Rock/Soul
Happy Mondays: Greatest Hits (London)
Manchester's mad bunch have reformed and are shambling on to a festival stage near you, but this collection reminds us why Shaun Ryder's gang were crucial to the development of so-called "indie-dance". Happy Mondays encapsulated the student dream of pop paradise, where beer flowed, beats thumped, and rock stars looked like nightclub bouncers in tracksuits. Wrote For Luck wrote the blueprint, and Lazyitis scrawled it in lugubrious longhand, but Step On and Kinky Afro brought it sprouting into life. 1987's 24 Hour Party People sounds surprisingly fresh, but the recent cover of Thin Lizzy's The Boys Are Back In Town is all mouth and no trousers, while the 1991 cover of The Bee Gees' Stayin' Alive is, frankly, flogging a dead horse.
Kevin Courtney
Macy Gray: On How Life Is (Epic)
This album is an effortlessly cool, serene and blooming marvellous debut from Macy Gray where hip-hop, funk, R&B and rocksteady Sly Stone merge into a delicious soundclash. Macy's husky soul holler is one major reason to cheer; the on-point musical ebb and flow is quite another, as tracks like the brash Why Didn't You Call Me, the slinky Do Something and the sheer wonderwall that is I Try pull you into the centre of her world. Heavy and light in equal measures, On How Life Is is all the more splendid for its unapologetic mix-and-match culture clash. Unless Erykah Badu comes up trumps later in the year, this is the soul album of 1999.
Jim Carroll