High Places - 'Vision's The First...'

One of the invented traditions of the household is that over the course of the festive period - roughly defined as covering the spell between Christmas Eve and whenever we must depart to bring light to the lives of our adoring relatives in a series of small, drab and not even particularly snowy northern towns - only appropriately seasonal music may be played. Fortunately or otherwise I have over the considerable stretch of my existence acquired a vast quantity of poor grade yuletide indie tuneage by the yard. There’s about a solid day’s worth of such, which each December 24th gets duly transferred to the trusty MP3 player and before New Year’s Eve (and there are, of course, even one or two decent songs about that particular dark night of the soul too) is equally quickly removed to free up some space for further swathes of live Fall bootlegs. The thing is, Christmas tunes can’t be innately bad, because even The Fall have recorded several of them over the long, long years. It’s just, they’re never as good as a band’s proper, non-festive work, are they? Would you choose to listen to even The Fall’s Xmas offerings ahead of their regular stuff? Just like in the real world, in music, no one saves their best for Christmas.

So it will come as some relief on the train north when once again regular listening habits will be resumed. First up will be this tune, from High Places, with which I am thoroughly beguiled. As usual, I am late on this one, and, as is equally customary, I know next to nothing about the band. This surfaced as a single on Upset the Rhythm, who also put on catchable gigs in old London town, and subsequently led me to a CD available from the redoubtable Thrill Jockey label. It’s a mysterious, slight and charming thing, distorted, like an favourite old tune found mangled on a chewed up Memorex tape (and I swear, cassette tapes are about to make a comeback). It’s a jaunty pop number - I hear Rihanna’s immortal Umbrella in this - mingled with and undermined by the shimmering clutter you get in A Sunny Day In Glasgow and the by now customary global village rhythms. It's a fractured kaleidoscope of a song. A smidgen of steel drum I hear at one point, for example. You could dance to this, but you'd probably dislocate something.

This is not the sort of website that offers up top ten lists of the year, but if it was, there's a good chance this would be on it. Once again I note in closing they're from New York. They own us these days.

The Wave Pictures - 'Long Island'

Our love for the Wave Pictures is already a matter of record, although when they first crossed the path of attention, we admitted some doubts. Not so now. We’ve since been utterly sucked into their world, and there seems to be little we can, or indeed want, to do about it. That single, I Love You Like A Madman and subsequent LP Instant Coffee Baby were our gateway drugs. Live they then clinched the deal. They’re pretty much the ultimate finely honed, value for money, good time guaranteed live band, inheriting the mantle - not that any criticism is thereby implied - from our old friends the Broken Family Band, as the act you could catch time and again at one of their frequent live shows and always know you were going to enjoy yourself. Now we see the Wave Pictures whenever we can, and we raid backwards through their back catalogue, past previous LP Sophie (while noting with bewilderment the inclusion of Instant Coffee Baby on the best debut LP of the year shortlist of those with it hep cats the Guardian) to the slew of early, rough and ready and utterly charming CD-Rs.

Long Island - wherein someone looks beautiful in lubricant - first surfaced, unless you know better, on Sophie, and was recently given a wash and brush up as part of a digital only EP, Pigeons, from the behemoth iTunes. Being venerators of the physical object, we’re not sure if we approve of the idea of the virtual only release (although we love seven inchers that come with free download codes, which help us sleep easier at nights) but this would appear to have been done for good, green reasons. Hey, we care about the planet here, even to the extent of reducing our meat rations and taking the occasional holiday in Wales, so this is to be applauded. This is the one where they walked to the studio, ran the equipment on wind power, mastered it using discarded brown, organic bread crusts, had only fresh rainwater for lunch etc. In its original form Long Island was a firm family favourite and in its new guise it only gains from a more muscular re-working. You could dance to this one, prior to hoping to win a grand in your hand on a Friday night. It’s all pianos and handclaps and sparkly, slinky clothes. You know when Orange Juice went disco? It’s nearly as good as that.

In short, we like. But then, you knew we were always going to do. And now we're off to see them live again.

The Dodos - 'Winter'

There are, ultimately, only so many ways of saying fuck, this is great, but fuck, this is great.

Here's a precise, controlled offering from the Dodos, the latest in a wave of US bands who wash up on these shores and do what we used to do ourselves, only better. It comes in cycles. Just accept it. It's their turn, and hey, America's cool again now, right?

Their stuff is a heady mix of disparate influences, and there is pointy-headed musicological fun, if you are that way inclined, to be had in unravelling them. Right now West Coast psychedelia, modern folk, the Walker Brothers maybe and more recently Beirut are springing to mind, but whenever I say something like this someone will correct me and leave a spot-on comment underlining what a cloth-eared dolt I really am. A year later. Or how about they're sort of like Yeasayer, but without the Genesis thing going on? This one's simple and complex at the same time, always a winning combination in this parish. Deep, eighties indie drums are joined by what I'd very much like to be a mandolin, and then lucious, almost crooning vocal. Someone appears to have been having a bad time of it, but will be over the worst ere next spring. Then a mournful bit of brass completes the job.

And of course it is, err, winter right now, at least in this particular hemisphere, but this is, for once, no lame attempt on this website's part to be topical. Tales of regret and longing suit any season, and I stumbled upon it only recently via the magic of Hype Machine, where you can find this and more. It is now frequently played on that great radio station that goes in my head and finds its way onto many a CD pressed into the reluctant hands of bewildered and begrudging acquintances. It's from an LP called Visiter - ah, those cute mispellings - which has been out for an age and which for some reason I don't seem to have, and for this I can only beg forgiveness and promise to take according corrective measures.

The Lovely Eggs - 'Have You Ever Heard A Digital Accordion?'

Oh, by the way, this is now officially the new best thing ever, and replaces all previous best things ever. We had a meeting about it and that was what was decided, okay? As is often the case, the Massive Crush taste committee were a little late getting around to this particular agenda item, as this tune has been huge in the world of proper music blogs that you can download stuff from for literally weeks, but you do realise how hard it is to get us all together for a meeting?

Anyway, we need new words in the English language to describe the casual and slightly crap genius of this latest offering. It's playground, nursery rhyme stuff, childishly sung, in a Talulah Gosh sort of way, that offers a new and escalatingly bizarre hipster checklist by which you will be judged and will fail. At which point they will sigh 'oh dear' and move on to the slimmer guy with a better cardigan than you and a full set of Pastels badges. It's the aural equivalent of one of those word ladder games that go from hate to love in five steps, taking us from digital accordions to time travelling in a De Lorean via a route that could best be described as entirely arbitrary. And then it rocks out. Of course you hear the Moldy Peaches in this and all your favourite mid to late eighties shambling anorak bands, and is there anything wrong with that exactly?

So, the Lovely Eggs. We love them. This forms part of a value for money five tune seven incher which gets quite Bearsuity and for which we're indebted to Cherryade records, whose releases are very rarely not worth a listen. Rudimentary googling, meanwhile, reveals a connection to the once-revered Angelica, who made us very happy once upon a time with 'Teenage Girl Crush'. Around these parts we prefer to listen to our music rather than watch it, but an amusing and indeed mildly disturbing video is also to be seen on the ubiquitous YouTube.

Go to it, kids. This is an order.

