Black Kids - 'I'm Not Going To Teach Your Boyfriend How To Dance With You'

Yes, we're even further behind the blogging curve than usual here. All the most fashionable places have been raving about these people for simply months now. Even newspapers now tip Black Kids, in those none-more-tiresome year end filler pieces, as one to watch in 2008, which of course makes them so 2007. But there's something been on my mind here, which I may as well offload. The purpose of these pages is pretty much only to praise - to assert the supremacy of an emotional, non-rational and enthusiastic response to music. It's all about things that I think are great and I want to tell other people are great. Sniping is usually confined to the margins, with only the occasional aside about how shit XFM is, or how lazy most record shops are. But here's my proposition about Black Kids: they only have one good song.

And it's a belter. I'm Not Going To Teach Your Boyfriend How To Dance With You is perfect. Big chorus, sexually ambiguous lyrics, life-affirming sing-along stuff, in short. It sent me dancing, spiralling around my kitchen in absolute rapture the other Saturday morning, and not much can. It found its way onto most of the compilation CDs I press into the reluctant hands of acquaintances. But I'd suggest there's no point those people investigating further if they like what they hear sandwiched between The Teenagers and The Fall. The rest of what they offer is painfully derivative stuff - 80% The Cure, 20% Arcade Fire. (I blame Arcade Fire for a lot, by the way. 2007 was the year that the large number of bands who'd decided to sound like them were pushed towards us by idiot record companies.) It's weak, unfinished stuff, like first rehearsal tapes prematurely exposed to the public glare.

I uphold, of course, the right of bands to have only one good song, to flare and die, to ripple the surface only briefly. Some of my favourite tunes came from one trick ponies. Apart from the brilliant Surfing Mice, did The Hermit Crabs (the 1980s ones) ever bother to make another record? If so, I don't want to hear it. It's just that I sort of feel sorry for this lot. I realised this when I saw them supporting Of Montreal a few weeks ago. Having heard their one good song, I'd arrived at ULU early in the hope of hearing it. No cheap gesture this, given the inadequacy of that venue, the bar of which is worse than the most desperate indie toilet. ('Do you have red wine?' 'No.' 'Do you have white wine?' 'No.') And they duly played their one good song in front of a half-hearted crowd, and I loved it and the rest wasn't great, and that's when my pity was pricked. They look terrific, have an eye-catching, provocative name, a logo, and are the right age, and have therefore received a wave of web hype. So they're playing to venues that are too big for them before they're ready to crowds who are quickly going to respond adversely to the hype. The trajectory of this lot is there for all to see.

I realise how old fashioned this sounds, but they haven't even put a record out yet. You download this stuff from their website. This is partly why I hadn't wanted to write about my love of this song. I still revere the physical object, believe bands ought to put records out for people to take home and adore. In our speeded up world, where 'new music', whatever that is, is venerated and everyone seems to be looking for the next new thing to break, it's like they've lived their time before that first record has even appeared. Where will this lead to? Should someone just come up with the idea of a band, promote it smartly and then we can all fall over ourselves in excitement without the band actually having to exist? Perhaps this is the point at which the world ends.

Having only recently taken this site out of mothballs after an afternoon nap that ended up lasting two and a half years, this is a conclusion I'm reluctant to suggest, but here goes: in the fast approaching New Year, perhaps we should all stop writing about music? Or if we can't do that, perhaps we can agree to give up the race to be the first to break the newest new thing and just let things find their level? No chance, eh?

Wild Billy Childish and the Musicians of the British Empire - 'Christmas 1979'

For someone who would never describe himself as a fan of the festive season, I seem to have acquired a lot of Christmas-related music over the years. In those glorious Decembers when we give the slip to the seasonal ritual of endless family visits - not, alas, this year - and instead huddle quietly in our East London hovel turning our unsociable backs on the outside world, I make up Christmas playlists to accompany proceedings. These lists get longer and longer each year. Of course this grotesque festival of greed and consumption could not be considered complete without the fragile masterpiece that is Low's Christmas LP getting its annual spin. But did I really need to chuck that five CD Sufjan Stevens box set into the mix last year?

