i Wanna be Yours

Leaving behind Columbia Records along with his latter-day collaborator producer Rick Rubin, Neil Diamond sets up shop at Capitol - which now belongs to Universal Records, who owns his classic recordings for Uni and MCA - and teams with producer Don Was for 2014's Melody Road. Diamond may have left his label of 40 years, but in an odd way, Melody Road is a return home after his stark wanderings of the 2000s. Rubin encouraged Diamond to be spare, sometimes recording him with little more than an acoustic guitar, but Was - who is assisted by Jacknife Lee - coaxes the singer/songwriter to bring back the schmaltz, an essential element of Neil's glory days that was largely ignored on the Rubin records. Was and Lee retain a hint of that new millennial intimacy - it's never once as overblown as his '70s records - but the songs themselves alternate between stately ballads, effervescent bubblegum, and self-important pomp…

With someone as prolific for new releases as Ginger Wildheart, you’d be forgiven to expect a drop in quality at one point or another. 'The Pessimist’s Companion' is not that release. Written as a follow up to the honest and personal 'Ghost In The Tanglewood', this album continues on the topic of depression, suicide and Ginger’s personal struggles, making it another very emotional collection of brutally honest songs…

Kenny G's work can be divided into three main categories: first, his improvisatory fusion efforts as a Jeff Lorber sideman in the late '70s; second, his R&B-oriented albums of 1982-1985; and third, the elevator Muzak he has specialized in since 1986. Falling into the second category, G Force is a fairly decent urban contemporary release that clearly benefits from the input of Kashif (who serves as executive producer). Kashif was hot at the time, and the R&B singer/producer/songwriter had been burning up the charts with hits by Evelyn "Champagne" King, George Benson, Howard Johnson and himself. Kashif's stamp is all over this sleek album; you can hear it on both the tunes with R&B vocals…

Maybe John Cooper Clarke's brief window of fame passed with the demise of punk. But his poems are every bit as arch and funny now as they were in the '70s. There are sly wordplay, groaning puns, and also plenty of strong social observation. He essentially took the ethos of the Liverpool poets of the '60s, using common language and bringing in lots of humor, but made his mark through speech, not print. This collection, cherry-picked from his major-label work, is an absolute joy. Backed by the relatively all-star Invisible Girls (which included Pete Shelley of the Buzzcocks), the Bard of Salford deadpans his way through the epic "Psycle Sluts (Parts 1 & 2)," "The Day My Pad Went Mad," and the piece that really gave him his first big exposure, "I Married a Monster From Outer Space." But in "Beasley Street" and "Postwar Glamour Girls" there's a more serious undercurrent happening, while "Kung Fu International," for all its lightheartedness, shows that little has changed in English street violence, and "Twat" remains as deliberately outrageous and hilarious as it was on its initial release. Culled from the four albums Cooper Clarke did for Epic, it shows that what was good then is still good. The world needs a Cooper Clarke for the new millennium.