Meaty, bouncy and trancey-this is the sound of someone's summer. It is certainly the soundtrack for the one million Britons that visit Ibiza each year. Harry Enfield's brassy parody of the scene exploits this by including tracks from Underworld, Fatboy Slim and Fragma ("Toca's Miracle") which catch the ambience, decadence and speed of the Balearic isle. The exclusives cut for the movie are more intriguing: Enfield and Kathy Burke's novelty banger "Precocious Brat" and trancehead Matt Darey's piece for Rhys Ifans, "Eyeball Paul Theme Tune". Although it must be hard to mock the sound of Ibiza when the island's favoured records are either cheap and fast or absurdly pompous, Hybrid suceed. They catch its bombastic sonority with a dire cover of The Pretender's "Kid", and Jools Holland and JK's version of "I'm In The Mood for Love" seems to sum up the entire project-amusing but hardly essential. Tony Marcus.

This duo worked hard before this debut album broke through in the mid-1980s. Formed in 1981 after a chance meeting in a record shop, Neil Tennant and Chris Lowe (the former an ex-Smash Hits journalist) made endless demos before their first version of "West End Girls" flopped in 1984. It wasn't till November 1985 that the song hit No. 1, and only then after an early release of "Opportunities" fell flat too. Which explains the maturity and sly, camp ennui that infuses this record, from the title to Chris Lowe's occasional sardonic voiceovers. Tennant possesses a voice that is affecting because of its imperfections, which, heard at the start of their career, sound even more touching in his faltering falsetto. The music underlying Tennant's sad words is fantastic-hard, sleek synthesisers that revel in their lack of human input. -Charlie Porter.

By 1969, black artists were following rock's lead and recording extended epics. At the forefront of such experimentation was big bad Isaac Hayes, co-author of countless Stax classics and an artist in his own right. On this, his second album, Hayes takes two adult-pop benchmarks, Burt Bacharach's "Walk On By" and Jimmy Webb's "By the Time I Get to Phoenix" and spins them out into slow-building sermons lasting 12 and 18. 5 minutes apiece. Heavily romantic, they predate by two years Barry White's symphonic adventures in the same style, revolutionising soul music in the process. Meanwhile, on the album's third epic, the 10-minute "Hyperbolicsyllabicsesquedalymistic", Hayes and his backing band the Bar-Kays wind up sounding, bizarrely, like a black Crazy Horse. -Barney Hoskyns.

The Afro Celt Sound System has now shortened its name, with Seed acknowledging that the metamorphosis into a fully functioning band has now been completed. Since forming in 1995, producer-guitarist Simon Emmerson's remarkably stable gathering has become strongly identified with the whole global, hippy, ambient rave culture. The only problem is that that's become something of a dated concept, musically. For their fourth album, the Afrocelts are given a homogenised production that smoothes all their diverse elements down into a global composite, removing any spiky protuberances. For an album that's largely the product of acoustic musicianship, it sounds remarkably one-dimensional in terms of its middle-ground textures. Space is lacking between each instrument, producing a thick wall of sound. The band's previous album, Volume 3: Further in Time, featured guest vocals from Peter Gabriel and Robert Plant, but now the band's regular singers are given prominence. Iarla O Lionaird's vocals hover in the heavenly realms, while N'Faly Kouyate operates at a more earthly, earthy level. There's still no shortage of exuberant instrumental guests, with flamenco guitar by Jesse Cook, a duet vocal for the Brazilian Nina Miranda and Irish fiddling from Martin Hayes and Eileen Ivers. "The Other Side" pulses swiftly, built around a frenetic drum work-out, and "Deep Channel" has a liquid bassline, with Emer Maycock's uillean pipes flitting around its trouncing beats. [+]

The declared mission of Alabama 3's Outlaw is to find a way of romanticising Britain's mythic criminals in song in the same way that American country music celebrates its pantheon of gunslingers, gamblers and sundry ne'er-do-wells. In this respect, the two key songs on Outlaw are "Have You Seen Bruce Richard Reynolds?" - a cool, wordy, talking-blues summation of the career of the Great Train Robbery mastermind and serial jailbreaker - and the single, "Hello. I'm Johnny Cash". The latter, set to Cash's trademark boom-chicka-boom beat, acknowledges the late Man In Black as the principal inspiration of Outlaw, and is a fine and funny song in its own right. Musically, Outlaw signals an end to Alabama 3's recent stylistic wanderings, returning from the overt, and occasionally oppressive, techno of Power In The Blood and the acoustic starkness of Last Train To Mashville to the slightly dance-ified country which characterised their first two albums. This is all to the good, as those first two were Alabama 3's best, until now. -Andrew Mueller.

Stars Die is a 2CD compilation spanning Porcupine Tree's stint with Delirium Records between 1991 and 1997 and consists of the best album tracks and singles as well as previously unheard rarities. Porcupine Tree began life in as a one-man vehicle for multi-instrumentalist Steven Wilson, eventually morphing into a full band line-up. Intent on dispensing with the 1970s mothballs, Porcupine Tree have carted the stale fabric of prog-rock off for treatment at the trance-and-dance-beat-drycleaners and-not entirely unsuccessfully-shifted the antique, astronomical black vacuum of space-rock on a few years from the era of blurry images of Buzz Aldrin on black and white telly. Whilst Stars Die hardly constitutes a giant leap for mankind, it exudes a certain eccentric freshness, not least of all on the trippy trance of "Voyage 34", the closet thing to Star Trek on LSD, and "Synesthesia", on which they manage to delude themselves into believing they are the techno-prog Stone Roses. At its best, this is a fine introduction to a band who may appeal to people who know this is the 21st century, enjoy a bit of Radiohead, probably even The Orb but-to their credit-can't quite bring themselves to stick those old Steve Hackett albums in the attic. -Kevin Maidment.