There's been a real trend in recent years amongst those who make unpopular, left field music of the kind I have accumulated in vast quantities these past two decades to make Christmas records, presumably guided by the spirit of that cheapest of devices, irony. These are, in the main, not as good as records by the same people that aren't about Christmas. But still, I keep on buying them, so who's the tosser here? I recently, for example, bought three volumes of Christmas tunes from Cherryade Records, and will I even listen to them?

But Billy Childish, in his various incarnations, I'll always have a soft spot for. I'm glad there are people like him around the place. Sure, what you get here is what even fleeting familiarity with his back catalogue would have you expect: ridiculously reductive, back to basics rock and roll from that alternate universe where music is held to have reached its apotheosis with the early work of The Who. I don't want everything to be like this, but I don't mind a bit of it. So here the Medway's finest son gives us a tale of being on 'punk leave' from gigging in Hamburg at around the time we bade farewell to the seventies and witnessing a fairly typical festive breakdown, shackled to artlessly primitive backing.

My advice is to get this and play it loud and often this yuletide, particularly if there are any cloth-eared visiting family members you want to annoy. This is a great 7" from those purveyors of ramshackle thrills, Damaged Goods, even if the accompanying entire LP of Christmas songs is a bit much. Of course I bought that too.

Merry fucking Christmas, indeed.

The Teenagers - 'Starlett Johannson'

At the time of writing I have just added up the number of plays for tunes by The Teenagers on both home and office computers (and one of the very best things about my job is that I get to listen to music all day long at work) and the count stands at 125, which suggests something like obsession. (The Last FM thing on the right there only counts some and doesn't function at all at work, for reasons that are doubtless too tedious to be worth understanding.) Actually, make that 127, as I had a couple further quick blasts on the portable MP3 player while slaloming around slow-moving crowds in London's busy West End this lunchtime. And of course that figure doesn't include countless turns of the hard copy vinyl artefacts on the trusty record player. (I haven't yet found a satisfactory way to capture analogue play counts and aggregate this with digital data. Perhaps I need to keep a notebook and pencil by the stereo? But we all know that if you try to record behaviour you end up influencing it.)

So yes, it would seem that I'm smitten by The Teenagers, and even though, as we've discussed before, that does make me feel rather the creepy Uncle Quentin meddling in the youngsters' fun (bands these days play 'all ages' gigs, but can I be alone in thinking an upper age limit might also be imposed?) there's not a lot I can do about it. It seems all my life I've been waiting for someone to come along and buy my soul in return for a fistful of cheeky, slightly cheesy, perhaps mildly misogynist and above all absolutely filthy Euro-pop-rock. Yes, perhaps I should have demanded a higher price, but on the other hand it's so damned catchy. And, as someone once said before he lost the plot, the music they play may say nothing to me about my life, but still I can't help it. Have I become a sort of voyeur here? Is that it? Is this why once again I spent a significant part of my weekend ferreting about amidst the innards of the miraculous Hype Machine seeking out and downloading fairly pointless Teenagers' remixes, none of which are, of course, as good as the original? (And naturally I have a theory about remixes too, the non-committal, anti-definitive and essentially open nature of which are perfect for these confused, relativist times. All versions are equal because the last thing we want is to have the courage of a clear conviction. See also directors' cuts and alternative endings.)

Of course nothing will ever quite replace The Homecoming in my affections, but this is still marvellous, being another slice of offbeat electro-rock about the almost eponymous heroine, who should either be amused or consider taking out some sort of restraining order. And naturally it connected neatly with my own Lost in Translation obsession, so maybe that's part of it. It's got a singalong chorus and they don't mind admitting they're scared of spiders. I am too. Perhaps there's a Facebook group all us arachnophobes could join?

Meanwhile the b side of the physical manifestation appears to be a hymn to the simple joys of self-abuse, in this case apparently aided by Christina Aguilera videos, which don't do it for me, but the diversity of human sexuality is a truly wonderful thing. There have been few songs about the pleasures of the humble wank - one thinks, of course, of the Buzzcocks' Orgasm Addict - and there really ought to be more. I've always considered it as evidence in support of Intelligent Design, or at least the existence of some sort of benign Creator, that human beings carry around with them all the essentials for solo sexual gratification - genitals, the means of manipulating them and an imagination. What better way to celebrate such a state of affairs than through the medium of song?

