Album Of The Week: Usher Looking 4 Myself

This week, a couple of seasoned soul-music professionals are releasing new albums that toy around with sonar beeps and European club-music thumps, trying to find the ways that they can use these sounds to convey some serious emotion. In this particular corner of the internet, we've been hearing a lot more about one of those albums: Bobby Womack's The Bravest Man In The Universe, in which the wizened legend, who narrowly avoided death earlier this year, throws his craggy and dessicated voice through dark, foggy, sparse tracks. Producers Damon Albarn and Richard Russell have given Womack tracks that sound like desolate warehouse districts late at night, and he's given them vocals that stare sadly into the abyss. It's a very good album. But I prefer the other one, the one where a young pop-soul perennial, a man who's been famous for most of his life and who has been more commercially successful than almost anyone in the history of his chosen field, grabs the Euro-house sounds that currently dominate the charts, bending and twisting them until they suit his needs, giving a master-class in how a great pop musician can make a moment his own.