WALTER BECKER, 'BOB IS NOT YOUR UNCLE ANYMORE'

Like Donald Fagen's more overtly conceptualised Morph the Cat, Walter Becker's Circus Money is a record that blooms with more freshness, passion, and conviction than Don and Walt's two most recent outings as Steely Dan.

From its sixth song, the title track, Circus Money is a reggaed-up, soul-fry (as the soul fries) spree. It is boozy, salacious, undignified, a million laughs, bitter, pitiless, and doomed.

Yet just as compelling as this carnal carnival, with its fangs and its smarts and its flying fur, are the five dysphoric songs which constitute almost the full first half of the album like a bust before a boom. Sonically fine-spun, they are nonetheless thick with the damp and desperation of persistent dreams and regrets.

'Bob Is Not Your Uncle Anymore' is the most chill-giving of the bunch. Becker, reaching new and surprising heights of vocal expressiveness for a man not well used to the role, sings of a homecoming in which 'home' is a desolate, haunted space. If that 'dopey Irish Setter dog, Regan' is a sly allusion to Lear, then we should probably be thinking of the King in humbled and hopeless mode on the heath. And 'Bob,' you sense, is a codeword for nothing less than emotion, focus, and meaning. The player, played-out and alone with his ghosts, laments their loss while still not certain that he would ultimately have been better off as Ethical Man.

Becker's band, meanwhile, grooves rockstead-easy in a deep freeze, the track as fascinatingly glacial and necrotic as one of Gaucho's De Palma-like crawls of pleasure over sun-glossed L.A. surfaces, albeit of a gloomier and more ominous cast than they. Rhythm guitar blinks like pale sunlight glimpsed through pines. We get keyboard textures like murky pools and sweet, smoky effluvia, the cold comfort curling around our downbeat hero who is still slightly breathless from the blows he has taken and dazed by the scale of his defeat. A cool sliver of the voice of Carolyn Leonhart-Escoffery, Walterlette supreme, drops dub-wise on the beat as branches tap against the window and the tap drip drip drip drip drip drip drips ... then sudden piano disintegrates dreamily like light as unconsciousness lets its curtain fall.

'There's an ocean full of midnight running right up to the door.'

Heavy bass for heavy times.

DJ KRUST, 'TOUCH'

Jungle tracks simply do not get any more exquisitely sensuous and beguiling than 'Touch.' It's an early record by Krust which seems to have appeared in hard format only in 1995, on a 12" split with fellow Bristolian and Reprazent-er Roni Size.

The piece is a slow but disorienting glide. There is a rippling electronic chime that is like an involuntary memory, startlingly clear, of something from the screens of a 70s childhood (and is, one guesses, a sample of something of that era). It has the aura of a white-magic word, a secret Open Sesame to an occult space of enchantment. Like as not you will feel as though you have heard it before, even if it isn't so.

Soon deep-blue woozy synth pads are let fall languidly on the surface of stuttering, skittish beats. They sound like a sweet love hangover from the ecstasy-drenched guitar delirium of My Bloody Valentine's Loveless. It's a heady atmosphere of erotic aquaticism that Krust is generating here, and bursts of furious sounds of bubbling make this explicit. Wordless female vocalisations are vaporised into a hyper-intimate haze of soft gasps and hungry moans. They are backed sometimes by accelerated flurries of keyed-up synth-strings, sometimes by gentle, exploratory pushes of jazzed electric organ. This siren comes and then she is gone, sucked down into the bass-weight vortex.

But there is another voice in the mix, this one belonging to an actor in the movie Wild Style whose character's words are familiar from their inclusion in 'The Genesis' on Nas's Illmatic: 'Stop fucking around and be a man.' Yet the introduction of this call to wakefulness, to the onerous task of grappling with reality, seems ironic given its obvious inability to diminish the extraordinary oneiric power of this track's spell.

Kodwo Eshun wasn't writing specifically about ambient jungle in 'Abducted by Audio,' but 'Touch' is one of those gorgeously intense aural seductions that bring to mind said text: 'It's almost like you're being drugged by the beat, you're being beaten by the drug. And the fact is, you love it. There's nothing like it.'