Music nirvana - New Randy Newman and The Streets albums

I'm happy. I'm listening to the new albums from The Streets and Randy Newman, two of my favourite artists, and both of them are among their best.

The Randy Newman is a lovely great sounding laid back affair featuring songs about love, getting old.... and about Bush's America - which he's not too happy about ("Jesus Christ it stinks here high and low / The rich are getting richer / I should now / and while we're going up / you're going down"). The great Bush baiting high point is the sad and shattering "A Few Words in Defence of Our country", which I already posted in a previous post. ( "The end of an empire is messy at best / And this empire is ending / Like all the rest / Like the Spanish Armada adrift on the sea / We’re adrift in the land of the brave / And the home of the free") Here it's re-recorded in a brilliant country-fied version. This album is definitely up there with legendary 1970s classics like "Sail Away" and "Good Old Boys".

The last The Streets album was a bit of an all round disaster. It was a post-fame album of the most annoying sort, with weak music, and lots of moaning about having lost it because of too much fame and money. And it had crappy female backup r&b/soul singers like the worst soft hip hop albums. But man, Mike Skinner is back, I'm happy to report. The new album is a kind of laid back Zen pop blockbuster. His philosophical musings about everyday subjects may not exactly be deep... in fact he acknowledges in the very first song that they are sort of clichés, but they're given enough of a twist to feel fresh when set on top of a beat. I'd say this is as good as his two first albums, which basically means I think it's brilliant. You can go to his myspace page and listen to a few songs, including my favourite "On the Flip of a Coin". You can go back a few posts in this blog and listen to the title track, which is another high point.