Music

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.

Released in July, Tell It Like It Is, by singer/songwriter Stephanie McKay, is an excellent soul album for today. Drawing on the sounds of classic soul, 1970s funk and old school hip hop, McKay's second solo album is a successful attempt to reflect and relate to the world that ordinary people find themselves in. Speaking about her album, McKay makes it clear what she is trying to do: "It used to be that albums from the past, particularly soul albums, would tackle life's issues and problems - as well as the fun... It's what I grew up on.

New Amerykah Part One (4th World War) is without question one of the most political and complex soul albums of recent times.

Sewn into the album are echoes of Marvin Gaye's What's Going On?, Curtis Mayfield's This is America and a flavour of Funkadelic. At times you can hear an historical echo of the Black Power and consciousness raising themes of the 1970s.

In solidarity with the Palestinian people, she also recently refused to play in Tel-Aviv during a tour of the Middle East, during which she performed in Ramallah.

The 12 songs on this CD are a good introduction to the Algerian artist Souad Massi. With influences from folk to Flamenco via popular north African music and Portuguese Fado, this live recording is like a warm embrace in winter.

On his new album, Washington Square Serenade, Steve Earle may have swapped crashing guitars for mandolins and banjos, and the harder edge of his work may also be punctuated with beautiful, melodic love songs such as "Sparkle and Shine" and "Days Aren't Long Enough". But the fact remains that anyone who signs off his introductory notes with the epithet "Fuck Lou Dobbs" - the CNN anchorman famous for racist, anti-immigration diatribes - has nailed his political colours firmly to the mast.