Pick of the week
Siobhan Donaghy
So You Say (Parlophone)
June 16, 2007 and the comeback single from a former Sugababe is still the pop song of the century - but we can't review Mutya Buena and Groove Armada's Song 4 Mutya every week, so here is Siobhan Donaghy. Once the cute, ginger Sugababe possessed of a hard-to-define sadness, she now comes across as a pale, Elizabethan wraith haunting the fringes of the pop chart. So You Say doesn't have the abstract melodic tangents of Don't Give It Up, or the closing four-song suite of her Ghosts album where she evaporates into space-pop texture, but it takes a simple pop structure and some clunky break-up lyrics and casually throws in a lovely warp of a chorus that just corkscrews into your ears and heart.
Shrag
Talk To The Left/Hopelessly Wasted (WIAIWYA)
Double A-side singles - a medium where polarity in pop is cherished - now seem like a relic from another age. Hopelessly Wasted doesn't seem cheapened by the bawdy, seaside sex-pop of Talk To The Left (a cute but curiously asexual-sounding indie-bitchslap to verbose love-makers: "Talk to the left ... cos the right hand's busy!" Ew!) but rather becomes more precious despite it. A trad arr 1950s ballad that sounds artificially sluggish, drugged, anaesthetised; Helen Shrag's words circle a void between two people, raining down in tiny punches against a failing, indifferent heart as the song's chorus yawns and swells into a simulacrum of drunken, balletic grace.
Clipse feat. Slim Thug
Wamp Wamp (What It Do) (Jive)
After Clipse's 2002 hip-hop masterpiece Lord Willin got cruelly overshadowed when their backroom boy producers, the Neptunes, decided to play at being pop stars themselves, and their third album went unreleased, you wouldn't blame Malice and Pusha-T for venting their crack-addled spleens with their usual seething, metallic anger. Here though, they sound imperiously on top of their game, bouncing almost playfully on a Neptunes-mangled dancehall rhythm that's as beautiful and machine-cold as the Knife.
Sportsday Megaphone
Less And Less (Sunday Best)
"Life's too short to spend your time, worrying about what strangers think of you!" urge Sportsday Megaphone, with all the blissful, unselfconscious earnestness of the true sixth-former. "What can we do but be ourselves? What! Can! We! Do!" While the rest of the world has bigger things to worry about - like teetering on the brink of general devastation - indie music is at its best as some kind of youth-empowering manual for living for the middle classes. And this dinky, lovely bedroom pop is indie at its very best.
Buraka Som Sistema
Yah! (Modular)
Regarded by the Lisbon-based Buraka Som Sistema's representatives as being "like a mutant African strain of grime", the indefatigable Yah! is more a hybrid of the much-loathed resurgent affection for early-90s rave synths and the ooh almost-passe clatter of baile funk. Don't let the trend-watch timing put you off, Yah! is relentless, destroying and brilliant.
