The Henry Clay People, a quartet from LA, give us back the Replacements we have missed for so long now. With the slack-loose bar band feel of a detuned Hold Steady, but with an AM-era Wilco, Tom Petty feel, For Cheap Or For Free feels live, and wonderfully full of energy. In a couple of places, that energy makes up (more than makes up) for some only-OK songwriting. But where it works, as on single Something In The Water, this is a wonderful formula – an improvement on the Stones-y Deadstring Brothers. The fantastic You Can Be Timeless has shades of Springsteen in its Darkness-era organ and spitting Tele solo, to complete the Hold Steady loop. For Cheap or For Free is aimed at a T shirts and jeans concert-going audience, rather than anything more cerebral. Despite that, the songs have some depth, lyrically interesting and vocally persuasive. The Henry Clay People will have some people who will love them a lot, and a lot of people who unfortunately may miss the chance to.

ACE rating 8/10

In what could easily be another Traveling Wilburys-like release, Monsters of Folk, a collection of Bright Eyes’ Conor Oberst, Jim James of My Morning Jacket, Mike Mogis and M Ward (and on the tour, Will Johnson of Centro-matic) have banded together to not be a supergroup. The album’s effect is of four part-albums added together – although there is some collective songwriting, the identities of the individuals themselves define each of the songs: M Ward’s songs sound like M Ward, Conor Oberst’s sound like Bright Eyes. This is still A Good Thing – chances are that if you like one of these guys, you will be in the right place for all the others. Plus, the seriousness which can occasionally be pervasive in their individual releases is largely absent here – they seem to having some loose limbed fun. Some games have been upped, though – Oberst sounds right up for this one, with focus and drive that he has missed a little recently. Seen as a nice slice of Americana, Monsters of Folk (which we have to guess is a little self-deprecating) is a nice enough album, one that in time will assume the same role as the Wilbury’s did in Dylan’s canon.

ACE rating 8/10

The Big Pink, an East End band, were always going to have a hard time living up to the hype that swirled around this release. A Brief History of Love instead sounds more like a brief history of the Stone Roses, Verve and Jesus and Mary Chain, as it lurches almost shamelessly from one to the other in its sound. The band achieve the kind of ambient, blissed out fuzz that they set out to, for the most part, with vibrant slices of guitar. However, this history of love seems to omit the passion – the album is curiously devoid of any glimpses of it. Even Velvet, hands-down the best track on the album, only achieves a few moments where ennui isn’t the prevailing mood. There are reasons to believe that The Big Pink could yet head towards a strange mix of The Enemy or The Klaxons, but in reality there are a lot of bands in that particular hopper. Download Velvet, and you’ll have one of 2009’s most fashionable tunes, but exercise caution with the rest.

ACE rating 6/10