It's a curious dichotomy: long one of rock's most literate songwriters, Paul Weller's always been at his best when it sounds like he's just knocked a song out. Whether with the Jam, the Style Council, or on his own, the Modfather's most pleasing tunes are his most natural. Think "In the City", think "You're The Best Thing", think "Wild Wood" or "Uh Huh Oh Yeh" or "Into Tomorrow"-and try not to think too much about the times when it sounds like he's been crafting a song for ages. That's the biggest problem with Heliocentric, a (don't say it!) ambitious album that features string arrangements by Robert Kirby (who has also worked with Nick Drake, the Strawbs and Elton John) and a drum solo (the horror!) on "Picking Up Sticks". That's not to say that there's not a lot to like on the album-there is, particularly the slow-burn tenderness of "Dust and Rocks" and the back-to-basics love song "Sweet Pea, My Sweet Pea". On Wild Wood, Weller asked "Has My Fire Really Gone Out"?; on Heliocentric, he shows that it still burns, just not as bright. -Randy Silver.

The Arista debut of Carlos Santana and band gives fans of the soulful guitar vet two albums in one, but it's a decidedly good-news, bad-news proposition. First, there's a fine collection of late-1990s-model Santana-tastefully tooled songs driven by Latin jazz and Afro-Cuban rhythms ("[Da Le] Taleo", "Africa Bamba", "Migra", "Primavera" and the emotionally charged instrumental "El Farol") that allow Carlos plenty of elbowroom for his passionate soloing. Then there's the collection of tracks featuring a lineup of de rigueur alternative and hip-hop stars, including Dave Matthews, Everlast, Lauryn Hill, Wyclef Jean and Eagle Eye Cherry. To their credit, Matthews ("Love of My Life") and Eagle Eye Cherry ("Wishing It Was") muster enough chemistry to make the fusion work. But the rest of the collaborations feel like an unnecessary stretch to reach out to a younger demographic that El Jefe has little trouble attracting on his own terms. -Jerry McCulley.

Michael Jackson's Greatest Hits Vol 1 is in fact the first disc from his previous greatest-hits collection, HIStory: Past Present & Future, which was half compilation, half new material. Despite missing a few okay songs that were included on the latter half of HIStory, none of the newer songs came anywhere near the magic of Off the Wall, Thriller, Bad or (to a lesser extent) Dangerous from which this album is made up. Starting off with the legendary groove of "Billie Jean", Michael shows exactly how he earned his reputation as the "King of Pop" for there are no album fillers on this 15-track CD. What's more, there are so many not included, as there simply isn't room to condense his very best work onto one single album. Guests include Sir Paul McCartney ("The Girl is Mine"), rock hero Eddie Van Halen ("Beat It") and top producers Quincy Jones and Teddy Riley-great songs, great performers, great moments in pop history when Michael Jackson truly was Invincible. -David Trueman.

So is generally regarded as a peak in Gabriel's recording career, notable both for its solid set of songs and lush yet musically sound production. For Gabriel, who'd put his music in theatrical contexts ever since his days with Genesis, the modern sound of So (co-produced with Daniel Lanois) was itself a dramatic conceit that effectively played off the more organic roots of many of its songs. The album's big hit was "Sledgehammer", the English rocker's somewhat stilted take on the Stax/Volt style of rhythm and blues. Gabriel was much more powerful on his own art- rock songs, such as "Red Rain", which evoked nuclear ruin with its cascading rush of guitars and synthesizers. "Don't Give Up" is perhaps Gabriel's best ballad, with Kate Bush's heavenly second vocal enough to give anybody encouragement. But the song that best exploited So's blend of technology and soul is "In Your Eyes", a beguiling rhythmic tapestry in which Gabriel duets with Youssou N'dour. - John Milward.

Encompassing everything from understated acoustic ballads to jangly, guitar-driven pop, Eddi Reader's folk-rock hybrid rarely plays it straight. Picking up where she left off with 1997's Candyfloss and Medicine, Reader remains true to her own unique and enjoyable muse. Of course, it doesn't hurt that her always-amazing voice is in top form. "Prayer Wheel", with its exuberant chorus, masks a story of lost love behind a veneer of unadulterated pop. As usual, Reader draws on a number of songwriters to compile a top-notch collection of songs (including one, "On a Whim", written for her by Ron Sexsmith). But the best songs here are the ones written by or with long-time musical partner Boo Hewerdine: "Bell, Book and Candle" is a gorgeous, haunting tale of lost love, while "California" has a truly greasy groove to go with Reader's equally sexy vocals. Besides, it's always endearing to hear a Glasgow gal work her way around the word "California". -Percy Keegan.

