Feeling like summer’s on its way out? Don’t despair yet, the radio’s keeping the dream alive for a month or so longer with lovelies like the new single from Belleruche. Clockwatching is a finger-picking slice of female-fronted tunesmithery from the Brighton three-piece. With a distinctly Roisin Murphy vocal, singer Kathrin DeBoer smooches her way through some delicious sophisti-pop. ‘I’m back in the backseat’, she smoulders, and a nation swoons. Overall lacking in genuine heft, Clockwatching is nevertheless a pleasant distraction from the turning of the leaves and as a forerunner to October’s album release 270 Stories, it’s a pretty promising one.

Cooler than cool is a dead concept, but there’s still an echelon of musicianship which towers above the rest. Such as a DJ duo from Brooklyn signed to DFA? Yes please! Holy Ghost! are a gift for the single reviewer, all hewn from cocky cool and swaggering entitlement. Alex Frankel and Nick Millhiser of the now-defunct Automato create a world of retro-tinged dancefloor pleasers on the Static on the Wire EP. The title track maintains the rules of straightforward chord progressions and a funky instrumental break and the whole thing gives dance skills to all who hear it. Or so they like to believe.

Next up, a band who have taken dancing lessons from their dads. Originally released earlier this year, Hurts have such faith in their single Wonderful Life that they’ve gone for a spot of reincarnation. Like Tears For Fears for now, the Manchester two-piece are clear 1980s revivalists, which is fine, but it comes off a little Human League circa Only Human, namely, not at the height of their powers. Still the video’s good for some moody guys’n'gals shots, and lots of po-faced posing against overcast skies. It’s grim up North.

Lucky for them, South Londoners Flash Fiktion have spent a lot of time carving out their look, as well as their sound, which should please muso types. A crashing punch in the face of neo-pop-punkery, there’s a sniff of nosebleeding nights here. Vocalist Matt brings the taint of the Skins generation to Johnny Rotten’s stylings and the end effect is a very stylish, guitar driven romp through glam rock’s back garden, stepping on all the plants.

For an evergreen musical recipe of note, take a little Interpol and mix in some Arcade Fire, and you’re somewhere close to the strains of The Strange Death Of Liberal England‘s new track Rising Sea. A pompous raucous escapade with plenty of oomph and a raw intelligence, the Portsmouth five-piece are charismatic to a fault and entirely bats. A live band with a real sense of place and stage presence, there are bright things ahead for their gloomy progressive sounds. If that makes sense.

Wolverhampton wanderers The Lines may be ten years too late with their definite article-touting name, but they’re bang on schedule with their beefy Glorious Aftermath single. A guitar-led track packed with gusto, their instrumentalism brings to mind And So I Watch You From Afar, before a vocal uncannily reminiscent of A-Ha’s Morten Harket peals out of the speakers. ‘Caught in the crossfire, caught in the crossfire’, bellows singer Alex Ohms, and the soaring wonder of the Last Shadow Puppets is anew. Will soundtrack many Freshers’ Week nights out this year with its inclusive anthemic holler.

A song which may soundtrack many Freshers’ Week morning afters is Why Did You Call? Known for being both beardy and chunky, The Magic Numbers nonetheless captivated a nation with some tuneful meanderings a few years ago. So it’s only fitting that for Romeo and his hirsuite bandmates, the comeback single is a humalong favourite that your nan would like. A melancholic edge to a poppy fandango, there’s nothing new added to the Magic Numbers’ canon here, but if you like their brand, you’ll like this.

Gorillaz - Superfast Jellyfish

The world of the single is a curious one. For some bands, the only difference week to week seems to be the track name – the song quite literally remains the same. To that end, Gorillaz have unleashed the new wave of their anti-charm offensive, in the form of ‘Superfast Jellyfish’. Like ‘Hot Tub Time Machine’, it is one of those titles that makes you turn to the sky askance, but within the satiny folds of its three plus minutes, the band’s trademark sound makes a welcome return, the refrain of “Superfast jellyfish” repeating to fade – formulaic but addictive.

