Rock

This week's Rock/Pop CDs reviewed

JASON MRAZ

We Sing, We Dance, We Steal Things Atlantic***

It's been a long time coming for Jason Mraz. The Virginia singer- songwriter with a penchant for racy album titles (his debut is titled Waiting for My Rocket to Come and, no, it has nothing to do with Nasa) has some of the most easy-breezy, round-the-campfire songs you'll be hearing in 2009. Mraz has spent the the past eight years or so honing his craft. His time looks to have arrived, and his songwriting skills bear all the hallmarks of a former niche act just waiting to cross over. If the appeal is obvious, it's simply due to a fundamental instinct for engaging the listener with catchy songs (Details in the Fabric, The Dynamo of Volition, If It Kills Me). While occasionally a tad bland, this is still the sound of summer six months before it arrives. www.jason mraz.com TONY CLAYTON-LEA

RIBBONS

RoyalsOsaka ***

With contributions to Xiu Xiu, The Dead Science, Parenthetical Girls and Casiotone of the Painfully Aware to his credit, Jherek Bischoff knows his way around the experimental pop houses. Royals,however, is a solo fling in which Bischoff gets to dive into deeper, darker waters. While there's an occasional sense of the producer trying his hand at eclecticism for the sake of it, Bischoff does keep his wits about him enough to rein in the more outlandish flourishes. Bischoff is at his best when he establishes an alluring, ghostly sonic pattern ( Automatism), then pushes the track into places where it really shouldn't be going. This scrap between soft, haunting, quasi- classical fragments of sound and Bischoff's appetite for noisy electronic destruction - a tussle repeated throughout Royals- makes the album all the more intriguing. www.myspace.com/ ribbonsband JIM CARROLL

Download tracks: Automatism, Children's Song

VARIOUS

50th Anniversary Plus Motown *****

The Beatles aside, it's difficult to think of a body of popular music which is so well known and so well regarded as the Tamla Motown catalogue. Set up by Berry Gordy in Detroit in 1959, it was the first label to be run by a black person. The wonder of Gordy's creation lies in his strict insistence that his acts recognise the supremacy of the three-minute pop song. This may have been pop, but there was depth and meaning aplenty. What really impresses, however, are the girl group songs - a genre so debased over the last decade. Martha and the Vandellas and The Supremes sound magnificent, and parts of Diana Ross solo work still hold up very well. All of this and Marvin Gaye, Stevie Wonder, The Four Tops, The Temptations and Smokey Robinson too. You spoil us with your box set, Mr Gordy. BRIAN BOYD

Download tracks: Heatwave, Where Did Our Love Go