The debut album from The Subways proves that for a man approaching his seventies, Glastonbury's Michael Eavis has excellent taste. Eavis plucked The Subways' demo from a pile of demos and pushed this young trio - frontman Billy Lunn, his girlfriend, bassist Mary-Charlotte Cooper, and his brother, drummer Josh Morgan - onto the Other Stage at Glasto 2004. A long, hot summer on, Young For Eternity fulfils all their early potential: "I Want To Hear What You Have Got To Say" and "Oh Yeah" barrel along with the raw, adrenalised energy of Nirvana or The White Stripes - full-bodied, powerful anthems that lose none of their live passion in the studio setting. Lunn's oft-stated admiration for Oasis surfaces on "Mary", a sort of amped-up "She's Electric" that's actually, rather sweetly, a love song from singer to bassist. Ms Cooper, too, however, has a pretty great voice: more grit-edged rock bitch than cooing indie-waif, it invests the likes of "Oh Yeah" and "City Pavement" with a smouldering - nay, flat-out roaring - chemistry that's all the more engaging because it's actually 100% genuine. -Louis Pattison.

Neil Diamond has always fancied himself a man of many styles, which probably helps explain why he tries to flaunt each and every one of them on this diverse, sometimes dizzying Christmas disc. He plays it relatively straight on "Silent Night" and "The Christmas Song," but really lets loose on a version of "White Christmas" that recalls the doo-wop of his teen years in the 1950s. Diamond even expands his palette to include a choir-accompanied take on John Lennon's pacifist classic "Happy Christmas (War is Over). " It's the kind of intermingling that makes his fans go wild, but casual admirers should watch out for those stylistic U-turns. -David Sprague.

No one ever managed to nail aimless suburban alienation quite like The Cure, so sensitive yet so party-hearty, and 4:13 Dream, their thirteenth studio album and first in four years, lands in a musical landscape presently infested with their descendents. Yet Robert Smith and his old blokes can still show the young shavers how it's done even as they enter their fourth decade as a working band. The wistful yet ominous opener "Underneath the Stars" keeps seeming to slip towards Pink Floyd's "Wish You Were Here", making for a perfect exemplar of the Cure's highly nuanced yet undeniably commercial English art-rock. "The Only One" manages to rework their own classic "Just Like Heaven", twenty years old and still soundtracking sports highlights, while "Switch" is febrile scratchy funk, which should be unconvincing yet sounds peculiarly contemporary right now. The woozy "Sirensong" simply refuses to settle into predictablility and even the lumbering and gloomy "The Real Snow White", owing plenty to Joy Division's back catalogue, sounds ready for arenas rather than confined spaces. Enjoyable throughout and often effortlessly commercial, 4:13 Dream should depress many young people, especially those musicians who realise just how far they have to catch up. -Steve Jelbert.

Kirsty MacColl's third album in a disappointingly sporadic solo career is a homage to her infatuation with the music of South America and the Caribbean. The songs are decorated with sounds borrowed from the environments that inspired it: the rattling of marimbas, the yelpings of mariachi trumpets, the twittering of songbirds or, occasionally, what sounds like the squawkings of macaques. None of which is a problem in so far as MacColl's voice would still bestow a certain human warmth on an album of martial marches, but too much of Tropical Brainstorm nonetheless rings hollow. The problem with this sort of musical tourism is that the performer often concentrates too much on getting the details right and not enough imposing their own vision on proceedings. Here, MacColl has roped in capable musicians, but spends too much time lapsing into Spanishchoruses as if to remind us that she knows her stuff as well. It doesn't help that her own usually sure lyrical touch is somewhat lacking-songs that sneer at online onanists ("Here Comes That Man Again") and conspicuous consumers ("Designer Life") are not the sign of an imagination firing on all cylinders. Towards the end of the album, the unfussy, plaintive and ruthlessly direct he-done-me-wrong song "Wrong Again" is a suggestion of what might have been; tellingly, it's the least Cuban-sounding song on the record. -Andrew Mueller.

