Pick of the week
Lupe Fiasco
Superstar
(Atlantic)
Quite why Lupe Fiasco isn't as glittering a star in the hip-hop firmament as fellow Chicagoans Common and Kanye West ought to be soon be rectified by Superstar. Which is properly ironic, because here Fiasco presents a lovely, low-slung, minor key treatise on the debilitating effects of fame. "I'm too uncouth, unschooled to the rules... too much of a newcomer and too uncool," he opines. It's sensitive, intelligent stuff - not adjectives you'll readily hear used for today's current rap chaps and as such sticks out like an attractive thumb. Can thumbs be attractive? Hell, yeah. Ask the Fonz.
Britney Spears
Piece Of Me
(Sony BMG)
She may continue to shock the world, but deep within the hardened kernel that is poor Brit-neh's soul lie significant traces of why we first loved her. Never mind that her voice has been tinkered with more times than the Liverpool first XI, Piece Of Me is just the kind of sultry, juddering, attitudinal grindpop that we want from her. Written, as most chart hits are nowadays, by some Swedish fellas, it finds Brit-neh unwinding a single digit at media intrusion. She rolls a Louisiana tongue around the phrase "pictures of my derrière". For this alone, we forgive her anything.
British Sea Power
Waving Flags
(Rough Trade)
If you won the chance to hear Arcade Fire, fronted by Prefab Sprout's Paddy McAloon and produced by Joe Meek, you'd be as happy as a wild boar in a pool of effluent, wouldn't you? Because break Waving Flags down and that's what you get. It's being tipped as 2008's festival anthem, à la the Fire's Wake Up or Snow Patrol's Chasing Cars. So why does such perceived magnificence feel slightly underwhelming? And shouldn't BSP go back to their day job providing a viable alternative energy source to smelly old coal and nasty nuclear?
Thao With The Get Down Stay Down
Bag Of Hammers
(Kill Rock Stars)
Virginian-bred singer/songwriter of Vietnamese parentage, Thao has Cat Power in her sights with her brand of bluegrass-tinged folkish pop. With lyrics shot through with self-deprecation and oddball humour, Bag Of Hammers is a quirky gem. It even sounds like there's a ukelele being plucked to hell on it. After the Sufjan Stevens-inspired Great Banjo Revival, it seems the humble uke is next in the unlikeliest musical instrument comeback stakes. I tell thee, who wouldn't pay top dollar for Arctic Monkeys' Alex Turner to take up the uke trend and square the George Formby circle? Eee, mother!
Lightspeed Champion
Tell Me What It's Worth
(Domino)
You wouldn't expect Lightspeed Champion's Dev Hynes to make a terrifically chirpy, two and half minute-long, chunk of Postcard Records-style jangly country pop like this. Sartorially, Hynes favours the overtight Hoxtonite winter gilet or full Kanye West bowtie and Ivy League cardi combo. Horn rim-bespectacled Hynes resembles the sort of chap who keeps bumblebees in jars, but his way with a melody and a cute turn of phrase suggests the former Test Icicle is a man to be watched in 2008.
