Music

Last month PJ Harvey won the Mercury Prize for her latest album, Let England Shake. She was the first woman to win the prize back in 2001, is the first artist to win it twice and has won it with an album that is determinedly anti-war.

Taking Iraq and Afghanistan as her starting point, this a departure from the deeply personal explorations of her albums to date. Harvey has said she wanted to write this album for years but has waited until she had the writing skills to do it.

The irony was probably lost in the Orwellian world inhabited by the BBC's directors. When a young rapper Mic Righteous delivered the line "I can say free Palestine" on the 1Xtra hip hop show M1X, the BBC censor proved him wrong. As if it were an expletive, "Palestine" was removed from the broadcast version and replaced with the sound of a bomb blast. The BBC has offered no credible explanation for this shameful act.

Just as the Velvet Underground stood out in 1967 like a black flower in the blooming summer of love, Radiohead's OK Computer clashed with the synthetic euphoria of New Labour and Cool Britannia in 1997. They gave us songs of alienation (and alien abduction) instead of bloated, cocaine-fuelled gibberish.

The human experience which the composers convey is not simply the product of past musical influences but is shaped by the historical context. This is borne out by the strange coincidence that Frédéric Chopin and Robert Schumann, the two greatest composers of romantic piano music, were born in the same year.

This new album by the three-piece string band The Carolina Chocolate Drops is perhaps their best recorded work. It really takes full advantage of their vocal talent - especially opera-trained Rhiannon Giddens - and covers a much wider selection of genres than their previous releases.

It's good to hear Gil Scott-Heron's deep voice - the voice of a poet mapping an emotional world - singing with more confidence than he has for a long while. After two decades struggling against drug and alcohol abuse he has made an album that those of us who remember him well will be happy with.

The Kronos Quartet is probably one of the most prolific string quartets around. Over the past 30 years it has released more than 40 recordings and performed live countless times (it spends at least five months touring every year). But what's most impressive with the quartet is its thirst to commission original works (more than 600 of them) and the number of artists it works with.

Two new albums, Grey Britain by The Gallows and Music for the People by The Enemy, are hymns for a new generation staring into the void created by the recession.

The Gallows are from Watford and The Enemy are from Coventry, both places, in their own ways, urban ghost towns - places where the dreams of the young, brought up on mass consumerism and materialism, are going to be destroyed.

Disclaimer - I've never previously much liked Gilad Atzmon's CDs. Live, he can be brilliant, with a bite and intensity that make him one of the best jazz artists working in Britain today. But I've rarely felt that he's managed to capture that on CD.

This is very different, though. His new recording mixes a love of and nostalgia for the jazz tradition with some very contemporary orchestration and sounds. But while the central concept is rooted in jazz history, this is far from a retro exercise in simply re-creating the past.

This December marks what would have been the eightieth birthday of Karlheinz Stockhausen, the German pioneer of electronic music who died last year. To celebrate this event the Southbank Centre is hosting a week-long festival of his music.