Vivian Girls - 'Where Do You Run To'

My most recent alien abduction was at least rather shorter than that which once took this website out of circulation for about two and a half years. At least two of you have been in touch to express concern about my whereabouts. Well, what can I say? Sometimes life happens, and sometimes work happens, and sometimes both happen at the same time, and sometimes I even get the two mixed up. But back confined to this humble planet pop, what has been missed? Tottering piles of CDs and sevens, and bland folders full of sound files, demand attention. The products of three figure gleeful plunders of record shops, the only trolley dash I ever really do, lurk largely with their price stickers intact, a sure sign that they have yet to be adequately dealt with. It occasionally occurs to me that an obsession with sound has ruined my life, but I’m not sure I’d have had it any other way. And some palpably good things have floated up of late. Of the various crystal bands, Crystal Stilts may turn out to be the best. I’ve also found myself begrudgingly admiring this TV on the Radio LP, even though it sounds like music I don’t think I like, and getting to grips with Gang Gang Dance. I need to listen to Those Dancing Days more, but seem too busy working my way through the Wave Pictures’ back catalogue, having now, working backwards, reached the delights of their early, self-released CD-Rs. That Mirror Mirror LP with the preposterous name is continuing to puzzle me - I still can’t quite work out if it’s brilliant or terrible - and Chairlift, via an advert for a music player, appear to have become famous. If we were the sort of website which we are not, we would claim that we championed them first. Then I’ve spent the last week immersed in a slew of frankly varying bootlegs from the recent live adventures of The Fall (I spent two nights at the Hackney Empire with them, one great, one good) and, following a recent gig, realising once again the skewed genius of Connan Mockasin. There’s enough there for you to get stuck into, no?

This self-titled Vivian Girls LP, which has of course been out for an age, has got me under its thumb a bit too. It’s taking me back to where it all started, and to the music of my youth, mid 1980s shambly, jangly, guitar music: a seminal, and indeed political movement, although we didn’t realise it at the time. I thought music was always like that. Only later would it become clear to me that we were living at a special moment, where for once music would not be about bombast, swagger and sex, but about those other human things like embarrassment, frailty and making a bit of a mess. Bands were amateurish and tried their best. It was art, but it wasn’t art wank. I’ve been looking for that honesty and simplicity ever since, while that era, mislabelled at the time as C86, mislabelled since as twee, occasionally spirals back into vogue, as seems to be the case now.

So how could my teenaged, shy, anorak-wearing self know that my late 30s fat, creased and frankly ugly incarnation would really be getting into a record that sounds a lot like the Shop Assistants? The whole thing’s brief. There’s ten songs on this LP, but the Vivian Girls get in and get out in 20-odd minutes. I admire this. There are too many hour-long CDs in the world already. And the whole thing sounds like it was recorded in a biscuit tin. The guitars thrash and the drums flail and both are equal. The choruses are more important than the verses. The vocals are tinny. All of this is great. I think my favourite tune here is Where Do You Run To, with its Mary Chain bass but annoying lack of question mark, but really, all the songs sound pretty much the same. And that’s part of the point. I just wish it was on a series of flexi discs rather than a CD.

White Denim - 'Mess Your Hair Up'

Or talking about hype, as we were, there's White Denim, who emerged top of the pile in the most recent South by South West hype contest, something nobody on this island truly understands. I resisted because, well, you do, don't you, if you have any sense of your value as an individual human unit. But come on - or is that c'mon? - this record's great, pure and simple, and only the churliest of churls could not admit this, and although the boat has long departed and you all know this by now for yourselves, I felt these words banging against the inside of my skull about it and I needed a vent. Indeed, I now feel bad it's taken me a while to get onto this one in front of all four of our readership. (Can you let me know when your birthdays are, by the way? I'd like to make sure I send you cards.)

What we have here is the sound of a small group of young men who don't know there are any rules about what you are supposed and not supposed to do in music and aren't particularly interested in finding out what those rules may be. It was recorded in whatever the Texan equivalent of a shed is and it sounds like it. It has that raw, rough and readiness to it you look for in a debut record. There's dirt under its fingernails. It smells of sweat and puke and back of the Chevrolet sex with your cousin. There's bad beer, late nights and all being men together. One of the base ingredients here is dumb, ballsy, what-the-hell music, of the kind you find in early Who. And there’s a fair amount of grubby southern blues too, and there is absolutely nothing wrong in this. An obvious comparison is the Black Keys, back when they were on the mighty Fat Possum label and before they got old, clichéd and boring. But there's more going on here than that. They would also seem to have a fine sense of the dynamics of a tune and when to interfere with them. They use repetition and fracture to keep your expectations on their toes. Less is sometimes more, and it’s sometimes as interesting to take something away as add things. They have an understanding of space that reminds me more of classic dub reggae than anything else, and the same kind of homemade feel you got when people were working with limited technology, although obviously the rhythms are different.

Take this song, Mess Your Hair Up. It's a balls-out rock tune, alright. But then it starts, stops again, gets locked in a mad wah-wah loop, things drop out. What is more satisfying than a tune where you know all possibilities have been explored, and all within five minutes? Isn’t it frustrating when you feel there was a bit more in there, if only the band had done a little more digging?

So revivalist, yes, and involved in the business of fusion, perhaps, but the inventiveness and sheer evident love of what they’re doing in this conquered the hype. Naturally they’ll have used all their ideas up in one go and the next one will be flat and turgid as they take the humdrum path towards straight rock and drab Americana, but for now, this is one to cherish.

Glasvegas - 'Daddy's Gone'

We are, in this humble, dusty corner of the internet, resisters of hype. Press buzz deters us. The NME is a comic, and we mourn the days when you might be able to pick it up and take as much as half an hour to get from front to back. And most music blogs are - is there any other way of saying this? - shit. Vacuous look-at-mes who somehow think they're on the cusp of a career rush to break the latest, newest thing. Anything new is good. It's all fresh blood. Break it, be first, then move on for the next. It doesn't matter whether it's the 27th faint carbon copy of something which once might have had some life in it. Forgive me, I'm tired. But what very seldom comes across is a sense of the life-affirming joy music can bring, the adrenalin it can push through your sytem, the tears it can drag from your eyes.

So Glasvegas have been hyped to buggery. But you can only listen with your ears, and it turns out about half the LP is really good. You couldn't I suppose, hope for one that could be great all the way through. This, presently, is rare. It dips in the middle. But I don't mind. I've always been the lover of the single anyway. And one of those, 'Daddy's Gone', has made itself essential to my life at the moment. Of course it's histrionic and overstated, but I've always kind of liked a little bit of that. The lazy comparison of the music press is the Jesus and Mary Chain, which must be largely on the basis that they come from the same place. True, I can hear a shared love of Phil Spector, but for me the obvious comparison is the Mighty Wah!, for whom I've long nursed a soft spot. It has the same over-ambitious, slightly failed poetry in it, the same gutter-looking-in-the-stars thing, all working class regret and aspiration, choked throat early morning drunk dreams and bruised sentimentality.

Of course, they must never make another record.

The Kabeedies - 'Palindromes'

"Most of my parents are palindromes: M U M and D A D."

Yes! It's obvious but how come no one's said it before? This is brilliant, stupid and just a bit shit, always obviously a winning combination. This lot, The Kabeedies, sound like they just can't sit still. They're evidently an itchy hyperactive bunch. And here's a short, jerky, dumb and smart offering. Boy/girl singer combination. Really good. No need for sentences.

I'm never going to stop liking stuff like this, am I? This is the third or fourth cycle of this kind of thing coming into vogue - hey, remember Bis, and weren't they great at first? - and it often seems to hail from Norwich. This one surfaced on NRONE records, with which we've already confessed we're in love, and I recall an earlier single I enjoyed, 'Lovers Ought To' on the fairly reliable Cherryade label. Of course they're sickeningly young and have a terrible name (but then as I type I'm listening to and enjoying a band with the worst name ever of Thomas Tantrum) but I reckon they should do this for two years and then get their hair cut, grow fat and boring and go and work in a bank somewhere, if there are any banks left to work in by then. I'm going to make sure I see them live, even though I know I'll be the oldest fucker there.

