If you're looking for that perfect slow hand CD to carry around in the car, Time Pieces is the disc for you. Featuring 11 of Clapton's most radio-friendly hits ("I Shot the Sheriff", "After Midnight", and "Layla", of course), this CD also offers up some of Clapton's most romantic moments in "Wonderful Tonight" and his most cynical in "Promises". Though there's nothing here that you don't have on another couple of discs, Time Pieces is a convenient package of great hits that make you want to roll down the windows, crank up the stereo, and roll. -L A Smith.

The second and undoubtedly breakthrough album for psychedelic soul rocker Lenny Kravitz is an eclectic mix of styles, all tinged with his inimitable sound. On the slinky, rocking "Always On The Run" he teams up with school chum Slash (the former Guns 'N' Roses guitarist) and the result is an explosion of hard-edged guitar funk. Removed from the image of posturing sex symbol are the warming love songs which spread a soulful bliss across the whole album. The Curtis Mayfield-inspired "It Ain't Over 'Till It's Over" and "All I Ever Wanted" are two gentler tunes with an array of soothing strings and whispered romance. With his life as a songwriter and lyricist often shadowed by his immense presence as a performer, Mama Said dispels any uncertainty as to where his true talent lies. -David Trueman.

Isolationist, misanthropic and cantankerous, New Wave survivors, the Stranglers were never a band known for ostentatious displays of affection, at least not to music journalists. However, 1981's conceptual La Folie (roughly translated as "madness") has become known in band circles as the Stranglers' "love" album. Typically, these were no ordinary chansons d'amour. Songs of faith, familial strife, devotion and dependency-spanning religion, celebrity obsession, lust, death and drugs-the nearest the album got to being superficially palatable was on the gorgeous, harpsichord-strewn "Golden Brown" (ex-drug offence jail bird Hugh Cornwell's paeon to the seduction of heroin) and the chilled-out title track, six sultry minutes of JJ Burnel reciting-entirely in French-the true story of a Paris-based student who murdered and ate his girlfriend. The Raven aside, La Folie found the Stranglers at their most instrumentally dextrous and melodically inventive; Burnel's nomadic bass lines, the discordant Four Freshmen harmonies on "It Only Takes Two To Tango", Cornwell's barb at the commercialised martyrdom of deceased pop stars on the waspish "Everybody Loves You When You're Dead" ("the fans will love you when your alive but the wreaths are laid by the rest instead"). There are some great should-have-been singles too, such as "Non Stop Nun" ("enlisted Sister, knows her mister, never two-times with the rest of the clan") with its cheesy organ licks, and the perky, Page 3 ogling synth pop of "Pin Up". Even the bonus tracks are excellent-"Strange Little Girl" (a Top 10 hit and a song covered by Tori Amos) and its even better picnic-jazz B-side, the Hot Club De Paris pastiche "Cruel Garden". La Folie is easily the most underrated album from Britain's most underrated band. -Kevin Maidment.

Pop punk: "because there is no fourth chord". It's an ethos that's served their forefathers well and Sum 41's 2000 debut Half Hour of Power, sticks firmly to this frantic fretboard formula. Their hugely successful All Killer No Filler album was recorded only two months after this-to say that they are cut from the same cloth is an understatement, but not necessarily a bad thing. What they lack in the assured canniness that Blink 182 occasionally produce (dirty jokes aside of course) they make up for with catchy riffs and a fine line in pre-pubescent white-boy rap-so much so that you'd think The Offspring aimed "Pretty Fly (For A White Guy)" at them. "Makes No Difference" is as close to the brilliance of "Fat Lip" as it gets here, but the breezy "Summer" keeps the adrenaline pumping where the tunes falls short (and a catchy hookline is essential for songs like these to succeed). Their delinquency is reminiscent of Ash's 1977 (with similar photo album booklets), but where Tim Wheeler wrote "Girl From Mars", "Bizzy" has written "Dave's Possessed Hair" with the lyrics "You say you're a pacifist/Instead you wave your fist. " Close, but no Harry Winterman cigar. Quintessential casualties of middle-brow, white-collar, suburban society, this is 30 minutes of power but only 15 minutes of tunes. Good enough for what it achieved but it's hard to see if they have the ability (or desire) to evolve and graduate from this tiresome genre and write classics like Green Day did. Still, they seem to be having the time of their lives while they can and that, apparently, is all that matters. [+]