The Lemonheads: "The Best Of The Lemonheads The Atlantic Years" (Atlantic)

Evan Dando's career has never had a truly dazzling moment, but he shone on 1992's It's A Shame About Ray. By 1993's Come On Feel The Lemonheads, however, Dando had been following Oasis around on tour like a sick puppy and generally losing the plot. Big Gay Heart, The Great Big No and It's About Time are inoffensively twee, while the more robust Into Your Arms wasn't even written by Dando. Car Button Cloth came a tardy three years later, by which time few fans really cared about The Lemonheads anymore, and songs such as If I Could Talk I'd Tell You, Hospital and The Outdoor Type saw Dando still floating along on his fluffy cloud, completely rudderless and locked on the same jangly course. Kevin Courtney

Cane 141: "Scene from 6 a.m." (Secret Records)

Well, they're already being called a Dublin band, so success must be imminent for Galway's finest, Cane 141. Scene from 6 a.m. is very much a first album, very consciously so. The band seems full of an urgent desire to pin down a moment they can feel slipping away from them. These are snapshots, taken in the knowledge that time will make them sadder and deeper than art ever could. Through these summer-haunted songs, friendships fade into love, and love grows into friendship, as acoustic guitars blend into electric. Sounds drift in and out, children playing, the rattle of a Super-8 projector: "Sing a swansong, on an old guitar and a cheap synthesiser/ It gets so hard, with no guardian angel or moral advisor/ And all we get is older, not wiser". Immaturity is seldom documented with such maturity. File their next album under "eagerly awaited".

Julian Gough

Ringo Starr: "Vertical Man" (Mercury)

History has taught us to keep our expectations low when approaching the solo work of Ringo Starr, and his first album in eight years finds the ex-Beatle drummer keeping comfortably to his past mediocre form. Ringo's latest rotogravure is filled with old-fashioned, rocksteady tracks such as King Of Broken Hearts, I'll Be Fine Anywhere and What In The . . . World; he's helped along by such friends as Brian Wilson, Alanis Morissette, Ozzy Osbourne, Steve Tyler, Tom Petty, George Harrison and Paul McCartney, but you'd hardly notice such heavy star presence, so lightweight is the fare on offer. es with the ingredients mixed for maximum irritability. Particularly annoying are the cover versions of Dobie Gray's Drift Away and The Beatles' Love Me Do; the crowning banality is the optimistic singalong of La Di Da.

Kevin Courtney