Pick of the week
Loney, Dear
I Am John (Regal)
With the nation's thermometers threatening to grow new heads to accommodate the rocketing mercury, we're going to need lovely, spring-heeled, vaguely Gallic summertime fun like this in abundance to accompany our picnics and park-based cider binges. It calls to mind nothing more than the saucy, him-her interplay of Serge Gainsbourg's duets with Brigitte Bardot, and there are accordions and High Llamas-style giddy strings in the mix too. It is, as you may have guessed, as lovely as nodding off in a deckchair, as suntanned ants eat your flip-flopped feet.
Dinosaur Jr
Been There All The Time (PIAS)
In the silver medal position by default (everything else is rubbish) rather than by dint of any mind-blowing properties, this is still, as you might expect given the pedigree of its creators, entirely agreeable hardcore rock with an interesting stop-start dynamic, plenty of full-throated hollering and a very satisfying habit of breaking out into full-on axe heroics whenever things threaten to get a bit formulaic and Foo Fightersy. There's nothing essential hereupon, but the flipside, penned by Lou Barlow, is an entirely more lovely, lovelorn kettle of rock fish.
Mika
Love Today (Casablanca)
2007 will already go down as "the year of incredibly irritating No 1 singles that make you want to set fire to everyone involved in their conception", and if this follows Grace Kelly to the top of the charts, then it will provide extra grist to that mill. Thankfully, it won't. Because it's dreadful. Truly dreadful. It's very Scissor Sisters at their most irritating, with its ersatz disco groove and its scrotum-in-a-vice falsetto passages, but there's no song at the heart of it, and for the most part sounds like Kenny Everett pretending to be the Bee Gees. Only not funny.
The View
The Don (1965 Records)
The Don is an album track from Hats Off To The Buskers. That isn't a factual statement, that's a value judgment: a single it most definitely is not, especially after the harmonicas'n'all majesty of Same Jeans. For the most part, it is skippy and anonymous skiffly pop with nothing to discern it from any of the ramshackle post-Libertines set - there's a passage of about 30 seconds, halfway in, when it nosedives into minor key, that hints at the kind of genius for which the group are often feted. The rest, sadly, is resolutely meh.
Jamie T
Sheila (Virgin)
Jamie recently stated that he loves doing lots of different jobs because of the contact with all kinds of people that such a lifestyle enables. If this is so, we must pray that he's going to knock his tedious Hoxton-hop on the head and become a cycle courier. Because, ever since this very tome brought the existence of LDN Is A Victim to the world's notice, there is really no excuse for this toss-awful estuary-vowel bilge to exist. Piss-poor beats, piss-poor rapping, piss-poor lyrics: if a cat showed up in the studio and its plaintive mewing was accidentally caught on tape, even that would be piss-poor. The arse-tighteningly smug sound of young middle-class London, and therefore just one more reason to call in the air-strikes.
