Though best known for the use of the single "Underwater Love" in a Levi's commercial, Smoke City's debut album, Flying Away, has a surprising amount to offer. Fronted by the multi-culti Nina Miranda-who answers the question of what a Brazilian-born Björk would sound like-the band combines an inherent bias towards tropicalia with the more electronic sounds of groups like Thievery Corporation and Portishead; the result varies between a dance jam like "Darkwalk" and the slinky "Mr. Gorgeous (and Miss Curvaceos)", between the darkly playful "Aguas De Marco" and the lush "With You". Gently inviting, but with significant substance, Flying Away is a long-term delight. -Randy Silver.

Like other DJ composers, Nightmares on Wax mentalist George "Herbs" Evelyn has stopped flea-market shopping for vinyl records out of car boots and started rummaging around in his own mind. The gorgeous retro soul strings, vocal choruses, and chill-out trip-hop he finds rolling easy up there in his fog bank are a definite maturation of the Philly-soul redub and bass-boss Barry White attitude that was pioneered on 1995's Smoker's Delight. Since then, though, Evelyn has scratched a ton of vinyl to get to the truth: nothing is warmer than live bodies. This album was still made with a drum machine and just enough wax to keep it in the boot, but bass, keys, guitar, and vocals are live. The real secret to this soft summer vibe is that Evelyn doesn't simply hand over the vocals and let the pieces become wannabe soul singles. Instead, these cuts maintain a jazz attitude recalling George Benson's Breezin'-not his most technically challenging playing, but a laid-back, perfectly executed distillation offered up like a gift. Unwrap the fragile jazz riff of "Fire in the Middle" or the upbeat, Fifth Dimension-like background vocal and hip-hop scratch of "Ethnic Majority" and the bad-ass horn funk of "Ease Jimi". Beware of a short little strings-and-bass dub called "Jorge": If this one gets in your ears once, you'll be humming the one-word chorus all summer. -Dean Kuipers.

Once a roving maverick who skipped from euphoric rave to speed-metal to ambient soundscaping as if just to prove he could, recent years have seen Richard Melville Hall relax into a comfortable - and yes, lucrative - niche. On the surface, Hotel follows a similarly laid-back trajectory to his last two albums, Play and 18: a collection of melancholic torch-songs indebted to electro-pop, gospel, and David Bowie's "Heroes", it's typified by the rousing, keyboard-drenched likes of "Beautiful" and the twinkling, optimistic "Spiders". But that's not to say Moby is stagnating, exactly: for one, he's bravely jettisoned the vocal samples that powered the likes of "Why Does My Heart Feel So Bad?", relying instead on his own understated, faintly awestruck vocals - and, indeed, those of guest vocalist Laura Brown, whose sparse, synth-and-drum-machine cover of New Order's "Temptation" is a low-key highlight. But there's also a return to his raving roots on the pulsing, diva-led "Very", and a touch of politics on "Lift Me Up" - a song that hides its contempt for the Bush Administration amid a dark carnival of sweeping strings and disco-noir rhythms. -Louis Pattison.

The first Orb album was entirely new when it appeared: a low-key dance record, with echoes and swells more than up-front tunes, stoner-level dub bass, and all sorts of samples and sounds-seagulls, film clips, astronaut voices, bits of disco-fluttering through the mix like hallucinations. Essentially a techno album for tired dancers, it's held up nicely over time, thanks to its intricate, dreamy sonics. Beyond the classic "Little Fluffy Clouds"-a set of interlocking synth hooks and loping percussion, held together by a cut-up sample of Rickie Lee Jones talking about the skies of her youth-there are lots of mellow delights here, particularly the blissful reggae groove "Perpetual Dawn. " -Douglas Wolk.

Music lovers can always tell the summer's here because the market gets bombarded by a wealth of 'chill out'compilations but none so esteemed as the Café Del Mar series. One the first ever "Balearic" comps to emerge into the dance market, it's imaginative and considered song selections have ensured it has remained one of the finest too. Conjuring up the mood of Ibiza's more gentle side beautifully, the series features enigmatic combinations of downtempo beats, gorgeous guitar strums, wistful flute and lush strings. This 8th excursion is once again akin to sinking into a hot, scented bubble bath after a hard days work, with supine sonics from respected artists such as Goldfrapp ("Utopia"), Dido ("Worthless"), Afterlife ("Sunrise"), Illumination ("Cookie Raver"), Ben Onono ("Tattouage Blue"), Digby Jones ("Pina Colada") and Scriptiure ("Apache"). As we've come to expect from the Café Del Mar series, this album provides the perfect backdrop to any relaxing summer day. -Paul Sullivan.

Morcheeba served as the template for subsequent "trip-hop" combos, with a line-up that consisted of brothers Ross and Paul Godfrey (both steeped in a musical heritage ranging from Hendrix to roots reggae, from which they cherry-picked at will) and female vocalist Skye Edwards, whose languid vocals melted into the brothers' melange of slide guitars, scratch DJing dub and tablas like cream into coffee. "Who Can You Trust" didn't immediately win over the dance crowd, moving as it did at Mississippi pace through a marijuana haze of sound. The album's standout tracks, however, including "Tape Loop" and "Trigger Hippie", an almost edible concoction of dark funky ingredients, ensured that it became a slow-burning and widely imitated landmark mid-1990s album. -David Stubbs.

