Elsewhere: With lounge lizards in mind

By GRAHAM REID

How many lounge albums do you need? It's a field in which they quickly all sound much the same: cool and distant, as ignorable as enjoyable, a touch of jazz for legitimacy, maybe some Indian instruments for exotica, and a dabble of electronica to make it contemporary. And they all have the obligatory German - or better, Viennese - artists included.

Yeah, maybe you need just the one lounge album. So if you have yours skip to the end where there's more interesting non-lounge stuff.

The two discs of London Lounge (Wagram/Border) are subtitled London by Day and London by Night. The Day collection features The Herbaliser's recent Something Wicked This Way Comes, Smith & Mighty, The Cinematic Orchestra (All that You Give featuring soul queen Fontella Bass), and former Aucklander Nathan Haines. Interest alights on the dreamy Gold of the Sun by Temple of Sound because they are former members of Transglobal Underground and play next year's Womad in Taranaki.

Homelife's lazy Too Fast is an airy glide, Haines gets you in a 2am mood with Impossible Beauty, and it falls to Badmarsh to bring in sitar exoticism on Easin In' which oddly enough eas,./es you out of these 16 tracks. Rae & Christian's rubbery bass and kick-drum-driven Swan Song seems almost alarmingly upbeat in this Mogadon-soaked world.

The Night selection is slightly more upbeat with Roots Manuva, DJ Food, Moloko and others shifting the focus between low-range drum'n'bass, with a nod to dub and clubland dance.

So London Lounge is much as expected: downbeat moods dominate and pulse rates remain low.

The Black Coffee series continues with Chapter Five: Booty Cooler (Echo Chamber/Border) which has Viennese cachet because it's compiled by DJ Klangwirkstoff Scheibosan (whose mum Mrs Scheiber knows him by the less unwieldy "Gerald"). The line-up includes Timo Mass (Hash Driven), Peace Orchestra, and Cutty Ranks' The Stopper dubbed up by Dorfmeister.

The opener is a remake of Pink Floyd's old Breathe given electric piano and soul diva back-up by Open Door. Kinda neat, but there's better to come in Sofa Surfer's echo-heavy track which features soulful reggae superstar Junior Delgado, then clips effortlessly into Chin Chillaz' Konkret which is anything but. It's the ambient soundtrack to circling a distant planet. Some real nice stuff - although the throbbing backdrop of Mathias Scaffhauser's relentless 6 Uhr Morgens eventually drove me nuts - and a notch above most such collections. So remember the name: Klangwirkstoff Scheibosan.

Melon (Border) is a collection of European artists with nods to North African sounds, lilting reggae, wooshing electronica, jazz-lite manoeuvres and so on. Nice enough, but all the adhesive power of Teflon.

Of greater interest are two new Back to Mine (Border) collections, from New Order and Orbital. The concept is famous folks - Faithless, Everything But the Girl, Talvin Singh - select stuff they'd play you when you end up back at their place. It's a good series and New Order's selection is the most diverse and challenging so far - they don't want you to nod off over the port and cigars.

It kicks open with Captain Beefheart's gritty, bluesy Big Eyed Beans from Venus, later there's Primal Scream's trippy Higher Than the Sun, Velvet Underground's Venus in Furs, the woefully unfashionable Groundhogs with the rocking Cherry Red and Can's strangeMushroom. If you think you've got a bead on that - dark psychedelica, perhaps? - then add in Missy Elliot's Timbaland-produced The Rain, the Doves' dreamy M62 Song, Roxy Music's eerie paean to an inflatable woman on In Every Dream Home a Heartache, Jellybean's wire-thin techno-take on Cat Stevens' instrumentalWas Dog a Donut? and a trimmed version of Donna Summer's 15-minute epic I Feel Love. Go figger, as they say.

It's an enjoyable, unpredictable trip so if you get invited back to New Order's house grab the chance. They have a diverse record collection and odd, amusing tastes.

Orbital's Back to Mine seems fairly standard beer after that - Lee Perry, their own Ska'd For Life in an instrumental version, P.J. Harvey's tense Kamikaze, Divine Comedy, Jethro Tull's Living in the Past and Tangerine Dream.

But it swings open on the Hammond organ and big band sound of John Barry and his Orchestra, includes the Tornadoes' chintzy early-60s electronica rock'n'roll of Love & Fury, German soundtrack master Gert Wilden and his Orchestra ripping off Canned Heat's On the Road Again for the theme to The Schulmaedchen Report (terrific), and goes out with the music to the Robinson Crusoe television series Orbital watched as kids.

Orbital have a taste for the kitsch and the minimalist end of electronic music, plus some add-on exotica.

So, unlike the surfeit of identikit lounge collections, the Back to Mine albums are from real people's lounges which you can enjoy in yours. And because they don't all sound the same you might need more than just the one.