You could never accuse Damon Albarn of resting on his laurels. Whether it's forming supergroups (The Good, The Bad & The Queen), working with cult animators (The Gorillaz) or making music with musicians from Mali, the former Blur frontman has nurtured a restless, questing spirit not normally encountered in Britop stars. As if to underline his diverse interests, he now turns his attention to ...

Manufacturer: XL

Manufacturer: Universal

Seth Lakeman's fourth solo album, Poor Man's Heaven, moves him ever closer to the mainstream, his frantic fiddle playing backed with a small, tight band fully aware of the power they generate. But the Dartmoor-based folk singer still digs into local folklore for material. The pounding opener "The Hurlers" refers to an ancient stone formation in Cornwall, while "Solomon Browne" commemorates ...

Manufacturer: Relentless

Led Zeppelin frontman Robert Plant and bluegrass crooner Alison Krauss may not be the likeliest of musical combinations. But on this welcome collaboration album, they work beautifully together, wringing a kind of magic from other people's songs. The key to the album is its versatility. Between them, Krauss and Plant can handle a vast repertoire on their own, and here they take on the lot, from ...

Manufacturer: Decca

The two-disc retrospective The Essential Leonard Cohen traces the Canadian bard's musical maturity from poet and novelist who sang a little, to multidimensional artist whose oracular vocals and increasingly rich arrangements are every bit as compelling as his verse. Even when Cohen came to prominence through the 1960s songcraft of "Suzanne" and "Bird on a Wire", the "folksinger" tag never ...

Manufacturer: Columbia Records

Manufacturer: Proper

Martha is the youngest of the Wainwright clan (with brother Rufus two years her senior), and she's also still the one with the most to prove, even after her eponymous 2005 debut captured hearts aplenty via a delightful bundle of timeless folk ruminations with intriguingly fraught seams--and one infamously foul-mouthed diatribe against her father (folk singer Loudon Wainwright III). It's hard to ...

Manufacturer: Drowned in Sound

Joel and Ethan Coen have long established themselves as film stylists without peer: from Blood Simple to Fargo, their movies have never been less than fascinating, and there has never been any question that their films could not have been made by anyone else. In T-Bone Burnett, the producer of the soundtrack for O Brother, Where Art Thou?, they have finally met their match: ...

Manufacturer: Mercury Records Ltd (London)

Beautiful Future--a hopelessly optimistic moniker for their ninth album, no matter which way you approach it, since Primal Scream are almost universally accepted to have strutted past their zenith around the same time they helpfully mislaid their vowels (on 2000's unrelentingly anarchic Xtrmntr). To claim any future, especially after the all-too-brief successes of 2006's turgid ...

Manufacturer: B-Unique

Even the production, laden with synthesized strings and cooing female choruses, is wry on I'm Your Man, a definitive Leonard Cohen album. Though still touched with the tragic ("Take This Waltz," based on a Garcia Lorca poem), the album often achieves its high points by combining Cohen's world-weariness with black-humoured evocations of social and romantic ills and artistic quandaries. "I ...

Manufacturer: Columbia