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POP

Eels: Tomorrow Morning

Cooperative Music/V2, 13.99

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Completing the trilogy which began with Hombre Lobo and continued earlier this year with bleak masterpiece End Times, Tomorrow Morning doesn't have to try too hard to be more uplifting than its predecessors.

At one point, Eels mainman E goes to church on garagey gospel number Looking Up. The song titles ring with positivity. But the album is still low-key, if not actually downbeat, for the most part consisting of lo-fi synth folk crooning arranged on cheap keyboards with programmed beats, broken only by the occasional burst of rowdiness such as Baby Loves Me or the cut-and-paste string samples of the album's fine romantic centrepiece, This Is Where It Gets Good.

!!!: Strange Weather, Isn't It?

Warp, 11.99

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Awkwardly-named punk-funksters !!! have dubbed this their "Berlin" album. Following the death of their drummer Jerry Fuchs in a freak elevator accident (this is not some sick Spinal Tap joke), the band went looking for fresh impetus and found it in Europe's clubbing capital. Even though very little of Strange Weather, Isn't It? was actually recorded in Berlin, they have tapped into the Hansa Studios spirit with the springy bassline, lean brass and generally Bowiesque feel of Wannagain Wannagain.

The proto indie funk of Even Judas Gave Jesus A Kiss could have been a long lost Paul Haig number, Steady As The Sidewalk Cracks sounds like Scissor Sisters rediscovering their club roots and they leave peers such as LCD Soundsystem for dust with closing all-out clubland banger The Hammer.

FIONA SHEPHERD

CLASSICAL

Di Chitarra Spagnola

Delphian, 13.99

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Scots classical guitarist Gordon Ferries continues his fruitful relationship with Delphian in a new recording that focuses on the guitar/theorbo music of 17th century Italian-born Angiol Michele Bartolotti.

This collection of Suites and other individual dance movements exemplifies the composer's cross-current influences of Italy and France, in both of which he worked. Ferries' informed performances, using a Baroque guitar from Edinburgh University's historical instrument collection as well as modern replicas, capture the dashing quality of the French influence and make light of those stretches of ordinariness that give an occasional workaday quality to Bartolotti's music. In short, some movements are more interesting than others.

KENNETH WALTON

JAZZ

Dave Liebman Big Band: As Always

Mama Records, 13.99

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Saxophonist Dave Liebman has been a guest artist with the Scottish National Jazz Orchestra in these parts, and leads his own high-level big band in this live recording.

Those who like their big bands straight-ahead and swinging in the classic pre-war fashion will probably find Liebman's approach a bit more challenging, but even in the most intricate reaches of the saxophonist's compositions the band – directed by Gunnar Mossblad – retains all of the sonic richness and dynamism of the genre.

Liebman's muscular, twisting solos on soprano saxophone push both the player's improvisational ingenuity and the notoriously intractable instrument's range and sonority in absorbing and often unexpected directions, supported by fine soloists from the stellar New York line-up, including outings in the epic Anubis and Philippe Under The Green Bridge from Charles Pillow on an instrument rarely featured in jazz, the oboe.

KENNY MATHIESON

FOLK

RICHARD THOMPSON: DREAM ATTIC

PROPER RECORDS, 12.99

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THE master of angst-ridden eloquence and renowned guitarist returns with a new collection (also available in a limited edition with a second disc of acoustic demos), recorded live during a US west-coast tour, with a fine electric band.

Hardly a bundle of laughs, these are nevertheless compellingly sung and played, as he musters impassioned rage and brooding melancholy, shifting from the opening up-tempo Money Shuffle to the disillusioned lament of Among the Gorse, Among the Grey, and wandering down well-trodden Thompson mean streets in the punchy Demons In Her Dancing Shoes. Crimescene becomes a howling crescendo of anguish while Sidney Wells is a latter-day sanguinary broadside ballad about a serial killer.

There are some classic Thompson electric guitar moments, not least in the rocker Haul Me Up – not so much pursued by Furies, as he suggests, but by the howling ghosts of old Fairport at their heady best.

JIM GILCHRIST

WORLD

The Rough Guide to Desert Blues

RGNET, 8.99

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AS THE writer of the liner notes points out, the desert blues of Mali, Mauretania, and Morocco share many traits with the blues of the Mississippi. Just as the themes of the American blues reflect the African-American experience – lost love, discrimination, floods, slavery – so do parallel themes permeate the West African blues, with exile resounding through song after song.

Robert Johnson's Cross Road Blues – a quintessential Mississippi song – actually refers to Eleggua, the Orisha of the crossroads in Yoruba culture; and as has often been pointed out, the American banjo derives from the West African akonting. Ali Farka Toure used to assert that the correct description of the music played on the banks of the Mississippi was American-Malian music, rather than with the key words reversed . And here he is, with a definitive line-up of desert blues musicians.

Here is Malam Mamane Barka, the world's only master of the biram, the five-string lute of the Boudouma tribe in Eastern Niger. Here are the superstars Tinariwen and their off-shoot Terakraft, and Tamikrest who took their cue from them: these Tuaregs all honed their art in refugee camps. Here are the blind artists Amadou and Mariam, still performing after three decades, and here is Etran Finatawa, from Niger and purveying their modern take on traditional Wodaabe chants.

My favourite track here comes from Malouma Mint Moktar Ould Meidah, born into a family of griot bards in Mauretania: her songs about vaccination, Aids awareness, the elimination of illiteracy, and the spread of women's rights illustrate the central part that music is now playing in desert culture.

What unites all these musicians is the pungent interplay between voices and plucked strings, and a sense of wide-open spaces and the all-pervading sands.

MICHAEL CHURCH