Where was I? But the magic doesn't stop there. Trawl the internet for the sleazier still Fuck Nicole - I've always had a fondness for the word 'quim', which is probably in Chaucer or something - or the straight-up, chorus-heavy rock of Tiger, two other personal favourites of the hour. Or find the strange but rather beautiful trombone-laden reimagining by Connan and the Mockasins, whose earlier tune Sneaky, Sneaky Dogfriend was one of the great lost classics of this website's two year nervous breakdown.

Got to go now. Play 128 is imminent.

Untitled Musical Project

These lads have been on my mind today, because they stood out in an otherwise pretty dismal gig on Saturday night. The occasion was an allegedly Christmas evening's entertainment - although of course it isn't Christmas yet - loosely organised by the once excellent Tigertrap records at Bloomsbury Bowling Lanes.

I confess part of the appeal was to visit a venue which sounded intriguing but which I hadn't had a chance to see before. The reality was rather less so. I'd been wondering how they'd integrate an American-style bowling alley and a music venue, and the answer is, they don't. There's a bowling alley, and then there's a rather forlorn and neglected small stage in the corridor next to it. You're painfully aware throughout that you're really in the basement of a large, bland hotel. And we couldn't even bowl, the lanes all being booked by Christmas party groups who must have found the racket of the sound-checking bands a nuisance. For the rest of us there was an awful lot of standing around listening to those sound checks, an insight that wasn't without interest, although one couldn't help wondering why the doors hadn't been opened after all this. Still, they sold plenty of drink in our direction - so there's your answer - as we sought to alleviate the boredom in the only way we knew how.

But these made it worth it. I took an instant shine to their urgent and intense manner. They gave me just what I was looking for: a set of shouty, spiky and short songs that didn't outstay its welcome and kept me awake (I've developed a bad record of late for falling asleep in theatres and seated music venues). Their (disappointingly self-titled) mini-LP/EP whatever it is CD on the aforementioned label offers you eight tunes in under 17 minutes, which gives you an idea of where they're coming from. In truth this isn't really anything we haven't heard before, but what sets them apart is a spark of wit, summed up in song titles like I May Not Be Jimi Hendrix But At Least I'm Still Alive. That combination of the agressive and the playful will always snare me. For those of us who've rather missed Mclusky, we may have found their heirs. Great band name, too. Try to catch them live in the six months or so before they become old and boring and crack the three minute barrier.

The rest of the evening was alas downhill from this point, concluding in a lairy drunk man, who had started an argument with me, picking up a glass bottle by the neck and testing its weight in a significant way. I made my excuses and left. Christmas, eh?

Robert Wyatt - 'Just As You Are'

Is it fair to say I've always liked the idea of Robert Wyatt more than I've felt a pressing need to listen to his records much? Sure, the odd tune of his has, at times, really settled under my skin: The Duchess from his record Shleep back in the John Peel days, Shipbuilding of course, and from before my time his insane, inspired cover of I'm a Believer. But in the main I take his work in small doses. It's perhaps the significant jazz influences you hear that deter me, jazz being one of those things I haven't made room for yet. I'm sort of saving jazz up for my fifties. (And classical for my sixties, if I make it that far. Then I'll like everything.)

Ah, but this, from his recent LP Comicopera, is purely gorgeous. I have no resistance. It melts me. I love the way he doesn't start singing on his own tune until about half way through. I love the confidence of that. Now, never one for letting knowledge get in the way of passion, I haven't remotely done my research here; I've no idea who the woman is who sings the first half of this, but lord, she has a lovely, Latin-accented voice. And then Robert himself comes in and he's never sounded better, reminding you that he's one of the greatest of all singers who can't sing, as well as one of our finest beard wearers. It's fragile, beautiful and perfectly weighted. It utterly works, with no hint of the self indulgence that you could sometimes accuse him of.

