Annie – Don’t Stop
For connoisseurs of perfect pop, Annie’s much-delayed second album was anticipated with such fevered emotion that over 200 pages had been created on the Popjustice.com forum before it finally saw the light of day. Thankfully, no-one was disappointed, with producers Xenomania, Paul Epworth and Richard X combining to create one of the best pop albums in recent years. In amongst the playground chants (‘Hey Annie’), stuttering electro (‘I Don’t Like Your Band’) and sophisticated synth ballads (‘Marie Cherie’), Annie’s glacial vocals and unique delivery helped make each song at least twenty times more memorable than most other chart music, which, given the fact this inexplicably failed to chart, is all the more amazing. In it’s original incarnation, the brilliant fuzz-pop of ‘My Love Is Better’ featured a certain Girls Aloud on the chorus, but record company wrangles meant they were removed. This is probably not that significant, but for the sake of symbolism we’ll assume it was because they couldn’t handle the fact that the quirky pop mantle had been passed on to someone else. Girls Aloud are dead, long live Annie.
Key track: ‘I Don’t Like Your Band’
We were on fire last week! We really pulled it out of the bag didn't we? True, putting our money behind Dizzee Rascal (three no. 1 singles and counting) and Madonna (global superstar for the past 25 years or something) is hardly taking a shot in the dark (are there too many metaphors in that sentence? Are they even metaphors?), but there you are. Madonna crashed in at number 1 and Dizzee settled in nicely at number 3. Poor Mika had to settle for a number 4, which sounds a bit dirty at first, but isn't because a number 1 is wee and a number 2 is poo so a number 4 is...we're not sure really. The single we tipped by Thom Yorke was limited to about 2000 copies so it didn't get anywhere, but it's more about the art of creating music with him isn't it?
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Album by Girls
Anyone who's anyone in the 'bloggesphere' (yuk!) is in love with this duo. We're not going to lie, we've only heard a few things (which we liked a lot), but we trust the opinions of our peers so we're giving it a shot. Plus, they have an amazing backstory, which these days is nearly enough. Basically, one of them lived in a cult, they may or may not have a millionaire benefactor and they seem to have consumed a tonne of prescription drugs in the recent past. They make woozy, simple songs that sound like they've been made during that point between sleeping and waking.
LISTEN TO THIS AND FEEL A BIT DISAPPOINTED
Once by Kid Harpoon 
This guy is from round our way. Or at least from round our old way. He used to frequent some pubs that we have heard of and visited occasionally but we never met. It's an interesting story, isn't it? It's kind of more interesting than this debut album, which takes a lot of the promise from his early recordings and pushes it through a massive filter called "Personality Reducer - Use with care for fear of over-producing the shit out of everything". Some of it is alright, but getting Trevor Horn to produce it seems like a bit of an error.
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'4Ever' by The Veronicas.png)
Your enjoyment of this song will hinge on whether or not you find young women pretending to be 'rock' a). really annoying, b). annoying, but a great song is a great song, or c). inspirational, because Avril Lavigne is punk and genuinely angry. We're with the b) group, and sometimes a song comes along that's so undeniably, almost irritatingly perfect in a throwaway pop kind of way that it makes us a bit sad for everyone else. This single was produced by Max Martin, who is 'responsible' for this and this, the latter is a kind of template for this rock/pop thing and appears on a certain person's iPod not too far from here.
We're going to stick our necks out here and say that 'Fight For This Love' has a reasonable chance of denting the UK Top 40 when it's released on 18 October. It's by a young lady called Cheryl Cole, who some of you might know as one fifth of a pretty obscure band called Girls Aloud. In Cheryl's spare time she enjoys crying diamonds on TV, dressing like Malibu Barbie, "being the Queen of our hearts" and putting up with her interminably dull husband.
This song is about struggling through a relationship even though it's possibly not worth the hassle:
Apparently a demo version by a young man called Andre Merritt is also 'doing the rounds'. We think it sounds a bit like Kelis' 'Lil Star', and is somewhat of a grower. Good luck Cheryl, fingers crossed you make it.
