album reviews.

BY ANDREW GREENHALGH JEFF BECK, LOUD HAILER EARLIER this year, Eric Clapton's 23rd solo album, I Still Do, emerged: a gently effective exercise in treading water by an ageing bluesman in his 70s.

Now, two months on, comes another new record by another ageing bluesman in his 70s. The pair go way back - Beck succeeded Clapton as lead guitarist in the Yardbirds in 1965 before giving way to another youngster, Jimmy Page, a year later - but the difference in their current output is startling.

With Macy Gray-ish vocalist Rosie Bones on board, Loud Hailer is fierce and funky, with influences including hip-hop and soul as well as the requisite blues.

It's not perfect - the lyrics are occasionally trite and out-of-touch - but in the main it defies belief that its chief progenitor is a 73-year-old white man, and demands attention way beyond the blues marginals.

DOWNLOAD: Pull It, The Ballad of the Jersey Wives NAO, FOR ALL WE KNOW THE kind of electronic urban soul that is Nao's stock in trade is everywhere in 2016.

Criticising it feels wrong, somehow, because there's nothing particularly bad about much of it - but that's half the problem. It's so darn tasteful that you can listen to it for a good half an hour and not be able to remember a single track you've heard.

Such is the case with For All We Know. It makes all the right Prince-influenced noises, Nao herself has a perfectly pleasant voice and, the odd 'F' word aside, it would all go down splendidly at a dinner party.

But stand it next to something outstanding - Beyonce's Lemonade, say - and it becomes ever so slightly disposable.

DOWNLOAD: Inhale Exhale, In the Morning ABSOLUTELY FABULOUS MOVIE SOUNDTRACK HAVING not had the dubious pleasure of seeing the Ab Fab movie, I can't say how many of this ragbag of tracks are actually heard the film and how they relate to the Kate Moss-baiting plot.

I can report, however, that Kylie's version of This Wheel's On Fire is abysmal and that unless a) you have seen the film and want an audio souvenir before it comes out on DVD or b) your musical tastes range from 1960s rudities (Serge Gainsbourg and Jane Birkin's Je T'Aime) and French pop Francoise Hardy, Charles Trenet) to 21st century stompers (La Roux, Formation, Jason Derulo), you give it a miss.

The songs' quality apart, it doesn't hang together in any way, shape or form and is eminently ignorable.

DOWNLOAD: La Roux, Sexoteque; Jake Monaco,