Speaking of formulaic, here’s Lee Ryan – the boybander with a penchant for opening his mouth and sticking his foot right in it. Blue found fame with a series of inoffensive pop singles that were shaft of pap but tip of pure urban influence. Sadly, Ryan has evaded the harmonious net that captured his ex-band, and ‘Secret Love’ is the epitome of his post-Blue period pseudo-erotic electronic blandishments – all asinine lyrics and keyboard-heavy dance beats. It’s the opposite of erotica, and leaves as unpleasant a taste in the mouth as edible knickers. If underwear as food interests you try checking out sexually unhinged Brightonites Eighties Matchbox B-Line Disaster. A band back in the early noughties who defied all taste and style, they still somehow just worked. Led by wild-eyed Guy McKnight, their rock-swathed venom was a delight indeed, all menacing stairs and songs about having sexual relations with mothers. On ‘Love Turns To Hate’, the surreal guitars call to mind behemoths like The Cramps, while McKnight’s squally vocal drips rock’n'roll excess and a type of mania. Nice to have them back on the airwaves.

Far from her non-conformist image, Kelis fits into the urban-tinged songbird slot better than she would like to acknowledge. The well and truly acceptable face of radio-friendly unit-shifting, ‘Acapella’ reinvents nothing other than her bank balance, but it is a diverting enough ditty. Peppered with the sort of “you complete me” lyricism that makes Renee Zellwegger’s career, “Before you/My whole life was acapella” is the message – now relishing the symphony of love, Kelis seems unable to keep herself down, and the euphoria makes this a perfectly placed summer radio hit.With American style streaming through the speakers, Fugative is a 16-year-old artist with pretensions of being the new Justin Timberlake. Except from Essex. Naming such diverse influences as Timbaland and Pharrell Williams on his MySpace page, ‘Crush’ is an uptempo rap from start to finish. Featuring a female vocal on the chorus, it’s got more than a hint of the Blazin’ Squads about it. If that sounds horrific, well, it is. Slightly better is the next release. Back in the day, ‘Truth Hurts’, as produced by DJ Quik, made a great play for best western pop song with eastern influences in ‘Addicted’. It’s been a long time in coming, but new release ‘You’ by Gold Panda steals its ethnic crown. All sultry hipsway and eastern promise, there’s a touch of class to the London producer’s emission, and it’s a pleasure that bears repeated listens.

If Eugene McGuinness decamped to the US of A and fashioned an artist in his own image, Dan Sartain would be out of a job. Because there’s a unique quality to his voice and intriguing darkness to his lyrics which make this Yankee singer songwriter the very essence of post- Jack Johnson musicality, and make ‘Atheist Funeral’ a striking guitar record. From the sublime to the slightly ridiculous – the whiff of privilege, the implication of education – Princeton made a bold move in naming them after an Ivy League institution, after Vampire Weekend’s deck shoes and Hollister schtick garnered them wedgies at every gig they played in 2009 (possibly). There’s a knowingness to ‘Shout It Out’ which is a little grating, and the fake handclaps only serve to underline the chasm between this sort of light hearted pop and that of, say, Paul Simon on Graceland. With a hint of Gorky’s, though, there is something a little more off-kilter in the veins of Princeton, and the track does end up bringing a smile to the stoniest of faces, fading on, “I love you, let’s shout it out.” Bless.Less worthy of our sentiment are the next band. If there was a space year 1984, think how crazy that would be. Jumped-up youngsters in turned-up jeans with bequiffed heads and an Oxford Compact Dictionary would make their way to gigs of jingly jangly guitar power pop like ‘Heartbeat’ played by angry young doppelgangers tired of not having a job and putting off girls with their questionable personal hygiene. This is Blighters. They’re not as good as The Smiths.

'Allo Darlin'

There’s a special place in every girl’s heart for twee pop. The Cardigans doing ‘Carnival’, Belle and Sebastian doing, well, any of their songs – it’s enough to make any red-blooded chick wear Hello Kitty slides in their fringe, get a uke and wear their boyfriend’s ratty brown cardigan.

Incidentally, making this sort of music have ‘Allo Darlin’ veer the same way – kooky, uke-y, and, on ‘The Polaroid Song’, very Lenka.

Elizabeth and Bill are from Australia, Mike and Paul are from Kent, but they’ve come together here in the UK to make the sort of fey indie pop that we should all demand more of. ‘The Polaroid Song’ is an upbeat, uptempo pop classic with its feet firmly in the past, telling tales of camera film of old.

The backing vocals add a richness to Elizabeth’s sweet vocal, and the whole thing is the aural equivalent of a hot chocolate packed with marshmallows – sweet, comforting and repeated consumption is never enough.

What would have been, in days of yore, the ‘B-side’ is the seasonally appropriate ‘Would You Please Spend New Year’s Eve With Me?’.

Steeped in some of that lovely ukelele tunefulness, Elizabeth’s breathy voice is both sweet and sultry, as she suggests we “hide in my bedroom and watch cartoons all night”. There’s a special place in every girl’s heart for that, too.