Chairlift - 'Bruises'

I couldn’t wait for this one to make its appearance in the UK. I bought this direct from the venerable Kanine records in the US. I needed to have it. The internet makes this music thing easy. And the pound/dollar rate isn’t what it was, but still, what I paid in postage I saved on the CD. In truth, not all of this record, nonsensically entitled Does You Inspire You, does it for me. There are times when it all gets a bit too knowing, the musical equivalent of comparing ironic 80’s fringes. There’s sometimes an obviously too kitsch kind of oriental synth thing going on there. Chairlift, you feel, are not above the odd arched eyebrow.

But ah, this, Bruises, first heard as a demo a bit back, is beautiful and fragile and, apart from its ending where they couldn’t resist adding a layer of whipped cheese, understated. Love hurts, and there’s a truth that cuts through any amount of tongue in cheek. There’s a childlike simplicity and repetition in the lyrics of this, but sweetness comes mixed with darkness. What self-abasement wouldn’t you perform for the one you love? Then the man comes in singing about frozen strawberries at precisely the right moment. And you never thought frozen strawberries could sound sad and romantic, until now.

This apparently comes out properly in October, or you can get it on the internet now, or you can go direct to Kanine, like I did. Evident Utensil is here too, and we’ve already established how great that is, right? So for those two, I’m in, and I’m listening to the rest of it, hoping to love it all. Pass me the eyeliner and something tartan, then.

Mirror Mirror - 'New Horizons'

I recently had something of a clear-out and unearthed and distributed to bemused friends a number of duplicate seven inch singles. It happens. I go to the shop and can’t remember whether I already have something. There’s a vague list somewhere, but never with me. And then I buy things on the internet and while they're on their way via creaky post I forget and grab them on some trawl through the physical racks.

This was one, but I didn't mind having it twice, and consider the recipient of my second copy a lucky man. Mirror Mirror are another band I know nothing about, burnishing further my deserved reputation for finger on the pulse musical punditry. A cursory search of the web reveals at least one other band who got the name first, specialising in bad metal, and if I can't find it on the internet straight away then I can't find it. All I know is that this is a great record which has begun to haunt me. It sounds like it was recorded in a tunnel, but a beautiful brick tunnel deep in the country with brilliant, blinding white light pervading one end, or perhaps in the vaults of a minor cathedral. Let's move towards the light. This is slow-paced, blissful but spooky; it's choral; it makes me want to join a cult. Providing it was a cult with good music. I'd like this playing at two am as I fall asleep. I'd have beautiful dreams. It would also be suitable for a funeral in a rural church on a sunny day. Any takers?

An obvious point of comparison would be Low before they got boring, and it's on Half Machine records, which is now officially a pretty good record label.

The Chap - 'Fun and Interesting'

Of late much of this website's music-listening has been live, at gigs. This site does not, you will understand, do festivals. We don’t camp, and we don’t stand in a field bellowing and waving our arms to trite ‘indie’ anthems with lumpen thousands of people we would normally cross the street to avoid. But the festival season - which now encompasses, it seems, much of the year - has created a beneficial kind of waste product as bands on the al fresco circuit must warm up or warm down at proper venues with roofs, occasionally working toilets and a public transport route back to the comfort of one’s own bed, many of these in the city that we choose to make our home but which we're now too embarrassed to name after the last elections. Thus at this time of year we are able to construct a kind of parallel - or is that serial? - festival of our own by forcing ourselves out night after night to small, smelly, scruffy venues. Recently we’ve caught A Sunny Day In Glasgow (luscious, layered, cute and complex pop), They Came From The Stars I Saw Them (daffy space jazz), The Wave Pictures (literate, nerdy indie pop), Ballboy (vintage literate, nerdy indie pop, good to have 'em back) , The Flaming Stars (skinny 1950s noir rock and roll), Bearsuit (cherished art noise poppers, wasted on this occasion on an unappreciative crowd of wankers), a double bill of Health (structured, precise noise) and No Age (enjoyable West Coast surf punk dudes who the kids loved) and most recently Shit and Shine (epic, mechanised, motorised, turbo-charged noise). Phew. No wonder we're knackered. At times of heavy gigging the site finds we're either listening to the band we're going to see next or playing them again after last night reminded us how wonderful they were (and all the above were) and so the rest of it piles up neglected. Truly, we need more ears.

All of which is merely lengthy and over-written apology to all three of you for the lack of recent updating of these pages. Did we mention we’ve also been away a bit, in Scotland and Belfast again? And none of which has anything to do with this next tune from The Chap, which has been knocking around my head and demanding attention these past two weeks or so. It’s one of those that worms its way in, burrows down and stays there. Here’s a cool and somehow simultaneously camp electronic offering, with an operatic chorus nicely undermined by a spoken voice intoning “good, good, super, super” and so on. We find it curiously uplifting. Perhaps if Sparks were any good this is what they’d sound like. It may be about cloning, and let‘s be honest, we‘d all clone ourselves if we could.

But gosh, what a wholly inadequate description this all is. This one’s beyond us, it seems. So let’s just say it’s great, and I remember now these people doing another song we loved, ‘I Am Oozing Emotion’, and it makes me wonder why we haven’t yet investigated further. Gross negligence on our parts. This recent single comes from an LP, 'Mega Breakfast', which is now on our shopping list, and if we have to choose between this and essentials like bread and milk, we’ll buy the record.

Let's Wrestle - 'Let's Wrestle'

Well, this is ramshackle and basic fare, and therefore something I instantly love. I swear I like complex, subtle music too. But when it comes down to it it’s the primitive, brain-dodging urgency of rock and roll and pop music that really makes me happy. We should celebrate stupid music more. At the moment the twin pillars for me seem to be the insistent, reinvented blues of White Denim, a band who might finally be worth the hype, and the rediscovered classic pop of Lykke Li, for whom I seem to have developed an embarrassing adolescent crush. I would fill virtual pages about both of these if I wasn’t so bloody busy working these days. But they both seem to me contemporary returns to time-honoured sources. Equally elemental is this eponymous gem from Let’s Wrestle, a beered-up, belligerent male-bonding anthem that should be bellowed by crowds of bad shirt wearers at Friday night chucking out time down the local Wetherspoon’s. “Let’s wrestle, let’s fucking wrestle,” goes the chorus, and that’s most of it. There’s virtually nothing to this. It’s troglodyte stuff, the only touch of attempted class added by the gold-coloured vinyl. I need to see these guys perform it live, and won’t even mind the inevitable lager shower. I like the Fallesque cut of Let’s Wrestle’s jib, allied with a Fall fan’s nerdishness about bands and record collections (see their earlier records; they’re all good). This is, in summary, nothing more than simplistic, dumb, primitive and clumsy. You will understand by now, of course, that these are words of praise.

Fuck Dress - 'Suburban Nietzsche Freak'

"God is dead, so I listen to Radiohead."

Quite so. How refreshing once in a while to find an utter throwback of a tune like this. Here we are with a slice of indie back from when that degraded word ever meant anything. This has surely wormed its way through a rent in the fabric of time from 1985. (Perhaps Radiohead were actually named after this lyric then?) The label of the day is In Tape Records. The Fall are going through one of their periodic spells when they are fashionable and it's cool to acknowledge their manifest influence on all music (these moments are interspersed with long spells where everyone forgets about The Fall, but they keep working regardless). Yeah Yeah Noh are putting the fun back into being pretentious. The Membranes are the next big thing. The June Brides are surely going to change the world. And all records sound like this: thin guitar, robotically thudding drums, and two singers, a deep-voiced male and an accompanying female, apparently stood too far away from the microphone. Things are recorded in sheds, and sound like it. The lyrics are alienated, knowing and not afraid of wearing their smartness on their sleeves.

