5 out of 10: A good collection of covers, but why bother when the better originals are so freely available?

You can’t sing rock or pop as you do soul, and you can’t sing soul as you do rock or pop: the many awkward interpretations of Beatles songs by soul singers looking for a wider audience and Jimmy Barnes’s bombastic collection of covers on Soul Deep are proof of that.

Although also a member of Cold Chisel, Ian Moss always sang silkily, lilting effortlessly through the melodies on such Oz rock classics as Bow River and When the War is Over in a manner reminiscent of soul music’s finest. Nevertheless, it took a stint on TV’s abysmal It Takes Two for anyone to realise that Ian Moss is the real soul singer of the rocking world, not his former frontman.

On Soul on West 53rd, Moss covers thirteen soul standards with an American band of session musicians. The slower, more graceful numbers such as Let’s Stay Together and Hummingbird are a natural fit for Moss’s natural vocal clarity and restrained expressiveness. What Becomes of the Broken Heart, upon which Jimmy Barnes and — oddly enough — Joan Osborne make an appearance, is also a highlight, gaining as it does from the contrast in vocal styles.

Unfortunately, Moss sings from too many people’s songbooks. He falters without the requisite grit on the funkier, rowdier numbers such as Shake and Use Me, the kind of songs that even Al Green – a singer whose style Moss’s vocals most resemble – rightly never attempted to sing. Making matters worse, the seasoned soul veterans backing Moss sound as harmless as the It Takes Two band when trying to dirty things up.

Most problematically, though, there’s no reason why anyone would listen to these covers over the originals. Other than some needless guitar solos, Moss’s covers don’t diverge enough from the classics, and despite his comfort in the genre, you can’t help asking yourself: why bother?

5 out of 10: Meander, meander… Oh Scarlett, how I wish you were mine.

Pete Yorn got his break writing the soundtrack to the Farrelly Brothers’ film Me, Myself & Irene, and it’s perhaps those links to the film industry that landed him the job of a lifetime: writing an album for Scarlett Johannson to sing on.

Yorn conceived of Break Up as an update on Serge Gainsbourg’s recordings with Brigitte Bardot. The passion of the relationship between Gainsbourg and Bardot, details of which Gainsbourg would sordidly reveal in his dotage, seeped into the recordings that were the equivalent of a French film on SBS: replete with sex and nudity, but artfully so. Conversely, Yorn’s collaboration with Johannson is more American teen flick: the everyday kid daydreaming of going home with the prom queen.

Yorn is another folksy, sensitive balladeer with an acoustic guitar in hand who sings nondescript songs in an anonymous, breathy, contained voice. The first track, Relator, is certainly hummable, but from there things turn decidedly humdrum. The songs meander inoffensively at a mid-tempo pace, an electronic flourish here and a pleasant string arrangement there, without anything memorable to speak of going on. What’s most surprising, though, is that Johannson’s voice is the most memorable accompaniment to Yorn’s lacklustre music. In fact, Yorn does the album a disservice by singing so much and using Johannson’s raspier vocals as an accompaniment rather than the central focus. Where Johannson chanelled Nico on last year’s album of Tom Waits covers, Anywhere I Lay My Head, Hope Sandoval seems the inspiration on Break Up, and her artful vocals reminiscent of such hipster starlets demonstrates why Johannson continues to be the indie pin-up girl of our times.

No one will still be listening to Break Up forty years on from its release as people still do Gainbourg and Bardot’s Bonnie and Clyde. That’s not to say Break Up is terrible — it’s not — but Pete Yorn ain’t Serge Gainsbourg, nor is he likely to ever get into the pants of the more famous actress singing by his side.

5 out of 10: A legendary band that’s seen better days.

Despite the establishment of a right-wing military dictatorship, somehow the musical arm of an art movement, Tropicalismo, whose catch cry was “it’s prohibited to prohibit”, flourished towards the later end of the 60s and laid the foundation for Brazilian popular music. In opposition to the political atmosphere of the time, the tropicalistas drew from the tenets of the Cannibalist Manifesto written by a Brazilian poet of an earlier generation and ate up influences from all directions. Tragically, the government made good on its veiled threats by incarcerating and exiling many of the movement’s members, thereby stalling Tropicalismo’s continued development.

Os Mutantes, or, in English, The Mutants, were at the heart of Tropicalismo. They released three ground-breaking, genre-bending albums that did justice to their choice of band name before moving into a largely-forgettable prog-rock direction, and now, more than twenty years after their last release, Haih… ou Amortecedor… extends that portion of their legacy labelled forgettable.