Robbie Williams

Post-Take That, Robbie Williams was a renaissance in motion. Drinking, smoking and actually living after so many years in boyband servitude, his spirit was released and his nascent music career sputtered to life.

Sputtered initally, until the might of ‘Angels’ swept through karaoke bars from Fochabers to Fowey and back.

With the guiding hand of Guy Chambers on the tiller, the good ship RW made a beeline for legendary status, and he got halfway there. But time – and ego, having landed – lay heavy on the writing partnership.

After a few years in the wilderness of LA, Rob is back from following Martians, rehabbing, balancing his chi, or whatever else the gossip rags are saying. He wasn’t putting any thought or effort into the big ‘comeback’, if a listen to Video Killed The Reality Star is anything to go by.

The album kicks off with ‘Morning Sun’, which is itself preceded by the mouth organ part from ‘Thunder Road’. That human touch is forgotten as the track swells into an adenoidal torch song with Elton John at its core, all bombast and insincerity. The incongruity of an ‘I Am The Walrus’- style chant amongst the cloying strings only serves to underline RW’s egomania – there ain’t nothing that he can’t carry off, this legend in his own mind.

Single ‘Bodies’ doesn’t get better with repeated listens, coming from ‘Wild Wild West’ and merging into a Backstreet Boys B-side. The issue of Williams’ lyricism comes to light starkly here. He seems to be bent on making clever-clever puns and pop cultural references, but it is at the cost of any comprehensible meaning- “God gave me the sunshine/Then showed me my lifeline/I was told it was all mine/Then I got laid on a ley line/What a day, what a day”. For a lead single, it’s not much of a leader, but it’s sort of the best we got.

From there it’s onto the Showaddywaddy swagger of ‘You Know Me’ – sappy as Sarah Brown and twice as outdated, ‘Do You Mind’ – like the J. Geils Band without a sense of humour complete with the exhaustively self-aware line “This is a song full of metaphors” and so on.

The low point would have to be ‘Blasphemy’, a track that insists on giving RW a low piano/rich voice singing part that he simply doesn’t have the range or resonance in his voice to carry.

The title of the record was hailed by tabloids et al for its chutzpah, but really it means nothing – just another lame attempt by this pop music has-been to regain some of that old renaissance magic.

Lou Barlow

Lou Barlow may sound like he’s giving lo-fi a crack at a mid-Western open mic night, but make no mistake, friend – he is the granddaddy of them all.

As the brains and heart of behind Dinosaur Jr, Sebadoh and Folk Implosion, Ohio native Barlow was Gen X before Gen Why-O-Y came on the scene, all too cool for school and heavy on the effects pedals. He’s had more collaborative recordings that you’ve had hot dinners, and yet carries the same detached, world-weary WTF air that he sported all the way back when he played bass on Dinosaur in 1985.

Through his work – songwriting and multi-instrumentalism – Barlow has influenced every lo-fi band since the dawn of time, buddying up with members of the unfeasibly legendary Slint and generally being there when ‘there’ was the place to be.

His mucky sonic fingerprints are all over Ben Kweller, Moldy Peaches and so much more modern anti-folk, and the fact that he can make this, his second solo record, so listenable and notable is frankly a testament to the great man’s skill and nonchalant cool.

This is important to know – not because his classic tunes and maturity make him any more pertinent in the musical realm than whichever rowdy teeny teens Zane Lowe is currently crushing, but because it’s a measure of how far we’ve come – like listening to The Beatles’ Tomorrow Never Knows and wondering how 33 years later we’re still having to put up with The Kooks.

So what’s so good? On the opening ‘Sharing’ there’s a great Phantom Planet drum thrust underpinned by Barlow’s resonant melodic baritone. The song has ‘pogo-a-go-go’ all over it, with a catchy refrain and characteristically fuzzy production.

Title track ‘Goodnight Unknown’ is a less strident beast, with the thumping drum keeping a slow pace. The music is shot through with Folk Implosion-style guitar flourishes, and it leads nicely into the ‘Cannonball’-style (Damien Rice, not The Breeders) ‘Too Much Freedom’, a lo-fi lullaby.

Barlow’s archetypal neo-folk may not seem cutting edge now, but he did help spearhead the whole thing back in the day. The moving thing about this album is 14 songs with a spellbinding quality – the slow, soft hymnal of ‘Faith In Your Heartbeat’, the dropbeat slacker cool of ‘Gravitate’ – at 43, Barlow is still rocking them out. And with 75% of these tracks coming in at under three minutes, he’s every MTV-er’s ADHD dream.