It's a rare trick to uphold the sacred tenets of rock & roll while simultaneously reinventing them. But over the course of their 21 Singles, compiled here, the Jesus and Mary Chain did just that. When the first, "Upside Down", emerged on Creation in 1984, the template was set. The Reid brothers who anchored the band would take the idea of sullen, black-leather-clad rebellion to a darker and more inhospitable place than anyone before them. Even now, the early Mary Chain singles sound astounding, the way pop and the avant-garde are mangled together in them so beautifully. But 21 Singles goes far beyond these, through another 14 years of protean glumness, patchy albums and, fortunately, many excellent singles. It proves, once and for all, that the Mary Chain's forte was the three-minute pop thrill, the precisely calibrated jukebox hit. An uncanny number of them-"Some Candy Talking", "Sidewalking", "Reverence"- remain among the very best of the past 20 years. And the more slack moments still have their uses: to render futile the entire careers of artless impersonators such as Black Rebel Motorcycle Club, for a start. The Mary Chain's last two singles, from 1998, "I Hate Rock'n'Roll" and "I Love Rock'n'Roll", neatly close affairs: bitter and celebratory; consumed and confused by music and the impulse to make it, which has driven them for so long. [+]

This compilation album is fascinating in that it tracks the dramatic artistic decline (and parallel commercial rise) of one the most successful groups of the post-punk era. "Love Song", "Promised You A Miracle" and "Someone, Somewhere In Summertime" see Jim Kerr and co. teetering like a cat poised on a fence, their sound a skittering, graceful interplay of glittering keyboards and adrenaline guitars, with Kerr's lyrics epic yet ambivalent on top. Then around the mid-1980s, Simple Minds fell from the fence into lumbering stadium rock rifferama. "Alive And Kicking" and "Sanctify Yourself" were big scarf-waving anthems but lacked the tantalising panache of their earlier work. As Jim Kerr sank further into megastardom, the music suffered further as he indulged in piously cumbersome ballads like "Belfast Child" and "Mandela Day". But while critics sighed, the Minds' audience swelled regardless-their "New Gold Dream" had come true. -David Stubbs.

With Feels Like Home, the follow-up to her eight times Grammy winning debut, Come Away With Me, easy listening's 24 year-old poster girl Norah Jones has a staggering weight of expectation to live up to. However, anyone expecting to be wowed from the start stands to be disappointed. At face value it's Come Away with Me MkII, albeit a more countrified version without the instantly dreamy and delightful melodies of "Don't Know Why" and "Come Away with Me". Over the long haul though, it's a quietly brilliant leap forward that not only lives up to expectation, but far exceeds it. With "Sunrise", "Those Sweet Words" and "Carnival Town" Jones ushers in more gentle sauntering and jazz-sweet reflection, but this time the understated dirt-track atmospheres don't just conjure pretty twilight moods; they convey a beauty and a powerful emotional cache that lingers. Likewise, "The Prettiest Thing" murmurs with tender sadness while the low-slung swagger of "In the Morning" broods with so much lip-curling passion it's almost seedy. However, the proof of just how far Jones has come lies in "Don't Miss You At All". A humbling end-of-the-affair lullaby built around the two-in-the-morning piano of Duke Ellington's instrumental "Melancholia", it's as moving as it is brave. -Dan Gennoe.

Twentysomething is a stunning second album. After rising to prominence with his debut album Pointless Nostalgic, Jamie Cullum signed to Verve in spectacular fashion with a million pound deal. If there was any pressure involved, Cullum certainly doesn't let it show on his first album for the label. Where Pointless Nostagic was recorded with a student loan, the follow-up was made on analogue tape at London's Mayfair studios (where Radiohead and Oasis had recently recorded) and was produced by Stewart Levine (Simply Red, BB King, Masters at Work, George Benson). Like its predecessor, it finds Cullum lending his warm, distinctive voice to jazz standards and popular classics such as "What a Difference a Day Made", "Singing in the Rain" and "I Get a Kick Out of You". There are renditions of more contemporary songs too, most notably Jeff Buckley's "Lover, You Should Have Come Over" and Jimi Hendrix's "Wind Cries Mary", and Jamie's own material (written with his brother Ben), including the gently rolling "All at Sea" and the Van Morrison-esque title track. Difficult to know whether anyone is worth a million pounds, but Twentysomething certainly sounds like a million bucks and re-establishes Cullum as indubitably the coolest crooner on the block. -Paul Sullivan.