The resurgence of rock in most aspects of popular music has certainly not gone un-noticed by Lemon Jelly's Fred Deakin and Nick Franglen as 64-95 is littered with epic guitars and explosive refrains nestling amongst the downbeat soul for which they are best known. Opener, "Come Down on Me", is tense, fiery and for the most part dominated by the partnership of crashing power-chords and a lead synth that, while not a big-beat tune, wouldn't sound out of place on an old Lo-fi's or Chemical Brothers album. However, for anyone missing the sugary sweetness of Lost Horizons, most of the album is business as usual—strict drum patterns and rolling, mesmeric loops of lush strings, acoustic guitars (that sound great if a little bit cheesy) and lovable bass hooks. "Make Things Right" sums up a great deal of the music with its summery melody and reserved mid-tempo groove, this track being particularly reminiscent of classic Nightmares on Wax. Among the deviations in formula are "The Shouty Song", which comes across as some sort of harsh, contemporary jig and "The Slow Train", which utilises a barber shop quartet to fantastic effect. From start to finish 64-95 is pretty much devoid of filler (the weaker tracks only being weak due to other songs being better) and it culminates in the wondrous epic "Go", with the beat poet talents of William Shatner building to a crescendo that'll send anyone home with a smile on their face. Another great collection that isn't too radical a departure but doesn't rest on past successes, pushing Lemon Jelly forward at their own pace. -David Trueman.

Tom Findlay and Andy Cato have steadily been dismantling their chill-out crown ever since the single "At The River" saw them float into coffee-table ubiquity. Lovebox finally stretches the duo's eclectic tastes beyond any semblance of continuity or restraint, finishing the job started on last year's Goodbye Country (Hello Nightclub). Named after Groove Armada's bi-monthly London club night, the duo's fourth album captures the excitement and diversity of pace you would expect from a masterful DJ set. While the opening track "Purple Haze" doesn't have a sniff of Hendrix's majestic histrionics, it is certainly Groove Armada's most rock & roll moment to date. Neneh Cherry lends her sultry voice to the lusty funk-fuelled hip-hop of "Groove Is On" and the urban soul of "Think Twice", and "Remember", with its languorous beat and swirling effects, nods toward their down-beat prime. Feisty dance-floor shakers are here in force though. "Madder", mixing the raps of MC M. A. D. with a pulsating bass and itchy guitar hook, kicks hard, and "The Final Shakedown" is an undiluted house anthem, albeit with a feisty ragga vocal. [+]

The Richest Man In Babylon is the third full-length record from Thievery Corporation and finds this atmospheric Washington DC-based electronica duo indulging their esoteric chill-out impulses, blending far-flung world-music influences into a slick, high-production trip-hop cocktail. With an emphasis on keeping it organic, Thievery Corporation boast a radically different sound to their sterile, mechanical-sounding peers: "The Outernationalist" wraps its ethereal electronic synthplay in dub-tinged passages of trippy Rastfari mysticism, while "Facing East" blends wailing Bhangra vocals and whirling sitars into a hypnotic, downotempo whole. They're not exactly on the cutting-edge of this sort of thing-"Un Simple Histoire" and "All That We Perceive" could easily have slipped neatly onto Air's Moon Safari, while the rolling brass of "Liberation Front" bears an uncanny resemblance to Nightmares on Wax circa Car Boot Soul. But like the greatest bits of DJ Shadow's The Private Press, it's often hard to say exactly how these complex, soulful tracks were pieced together in the soulless environment of the studio. It's a cool, impressive achievement. -Louis Pattison.

Moby is an ambitious man, both musically and philosophically, and that quality seeps into every aspect of Everything Is Wrong, from the wunderkind DJing that stretches the genre limits of techno to the angry, antiestablishment manifesto on the CD sleeve. The record's opening salvo of dancey club music sets the listener up for "All That I Need Is to Be Loved", which, out of nowhere, bludgeons would-be club kids with tuneless, mad vocals and punked-out guitar solos. The same bait-and-switch formula repeats twice on the CD at almost regular intervals in the industrial shriek of "What Love" and the sudden, slow, and acoustic bent and folksy vocals of "Into the Blue". All three shifts are jarringly abrupt. However, dance-floor continuity is in Moby's blood, and he uses these songs as parts one, two, and three of the underlying rage that drives the record's concept. Without these three tracks, in fact, you'd have a moody yet convincingly cohesive dance-athon, bouncing between house breakbeats ("Feeling So Real", "Bring Back My Happiness") and blissed-out trance ("God Moving Over the Face of the Waters"). Instead, Moby expresses his bewildered and desperate view of modern life by periodically yanking away the escape of blind, danceable ecstasy, using that discontinuity to express the eyes-wide-open ruminations of a furious idealist. -Matthew Cooke.