With the weight of history behind it, and the gift of incredible talent chiming through every note, Goodnight Unknown is well on its way to classic status – and deservedly so.

David Cronenburg's Wife

As you would expect of a band who use the identity of another (the real David Cronenburg’s wife is cinematographer Carolyn Zeifman), David Cronenburg’s Wife are a little bit schizophrenic donning many masks throughout Hypnagogues. They appear to make sport of taking on other sounds, making off with other bands’ influences and turning it to their own wicked musical ends.

From the off, the mood is light-hearted. ’Sweden’ namechecks Annabel Croft, delivered in a deadpan spoken word that calls to mind The Fall, Half Man Half Biscuit and Art Brut, and a driving constant dirge of guitar takes over focus until the end.

On ‘Keep Doing What You Do’, singer Tom Mayne’s vocal is almost twangy, and the lyric is shot through with a cruelty which doesn’t seem uncommon in DCW’s work – “First time I saw you, honey, I was not impressed” – offering a woman the sort of disdain that Dylan was so good at expressing.

If you can get past the self-consciously referential title, ‘The Lou Reed Song’ delivers a vocal that is so close to Lou Reed in tone if not accent, so unlike the singing voice on the other songs.

From the ‘Jean Genie’-swagger of ‘Fight Song’ to ‘In the Limo’ – a ‘Fairytale Of New York’-instructed folk song, complete with fiddle and Shane MacGowan slur – there is a sea change, a step back from the naughty-naughty humour of the first few songs.

‘You Should Have Closed The Curtain’ peels away from its organ intro to sink into a slow subsidence, and even the increase in tempo on the Ikara Colt-style ‘Body To Sleep With’ can’t disguise the more serious feel.

Hypnagogues is an album of two halves. The first, a giddy, playful and interesting world reflected in a ‘House of Fun’ mirror – warped and painful, yes, but funny above all things. The second half is a morose study of pain and life’s grey monotony, capped off with the elegiac ‘Make Me A Channel Of Your Peace’ fading into church bells.

There’s a lot of strangeness about David Cronenburg’s Wife, and no overriding personality. But the weirdness they introduce into music is about as challenging as the great man himself and his work. Who knows if the mask is the strangeness, or if it’s hiding something much more questionable?

Johnny Foreigner

Where do musical greats come from? The Smiths were straight outta Salford, all working-class woes and Manc miserabilism. Radiohead made the trek into rock’s back pages from Oxford, with the attendant intellect that that entails. But what of Johnny Foreigner?

On paper, the raucous trio are from Birmingham, but to chain them to any earthbound landscape, in the Midlands or otherwise, seems to be missing the point. Johnny Foreigner buck the trend, and everyone’s preconceptions, by sounding just out of this world.

Since the band’s formation from the ashes of several indie also-rans, singer Alexei Berrow has ploughed himself an astonishingly convincing frontman furrow, complete with handsome swagger and devil-may-care attitude.

On ‘Criminals’, they channel Chemikal Underground’s awesome Bis and Fight Like Apes – chaotic guitars over tight, rumbling drums and boy-girl vocals. ‘Your town’s run by criminals’ goes the chorus line, and it’s all you can do not to pogo without remorse.

‘Camp Kelly Calm’ starts off as a tuneful, endearing pop tune, but quickly morphs into the sort of enthusiastic punk pop that JF are renowned for. ‘Wow. Just Wow.’ owes more to Pixie-like thrash and madness than melodious influences, but really Johnny Foreigner’s exuberant pop thrives on joy. The songs here are the sound of yoof and the future of everything, if we’re lucky.

Johnny Foreigner are special and intelligent. Listeners are challenged to remain stationary during one of their top tunes.

Son Of Euro Child - Euros Childs

The new solo album from warbling Welsh oddball Euros Childs is probably already in your record collection – it’s been on sale at recent E.C. gigs for a measly £10 and it’s even available free of charge from the official Euros website.

For the unencumbered and, well, the uninitiated, a small digest of its contents may help.

Best known as the voice – and, let’s face it, heart – of 1990s indie wunderkinds Gorky’s Zygotic Mynci, Euros is a multi-instru-mentalist with a nice line in Welsh language tunage.

Son Of Euro Child makes this young chap’s fifth solo record, and is easily the most accessible to date. It’s easy when you hit your 30-something stride, it seems. But for all his newfound maturity, from the opening jolly ‘Shithausen’, it’s clear that E.C. is in his best childlike form, all giddy rhythms and entrancing organ wrapped around deliciously sweet vocals.

