Separating the sweet, juicy flesh from the stone and skin of this week’s major label releases.

Life is just one big game of  Whac-A-Mole.

We get born, and up through a hole in a great big plastic machine in some celestial games-room pops a little furry head. At some point later on – it could be 100 seconds, it could be 100 years – one of the gods playing the game notices us, whips his foam hammer around, and *bang*.

We’re gone.

The surrounding whac-a-moles feel terribly sad for a while, and consider just allowing themselves to fall back down into the game’s internal machinery. But, time strolls implacably onwards, and eventually the other whac-a-moles become so absorbed in extending their own gametime that they cease to remember the lost one. Perhaps just occasionally they’ll spare a thought, during those times whac-a-moles hold dear to their velveteen hearts.

Which dark thoughts bring us to:

Firstly, Nobody’s Daughter, Hole. Hole’s lead singer, Courtney Love, was once married to a chap named Kurt Cobain. Kurt sang for a band called Nirvana, who had something of a public profile during the early ’90s. Courtney was herself a singer: in 1994, she was finalising release of the grunge album, Live Through This.

Then Kurt whoofed his head off with a shotgun.

At which point time, for Courtney, stomped its heels to a standstill. So, you can listen to this latest album and feel like it’s still 1994. Which would be fine if Hole were some kind of ahead-of-their-time, revolutionary band. But they weren’t: they were a standard-issue grunge-rock-fem-band, with the requisite whiny-but-can’t-really-sing female vocalist. A kind of American Elastica, but with a rather more compelling lack-of-husband story.

Maybe at some point in the future, musical tastes will return to grunge, and Hole will once again become relevant. For now, though, the band are little more than Courtney’s therapists. Here’s the thought:

1994. *Sigh*. For every generation must have its John Lennon, taken too soon. And its Yoko Bloody Ono, who hangs around for far too long.

I still wear plaid shirts and Converse “sneakers”. Please take me to Nobody’s Daughter.

Secondly, Fearless Love, Melissa Etheridge. Any fan of country music faces a dilemma when it comes to Melissa. She has the sandpaper vocals and the songs about small-town America with big, rousing choruses. Everything your average truck-driver from Ohio with his enormous silver eagle belt-buckle loves.

But she’s a lesbian. And your average truck-driver from Ohio would rather have his enormous silver eagle belt-buckle rammed sideways up his nipsy than admit to liking a Sapphic songstress.

We, on the other hand, have nothing against lesbianism. Heck, our teenaged selves watched enough educational videos about the subject that we actually fancy ourselves as something of an expert. So, we can offer an opinion on the album which is free from bigotry and poorly-suppressed curiosity.

Well, it’s another Melissa Etheridge album, isn’t it? She was ploughing the tender-hearted-yet-big-voiced-anthem field long before Carrie Underwood came along, with her Grammys, and her folksy ways, and her cute little tush.

So, we have some heavy-rocking country songs (Nervous), some baldly political songs railing at anti-lesbianists (Miss California), and some beautiful, touching songs about sad and lonely girls growing up in desolate mid-western states (Indiana).

The whole genre isn’t really our cup of tea, but this is a high-quality, well-written and -produced album if you like that sort of thing. It’s represented by the thought:

Here I am then, driving my truck through the great state of Ohio. Listening to some great country mus… oh hell, it’s that freakin’ libyan lady again. Where’s my enormous silver eagle belt-buckle?

I like both the country music style and the gays. Take me to Fearless Love.

Thirdly, Daddy Yankee Mundial, Daddy Yankee. Arriba!!!!! Muy bueno! Es hiphop de américa latina! ¡Qué revelación! Es como estar en la Ciudad de México, pero sin las drogas y las armas y las mujeres peludas. Buena música! Andale! Andale!

We’d never heard of Daddy before this. But then, we rarely go into either horrible Eurotrashy clubs in Majorca or scary-looking tequila joints in LA with a Mexican gangster sat outside on a box, sucking on a toothpick.

And these seem to be the exact two scenarios in which this album was designed to be played. Half the songs are bouncy little numbers, set to a standard Eurobeat and leaning way too much on a Vocoder for our liking (Vida En La Noche, Las Despedida), while the other half are menacing-sounding gangsta tunes with lots of Mexicans in the background shouting, presumably, whatever “fo real” and “beleey dat” are in Spanish (Descontrol, Campeo A Mi Manera).

It’s not that this album is all that bad, really: in fact, it’s so smoothly polished we’d put serious money on Daddy becoming a genuinely influential music producer. No, it’s just that there is something inherently comical about South Americans performing this style of rap. The music is designed to be threatening, confrontational. And that’s a hard thing to take seriously coming from blokes who are five feet tall and have silly moustaches. Here’s its thought:

Ai, carumba! Este gangster rap de la papa es realmente hardcore, amigo. Sí, perras, putas, y … oh fresco, cena de mamá tiene listo.

I, sir have one of those “silly” moustaches, damn you. Take me to Daddy Yankee Mundial right this second.

Dearest PR people: if you have music you’d like people to hear about, sling us a line here: TheGibbo[at]gmail.com

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