Yep, I like this, like it a lot, and I'm going to listen to it 27 times and then file it away for the next 10 years before rediscovering and being confused by it. It currently exists only in non-physical form but is due a real release from NROne records - no idea of the capitalisation there, it's a guess - sometime next month, and you can pre-order it (not an expression I have ever understood) there. Nrone has become one of those quietly good labels which most of the time gets it right. Inevitably there's a Myspace site, which rather shatters the illusion that it's 1985, when we were all using ZX Spectrums, and there are other tunes knocking around the internet, none of which, inevitably, are as great as this.

Yet another fuck band, by the way, in what's getting to be quite a collection, but it's becoming a bit boring to keep pointing this out, isn't it?

Mogwai - 'Young Team' reissue

In the main, I manage to resist reissues. Of course, I’m a Fall fan, so the house is cluttered with their repeat offerings of the same LP. We’re talking three figures by now. My view is everyone’s allowed one act where they buy all the reissues, lives, bootlegs and pretty much any pointless everything, and mine is The Fall. It could be worse. Some people do it with Bob Dylan. But boy, the CDs just pile up. Recently, when returning from holiday, I opened the door to find it jamming against shiny discs strewn across the front room. At first the inevitable burglary was feared, but then the pleasantly mundane reality of it became clear: there’d been a CD collapse. Piles of them, and piles upon piles, were stacked precariously on speakers, and on top of bulgingly full racks. The faintest breath of wind would have been enough. Probably somebody slammed a door in a neighbouring house. Even now they sit higgledy-piggledy towered upon the floor awaiting the imposition of some kind of order.

Anyway, I don’t do reissues, but this one was always something special. There are times when Mogwai are the most important band in my life, and it’s still their t-shirt I wear probably more times than I should. I do have other clothes, I’m just proud of them. Ten years on, it would be hard to explain the impact of this record to some post-rock neophyte. There have been so many subsequent copyists that it’s difficult to get across how different, how shocking this music was. Of course they weren’t the first to do it, just the first to get it right. It redefined the rules. Most of the songs didn’t have lyrics. They were as long as they cared to be. They had very quiet and shockingly loud bits, or sometimes just quiet bits. It’s art stuff, but it’s rock.

But hearing it now I curse my cloth-eared 20-something self. I was then yet labouring with a mostly ideological misconception that all music should be three minute pop songs. Oh sure, I liked it enough, on then-novel double vinyl, but still it feels I missed a trick. Now, in an evidently louder and clearer edition, it seems it should have been life-changing. Meanwhile, all the other CDs pile up, inessential, and for this last week I barely listened to anything else. All other offerings sound flat. I only need this more.

This is an epic, infinite affair. I found it seizing on different emotional states and amplifying them. The twin peaks, Like Herod and Mogwai Fear Satan, had me strolling euphoric in sunshine one day, noticing leaves on trees like these were new things. The next day, they had me sobbing. And it’s really hard not to do this without talking about the sounds of stars dying or planets imploding. This is end of the world music. It turns everything into a scene from a film. It's your personal epic soundtrack.

About halfway through the week, I realised this is what I want to be listening to on my headphones as I leave this life. Of course, I hope that isn’t for a long time yet, but I can’t imagine a better soundtrack to go out to. If I time it right, the last notes of Fear Satan would be the final thing I hear on earth. I want this noted by the relevant authorities, and am prepared to carry a card to this effect.

Aidan John Moffat - 'I Can Hear Your Heart'

I adored Arab Strap. Sure, there were flabby moments mid-period, and times when they got close to self-parody (hey, here’s another song about drinking, drug abuse and bad sex for you) but they’re one of the few defunct bands whose songs I find myself coming back to again and again. I have these spells where The First Big Weekend, or Hey Fever, or Packs Of Three, or The Shy Retirer, or (I could go on, Christ, when they were good, who was better?) demand frequent attention. I’m in one such now, partly because when bits of my shabby life start to fall off I find the Strap supply a fitting soundtrack, and partly because the recent solo work of the two former Strappers has sent me scurrying back to the source.

Aidan Moffat and Malcolm Middleton now ply their separate trades, of course, and I have time for both. Malcolm’s given me moments of pleasure, not least last Christmas’s anti-heroic attempt at a festive chart-topper (check the sociopathic Santa video) We’re All Going To Die, or the recent hymn to the sad pleasures of at-home drinking, Blue Plastic Bags. But if you’re allowed to have favourites, Aidan, who recently has collected a John, was always mine. He always seemed to me to be the soul of Arab Strap, the man undergoing any amount of personal degradation so you didn’t have to. I admit, I worried about him with the demise of the Strap. Attending one of their last shows, at a mobbed and up for it King’s Cross Scala, he seemed to be the one who didn’t want to let go. I fast-forwarded and saw a grim future, embracing spiral of decline clichés. But here he is, with one of the few really essential records of the year.

Yet it took me a while to come to this. At first I thought it was too fragmented: brief, mostly spoken word pieces delivered over backing which turns out to be mainly recycled from old records. It just seemed too slight to me. But after a few plays I found it nagging, insistent. It’s life in the raw again, (hilariously the record's webpages ask you for your age to check you're over the threshold to access its 'adult content') but there are moments of pure poetry, lines that are going to haunt you and remind you of your own misdeeds and hurts. There’s apparently a narrative arc to this – in which case it’s the tale of a particularly mammoth and depraved weekend on a scale beyond even my own imaginings – but to me they work best as odd shards, gaps of beauty and gristle nestling between more conventional songs, without which no current playlist or mix CD can be complete. Live this really works too, having caught a recent gig at Kilburn’s Luminaire, now on its way to being my favourite place to see music, in which a slimmed-down, almost healthy-looking Moffat acted the raconteur and accompanied himself with an old record player and a stack of vinyl.

This is a beautiful thing, simple as that, funny and sad and full of life as it is lived. It’s issued by our old friends Chemikal Underground, which for many years was the greatest record label on earth (the Strap, Mogwai and the Delgados all in one place – did this really happen?). It comes appropriately packaged booklike, with a short story which you’re tongue-in-cheekly instructed to read before you listen to the CD. And you’re a bit foolish if you don’t already have and cherish this.

Look, all I’m saying is we’re going to be needing a new Poet Laureate soon, and we really could do a lot worse.

Be Your Own Pet - 'Becky'

So I've just got back from one of my periodic bouts doing scary, grown-up, serious work in another part of the world. By the end of it I felt almost like an adult. But the song that soundtracked more than any other this particular trip? Why, this snotty, teen, girl punk, three minute anthem, of course. My 15 year old inner self remains, it seems. It's only the container that's getting old.

There are a lot of bands around doing short, shameless, guitared-up rock and roll, none of them really doing anything new, but Be Your Own Pet just do it better than anyone else. They offer a perfect combination of wit and stupidity. They do short, dumb songs about partying, fighting and throwing up - and surely we all have those kind of weekends? It's tearing-your-jeans, falling-out-with-your-best-friend-because-you're-drunk, losing-all-sense-of-proportion-because-you're-young-and-you-really-
think-this-is-heartbreak music. It's full of spunk and other cheap bodily fluids, but a girl singer stops it short of being mindlessly macho. And you just know one day this lot are going to grow old and boring and release a difficult LP which demands that we admire their broody musicianship, at which point we truly move from party to hangover, but mercifully, there doesn't seem any sign of that happening yet.

So yes, I love them, even if that makes me feel slightly queasy as my outer container hurtles towards 40 in a undignified way via any number of catastrophes. But if I ever get too old to like this stuff, administer the final, fatal dose.