This is a song about acceptance and forgiveness, about love in the face of repeated failure and imperfection, and correspondingly about wanting to become a better person because you are loved and you know you keep letting someone down. There are, of course, days when I can barely stand to listen to this.

Bearsuit - 'Foxy Boxer'

Now these buggers have been on my mind this weekend because I saw them on Friday night. The venue, by the way, upstairs at a pub called The Enterprise, was pretty much the shabbiest I've ever seen. And I've now put in some 20 years of watching unpopular bands in obscure holes. The Enterprise, hard by Chalk Falm tube, is a pub that I had twice before entered, both times having walked out without taking a drink aghast in horror at the clientele. Truly, I love Bearsuit to have braved this a third time, including on this occasion sampling red wine visibly concocted by mixing the dregs of several different bottles.

Each time I see Bearsuit - and I think to my shame this was only the fourth - it occurs to me that they must be one of my favourite bands. And then between times I rather forget about them, which means I must be a bad person. They're one of those bands - see also the very different Broken Family Band - who make more sense live than on record. I realised on Friday that they are at heart a shouty noise band who like nothing more than making a racket. But that's not all they are. They like edges, this lot, both sharp and serrated, but they like melody and choruses and boy-girl singalongs too. They prefer it best when all these things happen at once. And when songs stop and start and begin again suddenly and make unexpected gear changes. And when they can shoehorn in trumpets and flutes at any opportunity, as they did on Friday. Melt-Banana meets Talulah Gosh, perhaps? Live, they always appear to be having a great time themselves, even if sometimes they can't remember how to begin or indeed play a particular song, and I always love this. I reckon, particularly on a Friday night after a week's senseless toil, I've got more chance of having a good time if the band I'm seeing are too.

It's just that each time I see them there seem to be fewer people there than the time before. I reckon there were 50 of us, if that, paying homage in the Enterprise. And this, alongside climate change, is surely proof that all of us in the developed world are going to hell and probably deserve to do so.

Anyway, new single Foxy Boxer showcases the more melodic, less crunchy side of Bearsuit, despite which it's stranger than 99% of anything that you might hear on, say, idiot indie station XFM, and contains an inexplicable line about having 'hips like mahogany'. This tune is apparently inspired by the sport of 'topless titty boxing', which has so far escaped my consciousness, but surely merits a quick google as soon as I've finished this. Hey, if we need a demonstration sport for the 2012 East London Olympics, we've surely found it? Why don't you buy the record, which comes with a badge - I often consider buying only records that either come with a badge or are on coloured vinyl, as I reckon the strike rate would be high, and this offers both - or even, you know, pay for a download? They deserve your money.

Filthy Pedro - 'Rock 'N' Roll Points'

Having spent two and a half years between blog posts wandering around looking for my lost memory - and honestly this is true, and of course I wish I'd thought of the canoe thing first, if only to bring fame of a kind - there are many, many gems that surely merited a mention in these never-read pages but which have since sunk to the bottom of the record stacks. This is one such that came out earlier this year, got played a lot as a 7" and duly downloaded too - not many justify this doubling - and then got lost beneath the next 500 or so singles that came along. Until for some reason recently, when I was putting together a slew of CDs for people who enjoy receiving them far less than I enjoy making them, and this simply insisted on being on every one. Perhaps this was inspired by some recent, uncharacteristic rock and roll behaviour of my own, involving extreme drunkenness, my head and a plate glass window, from which I emerged miraculously unscathed, barring a few minor cuts and bruises (but hey, you should have seen the window).

You can do a rock and roll points test on the Filthy Pedro website, by the way. I scored a creditable 20 rock and roll points.

Anyway, this is knockabout, smile-inducing, life-affirming stuff. If something in this doesn't bring a grin to your face then it's possible you're already dead. Every rock and roll cliche is distilled into something a little over three minutes long - feel free to tick them off your own personal bingo card as appropriate - and after this there's surely no need for a publication like the NME which celebrates these cliches every week afresh. This guy has nailed it, and all to an endearingly ramshackle, low-fi tune with a suitably rough-hewn delivery. A few years ago we all pretended to like 'anti-folk', but apart from the evergreen Jeffrey Lewis, it was never as much fun as this. Another comparison I've seen is with Camper Van Beethoven, but they surely only ever managed one good song, Take the Skinheads Bowling, whereas Filthy clearly has at least two, as the b side, which combines history and sex in a winning way, attests.

