POP

Alt-J

This Is All Yours

(Infectious Music)

★★★★★

Unfa zed by the supposed career curse of the Mercury Prize, geeky trio Alt-J have followed their 2012 winning debut album with a sublime second. Although it just missed this year’s prize deadline, their audacious and intelligent record is perfectly timed for students hoping to appear audacious and intelligent as they begin university.

Alt-J’s expansive songwriting incorporates plangent folk, glitchy electronica and experimental rock, alongside hypnotic vocals from Joe Newman and Gus Unger-Hamilton. It ranges from the stupendous riffing of Left Hand Free to the medieval instrumental Garden of England, from the Miley Cyrus sample on the brooding trip-hop of Hunger of the Pine to lyrical inspiration from Iris Murdoch on the lustrous folk of Warm Foothills.

Alt-J never lose their way, though, and their ambitious comeback is one of the best British albums of the year.

Andre Paine

Aphex Twin

Syro

(Warp)

★★★★

Techno had its equivalent of the Kate Bush comeback this summer when producer and provocateur Aphex Twin announced his first full album in 13 years via the computer nerds’ favourite web browser, Tor. These 12 unpronounceable tracks sound fantastic loud but don’t seem to be brand new as much as a hard-drive clearout for a man who has always enjoyed making music more than letting others hear it.

The mix of jittery beats and deep synth pulses is close to his Nineties work, with the gentle chimes of XMAS_EVET10 [120] [thanaton3 mix] proving particularly hypnotic. The many obsessives may convince themselves it’s as groundbreaking as his previous work but in truth this is a surprisingly retro return from a king of future music.

David Smyth

Leonard Cohen

Popular Problems

(Columbia)

★★★★

THE release of Leonard Cohen’s new album coincides with his 80th birthday, making him the oldest whippersnapper on the block. He takes things in his usual measured stride, doling out dollops of that unmistakeable voice from a seemingly bottomless smokey barrel. Almost Like the Blues is more like a gentle bossa nova and Samson in New Orleans is not about jazz hairstyles. A Street is wonderfully enriched by Hammond organ, Did I Ever Love You? speeds up alarmingly in places, while Nevermind features snatches of exhilarating African singing.

A cynic might carp that it follows the same template of its predecessor, Old Ideas, but old ideas are often the best.

Pete Clark

Tony Bennett & Lady Gaga

Cheek to Cheek

(Streamline/Columbia/Interscope)

★★

IF 2013’s Artpop marked the end of Lady Gaga’s stab at world domination, this timebuying curveball confirms that her creative fires remain dormant. An idea as flawed in practice as it threatened to be in theory, Cheek to Cheek is Gaga’s collaboration with a croaky Tony Bennett, who sounds each and every one of his 88 years, on the Great American Songbook.

Across 15 tracks they come across so uninterested that their take on Ev’ry Time We Say Goodbye makes Mick Hucknall sound like Radiohead.

There’s a jaunty chemistry on Goody Goody and they do a fair take on Nature Boy but the only mystery is how something this slapdash took a whole year to make.