This is a tune - a tale of vicious, disproportionate and very funny schoolyard revenge, and not a lot of regret either - that saw itself ludicrously excised from American versions of their new LP, Get Awkward. Truly, it's the world that's wrong, not the songs. Over here, in our new joke London city, even though booze is currently being made illegal, of course we lap up anything like this. More, exactly the same, please.

Half Man Half Biscuit - 'CSI: Ambleside'

28 April 2008 saw something akin to an alignment of musical planets. Solar eclipses are surely less rare. As if a brand new - and, should you not yet have realised this, utterly magnificent - new Fall LP was not enough, right-thinking folk the world over were prompted to camp outside their nearest record shop awaiting the Monday morning opening by the issue of the latest from Half Man Half Biscuit, CSI: Ambleside. Truly, the rest of the week could only be blissful, and there was no point in anyone else putting any records out, although that new No Age LP surely merits some further listening once a sense of proportion has sadly reasserted itself.

If you ask people who claim to know a bit about music about Half Man Half Biscuit, chances are they'll tell you some of about four things: that they were around in the indie mid 80s, they made funny tunes like All I Want For Christmas Is A Dukla Prague Away Kit and Dickie Davies Eyes, they supported Tranmere Rovers and they split up. People occasionally tell me that they split up, and I splutter, not again. Fewer people seem to know that they ever reformed, or that they went on through the 90s and beyond to produce a string of life-affirming, necessary records. Sure, the early stuff's great, but in it's the later work where singer and writer Nigel Blackwell's sheer observational genius truly shines through. There's grumpiness and disdain for modern inanities aplenty in this stuff, but also a pleasure in the small and simple things. The songs I like best are those seemingly pure streams of consciousness where odd shards of observation and apparently random thoughts line up together, strings of uneven pearls.

It's all about the words of course. The music remains rudimentary, occasionally veering towards competence. It's meat and potato fare. It's all about listening again and again to dig out the nuggets. Thank god HMHB LPs don't come with lyric sheets. Of course there's a website dedicated to HMHB lyrics, and I admire their dedication, but I try not to look at it. A large part of the fun is puzzling out obscure and unexpected references. The band remain a surely uniquely British concern. If you haven't spent at least 30 years growing up here, it's questionable whether you'd understand much of this. The growth of minor celebrity culture and the proliferation of shit TV must have come as a godsend to Nigel Blackwell. He's the man who observes and dissects this stuff so you don't have to.

Like other recent genius LPs - and everything since 1998's Four Lads Who Shook The Wirral has been essential - I thought on first listens this represented a dip in form. I always think they've lost it. But it takes a few plays before it seeps in. Bits of lyrics catch you. You hear new phrases every time, piece it together. By now, a week in, having barely had a day when this didn't get heard at least once, I'm convinced it's as good as anything they've done, and like the new Fall LP, an unusually consistent work, if perhaps lacking the occasional standout songs of earlier records. And of course I'm going to resist the temptation almost every HMHB review falls prey to, of simply regurgitating the best bits of lines. That would be spoiling your fun. Suffice to say that at the moments my favourites are the chugging Totnes Bickering Fair, which has one of the great throwaway final lines of all time, the only-they-can-get-away-with-it Hokey Cokey parody of Petty Sessions, which they have the good sense to leave short, and the closing sour state-of-the-nation blast that is National Shite Day, which follows in their tradition of both epic closing songs and sustained, weary rants - see also from earlier times A Country Practice and Thy Damnation Slumbereth Not.

They're a band like no other. They're really the only band allowed to do this. They're a secret treasure not too many people should know about. They're doing their best work right now. They are worthy of your love. But the question is, are we worthy of them?

The Wave Pictures - 'Now You Are Pregnant'

Sometimes tunes have to hang around a while and seep into your consciousness before they really hit you. Songs don't always make an early impression, and nor should they. They might seem okay, but nothing special. Then on one listen, for whatever reason, something clicks, and the run of the mill suddenly becomes something you can't imagine living without.

Here's one of those, currently part of a particularly dangerous playlist along with the sumptuous Daytrotter version of Casiotone for the Painfully Alone's Jeanne if You're Ever in Portland that left me blubbing twice on the same Victoria Line journey. Get a grip, boy. They're clearly a smart band, the Wave Pictures, shamelessly mining Postcard Records and vintage Hefner, the latest in that line of over-literate true indie bands who are doomed to make the girl smile but see her go off with someone who doesn't read books and has never even heard of Elefant records.

Not all their stuff does it for me but there are true gems amongst them, and this is the highest carat one, a bittersweet song to an ex-lover, the lyrics of which I'm not going to simply repeat here because half of the pleasure in these things is hearing them for yourself. This is one for anyone who's ever felt the pain of having an experience they couldn't share with a treasured ex, which should be most of us.

Ridiculously, this was a b side, recently re-emerging on a Moshi Moshi compilation of such given away with the increasingly ludicrous Artrocker magazine, though this is not their sort of thing at all. Their clothes are all wrong and they probably drink in unfashionable bars.

The Fall - 'Imperial Wax Solvent'

So lately I've been doing other things, like working, or one of the things I do that isn't work, editing a magazine (sadly unmusical, although I like to sneak the odd reference in). But mostly I've been listening to the new Fall LP, repeatedly, obsessively. I've not listened to much else.

And it's great. It's a magnificent work. I say this with some relief. The Fall are at the beginning and end of any musical journey for me. Since I made it over the initial barrier of Mark E Smith's anti-singing vocal style about 20 years ago, they've been the band I revert to. New Fall offerings are feverishly anticipated in this house, but also fretted about. You see the last one, Reformation Post TLC, had its great moments, but overall turned out a disappointment to me, flabby, too obviously filled out with offcuts, overall one of my least favourites. True, even a bad Fall LP is interesting, and better than pretty much anything else out there, but I'd expected more. At that time, the Fall live were nothing other than stunning. It's a little over a year since I saw the greatest Fall gig of my life at the Zodiac in Oxford. But that band went and the new ones I've found pedestrian live. The last few Fall gigs I've seen, since Manchester last summer, haven't inspired. On the last tour I only caught the London show - I usually manage a few more - and found myself that rarest of feelings, bored.

So hopes weren't high but this all goes to show you can never write the man off. A year ago they were great live but flat on record. Now it's reversed. Imperial Wax Solvent tussles with The Unutterable for the crown of best Fall record of this decade. So far. It's packed with ideas, layers, odd concealed sounds, intriguing phrases, snipes at celebrity culture. Vocally Smith finds a bit more of a range here beyond the blood-curdling growl he seems to have adopted as default mode of late, although there's still plenty of that to amuse. He unearths pronunciations of words that just weren't there before.

Musically, to generalise sweepingly, the key ingredients of the Fall have for a long time been garage rock, krautrock, glam rock, rockabilly, heavy metal, techno, goth, country and reggae, and here it's mostly the krautrock side on offer. I'm all for that. (I'm one of the few long time Fall fans, it seems, who had a lot of time for Fall Heads Roll, which I thought took one dimension of the Fall, the garage rock part of their DNA, to an extreme.) Key song Fifty Year Old Man manages to encompass most of the above genres in its sprawling but essential 11 and a half minutes. But then there's a snotty punk number where Mrs Smith gets to sing, then an odd Kraftwerkian piece. You don't settle down here.

This is not to attempt a song by song analysis, which would not be in the half-hearted spirit of this blog, which prefers to talk about individual tunes, or just moments in them. If I had a favourite right now - and it's changed a few times already - it's Is This New, a vintage piece of fractured, almost nonsensical MES spoken narration over something chunky and cheesy that has had me googling 1970s TV show themes to find out which one it's been stolen from. At two and a bit minutes it's all over a little too quickly, something that can be said for a lot of these tunes, with the whole LP just flying past. How gratifying to be left wanting more. And for once, the production seems to get the fine line between clarity and murk just about right.

