomon Browne", Lakeman's account of the 1981 Penlee lifeboat disaster, here commemorated in the finest traditions of the troubadour bush-telegraph.

Download this:

'Solomon Browne', 'Race to be King', 'The Hurlers', 'Blood Red Sky'