You can buy this stuff from his website, and clearly you should. Still here?

Of Montreal - 'The Past Is A Grotesque Animal'

Every so often – oh okay, on average about three or four times a week – it happens that a song leaps out from among its siblings on some playlist or LP sequence and demands immediate, overwhelming and recurring special attention, to the neglect of others. Thursday's and Friday's greatest song ever - doubtless to be supplanted ere Monday - comes from American art-poppers Of Montreal, about whom I have recently shifted ground, moving from a position of vague suspicion to one of simple love.

A special place in my heart is reserved for songs like these that quickly gather a head of steam and then just keep on going. This one crushes anything in its path and refuses to pause for breath. It's merciless. It just keeps on rolling, and it builds and builds. Somewhere else I saw it described as an ideal treadmill song, a description I envy, although at an epic near twelve minutes, I think the inevitable heart attack would have claimed me by the end, which would be at once a shame but at the same time not a bad way to take my leave.

Alongside its mighty momentum, in its words this song is also clearly about me and my life, as songs occasionally are. We all think that, don't we? We have all secretly entertained fantasies that the world is constructed around us and we are the reason for its existence and there will be no world after we die, right? Right. I wouldn't be so crass as to blurt the lyrical pearls of others all over these pages (although currently 'at least I offer my own disaster' seems to me a suitable epitaph for either my gravestone or Facebook page), because you need to do the work and have the pleasure of finding these things out for yourselves, but there seems to be enough in here to base a whole philosophy, or at least a religion on. I am left utterly skewered and trying to reconstruct what was my life.

And then ridiculously last night I went to see Of Montreal at ULU and they opened with this, and although it wasn't a great gig because it was at ULU with its uniquely muddy sound, there was something about it that was right and proper and felt like fate.

This is on this year's LP, Hissing Fauna, Are You The Destroyer? which looks lovely on vinyl and where all the good songs come towards the end.

Vampire Weekend - 'Mansard Roof'

I'm a resister of hype. Buzz around a band deters me. Lord knows, there are so many awful, third rate retread of retread bands who are being hyped to buggery on any given week. XFM, a kind of 1990s Radio One for stupid people, is particularly culpable here. Every run of the mill guitar band is a second coming for them.

But you have to go where your ears lead you. Apropos of some buzz band of a few years ago, a mate of mine whose tastes run the full gamut from the underground to the wilfully obscure once asked me, "But how can you like them?" "Because I hear the music and I can't help liking it," was all I could reply. I'm no analyst of sound. If these pages are about anything they're about asserting the supremacy of an emotional response to music.

So much has been written about this bunch already on this thing that we call the internet, and that made me disinclined to like them, but then I heard this record and it's great and so they win. It comes in at just over two minutes, has not an ounce of flab on it and is perfectly arranged. It's one of those tunes where everything happens at precisely the right time. Love the singing, love the little bit of strings towards the end, and especially love the percussion.

There would seem something interesting happening at the moment with western bands picking up on non-western rhythms. I've heard African rhythms a few times in unexpected places recently, enough to make me feel it's a trend. It's diverting if probably pointless to speculate on what might be behind this. Has 'world music' - and be honest, all the really good world music is African - become the mainstream? (Hey, Tinariwen are playing Shepherd's Bush Empire next week; it will be interesting to see how they fare outside the Barbican / Jazz Cafe 'world music' ghetto.) Has the crossover between the mighty Konono No. 1 and the American indie avant garde influenced things? (I saw them in London earlier this year and it was a joyful evening; head music and body music at the same time.) Are the current generation who learned the internet as a first language just so normal about being able to access anything instantly that they're open to anything too? Or is it just (and we can only hope not) that they've all got hold of dad's copy of Paul Simon's Graceland?