Brilliant. And, what next?

Imperial Wax Solvent finally comes out on Monday 28 April, although it's been over the internet and inside my head for weeks, and as can be seen, I failed to resist. Of course like pretty much every Fall fan who downloaded it early, I'll be going to buy my copy at the soonest. It's just, I needed to hear it. You do too.

Hercules and Love Affair - 'Blind'

I don't care. I know I'm not supposed to like this. It's... dammit, it's disco, okay, a word I generally only use pejoratively. When I grew up an anorak-wearing indie kid, the battle lines were drawn, and disco (along with cock rock, admittedly an unlikely bedfellow) was the enemy. And although I'm ever so pro-gay in my white, middle class, liberal way, I happen to fancy, you know, girls. Further, you'd never get me inside a nightclub. Hate the places. Music's too loud, beer's shit and I've never been to one that isn't a meat market. Give me a dark, gloomy and preferably smelly pub with three misanthropic old blokes and a packet of pork scratchings any day. Hey, that's a dream night out. Life is miserable; work with the grain.

But fuck it, this is brill and you'd have to have rags stuck in your ears not to realise it. Back in the days when I cared about this website and used to try to talk about music and stuff on it, I declared my mixed feelings about this guy Antony from the Antony and the Johnsons, and how a particular song had utterly floored and convinced me. Went to see them at the Barbican shortly after that, some pretentious art thing where a series of women slowly revolved as the man sang, some of them, thrillingly, undressed. (I've seen so much nudity in the name of art. Occasionally you go to the theatre and someone doesn't take their clothes off, although you can usually get a refund.) Anyway, he sings on this one and he sounds great - he has a fabulous, almost terrible, voice - against a cheesy and smooth disco track which is utterly of both of its times - about 20 years ago and because of that, completely now.

Of course you buy this on 12" and it doesn't include the best version, which is on the LP, although alongside some useless remix by some bloke or other there's a classy Frankie Knuckles mix, which takes me back to that brief interregnum when I utterly rejected guitar-based music for the abstract thrills of late house and early techno. The LP's got to be great anyway, having heard a fair chunk of it via illegal downloads on the office computer, while vaguely wondering why no one's got round to sacking me yet. But I find downloading just fuels more buying, which makes it okay, and this lot are added to the massive list of LPs I now need to get, work demands having intervened two weeks running to prevent me from venturing to the record shop. What's with everybody - Teenagers, Fuck Buttons, Crystal Castles, Be Your Own Pet, Nick Cave, Youthmovies - putting LPs out at the same time anyway? Some planning, please? I'm under a lot of pressure here.

Deize Tigrona - 'Bandida' / 'Me Chinga'

I never really got to grips with genres. I'm occasionally puzzled when I feed a CD into the computer or copy some MP3s into the relevant music-playing software and the machine tells me that this tune I really like is some sub-variant of a type of music that I hadn't known existed. Occasionally I flirt with reclassifying them all into one genre. I would call that genre 'music', although I might still have to reserve a special category for The Fall, who are above any such relativism.

So I thought this stuff was called Baile Funk, until I went to that ultimate authority on which I base all my life decisions, Wikipedia, which told me that basically that's a misnomer which only the crassest white guy imperialist tourist and cultural appropriator could make. Regardless, this is clearly modern Brazilian music and I seem to have pretty much fallen for this stuff in a generic way, in the same way I love, say Soukous music, without particularly being able to tell one thing from another. The daft and life-affirming Bonde do Role acted as a gateway drug here, although presumably they irk the purists by not being prepared to stay in the 'world music' ghetto, and from that starting point I now thrash about hopelessly in a great pool of similar-sounding records.

Take this one. It's so spartan. It's raw and angry-sounding. It's defiantly unmelodic, and as such seems quite typical. Of course, I don't understand the words, but as a hardcore Mark E Smith devotee, that's never really been an issue. She could be singing/rapping about love and kittens for all I know, but if so, she still sounds mightily pissed off about it all. This is rock music, and yes it's punk music, and a little bit of incomprehension probably helps.

A lot of this stuff seems to be on Man Recordings of, erm, Germany, and having unearthed this and paid more money than was sensible for it in the West London branch of Rough Trade the other week, I immediately had to fork out for more from Man, from Boomkat for a change, very good for these kind of things, through which resulting pile I continue to work, without finding anything quite in the same class. But now there's this new record by Tetine on Soul Jazz, I Go To The Doctor, which is so short and slight it virtually isn't there, and so crude in its innuendo, but which has managed to creep into valuable headspace nevertheless, and looks like making itself at home there, at least until the next impossible to predict thing comes along.

Casiotone for the Painfully Alone - 'Mother's Pearls'

The older I get, the more music seems to have the power to move me. This was not what I expected to happen. I assumed music's power would be reduced as adulthood exerted its deadening grip and other things crowded the space. But even back in my Polaroid-coloured days I used to be puzzled by the frequently-repeated tale of John Peel being forced to pull over when hearing Teenage Kicks while driving, helplessly reduced to tears. Music became an obsession for me over two decades ago, yet it didn't have the power to make this teenager cry. Not so now. I'm clearly at a vulnerable age, where youth's optimism yields to disappointment and practical realisation of modern life's limitations, and there seems an ever growing roster of tunes that are capable of bringing tears to my eyes. I have to be careful what I listen to on the tube these days.

I realised things had reached a new level this morning when I managed to make myself blub just by wandering around the kitchen singing this song to myself while making a cup of coffee. Clearly this is a worrying development. But oh, there's something about this at the moment that just makes me ache. First appearing on 2006's classic Etiquette - and by the way, where's the follow-up, huh? - it recently resurfaced as part of a new Daytrotter session. I've written about Daytrotter and Casiotone before, which means I need not repeat myself for all five of you - but I'll simply restate my view that this man is a genius and the sooner the world gets round to recognising him as such the better off we'll all be. This is one of Owen's brilliantly realised female point of view tales, and the usual sketchy story of regret and disappointment, this time about losing a family heirloom while drunk down the club. This is for anyone who's ever done anything they've wanted to unwish the day after, which is all of us. I've begun to think that regret might be the most powerful of human emotions, stronger even than guilt. On Etiquette a woman singer guested in to perform it, but intriguingly here Owen sings it himself, and it still utterly works, poignant words matched with a cheesy hands in the air disco thumper. Today, nothing is as good a this.

Go there, download it, and be not quite the same person you were before. More exciting still, Casiotone are in the UK at the moment. Bush Hall awaits. I am excited, but I'll try to stay dry-eyed.

Chairlift - 'Evident Utensil'

In truth I was a bit too young for The Slits the first time round. I've just googled 1979 and it looks like my favourite hits of the year were The Buggles' Video Killed The Radio Star and The Boomtown Rats' I Don't Like Mondays. Could be worse. But I've since come to love the warped, feminist reggae of Ari Up and co. I'm hearing a lot of that now in this tune by Chairlift, another in that seemingly endless wave of US bands - see also Vampire Weekend, MGMT and Yeasayer - who mix things up like kids who never heard of genres and wash up on these shores to great acclaim. There is no criticism here - all of those bands have much to commend them, and we have been so ill-served domestically these past few years by dull, pale British boys who all wanted to be The Libertines. Did I miss anybody out? Only the next five uber-cool bands I haven't heard of yet.

