The font of happiness

There is some brilliant music around at the moment. Its just a shame that it is painfully unfashionable (not sounding as if it is being created by a prepubescent girl who wears too much makeup using an Amstrad CPC to play various platform games and sample the noises). Anyway, amongst the anger i promise i'll be happy about some tunes today:

Starsailor - Tell Me Its Not Over (Virgin)
Odd choice of a comeback single, sounding like the traditional difficult second single from any Starsailor album. It limped into the low seventies of the singles chart a month or so back, despite probably deserving better but EMI are too busy shitting themselves over anything female doing bad synthpop at the moment to promote it properly. The song itself is a bit of standard Starsailor work, doing the "low-key, but quite epic" quite well. What is worth looking out for is the utterly superb b-side on the CD single, "In Their World" which sees the band taking a different direction and sounding far more loose and like they're enjoying themselves.

The Gaslight Anthem - Great Expectations (SideOneDummy)
A top bit of slightly garagey sounding pop-rock which boasts more hooks in one song than the entire last Kooks album did. Give it a few listens and its impossible not to find yourself singing along with the chorus.

The Gossip - Heavy Cross (BMG)
Fitting quite nicely into the current trends is the return of The Gossip and the awesome voice of Beth Ditto. Heavy Cross is my favourite Gossip single ever, building on the shrieking choruses and scruffy neo-punk of "Standing in the Way of Control" and adding a much more refined level of songwriting and production. On the strength of recent live radio performances, the band are a much tighter unit than they were when they embraced the skins generation a few years ago.

Lady Gaga - Paparazzi (Interscope)
Just in case anyone was suffering from Gwen Stefani album track deficiency, this bollocks is now being paraded across daytime radio.

Basement Jaxx - Raindrops (XL)
I'm trying to work out why everybody is getting quite so excited over this Basement Jaxx comeback single. Its a bit of painfully average discopop which doesn't seem to offer anything other than a few extra vocals that wasn't done by practically every record released by Roule in 1997. And what really puts me off is that the creature on the cover looks like a Womble.

Florence and the Machine - Rabbit Heart (Raise it Up) (Island)
Proving that not all of the current wave of pop is pish is this rather fine tune from Florence and her Machine. Its a bit Kate Bush in places, but with a hooky and overground production that makes it more mainstream fare. Unlike many of her peers, Florence also has some very interesting references in her lyrics.