And of course it opens up a can of worms labelled appropriation if (presumably) privileged white kids take this stuff and prosper on the back of it, but that, my friends, is the entire history of rock and roll music, and are we saying it's better for cultures not to mingle and each to stick to their own? And isn't it great, and a testament of the endless journey music takes you on, that I'll now know what a Mansard roof is the next time I see one?

When it all comes down to it, what the hell, as soon as the drums start beating on this one they have me.

The Blow - 'Parentheses'

It's possible, isn't it, that Tomlab has quietly become the best record label around? Think about it. There's that insane, identically packaged alphabet series of 7"s - one for every letter - where the last I'd heard we'd got up to about U and I've ended up buying half of them at least twice because I can never keep track of what I have and what I don't have. Then there's the fact that they're home to the wonderful Casiotone for the Painfully Alone, one of the great underrated acts of this or any other time, and that by itself would be enough. And I've developed a soft spot of late for the looped bedroom strings of Final Fantasy. They seem to be the place where lone oddball types find a comfortable home. We'll overlook for the moment the fact that they gave a leg-up to arch, tiresome Patrick Wolf.

And then there's this tune by The Blow. This has, of course, been out for ages, sealing this site's reputation for being hopelessly behind whatever this week's trend is, having first crossed my path as a 7" earlier this year. I buy too many 7"s - I pile them on the floor and they creep ever forward and claim more carpet week by week (I can't remember what the pattern was now) so sometimes things get lost in the pile. Perhaps I was deterred by the usual swathe of less-good-than-the-original remixes that cluttered the single, when what I really wanted was a classic a side/b side combination. It came to light again for me as the opening song and the one I couldn't ignore on a cheapo sampler to celebrate Tomlab's tenth birthday, Puppy Love.

I'm an incurable softy and so a tune like this is going to get me every time. This is a song about being in love, about completing someone by being with them, and about accepting faults. Eccentrics should stick together, at least to take two people out of the equation for everyone else, or so I keep telling my wife. Ah, and I'm a sucker for a great chorus, and lyrics that assume a life before and don't need to spell everything out, and upbeat, chirruping, vaguely Latin synth tunes, which makes this pretty much the complete package. "Something in the deli aisle makes you cry," indeed - I love inventing the story for that one. There's a whole Raymond Carver tale lurking in that one line. And there's a great lyric too about the wisdom of babies which I won't spoil here, but it was almost enough by itself to make me reverse my personal ban on reproduction.

You could, of course, find somewhere to download this for nothing on the internet, or even pay for it if you're experiencing a dose of scruples - for once, emusic has it, for example, along with the rest of the LP, which of course isn't as good. Or you could take note that the great Norman Records has the physical object with music on it of Puppy Love for £2.99 plus postage, and in doing so support two fine institutions.

Burial - 'Untrue'

Much has been written about this bloke. In some ways - although don't I always say this? - he's the perfect artist for our time: blank, anonymous, open-ended for your own interpretation. As an image, it's a shrewd one. A Banksy-like air of deliberate mystery never did anyone any harm, but then aren't most of us hiding behind constructed, distilled personas online?

The music all sounds the same, and the new record sounds pretty much like the old one. This is what he does. You listen to the whole thing; it doesn't really make sense to pick out isolated tunes. If I was feeling pretentious I would call it a soundscape. It's murmurous, concealed music, muffled voices hinting at hidden depths. It holds back. Occasionally you could dance to it, but then it frustrates itself. It's cool, detached. It is, of course, for once a realisation of that often misused, politically confused term, urban music. This music is uber-urban, and utterly London. It's arguable whether anywhere else other than the endless hinterlands of the world's greatest city could have produced something like this right now.

It's a cliche - and sometimes you can only embrace them - to call this 4am music, driving round the south circular music, sitting in a laundrette watching the drum revolve music, eating takeaway chicken music. It's all that but this morning I realised something else, which is why, tired and jet-lagged, I write. My job - which obviously secretly I love - occasionally scoops me up and dumps me in hot, distant places for a week or two to do some work. Flying back this morning from a spell in East Africa I realised where this music really works: it's music to listen to on a plane, that disembodied, unreal experience, at a time when you don't even know what time it is any more and when you're awake but can't do anything. This morning this record made perfect sense. It helped me. It was better than sleep.

