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This is Me . . . Then

(Epic)

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BEING Ben Affleck can't be that hard a gig. Then J-Lo pens you a love letter (in collaboration with Bernard Edwards Jr) that hymns your all-round stud-like perfection. That sort of thing could lead to second thoughts about tripping down the aisle. Actually, lyrically cringeworthy though it be, Dear Ben is rather pretty, as is much of this disc, and if I were Ben (I know, I know) I'd be quite chuffed. Almost under-produced and mercifully free of fashionable excess, this is a beguiling Jenny-from-the-block, and its appeal I venture, will further extend her audience. Listen up for her cover of the 1978 Carly Simon/Michael McDonald tune You Belong To Me as a likely future single.

Keith Bruce

Whitney Houston

Just Whitney

(Arista)

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Whitney is happy. It's in the intermittent cackles of laughter and beaming smiles on the artwork. After a few years of romantic and narcotic speculation by the press, she's using this album, her first for four years, to get her own back. Current single Whatchulookinat confronts her detractors directly.

Despite its tokenistic blips and compulsory P Diddy remix, this is classic R&B, which means it's outdated. It's heavy on the backing vocals, lazy in rhythm, and has a sheen of romantic wellbeing, when modern R&B is all about tales of love gone wrong. The years show particularly in the power chorus of Tell Me No, which even has a soft rock guitar solo. Husband-wife collaborations are rarely a good idea, and the gospel-tinged My Love more than explains why. Whitney may derive a sense of satisfaction from answering her critics head on, but the sweetest revenge would have been making a fresh-sounding album that has something to say.

Beth Pearson

Toah Dynamic

Cops Hate Our Love

(Invisible Spies)

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Toah Dynamic's debut LP, Movement, in 2000, generated much chatter among music journalists. This is the latest

from the Invisible Spies record label collective.

This is the kind of record that makes you reassess adjectives you take for granted and use all too easily, specifically: inventive, idiosyncratic, and chaotic. It's a

rag-and-bone man collection of beats, lyrics, and general noise-making that includes chants of the names of wildlife creatures on Lions, Tigers and Bears, a non-tantric interpretation of Sting's Don't Stand So Close To Me on Pentecostal Quids In, and ruminations on ''women slimming/women swimming'' on Get Some Exercise.

It's the sort of album you'd expect from a music therapy session for anal retentive classical musicians, desperate to miscount beats, play out of tune, and sneakily come in when they're not supposed to. Buy it, enjoy it; just don't try to understand it.

Beth Pearson

Ladytron

Light & Magic

(Telstar)

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There's something instantly appealing about Ladytron and their shadowy aural world of garish plastic, stuttering neon, wistful memories of music past, and bone-headed dedication to keyboards and drum machines. Some of the crunchiness of the record owes more to the brashness of the 2002 electroclash club scene than the desperate machine-driven melancholia of the Sheffield sound in 1982, and on Seventeen and Blue Jeans, a keen pop spirit emerges.

Despite using a palate of noise so limited, Light & Magic somehow manages to avoid pastiche, although it is too long - and the onerous Startup Chime is a mess. Indeed, this group of blank-faced aesthetes have succeeded in creating and sustaining their own brittle, involving, melodious sound world with an impressively grim level of studious cool.

Phil Miller

JAZZ

Mario Caribe

Bacuris

(Caber)

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The bassist who has established his own Brazilian colony in West Calder while providing the backbone to numerous Scottish jazz groups, including the Scottish National Jazz Orchestra and Celtic Feet, sets a septet of largely Scottish colleagues dancing to a samba beat on his first Caber release. Nine of the dozen tracks are originals, often combining sunny Brazilian grooves with a brooding Scottish landscape to good effect, and inspire fine solos from Brian Kellock (piano), Malcolm MacFarlane (guitar), and Martin Kershaw (saxophones). Influences such as Gismonti (on Caribe's own Choro Escoces), Jobim (on a subtly mysterious Girl from Ipanema) and Nascimento (on a rather brisk Cravo E Canela) understandably figure, but Caribe's nurturing his own compositional voice, too, and further developments will be followed with interest.

Rob Adams

CLASSICAL

Tchaikovsky Pathetique Symphony

Leningrad Philharmonic/

Mravinsky

(Elatus)

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THIS 1982 recording of Tchaikovsky's sixth and last symphony with the legendary Leningrad Phil and its iconic conductor, Evgeny Mravinsky, comes with a health warning.

It's a live recording, made in the Great Hall of the Leningrad Phil, and, says the record company rather prosaically, though remastered, ''some technical artefacts from the original source material remain''; for which, read poor orchestral balance, extreme distortion at loud climaxes, and generally anaemic sound quality. None the less, devotees of this great orchestra and its austere conductor will want this version

(if they don't already have it) because it positively aches with passion and intensity. Seldom was a more fatalistic valedictory statement made than in this symphony, and that fact informs every nuance of the Leningrad performance, even through the most grossly distorted moments

of the recording.

Michael Tumelty