So yes, this Chairlift tune - and I can't confess I've investigated further beyond this immediate particular seven inch, although obviously it's on my gargantuan list of Things To Do once I've stopped wasting time putting in order sequences of words for an audience of five - puts me in mind of the Slits, and that, in my book, can be no bad thing. The less masculine we can make this thing we call music, the better - that's my view. True, with its daft lyrics about pencils it lacks the political edge of our correctly-chromosomed crusaders of yesteryear, but hey, don't we all? Anyway, one can stretch analogy too far. There are blokes involved in this too. There's one singing in the background, in a ludicrous, faux-sexy deep voice. For some reason the reference that popped into my head here was The Boys Town Gang, but then when I checked, their most famous tune doesn't have any male backing vocals in it, just some fabulous dancing - although you should not need any excuse to view this video. Instant Prozac, except this stuff works.

The b-side is the usual non-essential remix which isn't as good as the a side, this time by our new friends the aforementioned MGMT, although the backing vocals really come into their own here. The physical object, on Kanine Records, where you've previously found Holy Hail and Grizzly Bear, both revered in these quarters, is sold out at Norman Records, although Rough Trade or Pure Groove might have it, and remarkably for once, given it's something new, you can get it on crusty eMusic instead of giving Apple any more of your money. Remember, paying for music is the new getting music for free.

Munch Munch - 'Wedding'

A couple of weeks ago I worried that I was going through one of those dips in the road where music mattered less. Well, I appear to be through that now. Partly it's this new Vampire Weekend record, which I suspect is the sort of thing I'm ideologically not supposed to like, but with which I appear to be helplessly obsessed regardless, and partly it's seeing Art Brut a few days back for the first time in ages and them restoring my faith in rock and roll. True, I was drunk, but I somehow had a very good night indeed, for perhaps the first time this year.

And then there's Tomlab, again, they being very much the label of choice for anyone seeking something they can't automatically predict these days. I'd offer to marry them and have their kids, except that I'm a man, I'm already married, and they're a record label. Apart from that, I foresee no difficulties, and may well propose sometime when suitably intoxicated. On offer this time is the fractured glam disco of Munch Munch. This is fine, ramshackle fare, boasting a chorus so rudimentary that it doesn't contain any words as such, until that is someone with a sore throat decides he might as well get involved too and joins in. This is so DIY it's held together with gaffer tape, but at the same time it has a mirrorball surface sheen. Then two thirds of the way through it turns into another song, with a cheap organ sound that recalls early - i.e. good - Inspiral Carpets. It's as chaotic as a northern wedding, and much more fun than the last few I've been to.

Rough Trade - I like their new shop, although it appears to be mostly a place for people to drink coffee - would appear to still have this.

Fuck Buttons - 'Bright Tomorrow'

So, fucking Fuck Buttons, then. As I think we have by now established, there is currently an intriguing correlation between swearing and musical quality. As a rule it doesn't hold hard and fast, of course, but there would seem to be a fair degree of overlap between using what we might coyly call the f word and producing something worth listening to.

I'm increasingly told I swear too much, by the way, and occasionally make failed efforts to cut down. But swearing's as addictive as smack. At work, where I daily and increasingly interrogate the gap between effort and meaning, I have apparently infected my colleagues, and unwittingly introduced a culture of swearing which negatively impacts on the image of the organisation, or something. Like I fucking care. On one recent work trip I was advised the old swearing thing had slipped completely beyond the grasp of my control, at which point I instituted a day in which I would do my damnedest to watch my language, or each time I failed I would donate £1 to charity. This was a day in which I was excessively, maddeningly careful with my fucks. And it still cost me £25. Is there a support group I can join? Are there internet brethren I can socially network with to cure me of this ill?

Anyway, to this. It's all going along nicely enough as some kind of Spaceman Three - no, come back, but good - type of subdued drony thing, and then this ultra articificial, thin metallic guitar comes on over the top, and that's enough already to tickle the fancy of yer average Mogwai fan like me, until some bloke starts incomprehensively howling, indeed screaming, along as well. He's certainly venting, and possibly feels better for it afterwards. We may be listening to someone's catharsis here. The whole thing disappears as soon as it starts, via a quick bout of thudding drum, to leave you puzzled, wondering about meaning... but playing it again. This is all very avant-something. It's brill.

And wonderfully it's on a 7" picture disc, and as they seem to be a bit arsey about taking it off MP3 blogs which are seeking to share the good news, which I have mixed feelings about, it means you've got to go out and buy it and maybe support your struggling independent record shop in the process.

Now I may have to take time out from stalking Vampire Weekend, which is pretty much a full time job at the moment, to make good on this threat, but after this, I expect great things of this lot, and reserve the right to be disappointed and a bit disapproving if they don't go on to achieve them.

Bitchee Bitchee Ya Ya Ya - 'Fuck Friend'

Typically, I'm months behind the curve on this one. But it's all relative, huh? I know I'll the only kid with my postcode to be into this, for example. I always have been, and always will be, interim hip. Cooler than most, but with a broader and shallower perspective than the true scenester. Take that Youthmovies gig I went to the other night. I love that band, but the venue, amidst the Turkish shops and restaurants of Stoke Newington Road, was full of Dalston trendy scene wankers who'd drifted northwards. Lower Dalston is North Hoxton these days. There was not a sensible haircut to be seen. And I bet they've been downloading this stuff for months. Fuckers.

Anyway, tedious work and life having intervened these past weeks - the two are distinct but subtly related - it's been a while since I last confessed my love of a particular record to no one in particular on here. I don't know if it's a coincidence but I seem to be going through one of those areas of poor reception where very little music is doing it for me at the moment. Most things sound standard; little really inspires. The only things that are exciting me just now are mixed up, mucky stuff like this, and like the Fuck Buttons record, and to some extent Munch Munch, and of course Crystal Castles. What this grab-bag might have in common I'm not sure, apart from a certain willfulness and willingness to defy formula, and the offering of a refreshing possibility that there might be people making music just for the playful hell of it all, rather than seeing it as a career.

So this is yet another Euro-trashy record put together by doubtless fearless 16 year-olds who I would despise if I ever met in real life, where they would be hanging around a bus shelter and filming my mugging on their 3G mobile phones. There's a lot of this stuff around at the moment to be sure, and it all comes from Kitsune in 12"s with those generic sleeves. Through all this CSS remixes run like a golden thread, pulling all these tunes together. You know, something interesting happened when the internet became the prime means of disseminating music and all the barriers came down and people started making records that just mixed stuff up without even realising that you weren't supposed to do that. Remember when you were only allowed to like certain things? We were wrong, weren't we? At the same time, of course, this internet generation grew up with instant, permanent access to eye-popping hardcore pornography, so there's a certain blank, whatever, grubbiness to proceedings, as captured brilliantly by our old friends The Teenagers. I'm convinced our civilisation is doomed and we're all going to hell, but at the same time I rather enjoy the soundtrack.

Naturally regardless of the internet I still demand the physical object by way of affirmation - people were blogging about this lot back in May, but it's only in December that the record came out and made it real for me. And what you get on this 12" is ludicrous and brilliant. A big crash bang wallop of a start yields to seriously distorted, squelchy keyboards. It sounds like something taped off the radio onto a gnarled old C90 tape (ask your parents). Amidst all the crunchy filthiness of this tune which is rock and dance simultaneously lurks a sweet, naive vocal and a memory-grabbing unashamed pop chorus. Is that I hint of Baccara I hear? Plus all the good records these days have gratuitous swearing in them, like this does. Fact.

Anyway, go and buy the record from someone, and then you get the mandatory not-as-good-as-the-original remixes too. Where would we be without them? No wonder Brazil's economy is booming. And then go and download The Anthem by the same. It's almost identical, and nearly as good.

