Album reviews: The Saturdays | Bill Ryder-Jones | My Darling Clementine | Classical | Folk | Jazz | World

POP

The Saturdays: On Your Radar. Polydor, £12.99 **

THE UK’s biggest girl band (in a field of about one) have made it this far without offering a signature sound, a memorable image or a ubiquitous hit to cross over beyond the tween market, making the title of their third album sound more like a hopeful plea than a statement of intent. Rather than do anything as commercially dangerous as cultivate an identity of their own, they offer up the competent pseudo-Gaga rave pop of singles All Fired Up and Notorious and attempt to muscle in on the Adele market with formulaic piano ballad Last Call. At least The Way You Watch Me, their collaboration with Travie McCoy, musters some of the playful cheek of Girls Aloud, still the gold standard for 21st-century girl groups.

Bill Ryder-Jones: If... Domino, £11.99 ****

THE erstwhile lead guitarist of The Coral steps away from fine psychedelic pop to the evocative soundtrack territory of the likes of Sigur Rós with this debut solo album, inspired by Italo Calvino’s novel If On A Winter’s Night A Traveller and composed as though a film score. Intersect pushes all the emotional buttons of a Hollywood tearjerker, while the stealthy, mournful beauty of By The Church Of Apollonia would not be out of place on Rome, Danger Mouse’s homage to the Italian film composers of the 1960s. He switches back to guitar on the sparse acoustic number Le Grand Desordre and fails to stand out from the self-regarding singer/songwriter crowd but just when you think you have figured the reflective mood, he hits you with the proggy guitar coda of Enlace.

My Darling Clementine: How Do You Plead? Drumfire Records, £11.99 ****

SONGWRITING couple Michael Weston King and Lou Dalgleish channel the spirit of George Jones and Tammy Wynette on this lovingly executed collection of strictly old-school country laments about rotten relationships with tell-all titles such as She Is Still My Weakness and Goodbye Week. In style, subject matter and arrangements, they stick close to their classic influences – 100,000 Words could easily be mistaken for Loretta Lynn’s Success, for example – but make a virtue of their own chemistry on the skiffly, witty, bitchy and bitter I Bought Some Roses. FIONA SHEPHERD

CLASSICAL

Nikolai Lugansky plays Liszt. Naïve/Amroisie, £13.99 ****

AT THE opposite end of the spectrum from Hyperion’s recent marathon release of Liszt’s complete piano music (over five days of stormy listening) is Nikolai Lugansky’s recital-sized single selection disc on the stylish Naïve label. It’s a heroic popular compilation, in which the Russian displays a magnificent range of colour and startling display of virtuosity. From such sugary confections as La Campanella, rich in pianistic thrills and spills, to the stringent technical demands and powerhouse expression of such heavyweights as the F minor Etude, Lugansky embraces that wonderful composite of showmanship, sentimentality and subtlety that gives Lizst’s music its magical charisma. KENNETH WALTON

FOLK

The Hot Seats: Live. Own Label ***

REGULAR visitors to this neck of the backwoods, The Hot Seats generate an infectiously driving mixture of American old-time and jug-band music, laced liberally with zany humour. This live album captures them in typically exuberant form.

Don’t expect too many subtle nuances from this Virginian fivesome, just rollicking guitar, fiddle and banjo in numbers such as the frenetic, beer-drinking ragtime of Killing Time, the holler-along River Stay Away from My Door, or the tongue-in-cheek anguish of Cheesy Beef Boogie.

There’s some hell-for-leather playing in instrumentals such as the Dill Pickle Rag and Hell Broke Loose in Georgia while, well … where else might you hear lascivious double entendres concerning sweet Georgia peaches, or the heart-tugging a cappella line “That mule stole my wife”? JIM GILCHRIST

JAZZ

Dennis Rollins Velocity Trio: The 11th Gate. Motema, £12.99 ****

TROMBONIST Dennis Rollins dedicates this disc to the new age of Global Awareness we are allegedly entering, but on a more mundane level, it is a very enjoyable and upbeat collection of tunes for the relatively rare combination of trombone, organ and drums. Rollins demonstrates his usual level of invention and technical command on his instrument, revelling in its deeper registers, and throwing in a bit of electronic manipulation for good measure. He has ideal partners in Ross Stanley’s vibrant organ work and Pedro Segundo’s grooving drumming, and they find plenty of warmth, colour and textural variation within the compass of the instruments. They include a joyous cover of Eddie Harris’ Freedom Jazz Dance among the original material. Feisty and fervent on disc, it promises to be an exciting live prospect (they play Montrose and Inverness later this week). KENNY MATHIESON

WORLD

World Routes: On the road. Nascente, £13.99 *****

RADIO 3’s World Routes programme has been going for 11 years, and is now an established media presence. Its achievements have not all been positive. It has at times enthusiastically promoted the global pop which has given “world music” the crowd-pleasing connotations which that term’s original inventors intended, and the World Routes Academy, designed to nurture young musicians from other cultures who are living in the UK, has not delivered anything very significant. The World Routes residencies in remote regions reflect a much more constructive policy.

But despite intermittent overkill with wall-to-wall Malian music, Lucy Duran and her producer James Parkin have over the years brought to light some remarkable and endangered musics which they have helped preserve by throwing a spotlight on them. And this double CD – in which Central African music is fitted into an admirably balanced global picture – beautifully illustrates that achievement. It’s only a sampler, but every one of its 30 tracks is a winner, and anyone wanting a quick way into the real “world-music” should start here.

The somewhat self-congratulatory notes talk at length about the circumstances in which each track was harvested, and about the respective singers’ and instrumentalists’ backgrounds, and although the actual music isn’t discussed in any detail, its presence is enough. Everyone will have their own favourites here, but mine come from Georgia, South India, Cape Verde, Azerbaijan, and – most mysterious and wonderful of all – Epirus. MICHAEL CHURCH