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George Michael "Older"

Aegean/Virgin, CDV 2802. (58 mins)

Dial-a-track code 1201

Doesn't everyone look just a little older today?" was the comment this writer couldn't help but make following the funeral service for fellow music critic Bill Graham little more than a week ago. The death of a friend has a way of drawing out such observations. Likewise in terms of George Michael, whose new album, the perfectly titled Older, is dedicated to hiss Brazilian friend, Anselmo Feleppa, who died of a brain haemorrhage. And to a musical hero of Michaels, Brazilian bossa nova icon Antonio Carlos Jobim, who also died relatively recently, in his case as a result of cancer.

Their presence dominates this album particularly the former, who is the subject of its opening song, Jesus To A Child with its heart stopping lyric, "you smiled at me/like Jesus to a child". Obviously George Michael believes that blessed are those who have known a love as pure as this, even if that means they may forever run trying to recapture "a moment of you", to quote Jobim's Someone To Light Up My Life.

Such a quest sits at the soul of many of this album's defiantly assertive affirmations of love, life and sexuality, such as To Be Forgiven where the man bravely admits, it takes all I have just to cry for help. Fast love, where please bring me back to my body passion, without commitment, is about all that can be asserted following death. Indeed, all these songs are suffused with a longing that cries out for a sense of reconnection with the physical world allied to a need for transcendence. Nowhere more so than in the Eastern influenced The Strangest Thing, where the narrator, again, implores a would be lover, "take my life/please don't analyse/Please just be there for me.

Such naked expressions of need, as with the lace like textures that make up the music, are diametrically opposed to much of the macho ranting that defines British pop these days, and this song cycle is all the more glorious because of that. In essence, what we have here is a feminine sensibility fearlessly in the ascendant as he does get older, George Michael coming of age.

If you don't believe me, then just check You Have Been Loved, which is almost Cohen-esque in terms of its powerful poetic imagery, particularly when Michael sings, in a painfully tender sense, through the eyes of a mother at a grave side "what's the use of pressing palms/When children fade in mother's arms?" The subject of the song sure was lucky if he was loved that deeply. By a mother or the lover who later moves centre stage in the song and whispers, "if I was weak, forgive me/But I was terrified/you brushed my eyes with angel wings/filled with love/the kind that makes devils cry".

Listening to him sing, one is bound to be less dismissive than one might normally be at potentially platitude nous lyrics like this song's other pivotal line, "Don't think that God is dead". As an affirmation of life after death there is unlikely to be a more perfect album in popular music for years to come.

Various Artists "Common Ground"

SEMI Premier, 8 37691. (58 mins)

Dial-a-track code 1311

There is too much hype surrounding this album, in which I probably originally participated, interviewing "its producer, Donal Lunny, for this newspaper. Then we had the Late Late Show Special, a three page feature in Hot Press and claims that it is a contender for title of "Irish album of the year". As a musical mix of artists who allegedly are equally at home in the "common ground" of rock and Irish music, it is, at best, richly resonant along these lines, at worst, mediocre. Bono and Adam Clayton setting Tomorrow in a more acoustic setting, than their previous recording of the song is the former and Kate Bush fumbling her way through Mna Na hEireann, is the latter. Likewise, Andy Irvine's My Heart's Tonight In Ireland which is as clumsy as its title, while Maire Brennan, Sharon Shannon, Christy Moore and Paul Brady occasionally rescue a project that was obviously full of good intentions but finally falls far more often than it soars.