Paul Rooney - 'Lucy Over Lancashire'

Dandelion Radio's Festive Fifty has again justified its existence. Dandelion, an online radio station moved by the spirit of John Peel, which is streaming the Festive Fifty all the way through January, inherited this venerable yearly poll from Radio One, which has been predictably careless with Peel's legacy (compare and contrast, say, one of Peel's final tracklistings with those of minor celebrity Colin Murray, who now occupies that slot, and weep). Thus the annual ritual - a highlight, surely, of any yuletide - of picking through, disagreeing with and being occasionally enthralled by half a hundred of the year's choicest musical offerings, could be fulfilled once more. I listened to it in one great five-hour glob on the afternoon of New Year's Day, giving grateful due thanks to an understanding partner, and felt somewhat guilty and slightly queasy afterwards, much as one might when one has consumed an enormous amount of tasty but nutritionally dubious food in one sitting, a feeling which obviously I got more than once over the holiday period.

As is customary with Festive Fifties, my own choices fared fairly badly, with only one of my three votes making it in there and not a lot on my shortlist surviving the cut either. There was a particularly pleasing sequence where The Fall and Von Sudenfed rubbed close shoulders, and overall there was little I could object to. I like Battles, although obviously consider it a travesty that The Teenagers, with whom I am obsessed, were overlooked. But as I said, it utterly justified its existence by banging me over the head with a tune I really ought to have known but which has somehow passed me by until this point.

Cards on table time here. I guess I was always destined to like this one, having been born, grown up and spent some twenty years of my life in the shadow of Pendle Hill, referenced heavily herein. Pendle is famous for witches, you see, and the subject matter of this extraordinary record is the many satanic connections of Lancashire. Plus I'm a lover of dub reggae and this is what you get here: a sprawling 14 minute slab of best heavy Northern dub, on which sits atop a sprite of the air, an unreliable narrator, misinformed by the mysterious Alan (or Allan?), who delivers in a spot on parody of a now slightly antiquated East Lancashire accent - not a full definite article to be heard - a bizarre, twisting monologue. This touches with varying accuracy on, amongst other things, from memory and doubtless missing lots, Satan, the aforementioned Pendle witches, the A666 road, the colour red, cotton weaving, (dark satanic) mills, Marx and Engels, climate change, the slave trade, immigration from South Asia, the BNP, Mick Hucknall, dub reggae, Radio Lancashire's legendary On The Wire programme (one of the finest of all things about the County Palatine, and for which this apparently was first made, and thanks to which I've just discovered you can now listen to the show via the web, which I hadn't realised before), rival Red Rose Radio, Liverpool band The Beatles and of course Mark E Smith and The Fall.

You see, it all joins up. The title winks of course to The Fall's now 20 year-old b-side minor classic, Lucifer Over Lancashire. Don't underestimate the importance of Lancastrian folklore in the brew that makes up the greatest group of all time. See particularly 1979's sinister Dragnet. Bear in mind always that The Fall is a north Manchester (Lancashire) child rather than south Manchester (Cheshire). The difference is vital. Recall also The Fall's early 1990s invention of a unique hybrid of northern and reggae with their magnificent kitchen cover version of Lee Perry's Kimble and cut-and-shunt job of two tunes to make Why Are People Grudgeful? It's all about making connections. And all the connections are in this record.

I'm always thrilled, but at the same time embarrassed, when something I've missed resurfaces, but that's the joy of music and that's what keeps me listening. If I'd heard this before, I'd have voted for it too. Apparently it first came to light last May, which was a busy time, so there are my excuses made. Although, I recall this fellow (and a quick bit of googling confirms), then Rooney only, doing moody, spoken word and music pieces played much by Peel in the late 1990s. It's all joining up again. One about touts in the Barrowland, wasn't there? I could dig out the tapes if I get a spare day. And one turned up again on a Sonic Arts Network CD 'curated' by comedian and Fall fan Stewart Lee last year. I love connections.

Anyway, the shiny red 12" of this has now been ordered, and in the meantime I have the thing downloaded from that last link to listen to (in unwieldy 'ogg' format, whatever that may be, which eventually I turned into something I could hear... best have a twelve-year-old to hand to decode this). The MP3 player is currently being used for little else. This is a top three choice, in any year.

Casiotone for the Painfully Alone - 'New Year's Kiss'

By now, the whole world of course knows about Daytrotter. The idea is brilliant and simple: when suitable bands tour themselves around the country we know as America, they are invited to stop off at a town called Rock Island (about which I'd like to retain my own mental picture, thanks, without adding any factual details to spoil it) and record a session. Brevity usually encourages a stripped-down, somewhat acoustic sound, which obviously suits some better than others, and there's a distinct lean towards Americana in what they offer. It's part of the jigsaw, but not the whole jigsaw. We are not Uncut magazine here, after all. This is, you feel, a world where Bonnie Prince Billy is revered as a god, and Iron and Wine as at least a minor deity (but hey, I really liked that last Iron and Wine LP, you know, played it a lot).

And what do you want, you miserable bastards, anyway? It's regularly updated, it's done with wit, it's free, it's legal, so none of that liberal guilt you get from downloading MP3s (you do get liberal guilt, I hope?) and it has a great cartoon strip too. Just now I grabbed a session by the Papercuts (it's okay... heard-it-before gentle indie) and a couple by the Dirty Projectors (despite myself I've recently found I've warmed to their pretentious art thing).

Anyway, Casiotone. They/he are/is utterly wonderful, and if you don't know this already, just what the hell do you think you've been doing with yourself for the last few years? Owen Ashworth is a short story writer and film-maker who just happens to work through the medium of short, bittersweet, observational pop songs. Cheap, generic keyboard sounds bang their noses against glimpses of stories, shards of life, snapshots of lives lived on the margins or in surprised disappointment, with these occasional moments of hope. Vocally, and in his ability to wring sad poetry from the mundane, he reminds me a bit of David Gedge of the wrongly-maligned Wedding Present. His 2006 LP, Etiquette, is a modern masterpiece. I hardly ever go back to old stuff - the new listening pile only seems to totter further upwards - but I still listen to this a lot. More instruments and voices are added to the brew in this one, and on the whole, and somewhat messily, love triumphs. Get it from Tomlab, which would be our record label of the year, or something, if we did such things here.

My favourite tune on there, over time, is probably New Year's Kiss, which resurfaces in a new form in this recent Daytrotter session. To be honest, I prefer the original, but I felt like making a lame stab at topicality, what with the recent arbitrary date change. Go here to download the songs. And don't miss the first session, too, which includes a heart-breakingly definitive reading of Tonight Was A Disaster.

There are mercifully few songs about New Year, compared to the endless glut of Christmas tunes. (Anyone, by the way, who has ever seen fit to give a spin to the appalling U2's ghastly bombastic offering on 1 January is surely going to hell.) New Year's Eve is, of course, the single worst night of any year, an annual wankers' charter where the basest excesses of group mentality are not only tolerated but positively encouraged. It is an evening to shun humanity. (This one just past I counter-intuitively went to the theatre, and then, after pushing my way through Sodom and Gomorrah crowds to get the tube, made my way safely indoors ere midnight. I always say that the perfect New Year's Eve involves a locked door and a bottle of scotch, which if I got the timings right would see me snugly passed out by eleven.)

Anyway, yer man Owen gets it spot on as usual, capturing the anticlimax which greets each January 1st, with this tale of a girl's less than perfect NYE encounter, from waking up in a strange boy's bed backwards. He's one of the few men around who can write as good a song from a woman's point of view as a man's. Every line's a delight from first to last, and I'll long treasure a phrase about 'champagne lips'. I'm currently learning to play guitar, largely so next December 31st I can head down Embankment tube station and busk this to an unappreciative crowd.

Next stop, Half Man Half Biscuit's Epiphany, January 6th.