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.