Ozzy Osbourne Black Rain Epic (46m 28s) . . .

IT'S 37 years since Ozzy's first Black Sabbath record was released. Cue 50 million album sales and a solo career that has refused to die right through the 1990s despite his numerous drug and alcohol problems. Sixty next year, his first album in six years sees him teaming up with his touring band (including axeman Zakk Wylde) to record a fresh, ballsy Ozzy album. Songs about addiction ('I Don't Wanna Stop'), his wife's cancer ('Lay Your World On Me') and an anti-war number ('Black Rain') would probably sound like self parody but for the fact that he has always been like this.

Download: 'Black Rain' 'Not Going Away' 'Here For You'

Neil Dunphy

Hot Chip DJ-Kicks ! K7 Records (68m 06s) . .

Of the almost 30 mix albums in the DJ-Kicks series made since 1995, it is the Kruder & Dorfmeister and Nightmares On Wax offerings that proved most successful. This time it's the turn of English electro-pop duo Hot Chip, whose second album The Warning made many people's best of lists last year, earning the collective a Mercury nomination. Forget about getting something similar here, however, the one new original song is passable at best, proving this format tends to suit producers rather than bands. Joe Jackson's 'Steppin' Out' is good because it's hardly remixed at all.

Download: 'My Piano', 'Steppin' Out' 'Mess Around'

ND

Jeff Buckley So Real (72:00) Columbia (72:00) . . . .

TEN years after Buckley drowned in the Mississippi river, his estate and Columbia release another compilation of sorts as the singersongwriter's popularity posthumously grows. Fourteen of his best-known songs and covers are here unchanged; 'Hallelujah', 'Last Goodbye', 'Grace' along with a heavier 'road version' of 'Eternal Life' and lesser known 'Forget Her' and 'Vancouver'. Unfortunately, not included are Buckley's two best performances; 'Morning Theft' and a cover of Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan's 'Yeh Jo Halka Halka Saroor Hai', but it's still inevitably beautiful.

Download: 'Hallelujah', 'Lover You Should've Come Over', 'Je N'en Connais Pas La Fin'

Una Mullally

Bonde Do Role With Lasers Domino (30:15) . . .

In case you haven't noticed, it's summer and Brazil is so hot right now. Enter finally, the debut record from Bonde Do Role who twist baile funk and the carioca sound adored by Diplo. The result? A sleazy, humorous, beatsy party in your stereo. My non-existent command of Portuguese means that I'm just guessing that lyrically it's all about wrecking the gaff, sex, boozing and all the other things that indie-dance kids are getting up to these days. In other words, it's just great energetic fun, and probably the only album to have playing in the background to serious pre-Electric Picnic caipirinha drinking.

Download: 'Danca Do Zumbi', 'Tieta', 'Office Boy'

Jazz

Reverse Trust As If www. reversetrust. com . . . .

BASSIST Niall O'Neill was one of the most promising musicians on the Dublin scene during the '80s but he developed a taste for regular meals and was lost to jazz. Or so it seemed. In fact O'Neill never stopped playing and recording in his spare time, and the results . . .straight out of the Steps Ahead and Brecker Brother's tradition of full-on jazz rock . . . are impressive.

Featuring the virtuosic Derek O'Connor on saxophones and keyboards, and guitarists Dick Farrelly and Mike Nielsen, Reverse Trust is a gloriously unfashionable triumph, on the basis of which O'Neill should give up the day job.

Cormac Larkin

Classical

Schubert: Piano Sonata D958 Leif Ove Andnes EMI Classics (59m 35s) . . . . .

NORWEGIAN pianist Leif Ove Andnes returns to his former explorations of Schubert's late piano sonatas coupled with lieder, a project he began, with tenor Ian Bostridge, in 2002 and which now sees its forth and final chapter in the guise of this presentation of the C minor sonata, the D478 lieder, "Gesange des Harfners" and other piano and vocal fragments. Ian Bostridge's refined and none-too-overcooked performance of the D478 is particularly moving, often achieving a delightful quasi- plainchant timbre with his judicious use of vibrato.

Andnes' performance of the C minor piano sonata boasts nothing less than insightful and sensitive musicianship.

Karen Dervan