There are moments of darkness, such as ‘The Dog’ – all reverberating organ and wistful words – but the mood is predominantly one of musical lightness, through the wonky piano parade of ‘The Fairy Feller’s Masterstroke’ to the blistering pop insta-classic of ’1000 Pictures Of You’ and beyond.

‘Mother Kitchen’ is none more Gorky’s, with its staccato melody and quirky lyrics: “So buy yourself some dinner/Have a chicken soup/Stick it in the oven/See what it will do/Your mother’s in the kitchen…” It’s like it’s 1996 all over again – and it tastes good.

There is a very real sense of the magical about Euros – he takes the meandering musical mystery tour and places it at the heart of all of his work, revelling in tangential sounds and intangible feelings and making everything seem terribly abstract and free.

But this is a trained musician with a lot of experience making music that people love to listen to, so to dismiss him as a nonsensical Celtic pixie is to do him a tremendous disservice.

The second best thing about Son Of Euro Child is that it’s free to download right now. The first best thing is listening to it.

Modern Skirts - All Of Us In Our Night

Launching a new business is the dream of hundreds of thousands across the globe.

As any fule kno, and as Sirallun would attest, the most important measure of any new business is to isolate a gap in the market and squeeze yourself into that niche. That way, you become that “thing” that so many people thought they couldn’t live without but couldn’t quite verbalise.

Sadly, there is no such stringency around the forming of a band. You can pretty much make any old noise and there’s airplay offered, because that’s what individual “taste” is about. Good news for Modern Skirts.

All Of Us In Our Night is their second studio album and the Athens, Georgia four-piece are awash with confidence and swagger throughout. Opener ‘Chanel’, starts up like Lee Marvin before kicking into a strummy American college rock paean to heroin “chic”  featuring the line: “Cover up your tracks with a cardigan”.

The driving drums here hold the whole thing together, but the vocals fall on  the wimpy side of rock. ‘Soft Pedals’ is tuneful and inoffensive, but the wistfulness of the meandering vocal starts to grate, all outsider posturing and musical wallpaper.

The high point musically is ‘Astronauts’, a melodic ‘I’m Only Sleeping’-style chugger, all stripped back guitars and vocal, before easing its way into a dainty-played pop suite of choral singing and listless wonderings: “I miss you, hope you stay”, the refrain goes, before the drums pick up a mere 2 minutes 9 seconds in, and a spin around a Beatles-esque musical world is the reward for the faithful.

Throughout All Of Us In Our Night, Modern Skirts are trying their hardest to woo. From the radio-friendly pop of ‘Eveready’ to the veritable lyrical nonsense of ‘Conversational’, this is best face forward, all “this is what you want” temptation.

But, even with the involvement of R.E.M.’s Mike Mills, there is something missing – some soul or heart, something real that Modern Skirts are offering above and beyond the usual. The best you can say about All Of Us In Our Night is the poppiness of tracks like ‘Motorcade’ – style over substance, but singalong enough for commercial FM.

Good news for Modern Skirts. Bad news for fans of good music.

Eugene McGuinness - Wendy Wonders

Leytonstone’s chief troubadour is back with more wryly observed pith and middle England melancholia than you can shake a stick at.

‘Wendy Wonders’ is the epitome of Eugene McGuinness‘ split musical personality – one the one hand, an injection of punk with a side of snarling teen attitood, but on the other, a class which evades musical stars operating outwith the 1950s.

Vocally, Eugene’s echo-laden thrum owes more than a little to the mellow style of Matt Munro, the laconic beat drifting through like an early evening cabaret.

Opening on a spinning disco ball, the dreary club playing host to Eugene McGuinness and the Lizards in the ‘Wendy Wonders’ video really gives the Phoenix Club a run for its tired, tacky money.

Against a backing of tinsel and disco lights, a grey-t-shirted McGuinness mugs and giggles, all the while singing a maudlin ode to suburban sadness. Parading in the skinniest of jeans, there seems to be a definite risk of permanent physical damage among the onstage players.

Perfectly pitched to soundtrack a Smiths reunion night, there’s plenty of character in McGuinness’ never disappointing voice, and a myriad of funny lyrics make it clear that the apparent simplicity of ‘Wendy Wonders’ is a myth, and that there’s actually plenty going on here.

The lustful heartache of the lyric is a testament to young McGuinness’ sorcery, with lines like, “I’m a hollow man with twelve tin cans of woe” and “Wendy wonders why I’m still so cold/Proceeds to throw my stuff out the window”.

Emotional and intelligent, McGuinness has once again emitted a release which makes nothing of his tender years. Exquisite.