IF you have not yet said hello to The Czars, from Denver, Colarado, then please make your acquaintance with their third album, Goodbye.

Once introduced, you will not wish to be parted from John Grant's hushed baritone or the sumptuous, gracefully baroque song structures, or the wistful ballads worthy of Nick Cave or Morrissey. As the album title suggests, they contemplate themes of heartbreak, loss, regret and transience; writing of Grant's grandmother on Little Pink House and adding a novel sting to their tale of forbidden love, My Love, where they warn of the need to appreciate what you have before losing it. Buy Goodbye: you will love that losing feeling.

No Devendra Banhart albums since the year dot, then along come two inside six months. The New York weird beard, who memorably sat hunched inside a candle-lit tent on Jools Holland's Later show, has released 16 more songs from the Georgia sessions that spawned Rejoicing In The Hands. Once again they are stark, intimate, scuffed and scruffy folk stories of love and wonder, propelled on drowsy acoustic guitar and revelling in such titles as Horseheadedflesh-Wizard and Little Yellow Spider. The hippie spirit of late-Sixties' Marc Bolan is alive and fluttering.

Charles Hutchinson

Updated: 09:04 Thursday, October 28, 2004