A well-respected man

THESE are highly peculiar times for the music industry. If you'd told me even two years ago that Radiohead would be inviting their fans to "pay what they like" for their new album, or that the latest Ray Davies album would be available as a free covermount with the Sunday Times, I would have... well, not laughed in your face exactly, but I would certainly have given a ruminative stroke to the beard I hadn't grown yet.

Record companies are running scared, and have been thus ever since the whole download phenomenon started biting. Growing awareness of the dreaded carbon footprint has also meant that those artistes and consumers who are more self-aware and afflicted by conscience have been seized with doubt over the essential worth, or otherwise, of recorded music.

Sadly, it hasn't yet stopped the daily deluge of crud which constantly kicks us in the ears with its enormous carbon feet, but change is most definitely in the air nevertheless, and it will be interesting to see how the situation is going to pan out.

In the middle of all this, there's Ray Davies, inexplicably free with your soaraway Sunday Times (in advance of the album's release proper, with two extra tracks). To those of us who regard Davies as the brightest jewel in Britain's songwriting crown, this is a bit like being offered a free clutch of Faberge eggs - but then there's always the suspicion that if it's free, it can't possibly be any good.

Well, pish, posh, balderdash and tommyrot. Working Man's Cafe is reassuring proof that Davies has still got it - and how - and that the rejuvenated wonders of 2006's Other People's Lives were no flash in the pan.

You may admittedly find yourself initially wrongfooted by the twangy mid-Atlantic inflections and rolling R&B groove of opening track Vietnam Cowboys, which borrows its drum pattern from Holiday In Waikiki, but it's all too easy to forget that The Kinks were a blues band in the first instance - as much in thrall of Americana as any of Britain's generation of 1950s teenagers.

Working Man's Cafe leans more towards the clanging riffs and direct lyrics of early Kinks music than the sighing langour of Davies' "quintessential Englishman" phase, but these spry, energised compositions are audibly the work of a man who is on easy first-name terms with his muse.

In A Moment, for example, is one of the most perfectly constructed slices of classic pop to come down the pike since Squeeze turned up their toes. Best of all, You're Asking Me wouldn't sound out of keeping on 1966's Face To Face - a surging performance lit up with Davies' trademark fey harmonies, just great.

On to more pressing and depressing matters now, and the release of yet another 2CD set in the endless Massive R&B franchise. There's no point in my pretending otherwise - I'm old, so R&B means Muddy Waters, Howlin' Wolf, Otis Rush and The Yardbirds to me. I simply can't relate to the stuff that goes under this name now, and the identikit production values and vocal tics cause me actual, palpable despair.

For fans of the form, however, this will be hog heaven - 40 tracks including offerings from Fergie, 50 Cent, Nelly Furtado, Mutya Buena, Nas, Ludacris and Snoop Dogg to name but a mere handful. I've tried to like it, but I wear a cardigan and enjoy reading PG Wodehouse - move along, there's nothing to see here.

Duty compels me to report the release of a bunch of kiddy-friendly albums which, again, are of limited appeal to a 46-year-old whose idea of fulfilment is to have not one but two cans of beer in the fridge.

The Complete Halloween Party Album is just that - a 2CD set for gouging pumpkins and chowing down on blood capsules by. This initially looked quite promising, with There's A Ghost In My House, Spooky, Monster Mash and Thriller among the tracks featured, but distressingly these are lacklustre cover versions - the Top Of The Pops album ethos is evidently not dead.

CBeebies stalwarts LazyTown are evidently a phenomenon across the globe, but by the time it got to track nine (Techno Generation) on their album, I was about ready to declare war on everything. Like a virus that keeps cunningly mutating, you get all 20 tracks again in karaoke sing-along' form, and then 12 sing-along videos on DVD - by which time you may find yourself eating through the masonry in your desperate need to secure an escape.

Hey Hey! Big Songs For Little People is comparatively familiar territory, gathering together the themes from Bob The Builder, Thomas The Tank Engine, Fireman Sam, Postman Pat and The Tweenies among many others in what can only be a concerted attempt to smooth out the crenellations of your brain and leave it as stupefyingly pink and featureless as a blancmange in a 1950s cookbook.

Finally, Fifi's First Album by Fifi And The Flowertots is something I know nothing about and, after synaptic bombardment from all of the above, can offer no coherent criticism of. The thought briefly crossed my mind that it might be an incognito supergroup a la Derek & The Dominoes, but this is of course a nonsensical notion. Tell you what, though - if I'm honest, it all kind of makes me wish my kids were little again...