Why not buy this from Sounds of the Universe records? I always enjoy getting their emails and they seem genuinely enthusiastic about all this kind of stuff.

I Like Trains - 'Spencer Perceval'

This tune is as goth as I allow myself to get. Hey, there has to be that little bit of goth that lurks within even the poppiest of pop kids of all of us. I concede, albeit grudgingly, that there is that side of me which yearns to don a Joy Division trench coat and walk moodily around a concrete East European city in black and white. In the main I keep it successfully repressed. So I resisted this lot, deterred perhaps by their erratic capitalisation, which I still refuse to concede, and somehow lumping them in mentally with all those interchangeable Leeds-ish bands who scarcely merit attention on Dance to the Radio Records.

I was wrong. This lot are different and pay persistence. Imagine an intelligent Bauhaus with a penchant for Victorian melodrama, bookish, nerdy and, yes, with something of the trainspotter about them. (An earlier favourite of mine was The Beeching Report, a phrase which can still be guaranteed to send into a rage locomotive enthusiasts of my father's generation.) So here's a tune about the only British Prime Minister - to date - to be have been assassinated. And it's a true epic, passing the nine minute mark. Which breaks all my rules. Which is of course great. It appears to be written from the point of view of the assassin, with all the self-justifying, unpunctuated, almost logical madness of the latest YouTube posting of this week's high school killer. You see, only the technology changes. It dives and soars, and I particularly like the moment where everything seems to slip out of time and the whole thing teeters on the edge of falling apart.

This first surfaced as a luscious, jet black 10" - which, we have already established, is the best of all formats - and I frankly didn't give it the attention it deserved then. It resurfaces now as the outstanding moment - rather, series of moments - on the recent LP, Elegies for Lessons Learnt. Pretentious? Of course. There must be a silent film these guys could write a soundtrack for out there somewhere.

The excellent online radio station Dandelion Radio, which of course everyone in the whole world already knows about, a station in the spirit of Peel, is the rightful inheritor of the venerable Festive Fifty tradition. I've cast my three votes and this came third. Only The Teenagers' The Homecoming and Von Sudenfed's The Rhinohead beat it. This means it's been a great year for music.

But then it always is.

Fabienne Delsol - '(I'm Gonna) Catch Me A Rat'

It's basically all about sex, this music thing, isn't it? I know this is a far from original insight, but occasionally it needs restating.

So yes, I'm a boy (at heart, I'm not convinced I ever got past being a confused 15 year old adolescent) and here's a breathy, effortlessly cool and frankly sexy French girl singer. And that is already enough. London is the greatest city in the world, of course, but the idea of Paris is cooler, and that's where her songs take me, having been led on from this 7" to listen to more. It's late, I'm in love, I'm smoking an unfiltered cigarette and my chic Parisian girlfriend simply adores it when I talk pseudo-intellectual bollocks about Sartre. At the same time, this particular tune is utterly Nancy Sinatra. And there is, of course, nothing wrong with that. There's virtually nothing there: a drumbeat, a slither of guitar, some gloriously dumb lyrics and it's all done and dusted in somewhat less than two and a half minutes. It demanded an instant second play, and too few things do. This is a Toe Rag Studios at its best, and makes up for all that boring White Stripes stuff.

You can buy the physical object from Damaged Goods - and this is surely something you need to walk around carrying under your arm to strike the proper pretentious pose - or as downloads from, for once, emusic.

I'm off to have sex now. Immediately.

The Teenagers - 'The Homecoming'

I have a habit of wondering the parched, soulless offices in which I daily toil mumbling snatches of songs which have made themselves stick in my head. So I'm in trouble here, biting tongue as I slope from one pointless meeting to another to stop myself bursting into a quick rendition of a central line from this song.

"I fucked my American cunt."