Although there are seven of them on this release, only a single member of the original trio, Sergio Dias, is part of the current line up. Nevertheless, the music is suitably genre-bending and the lyrics political when not light-hearted fun, but the samba, forro, salsa, rock, soul and middle-eastern oud that’s heard from song to song, if not within the same one, sounds too much like pastiche bordering on parody that’s weird for weirdness’s sake. The bane of much Brazilian music, a too-clean production reminiscent of muzak or beige lounge, also serves the album poorly.

That’s not to say there aren’t successes: Anagrama is possessed of a fantastically odd melody that well-suits the sweetness of the lyrical sentiments; and O Careca is a fantastic, modern-soul update to an old Brazilian standard. What’s missing, though, is that prepossessing joy and naive fun in experimenting which made Os Mutantes justifiably famous and will remain the standard by which any group that goes by the same name will be compared to. This album ain’t half bad, but even though the band’s reincarnation has at least partially fulfilled the wishes of many fans, even Kurt Cobain’s, it’s not a patch on what’s come before.

3 out of 10: Many influences manhandled into an overreaching mess

Oscar Wilde once noted that all bad poetry springs from genuine feeling. I have no doubt that on the panegyric to a love an ocean away, Dinosaur, that the sentiments expressed on the song spring from genuine feeling. Nevertheless, “our love is a dinosaur, hear it roar” and “our love could survive a war without the slightest sore” is just execrable poetry.

Seizures is replete with such hamfisted lyrics. Instead of setting his sights lower and settling for less-challenging, fun-loving pop lyrics, the band’s singer-songwriter, Darren Cordeux, makes himself appear foolish by failing miserably in his every attempt at achieving any kind of profundity.

Of course, lyrical concerns are of little overall import when rocking out is the aim, and Seizures does feature a number of hummable choruses abounding in hooks. Kisschasy schooled themselves on the indie-pop kings of the late 80s and early 90s — Nirvana, The Pixies, Pavement — so their odd jangles and fills are tempered by a delight in melody. And in this regard, Kisschasy have been served well by Rob Schnapf, producer on albums by Beck and Powderfinger amongst others, whose clear and layered production adds the right anthemic sheen to what could have been a sonic mess in less-able hands.

What big choruses can’t make up for, though, is a lack of songcraft. The verses are generally non-events: unmelodic, meandering, forgettable. And without the setting of a stage, a build up, the choruses seem to hit from nowhere, without purpose. A lack of variety in tempo or song structure only exaggerates the sense that the verses, choruses and the bridges which make up the songs on Seizures could be swapped around without anyone noticing, as if all the bits and pieces were slapped together without forethought.

On Strawberry Jam, Cordeux opines “I’m just regular, regular”.

Indeed.

5 out of 10: Classy, yet too clever by half

It ain’t New York or San Francisco hipsters in the United States head to these days, it’s Portland, Oregon. Not surprisingly, then, Pink Martini were formed in this haven of environmental progressiveness and liberal values by multilingual, multiethnic, socially-conscious Harvard graduates originally from somewhere else and became the hipster band par excellence.

On Splendor in the Grass, Pink Martini follow the same trail they blazed on earlier albums and mix elements of lounge, latin, pop, jazz, Bacharach and cabaret into a palatable whole. The eleven-piece band cover all bases with aplomb, professionally jumping from genre to genre from song to song. The mostly-instrumental Ohayoo Ohio — the pick of the bunch — showcases their skill, the latin groove and dynamic interplay between melodic and rhythmic elements reminiscent of Herbie Hancock’s finest work.

Sadly, such tasty musicianship too often takes a backseat to bland singing. Much of the music leaves room for the vocals to take charge, but China Forbes, who’s the primary singer on the album, sings plainly, cloyingly and without vigour. The singing is dull enough when Forbes sings in English, but when certain songs have her singing in Neapolitan, Italian, French or Spanish, her accent imbues the songs with a grating inauthenticity that has one wishing Pink Martini would just play instead of attempting to impress us with their worldly outlook.

Pink Martini try to do too much and never sound as good as the real thing despite their musicianship. This is put into stark relief when Pink Martini call on Chavela Vargas, the legendary ninety-year-old Mexican ranchera singer who was once Frida Kahlo’s lover, to sing on a well-arranged cover of the classic Piensa en Mi. Vargas does a heart-breakingly good job — too good in fact, because she ends up demonstrating exactly what the rest of the album lacks: sincerity, heart, conviction.