The dust has barely settled from their recent The Singles retrospective but Basement Jaxx are back on the floor with a brand new studio album. Crazy Itch Radio, built around the concept of a radio station (complete with interludes and skits), begins with an absurdly dramatic intro before flowing into the contrastively slinky, feel-good single "Hush Boy", a slick, mellow mash-up of styles that wouldn't be out of place on the duo's kaleidoscopic debut Remedy. Indeed, Crazy Itch… unfolds with a fluidity and infectious joie-de-vivre not really seen since first album. The ease with which tracks like banjo-house anthem "Take Me Back To Your House" and "Hey You!" spill from the speakers in colourful floods of cinematic strings, Balkan folk references, house beats and rock guitars, pays testament to the duo's outstanding studio alchemy. Elsewhere on the album they make grime sound fun ("Run 4 Cover"), pay coruscating tribute to marijuana ("Bubbles") and drop the odd slow number ("Lights Go Down"). Immediate and vibrant, Crazy Itch. is Basement Jaxx at their sassy, life-affirming best. -Paul Sullivan.

For a while there, the helium-voiced Macy Gray seemed to be coasting instead of crashing down the walls between funk, rock, and R&B the way scads of breathless music pundits once said she would. That was before will. i. am and a handful of other skillful knob-twisters entered her life. Now, multi-genre destruction and utter domination once again seem possible: Big, as its title suggests, is a huge record-bold in all the right places and subdued where it needs to be; scruffy around the edges but slick below the surface; at once nonchalant and reckless to the bone. Gray, in her way, is a vocal Timbaland-it's tempting to think she's too imposing to make a random-seeming hook-up work, but she stretches her singular gift around pretty much any collaborator a producer can throw at her, and with style to burn. On Big, those tossed on for the challenge include Natalie Cole, who lights up opener "Finally Made Me Happy"; Nas, who gives up the grit likably on "Ghetto Love"; and Fergie, who coos efficiently throughout "Glad You're Here. " As vibes go, the one given off here is cool, casual, and slightly crazy-all Macy, in other words. She does her thing up right, and she does it Big. -Tammy La Gorce.

Having collaborated with such dance acts as Red Snapper and the Chemical Brothers, singer-songwriter Beth Orton is sometimes regarded as a young folky hitching a ride on the electronica bandwagon. On Trailer Park, however, she harks back to a lost Seventies tradition whose exponents included Traffic, Tim Buckley and especially John Martyn, all of whom worked in a hazy interface between jazz, blues and folk. Fleshed out with multiple layers of vibes, strings and keyboards, Trailer Park is at once a soul-searching and sensual album, with Orton's flat-edged and indistinct lyrics often seeming to melt in her own mouth. Only "Sweetest Decline", featuring Dr John on keyboards seems slightly twee. Otherwise on the likes of "Couldn't Cause Me Harm" and "Feel To Believe", the pleasures and pains of love are conveyed so tangibly it almost hurts. -David Stubbs.

The title, coupled with a sleeve depicting an Apollo launch pad with a huge middle finger giving that gesture, summarises the ethos of former Killing Joke roadie Alex Patterson's The Orb. Their musical scale is gargantuan and fearlessly meandering, taking in ambient, reggae, techno and innumerable mutated samples. In order to pre-empt "prog-rave" tags or accusations of Pink Floyd-style pretentiousness, however, Paterson and his various collaborators always took a facetious, self-deflating approach to their work. In spite of the aura of silliness shrouding The Orb-as evinced on titles like "A Huge Evergrowing Pulsating Brain That Rules From The Centre Of The Underworld"-they can't puncture the delights of the freewheeling, orbiting "Pomme Fritz" or the intoxicating "Little Fluffy Clouds" with its ingenious sample of a Rickie Lee Jones interview. This compilation could either serve as an introduction to The Orb or as sufficient for those unwilling to follow them on some of their more extreme sonic excursions. -David Stubbs.

For Tubular Bells 2003, the ever-perfectionist Mike Oldfield (unhappy, apparently, at the odd bum note on the indubitably classic original) utilises the latest studio techniques and trickery to re-record his flagship classical/folk/rock instrumental masterwork in its bar-for-bar entirety. It may be true that The Bayeux Tapestry would look pretty good if someone re-embroidered all 230 feet of it on a modern sewing machine, but that's hardly the point. Surely, the original Tubular Bells-16 million sales, reverential status, important historical artefact and so on-has more than enough going for it? Although the production here is fatter and brighter, playing "spot the musical difference" between this and the one that continues to pay for Richard Branson's hot air balloons may require levels of diligence and dedication bordering on pottiness, which in a way is kind of a relief. There are minor distinctions-louder bass guitar, better sounding bagpipes, Sally Oldfield (presumably) joining Mike for a grunt on the always-amusing "Caveman" section and John Cleese playing Master of Ceremonies on "Finale" (saving his best "pining for the fjords" voice for the announcement of the arrival of the "double speed guitar")-but, by and large, the apple cart remains upstanding and no babies are thrown away with the bath water. -Kevin Maidment.

Three years after the scattered Embrya, new-soul prodigy Maxwell returns with Now, his most fully realised disc yet. While not as ambitious as D'Angelo or just plain flippin'-off-the-wall as Macy Gray, the singer-songwriter does claim a stance: acoustic-guitar-based, near-tone poems ("Sympton Unknown") and Kate Bush covers ("This Woman's Work") are hardly the stuff of your average pop-R&B love-man. Maxwell's lush thickets of overdubbed vocals could stand as a fine listen on their own; the varied textures of the instrumental tracks make the flow that much more inviting. A steel guitar subtly fires "W/As My Girl", while a rock-influenced beat gives "Temporary Nite" a groove both choppy and slippery. Now's unity of feel and often pensive tone bring it a cohesive air. Even the potentially throwaway last track, "Now/At the Party", works as more than just an exercise in 70s-party groove. If the many brokenhearted plaints here were telling a story, it would provide a suitably happy ending. -Rickey Wright.

A collection of B Sides (Sorry, G Sides) from a band with only one album to their credit should be an exercise in lowest-common-denominator barrel-scraping. But Gorillaz' G Sides, as befits a band whose "live" performances take months of preparation, is an exercise in careful planning that actually manages to outstrip this near certainty. It's by no means a work of lost gems. "19-2000" features as a more uptempo mix, and "Clint Eastwood" reappears as the more chunky mix performed on the BRITs with Phi Life Cypher, and as a CD-ROM video. Other tracks, such as the closer "12D3" come across as 13 era Blur on autopilot. Unsurprisingly it's not hefty either, weighing in at a fairly paltry 37 minutes and 10 tracks, but overall it provides a fairly good companion to the album, and is better than it has any right to be. -Chris Blenkarn.

Between the smashes of On the TLC Tip and Fanmail, TLC made CrazySexyCool, on which the trio made an ill-advised bid to out-diva groups like En Vogue. Despite their premature stab for respect, the albums contains one of the trio's signature tunes: "Waterfalls", a wistful take on unrequited love that was wise beyond their years. They didn't match the tune until the release of Fanmail, on which the ladies fulfilled the promise hinted at here. -Bucky Wunderlick.