I know, by the way, that as a person who has recently moved down a row on any survey in which you are required to belong to an age range, I'm years behind the curve on this one. A perfunctory google suggests oceans of hype have washed around this bunch, none of which has crossed my cloistered consciousness. And yes, since you do ask, I do at times, as an ageing music obsessive, feel somewhat like a creepy uncle eavesdropping on the beautiful young things. But damn it, I refuse to concede the space and go gentle into that good night. That I'm not a spotty teen but a cynic who feels he's heard everything before but still loves this says something interesting, surely?

But then I've always been a sucker for boy/girl, call and response tunes. I love the cynicism and amorality of this, and the way it twists to suggest something sweeter towards the end. I love the difference between the boy and girl viewpoints. I love it when the girl speaks and it's exactly like something out of Clueless, that smartest of Jane Austen adaptations. I love the accents, I love the distant, barely there music, and I don't know or care what genre we're supposed to call this. Knowing, smart, cool, it's the perfect tune for our fractured, knowing but neurotic, post-my space, over-social networked but simultaneously atomised times.

There's more than this to The Teenagers - and of course, the name is perfect too - and new single Starlett Johanssonn is increasingly claiming headspace as well. They do a good line in filth, this much is clear. You can buy this stuff from, say, Pure Groove, and when that isn't enough you can do what I just seem to have spent a large part of the afternoon doing, and trawling via Hype Machine blogs which are better than this one because you can download illegal music from them to get more. We may just have found the definitive band of this era.

Von Sudenfed - 'The Rhinohead'

Okay, so I've been away for a while, having, like they do in films, lost my memory and ended up wandering around this shabby land, attempting for reasons I can't recall to visit every branch of Tescos, coming to my senses only in a public cemetery during a cloudburst in, somewhat to my irritation, Accrington. On the journey I shed many things, but I seem to have retained my love of music, and there is now so much catching up to do.

Back in the days when I invented the internet, I wrote about the Mark E Smith / Mouse On Mars collaboration. And things just got better and better. So here all you need to know is that Von Sudenfed have made the greatest record of this year and perhaps the century so far in The Tromatic Reflexxions, and yes of course it goes without saying that it's miles better than the last Fall LP, to the extent that it's really a cliche to have said so, and The Rhinohead is its most glorious, immense, life-affirming slab of a tune. I can't imagine living without it. This is Northern Soul as you always wanted it to sound, a classic from a speed-fuelled late night down the Wigan Casino upgraded, rebuilt for a new era.

What seems clear to me now is that our world is fucked, because in a sane world Rhinohead would storm the hit parade and sit in splendour at the top of the charts until about March. Everybody else would stop putting out records because there'd be no point, really. Its release would be celebrated by Von Sudenfed themed parties where children would dress up as their favourite member. Who'd you like to be today kids: Andi, Jan or Mark? In a world where things are right and all was well they'd have brought back Top of the Pops for a one off five minute special, repeated every hour on the hour, with Mark reading the words off a bit of paper. Was a national holiday in honour of its release even considered, I ask? What then do we have politicians for?

You also need to have seen them live, and so I'd suggest spending your weekends on perfecting that time machine you're working on so you can get to the gig at Heaven a few weeks ago. There was a night. Miserablist fat, bald Fall fans hogged the back while lovers of life at the front lapped it all up. Anyone who thinks people who play laptops aren't, like, proper musicians should have seen this. But in the regrettable absence of a Tardis in most households, can I suggest that you visit Dime a Dozen, the default website for live Fall-related content, every single day until you can slip in under their 100,000 members bar and sign up for piles of low-quality, lovingly assembled recordings? It worked for me.

Rhinohead comes in a big fat 12" with a beautiful purple cover and you can buy it from shops or from the internet. Everyone knows that the best online record shop is still Norman's, right? Or you can download it from, say, 7digital, which I only mention here because it isn't, you know, itunes. It contains the usual utterly pointless remix - and there remains work to be done in analysing the amount generated for the national economy by paying for the vast swathe of otherwise utterly pointless remixes around - and this year's second greatest song, Slow Down Ronnie, in which Mark E finally gets round to tackling a subject he was always going to have to do, and dispenses advice to snooker legend Ronnie O'Sullivan. If Mark E Smith is telling you to slow down, you've got problems, I'd have thought.