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

There have been many songs written about Monday, but they all seem to use the working week’s start as a metaphor for sadness, despair, and classroom shooting rampages.

Well, no more: your Mango thinks this is a pretty damn fine day, actually (much better than stupid Thursday. More like ‘Turdday’ if you ask us) and we have done a little song of our own to show you how brilliant it is. Come follow us to the post-jump world, where we’ll show it off…Oh, Monday: you’re the one day,
When we really come alive.
Oh, Monday: such a fun day!
Makes us want to jive.

With your football and your horseplay,
And of course the Mango: fine art!
Stupid Thursday is like Michael Bublé,
To your Django Reihnardt.

Quite brilliant, you’ll agree. If you’d like to contribute to the nascent pop masterwork (we’ve got a band name and everything: Floating The Mango), then do leave your lyrics and/or the instrument you play in the comments box (bear in mind we already have a drummer, an accordonist, and a bloke in our local pub who can fart a middle C that would make you weep).

Alright, we must drag ourselves to consider this week’s trio of releases.

Firstly: If On A Winter’s Night, Sting. The tiny tantrist from 80s pop pioneers The Police has decided to go medieval on our asses, releasing an album of lute-backed songs about winter. If the Twelfth Century had middle-ranking sales executives called Steve, this is what they’d play at their dinner parties, as the guests tucked into a delicious hedgehog soufflé.

It is, incredibly, even more terrible than you’d think, beginning with the song titles. Only one of the following is made up: There Is No Rose Of Such Virtue; The Snow It Melts The Soonest; Lo How A Rose E’er Blooming; Lawks Me Bum’s On Fire (Then Sit Thee ‘Pon The Snow, Sire).

And the music…oh, the music. Every song has a different vocal style, like Sting thought they were so boring he’d better perform each as a different zany character. Check out Soul Cake (sung by a medieval Bob Marley). Or Cold Song (Frank Sinatra singing opera very, very slowly). Or Cherry Tree Carol (sung by a castrato who’s being tickled).

Our favourite: Lullaby For An Anxious Child, which seems to be sung from the point of view of an asthmatic Italian pervert peering through the anxious child’s bedroom window.

This album is represented by the thought:

Forsooth, thine dinner party is surely proceeding in most merry a way, Sir Steve. I congratulate mineself. But shouldst I perchance play now the sounds of Sting? No, not his new one, for it doth give mine ears much anger. Just go with Fields Of Gold, for the ladies do so love it.

I want my friends to think I am sensitive, please take me to Sting.

Secondly, Bad Boys, Bryn Terfel. Grrrrrrr. Bryn is angry. He’s pissed off. He’s up for a fight. Just look at that album cover: Bryn, up close and in yer face, looking ANGRY. Looking PISSED OFF. Looking LIKE A STATUE OF ROSS KEMP MADE OUT OF GRIZZLY BEARS AND CROWBARS. Blimey, this is going to be a thrilling album: probably some kind of hard’n'fast thrash metal? Or house music so deep and intense it’ll make your ears resign, jump off your head and go live in a Trappist monastery?

Can’t wait for this one, let’s see..

WTF? We can only repeat: WTF?

It Ain’t Necessarily So from Porgy And Bess, sung by a tortured bison? Stars from Les Miserables, sung by Africa’s gayest hippopotamus? And a load of operatic toss sung badly by a fat bloke from Wales who looks like Meatloaf’s uglier brother’s ballbag? WTF?

This album is represented by the thought:

Right, let’s stick this one. Look at that cover! I am going to look so fricking awesome walking away from the jukebox here in The Ruptured Spleen pub when they hear what will surely be some pounding speed metal, or some other tough-sounding genre of music.

WTF?

I want my friends to think I am cultured and that, please take me to Bryn.

Thirdly: Slow Attack, Brett Anderson. Hooray! As a sweet antidote to the poison of Sumner and Terfel, please welcome swoopy-voiced androgynous 90s hearthrob, Mr Anderson!

Well, nearly. It’s certainly not a terrible album – just make sure to skip past the first track, Hymm, which is a bit too close to Coldplay for aural comfort – but it does leave us with the feeling that it’s not all it could be. Like sitting down for a meal in a posh restaurant, then being told by the waiter that your dinner will be cooked by some work experience boys from Walsall.

It’s fey, it’s folky, but it’s a sad waste of a fine voice.

Oh, Brett: this could have been wonderful. Consider yourself lucky to have landed in a week such as this, where you are the cleanest piece of sweetcorn in the musical turd.

This album is represented by the thought:

Just my luck. The wife pays for a birthday meal at the Ritz, and it turns out that, in an improbable turn of events, they have asked some completely unsuitable boys from an industrial town to be the cooks tonight. Could it get any wor…oh, tosspants, they’ve just put Slow Attack on.

Screw my friends, there’s no way I’m buying either of those. Brett, please.

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